Some highlights:
A tour of music’s new virtual realm might begin at www.schoenberg.at, the Web site of the Arnold Schoenberg Center, in Vienna. In a handsome twist of fate, the most famously difficult composer of the twentieth century is now the most instantly accessible: possibly no modern artist has such a large Web presence. On the site, you can read immaculate digital reproductions of Schoenberg’s correspondence, listen to his complete works on streaming audio, examine his designs for various inventions and gadgets (including a typewriter for musical notation), and follow links to YouTube videos of him playing tennis.
Go next to Think Denk, the blog of the pianist Jeremy Denk, a superb musician who writes with arresting sensitivity and wit. The central predicament of Denk’s existence is that he is struggling to master the great works of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries while meandering through a twenty-first-century landscape of airports, Starbucks outlets, and chain hotels. He relishes moments of absurd collision. While he is practicing the finger-busting fugue of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, his wearied brain discovers that the principal fugue subject matches the theme song of “Three’s Company”
Perhaps the most constructive digitization of classical music is taking place on a Web site called Keeping Score, which is hosted by the San Francisco Symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco’s music director, has set a new standard for educational programming with a series of behind-the-music radio and television broadcasts. To accompany the TV shows, which delve into canonical works such as Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” Tilson Thomas and the orchestra have set up high-tech pages where listeners can follow the score bar by bar, stop to listen to the conductor’s explanations of the particulars, and see musicians demonstrate how Stravinsky reinvented their instruments.