Concertino for Cellular Phones and Symphony Orchestra

On Oct. 1 the Chicago Sinfonietta premiered Indiana University professor David N. Baker's "Concertino for Cellular Phones and Symphony Orchestra" at Dominican University.

"A device similar to a traffic light signaled the audience members to activate their rings — red for the balcony, green for the orchestra seats — at various points in the piece. An assistant conductor, Terrance Gray, followed the score and activated the lights," Daniel J. Wakin wrote in The New York Times. "Four amplified mobile phones were onstage. One, operated by a teaching assistant at Indiana, Aaron Vandermeer, was programmed with Mr. Baker’s main tune and well-known classical themes like the 'William Tell' gallop and a motif from the last movement of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4. The other three cellphonists onstage played random rings, sometimes timed to destroy a pastoral melody here or there."