Quite without the mobility of the young, I was nonetheless able to travel from Paris to Atherton, California, to the San Francisco Civic Center of the future last Friday.

Within a few hours, I watched a live performance of Jakub Józef Orlinski singing Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Viens, Hymen” at the Paris Olympics on Peacock, then saw Wu Han’s brilliant performance in Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio in A Minor in a Music@Menlo livestream, and finally received the schedule for San Francisco Opera’s livestreams for next season (see details below).

All this prompted thoughts about the significance of today’s electronic presentation of music and where it may lead in the future. Livestreaming is both a relatively new phenomenon and the continuation of a technological development that’s more than a century old now.

Music cylinders appeared in the 1870s; radio broadcasts of concerts and operas began as early as the 1890s (or perhaps even before). The Victor Talking Machine Company was born in 1901, and 78-rpm records were available at the beginning of the 20th century — the nifty 33¹⁄₃s appeared in the 1930s.

Edison cylinders — There is a line from Thomas Edison’s 1877 music cylinders to today’s livestreaming | Courtesy of the Leiden University Libraries

You could watch operas on video cassettes from the 1950s on (and Amahl and the Night Visitors on network TV) and listen to audio cassettes in the 1960s and decades after. CDs followed in the 1980s, and DVDs beginning in 2000.

Even streaming has its own history, starting with the 1999 launch of Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that allowed users to access millions of MP3 files for free. In a few months, Napster acquired over 20 million members — and was shut down in 2001 by a court injunction. Two decades later, the COVID-19 pandemic gave a huge boost to the phenomenon of listening to and watching “music from a distance.”

Yes, streaming in various forms has a history, but what’s new — and probably significant — is how complete and satisfying livestream performances can be. In the future, might there even be the possibility of a perceived presence at live performances?

Teleportation — instantaneously moving physical objects or living beings from one location to another, made to look so easy in Star Trek — remains a concept in the realm of quantum physics, fervently wished for, not only by music audiences. When it happens, SF Classical Voice is certain to carry the news of its arrival.

Back to the near future: SF Opera’s livestreams are presented on the dates below, with replays available in the days after.

Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera — Sept. 15 at 2 p.m. PT
Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale — Sept. 20 at 7:30 p.m. PT
Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde — Oct. 27 at 1 p.m. PT
Georges Bizet’s Carmen — Nov. 19 at 7:30 p.m. PT
Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème — June 10, 2025, at 7:30 p.m. PT
Mozart’s Idomeneo — June 20, 2025, at 7:30 p.m. PT

Home

Where Will the World of Streaming Go Next?