A million hits on Youtube

Georg Mertens

Congratulations to our colleague, Georg Mertens, whose Georgcello Youtube site has now received a million visits.

As we said in a post last month, Georg Mertens is a cellist, guitarist, composer, arranger, teacher and author who combines great musical skills with an astute knowledge of successful internet marketing.

How did he achieve a million hits on Youtube? It was not by choosing to play current popular music, which was the way former Mitchell Conservatorium student, Ella Jamieson and her band, Aston, clocked up the magic million, with their classical version of Lady Gaga's Telephone.

And it was not a viral campaign, like the wildly successful Canadian Christmas flashmob version of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.

Georg's success in attracting a million visitors to his Youtube site has been achieved through providing so many musically interesting, varied performances on guitar and cello, both solo and in combination with other musicians.

His most popular video, so far, has been an Arabian improvisation on cello.

Britney Spears goes Baroque

Remember the Lady Gaga fugue? The very clever Giovanni Dettori has done it again: this time with his Baroque version of Britney Spears's songs Hit Me Baby One More Time and Oops, I Did It Again in his new composition called Counterpoint.

Mr Dettori has kindly made the sheet music available, too.

Counterpoint refers to the unique ability musicians have of saying two or more things at once and making sense! Lots of pieces of music have several tunes going at once, but this was developed to a high art in the Renaissance Period of Music (1450-1600 AD) and perfected by Johann Sebastian Bach in the Baroque Period (1600-1750).

The Naxos summary of periods in Music history is pretty well written and useful.

Giovanni Dettori teaches counterpoint via his Youtube website, which is well worth investigating.

I like the way you can listen to this piece and follow the scrolling score. Well done, Maestro Dettori!




Did I mention that Britney Spears is an anagram of Presbyterians?

Our talented students

At last we have some of our own music to share! Come on over to TheMitchellCon Youtube site and enjoy some great piano, trumpet, classical guitar and flute choir music from an end of year student concert and our annual Scholarship concert.

More to come!

You will also find links to sites that Youtube sites hosted by our staff and students.

Mitchell Con Youtube site is live

Belinda Macri performed this piano piece on Sunday, 5th December, 2010 at a Mitchell Con end of year student concert.

Do you like the Mixolydian flavour at the beginning?

The piece is called Larrikin and it is by Elissa Milne, one of Australia's best-known and best-loved composers of pieces for students. We hope you enjoy our very first video, and look forward to sharing lots more with you in 2011.
I'm sorry that the video is only taking up a small part of the screen. But I don't think it is distorting our performer by making her look stretched out or elongated.


Our second video features, Will Schoenmaker, playing at the same student concert.