Newsday, June 2004

It's about the size of a deck of cards. It promises to "deepen your concert experience." And, as one enthusiast chirped before a recent New York Philharmonic concert, "It's the future!"

The wireless handheld Concert Companion—nicknamed "CoCo"—offers concertgoers scrolling, real-time musical commentary and close-up video of performers. The Philharmonic has not committed to adopting the technology, but it made CoCo available for tryout to several hundred subscribers during late-May concerts featuring music by Stravinsky, Ravel and Ives.

Infrequent concertgoers in New York and elsewhere have indicated that CoCo "would inspire and motivate them to come to concerts more regularly," says the device's creator, Roland Valliere. Composer and critic Greg Sandow, who wrote the CoCo display commentary for the Philharmonic's trial run, underscored the excitement with which audiences have welcomed the technology. (There was no extra charge for using the device.) CoCo also has been tested by such major organizations as the Aspen Music Festival and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

My reaction was mixed. At their best—during Stravinsky's "Petrushka"—Sandow's annotations brilliantly filled the gaps that arise when a theatrical work is performed in concert, instead of fully staged. They directed listeners' attention to the "dainty repeated notes" of the "pirouetting" flute and the "sunset tinge" of the harmonies in the fourth tableau.

The commentary flew by, however, and the few times I snuck a peek at the orchestra, I missed a chunk of text.

There was something sterile and isolating about staring at digitized words instead of watching the musicians work their magic—a source of delight and instruction in itself. (Given current bandwidth limitations, CoCo's video cannot be viewed concurrently with the commentary.)

"It's like having a musical expert with you," proclaims CoCo's user guide, "explaining the music while you hear it performed." Fine-tuning commentary to heterogeneous audiences, however, is likely to remain a challenge.

Newcomers to classical music are not necessarily unsophisticated listeners, and Ives' layering of different compositions won't seem especially noteworthy to anyone familiar with hip-hop.

Still, CoCo might be particularly useful in conjunction with new works or more sprawling pieces.

As Sandow observed recently, orchestras in some U.S. cities are on average younger than their audiences. If CoCo can help attract newcomers to the symphony and keep 'em coming back, that's enough reason not to stand in the way of the future.