Correspondent No. 1 is a trustee of a chamber-music concert series in a Midwestern city, and I used to feel the way he did. Now I don't. Mind you, I readily admit that the decline of live performance will have dire and unpredictable effects on the culture of classical music and the ability of performers to earn a living--but I don't think the trend can be reversed, at least not very easily, and I'm no longer so sure it should be. This is a complicated problem about which I wrote at length in "Death of the Concert," an essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader, out in May from Yale University Press (plug, plug). I don't want to reprise the whole thing here, but this paragraph is especially relevant:

To what extent is it reasonable to expect that Alfred Brendel has something so dramatically new to say about the Schubert A Major Sonata, D. 959, that it is worth paying $60 to hear him play it in person? For the veteran concertgoer, the answer is obvious: recordings are at best a pale substitute for the immediate experience of live performance. But for the younger person who can sit in his living room and listen to the same sonata being performed by Maurizio Pollini, Andras Schiff, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Richard Goode, Murray Perahia, or Artur Schnabel--not to mention Brendel himself--this argument is unlikely to withstand close scrutiny.

My point was that a piece of classical music is infinitely more important than any possible interpretation of it, and once a half-dozen first-class versions are available on CD, the marginal utility of hearing an additional one, whether on record or in person, becomes subject to the law of diminishing returns. Therein lies the problem of the classical concert. Believe me, I treasure the "communal aspect" of art, so much so that I go out of my way (and my apartment) to experience it four or five nights a week. I couldn't get out much more than that! But I no longer feel any compelling need to regularly experience it in the form of routine live performances of the standard classical repertoire, any more than I feel the need to own another recording of Beethoven's late quartets, no matter how good it may be.

Is my attitude widely shared? Absolutely. Is it bad for classical music? Probably. Can anything be done about it? Maybe. Go here to read about what might be done to save the classical concert from extinction.

Moving on to Correspondent No. 2, I have some nagging doubts about his suspiciously plausible-sounding plan. It happens that New York once had a perfectly wonderful little combination theater-restaurant called the Screening Room. (That's where I saw Croupier.) You went there to eat a tasty, well-served dinner, then strolled down the hall at the appointed hour to watch a foreign or independent film, all for one reasonable prix fixe. Alas, not enough people appreciated the one-stop convenience, and so the Screening Room was forced to close its doors. My guess is that in our choice-intensive society, fewer and fewer of us care to commit ourselves to package deals of that sort. For much the same reason, it's also becoming difficult to persuade people to subscribe to any kind of advance-purchase ticket series, be it for opera, ballet, concerts, theater, or whatever. Like the song says, we want what we want when we want it--and we don't care whether that makes it impossible for the local ballet company to pay its bills on time, either.

Correspondent No. 3 has answered a question aboout which I'd been wondering. Who watches all those special features? I don't, at least not very often--but I'm not a budding young filmmaker. And I love the idea of young people learning how to make movies "mostly or entirely from a DVD-based education" rather than by going to school. If film-studies majors are anything like creative-writing majors, the result will probably be better independent films. Talk about unforeseen consequences!

Thanks to you all, and to all my readers and writers out there in the blogosphere. Sifting through the mailbox is one of the best parts of blogging.

Posted December 10, 2003 12:02 PM

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