YouTube is setting its sights high these days. The video site, bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock, seems to be trying to class up its act and make a name as something more than a place to watch waterskiing squirrels and lip-synch contests. (Ghost-riding—yeah, that’s a stunt to celebrate among our nation’s young.)

The channel hosted a YouTube Live event about a month ago to showcase the rock, rap and general acts of weirdness that it has either given a start to or fostered with video clips, including Free Hug Man, Tay “Chocolate Rain” Zonday and Tom Dickson of “Will It Blend?” fame. But this month and for the next few months, it’s elevating its brow and serving as the online audition hall for a symphony orchestra that will play—in a Web mash-up and in a real live performance at Carnegie Hall—an original composition by Oscar- and Grammy-winning composer Tan Dun.

Applicants from anywhere in the world can come to www.youtube.com/symphony, download the parts for their instruments and get a list of other recommended performance pieces for their audition. They can then upload two video recordings of their art: one performing the original symphony, titled “Eroica”, and the other a public-domain piece showcasing their broader musical and technical abilities.

A panel of experts from the world’s top orchestras will select a range of semifinal contestants for each chair to be filled in the 80-person orchestra—up to 200 possible entrants– and their clips will be put up on YouTube for a public vote Feb. 14 to 21.

Finally, the top vote-getters will be passed to conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony and the creative director of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. He will evaluate the applicants based on the same criteria as the first round of professional judges; musicianship, vitality and originality of the Tan Dun piece, and the interpretation of the second performance item. If he wishes, he may also take into account whether the contestant got a “thumbs up” in the public voting round.

In April 2009 the 80-or-so winners will be flown to New York at YouTube’s and Google’s expense and take part in a three-day classical music summit led by Thomas and other leading performers. After that comes the big night: a Carnegie Hall performance on April 15. It’s not certain whether this event will be streamed live on YouTube. But last month’s Webcast showed that the channel has the capacity to do it and to draw as many as 500,000 viewers. So if it doesn’t happen live, it won’t be YouTube’s fault.

Running parallel will be a project to take the best and most original of these video performances of Tan’s work and mash them together into a very non-traditional virtual orchestra performance of the work, which will also be posted at the YouTube Symphony site and may also be shown during the New York event.

I find a couple of aspects of this promotion really interesting. For one thing, it’s reaching out to musicians in any style, on just about any instrument, and at any level of professionalism. You’re not excluded just because the instrument you’re proficient on—the African mbira, say, or the Japanese biwa —isn’t part of the Western orchestra as built by Mozart et al.

Looking to show off your chops on the duduk? Simply hit the “prepare” button on the YouTube.com/symphony site, click on “other” on the menu, and find out that you should be preparing using the oboe part from the “Eroica”.

In fact, you’re not even ruled out of the contest if you can sing or rap in a pitch and range that matches the notes required in the symphony. So human beatboxes, take heart.

In fact, there are only a few things you can’t do in your audition videos, according to the rules. No group performances, for example. No improvising or changing tempos in the Tan Dun piece; no using words, just notes.

“The Internet is an invisible Silk Road, joining people from across the world,” Tan Dun says in a statement. “East or West, North or South, anyone can download a score of my Internet Symphony No. 1, pick any part and play it with any instrument or object, in any style. YouTube is the biggest stage on Earth, and I want to see what the world’s undiscovered musical geniuses will create with it.”

This looseness was built into the “Eroica” from the start. Tan, who won awards for his scores for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “hero” and also composed the them for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, says he was listening to the cheers for the Olympic athletes during the games as he traveled to various cities. He then passed by an auto repair shop and heard mechanics banging on brake drums and heard “the spirit of today.”

In fact, one of the coolest things about the project is that 24 members of the London Symphony Orchestra offer video master classes in how to perform the parts of Tan’s work—including a percussionist, Neil Percy, who shows how best to play the hubcap.. To a closet drummer like myself, that’s gold.

Making those learning materials available seems another of the breakthrough ideas in this collaborative project. After all, there’s a place for raw, diamond-in-the-rough talent—certainly there is on YouTube—a symphony orchestra has to coalesce at some point and pull in the same direction. In this case, Tan has even recorded different versions of himself looking at the camera and conducting for one specific instrument: invaluable help for a performer who may never have played with a large group.

By building so much performance help into the site, Tan, Thomas, the LSO and the other orchestras sponsoring this contest have thought about what aspiring musicians might need and provided that content.

Finally, what interests me is the scale of this promotion. It’s notably difficult to run truly global contests both from a logistics standpoint and a legal one. Those aspects of the contest are being handled by agency Marden-Kane, and executive vice president Marc Wortsman says the campaign is a unique challenge in both ways. A glance at the official rules shows that Google and YouTube have had to include some special clauses for specific countries such as Brazil, Canada and Mexico, to handle their unique prize-award and copyright requirements.

“A year and a half ago Marden-Kane started working both with YouTube and some of its clients to conduct user-generated contests on the YouTube platform,” Wortsman says. “We’ve been involved doing the legal, judging and admin work on many contests on their brand channels and now have worked on about 30 projects on YouTube in the last 18 months.”

YouTube is localized for 23 countries, including Japan, Portugal, Spain and Russia, so contest regulations had to be offered in the languages appropriate for each of those nations. That meant authoring a draft version of the rules in tandem with YouTube’s legal team and then circulating those drafts to the consulates of the 23 countries, compiling legal comment from advisors in those nations and then building those emendations into the master rule set.

“The European Union has data transfer issues so that depending on where the sponsor’s servers are located, that could affect the right to opt in or out of the promotion, how your private information will be used, and the ownership and usage rights for these submissions,” Wortsman says. “We look at all those nuances in European, Asian and South American law to accommodate those differences.”