For anyone who has endured clichéd, condescending, uncomprehending, or otherwise aggravating depictions of classical music in American TV ads—the snobs at the symphony, the sopranos screaming under Valkyrie helmets, the badly edited bowdlerizations of the “Ode to Joy”—a new ad for the Apple iPad featuring the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen may come as a pleasant shock. It is, first of all, a cool, elegant piece of work—not surprising, given Apple’s distinguished history of television propaganda. Salonen is shown receiving inspiration for a passage in his Violin Concerto and trying it out in his iPad; then, after a montage of scenes in London and Finland, we see the violinist Leila Josefowicz and the Philharmonia Orchestra, of London, digging in to the score. More notably, it is musical: the concerto dictates the rhythm of the editing, and the correlation between notation and sound is made excitingly clear. Most unusually, it celebrates a contemporary classical piece; Salonen’s concerto had its première at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009 (my review is here).

Salonen’s enthusiasm for Apple products is genuine. When I wrote a Profile of him, in 2007, I began with an extended scene at the Santa Monica Apple Store, where he demontrated how he used various kinds of software to compose. He is now being rewarded with an extraordinarily powerful platform: in less than a day, the ad racked up a hundred thousand views on YouTube, and there is an auxiliary page of videos on the Apple Web site, including a free recording of the entire concerto, made for this occasion. One can’t help thinking of the hundreds of gifted composers who are not so fortunate—there is no job as solitary and invisible as writing music for a living. The very phrase “classical music,” implying an art devoted exclusively to the past, banishes it into limbo. But I imagine that many composers will be pleased at the sight of Salonen’s mass-market breakthrough. Very simply, it says: We exist.