Sandow

...about the dead-horse essay I've been beating. The writer of this airy document, Heather Mac Donald, offers this notion:

[Perceptions of a declining audience demand for classical music in our time], however valid, should be kept in historical perspective. Much of today's standard repertoire was never intended for a mass audience--not even an 1820s Viennese "mass audience," much less a 2010 American one.

I've seen many people make this point. The reasoning, I guess, would be something like this: Classical music has never had, and was never meant to have, a mass audience. So it can survive without one now.

The problems with this line of thought are staggering.

First, the reasoning, if it goes the way I suggested, is specious. Fine -- classical music never had a mass audience. But it had enough support, given in whatever form, to survive. That doesn't mean it can find support today. What's missing here is data and analysis. How did classical music survive in the past? What supports it, or could support it, now? How secure is its current support?

Second, the argument is entirely a red herring. Nobody says -- or certainly I don't say -- that classical music needs mass support. Maybe it's a specialized, highly rarefied, highly artistic niche. The question, then, isn't how large the audience in that niche might be, but whether the audience -- of whatever size -- is sustainable.

People these days who say classical music needs a new audience aren't saying that it needs a mass audience. They're saying that its niche audience might disappear, and needs -- inside the niche -- to be replaced.

Besides, Mac Donald has just quoted people -- and cited statistics -- suggesting that demand for classical music is diminishing. So how does it help us to insist that support was never all that strong in the past? We're not living in the past. We're facing that declining demand -- if that's an accurate picture of what's going on -- right now.

Finally, the notion of a mass market is meaningless historically. There wasn't any such thing in the 18th century, or in much of the 19th. The largest part of the population -- laborers and farmers -- weren't part of any organized music audience. Any kind of formal musical performance, anything staged for an audience in a theater or concert space, would have been for an audience of aristocrats, with more and more newly well-off, newly ambitious middle-class people showing up as the years progressed.

So why talk about a mass market? Let's talk about the market that existed. In the 18th century and for much of the 19th, all formal musical performances -- and all the informal ones, by amateurs -- were of what we'd now call classical music, though that term didn't come into use until the 19th century.

Which meant that classical music utterly dominated the musical market, however large it was, Or, more strongly, there wasn't any other musical market.

True, a lot of the music in that market -- showy piano pieces, written to describe and commemorate famous battles, sold for people to play in their homes -- was trivial. But in its style it was what we'd now call classical.

In the 19th century, the rise of the term "classical music" signalled the emergence of the first formal musical distinctions ever made on any large scale within what we now would call classical music performance. People made critical distinctions in the past, as British musical connoisseurs did in the 18th century, when they worshiped Corelli and thought Vivaldi's vulgar, theatrical verve meant the end of civilization. (See William Weber's essential book, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology.)

Early in the 19th century, when the term classical music emerged, it was used to label "serious" music by composers of the past, Haydn and Mozart, and music in that tradition written in the present, by Beethoven, and later Mendelssohn and Schumann. (Schubert wouldn't have been well known enough to rate much mention, until after his death.) This "classical music" was a small niche in the musical world, while "popular music" -- the term was actually used -- was a hugely larger niche.

But what was this "popular music"? Performances by virtuosi, like Liszt and Paganini. Opera, above all operas by Rossini, by far the most popular performer in Europe.

So here we see the emergence of a mass market, as opposed to a smaller, more artistic "classical" one -- except that the music in the mass market is still what we'd call classical! So some of the music in our present classical repertoire in fact did have the beginnings of a mass market in its time. And some composers, like Brahms, played both sides of the tracks. Brahms worried (see Jan Swafford's biography) that his first symphony wouldn't earn him enough money to pay for the time needed to write it, and made his large fortune writing what then were popular piano works.

Later in the 19th century, a true mass musical market emerged, as the working class grew prosperous enough to buy tickets for musical performances, and venues -- along with new musical styles -- like music halls in England rose up to serve them. (See Derek B. Scott's fascinating book, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris and Vienna.) Now, for the first time, it was possible to talk of a mass musical market distinct from what we now accept as our classical music repertoire, though even then classical music dominated, culturally, in a way that it doesn't today. You didn't have critics taking British music halls seriously, as critics take rock and pop and jazz in our time.

This -- and I apologize for its length -- is a look at the notion that classical music never had a mass market, a notion that I think is just about wholly specious, especially if it's used somehow to suggest that classical music isn't losing support now. Whatever the musical market was in past centuries, what we now call classical music entirely ruled it, often with characteristics -- sensation-seeking audiences, for instance -- that in our time we'd associate with the mass market, and not with art.

To wrap up what I've been doing in this post, this one, and this one (dispelling some optimistic silliness about classical music's present state and its future)...

