What’s playing?

About Classical Watch

Classical Watch was created by George Mount, founder of Stringfest Analytics, to make the remarkable number of free classical performances online easier to discover.

The project combines a personal enthusiasm for classical music with the kind of work Stringfest Analytics does every day: finding scattered information, organizing it into useful data, and presenting it clearly. Classical Watch is an independent discovery tool and is not affiliated with the institutions listed here.

Questions, corrections, or a livestream we missed? Contact George.

A small experiment

This is a first version of an independent concert roundup, built to test whether having these livestreams in one place is useful. The starting roster contains schools that were relatively straightforward to add and keep updated. If people find it useful, the project can grow to include more schools and features.

How the schools were selected

Each school needed an official, publicly accessible schedule, clear evidence that a performance would be livestreamed, a usable viewing link, and a date and time we could interpret reliably. The current roster meets those practical requirements with simple automated collection. Inclusion reflects how readily their information could be collected; it is not a ranking of musical quality or a complete survey of conservatories.

European coverage starts with the Franz Liszt University of Music Weimar in Germany. Its afternoon and evening performances can fall during the US workday. Only explicitly announced streams are included, and titles appear in the language published by the source. Other European schools remain candidates; the Music Academy in Liechtenstein has suitable concerts, but its streaming partner did not allow dependable access from our automatic refresh servers.

How the calendar is assembled

A scheduled program checks the supported schools every Monday around 3 a.m. Eastern and looks up to 45 days ahead. Where a school offers a structured data feed, the program reads it directly. Otherwise, it reads the school's public webpages and extracts the relevant fields. This is often called scraping: collecting information from a page's underlying text and structure.

Each school has its own collection rules. An event must have an explicit broadcast label or public livestream link; a free in-person concert alone does not qualify. The program standardizes dates, removes duplicates and expired events, and saves the results in a small data file. It does not use AI to guess missing schedules. Your browser converts concert times to your time zone, with the original school time shown underneath. This includes the weeks when Europe and the US change their clocks on different dates. Videos play through the school's linked service.

Why Oberlin is not included yet

Oberlin does offer livestreams, and its official webcast information page was accessible. But the dates are supplied through a separate calendar service. In our initial automated tests on September 25, 2026, that service's data feed and embedded calendar both returned HTTP 403, an access-denied response.

That result does not mean Oberlin cannot be added, or that ordinary visitors cannot use its calendar. We would need a reliably accessible official feed or another dependable way to read and verify its schedule. For this first version, the project prioritizes sources that work with the simpler approach. Search results can help find individual concerts, but are not a dependable weekly schedule on their own.

What to keep in mind

Coverage is selective. Some schools publish only a few upcoming streams, and a weekly refresh can miss late additions or cancellations. If a source stops working, its recently verified future listings may remain for up to 14 days with a warning. Always check the official event page before making plans. “Scheduled now” follows the timetable; it does not detect video playback.

Calendar downloads are saved copies, not subscriptions. They will not automatically reflect later changes. Where an end time is unavailable, the invite reserves 90 minutes and labels that estimate.

Sources & latest checks