I'd been enumerating the reasons given, if you follow the link, for classical music being not just healthy, but in a golden age. Those I've listed so far are: Performances are better (more technically accomplished) than they've ever been. Performances are more faithful to the composer's intentions. The early music movement has brought new energy to classical music. Classical recordings are booming.

As both I and some commenters have said, a lot of this amounts to no more than saying, "Wow, there's a lot going on." Without looking deeper to find out how much of it is sustainable.

So, moving onward:

5. A lot of students are studying to be classical musicians.

This genuinely is a mystery. Music schools are full of students, even though other people the students' age don't care about classical music. How can that be?

Probably the riddle could be solved, if there were studies showing who the music students are, demographically, and how they came to classical music. One guess I've made is that music lessons -- in classical music -- are part of the portfolio, so to speak, of kids from upscale families. And some of the kids really take to classical music, which would make sense, because the music is, after all, quite wonderful.

And as long as jobs in the field still exist -- in orchestras, for instance -- a professional career seems reasonable.

But that's just a guess. The downside of the situation -- which speaks strongly about the clouds that really do sit over the classical music world these days -- would be this. First, the students acutely feel that other people their age aren't interested in what they do, and many of them don't like that. Many more might not like it -- or might much more strongly say that they don't -- if discussion of this were encouraged at their schools.

Second, the schools themselves acutely feel that there might not be jobs for the present and future generations of their students. That's why entrepreneurship is such a buzzword at music schools these days -- if there won't be orchestra jobs (for instance), then students will have to learn how to make careers on their own. The students, too, are aware of this.

I'll admit that -- at Juilliard, for instance, where I teach about the future of classical music -- the students in my classes might be more likely to think these things than their colleagues would. But maybe not. At the National Orchestral Institute at the University of Maryland, where I've spoken to students for the past couple of year, or at Yale, where I spent two days talking to students (among other things I did there), I found  these sentiments to be quite strong. Classical music students don't feel rosy about their futures.

6. Classical music is booming in Asia.

We hear this a lot, with thoughts of China shining in the air. So many piano students there, so many violin students! And so many new opera houses, with no opera performed in them. So few orchestras, and those that exist giving very few performances. Such small audiences, sometimes, for touring performers from the west. So many Chinese and Korean students taking my Juilliard course, saying that there really isn't strong support for classical music in their countries, hoping to go home and develop that support.

And, in China, so much passion for western popular culture. I remember reading once of a China tour by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a band with wide indie support, but no pop chart success. They were one of the first western bands to tour China, and found, according to one member of the group, 10,000 fans at their shows, all mouthing or singing the lyrics of their songs. Chalk some of that down to exaggeration. It's still stronger support -- stronger fandom -- than western classical musicians might find.

For a none too rosy look at classical music in China, go here. (The link is to one of the documents prepared for the Australian classical music summit I've blogged and blogged about.)

My guess is that support for classical music in Asia, or at least in China and Korean, is to some extent aspirational. That is, classical music is an attainment that newly well-off Chinese and Korean families want their kids to have. But again, that's a guess. I'd love more data. But I do think to blindly say things are booming isn't quite right.

Continuing (with apologies for letting it drop yesterday) my catalogue of reasons why Heather Mac Donald thinks classical music is in a golden age. Here's her essay to that effect, and here and here are my previous comments on it.

And even if Mac Donald's essay is, essentially, fluff, remember that some of these arguments are made by others, too. I'm finding it helpful to put a lot of my answers to classical music optimistts in one place.

Mac Donald's first argument was that performances are better than they've ever been. And from there, more briefly, I hope, we have:

2. Performances are more faithful to the composers' intentions.

Much of my response to Mac Donald's first reason would apply here. We have a cult of fidelity now, and this might make performances more guarded, more rule-bound, and less individual. If you read my last response, you'll see that I found Mac Donald praising a book that makes exactly this point, though it's an issue -- and an objection to her thesis -- that she never even mentions.

3. The early music movement has brought new energy to classical music. By reviving a lost repertoire, it's also given us what in effect is new music.

All true, and a good thing, probably not disputed by anyone, except a few old-school celebrity soloists. But saying that there are good things happening in classical music today -- which there are -- isn't (or shouldn't be) the same as saying that we're in a golden age. The big question Mac Donald sidesteps (as I discussed in my first response) is whether anything in classical music today is sustainable. If it's not sustainable, then we're hardly in any kind of golden era.

The early music movement might, in fact, have given us at least a small new audience. But Mac Donald doesn't discuss this. She just exclaims in rapture over how wonderful the early music movement is. What tangible difference it might make to the economics of classical music -- to classical music's survival -- she doesn't say.

And note one fascinating argument she makes. Early music, she says, literally becomes our new music, in the classical music world. That's because new music, as we usually define it -- newly written music -- is as good as dead:

...the tidal wave of creation that generated the masterpieces we so magnificently perform is spent; we're left to scavenge the marvels that it cast up....

The public could not be more unequivocal: it finds little emotional significance in most contemporary classical music, especially that produced in academic enclaves.

The first of these thoughts is, to say the least, open to dispute. I certainly don't experience new music as Mac Donald seems to. Over the nearly 40 years I've been in this business, I haven't heard new music and said, "Oh, too bad. The tidal wave of creation is spent." Just the opposite. And many others would agree.

So then we have the second sentence I've quoted here, where "the public" is brought in as, so to speak, a prosecution witness. "The public" doesn't like new music! So what good can it be?

But which public do we mean? The established classical music audience? Yes, in the past they haven't much liked new work. But there are other publics, including the large younger audience that drinks in new music at events like the annual Bang on a Can marathon. I've seen that audience at enough New York events to make me believe it's a tangible reality, even if no one seems to be marketing systematically to it.

And even the older audience may be changing its stripes. My wife, in a major piece on new operas, found that opera companies around the country are having trouble selling tickets to the old repertoire. New operas do much better. This was a surprise to her, as it is to me, but it shows apparent changes that something that, in this case, Mac Donald isn't alone in taking for granted.

4. Classical recordings are booming.

Contrary to the standard dirge [Mac Donald writes], the classical recording industry is still shooting out more music than anyone can possibly take in over a lifetime.

Sure. But the classical recording industry has changed. The big for-profit labels release far less classical music than they used to, and shore up their bottom lines with crossover. Many of the smaller labels are non-profit, and in many cases there's a double whammy -- the record company has to raise money to survive, and the artists making the recordings also raise money, to pay the recording costs. I've known that to happen even on a big,  profit-making label like Naxos.

Does this sound like a golden age, an age when musicians have to pay to have recordings made -- as opposed to a generation or two ago, when classical recordings could be profitably sold?

If funding for classical music is endangered (as even Mac Donald gives evidence that it might be, though she quickly runs away from that point; see my first response to her), then classical recordings of course will be, too.

And even for the most successful commercial label around -- Naxos -- the trendlines seem to point down. Here's the founder and CEO of Naxos, Klaus Heymann, quoted in an interview with my wife:

Frankly none of [our marquee releases] make any money, if you ask me. Even the Bernstein Mass  [with Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra], we sold 20,000 sets worldwide, has still not made any money for us. It's in copyright; it cost us a lot of money to produce, and cost the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra a lot. [Even at Naxos, the artists might pay all or part of the costs of their recordings.] At our price we have to sell a lot a lot of records to break even. For us these are prestige projects. It's good for the label; we make money from licensing and distribution; it just goes from the pot. The only thing you can make money from these days is guitar solo or piano which doesn't cost you anything [to record.] With an orchestra recording you have to sell 20,000, and nothing sells 20,000 these days....

right now, in the first five months our recording of the Spohr concerto for 2 violins sold 7,000 worldwide. Then Vaughan Williams, "Dona nobis pacem," 6,000 in only 3 months. 4,500 Vaughan Williams Sacred Choral Works. Alsop Dvorak Symphonies 7 and 8, 4,000 in only two months. Petrenko Shostakovich 8 Liverpool also about 4,000 in only 2 months. Khachaturian cello concerto also about 4,000. Haydn Stabat Mater from Trinity New York also 4,000, but that's not selling so strongly any more. Roussel Symphony No. 4 also 4,000 in 4 months.

It's a very odd repertory nowadays. It's in many ways gratifying that all this material [is selling]. Of course with sales of 4,000, you're not making any money.

Can you continue to exist if you're just breaking even?

This is a question has been debated in the company a lot. Our strategy is that we will be the last man standing in terms of distributing classical music.

He goes on to say that, even if physical records are entirely replaced by digital sales, he'll find a way to make money. But if his ambition -- as he defines it himself -- is to be the last man standing...

I'll continue this tomorrow.

So here are the main points made in the essay I talked about yesterday -- the main points as I think the author sees them, rather than the serious holes in both her data and her analysis that I noted in my post.

This, remember, is an essay on classical music's new golden age, a golden age that the writer, Heather Mac Donald, thinks is happening right now. Anyone who doesn't agree, apparently, is a "declinist," to use the very cloudy term Mac Donald throws around, apparently applying it to anyone who thinks classical music might be in trouble.

(Which, parenthetically, might include many of the leading people in the classical music business, Peter Gelb, for instance, and also many others who run big classical music institutions. Does Mac Donald know that the people on the front lines -- the people who, unlike Mac Donald or me, actually have to cope with classical music's present-day reality -- wouldn't, on the whole, agree with her?

(But then she has an answer for them. They're "declinists.")

Here are Mac Donald's main points, at least as I understand them:

1. Performances are better than they've ever been.

Anyone inclined to lament the state of classical music today should read Hector Berlioz's Memoires. As the maverick French composer tours mid-nineteenth-century Europe conducting his revolutionary works, he encounters orchestras unable to play in tune and conductors who can't read scores....

Berlioz's exuberant tales of musical triumph and defeat constitute the most captivating chronicle of artistic passion ever written. They also lead to the conclusion that, in many respects, we live in a golden age of classical music....

The caliber of musicianship also marks our age as a golden one for classical music. "When I was young, you knew when you heard one of the top five American orchestras," says Arnold Steinhardt, the first violinist of the recently disbanded Guarneri Quartet. "Now, you can't tell. Every orchestra is filled with fantastic players."...

The declinists who proclaim the death of classical music might have a case if musical standards were falling. But in fact, "the professional standards are higher everywhere in the world compared to 20 or 40 years ago," says James Conlon, conductor of the Los Angeles Opera.

These points, I should add, are buttressed by many fetching if not entirely unfamiliar anecdotes from the past. And in fact her contention, on which she lavishes so much space, isn't new, or very revealing. No one doubts that technical standards are higher now than in centuries past, or even than in decades past. It's a well-known story, with two of the main landmarks in it (which Mac Donald doesn't mention) being the rise of recording -- when musicians for the first time heard themselves they were amazed at how imprecise they were (as Robert Philips recounts in his books) -- and the collossal impact of Toscanini in the early years of the 20th century, with his unprecedented insistence on precision.

And so it's amazing -- given how familiar this territory is -- that Mac Donald doesn't mention the counterargument, that performances have grown not just more precise, but more sterile, especially in the last few decades. I might argue this on what you could call ideological grounds -- I think classical music has lost touch with the world around it, has retreated into itself, and set up rules for proper performance that have little to do with real communication.

But others, for decades, have made the argument without any ideological point. They've said that jet travel has made performances sterile -- musicians travel so much, and perform so much, they don't have time to be themselves, and also constantly perform with different partners, so they can't settle into a free and individual performance style with musicians with whom they have a meeting of minds and souls. (Of course there are exceptions to this.)

People also say that recording makes things sterile -- recordings, edited to be perfect, now set a standard that audiences expect to be met in live performance. Musicians, trying to meet those standards, work on precision first, and expression only later.

Neither Mac Donald or anyone else has to agree with these arguments. What's amazing to me is that she doesn't even mention them, given how rampant they are in the music world (especially, maybe, in opera, where it's routine to meet people who think current singers can't stand up to the singers of the past, even in their vocal technique).

Stranger still, Mac Donald quotes an anecdote from a book she calls a "mesmerizing study of Romantic pianism," Kenneth Hamilton's After the Golden Age -- and Hamilton himself says performances have gotten more sterile:

Romantic pianism [he means piano-playing in the Romantic era of the 19th century] was not simply a matter of creative translation, of free rearrangement. Virtually the entire spectrum of performing styles was heard and applauded somewhere, from our standard sober renditions of pieces [he means the "standard sober renditions" we normally hear in our time] to [very free] versions which we would without hesitation classify as transcriptions. The key word is variety -- the fascinating variety of approaches one finds on early recordings, which always leave open the possibility that with each new disk transferred to CD we will hear something quite thrilling, or something quite appalling. Modern pianism is no less full of talent, but it is often more uniform or straitlaced, a mirror of our stiffer concert etiquette.

Hamilton also blames the belief that performance exists largely -- or only -- to realize a composer's intentions. The passage I quoted comes from the last chapter of his book, at location 3478 of the Kindle edition. Remarks about realizing a composer's intentions come a little later.

Again, I'm not saying that Mac Donald (or anyone else) has to agree with this. But it's stupefying, I think, that she'd make her argument without even mentioning an opposing point of view so common that I've encountered it routinely for many years. And, even more stupefying, that she'd praise a book that takes this opposing point of view, without ever mentioning that it does so. That almost equals the feat I noted in my last post, when I showed how Mac Donald cites facts that undermine her opinion, and then leaps away, never to mention them again.

(Granted, Hamilton states his views judiciously, and starts by debunking the idea that the past was a golden age, but still, as the passage I quoted shows, he's no fan of the idea that our present-day precision is an achievement of supreme value.)

How sad, beyond this, to hold up precision as the standard for a golden age! Have we really sunk that low?

This has gone on too long, so I'll discuss Mac Donald's other main points in a future post.

People have been sending me links to an optimistic view of the future of classical music -- an effusive essay that even says we live in the greatest age classical music has ever had. This is "Classical Music's New Golden Age," by Heather Mac Donald (that's really how she spells her name; the space after "Mac" isn't a typo), appearing in the summer 2010 issue of City Journal, a quarterly journal of urban affairs published by the Manhattan Institute.

Of course I take a different view, and one person who sent me the link said, wittily, that Mac Donald is "sort of like an inverse of you," because "[s]he seems to be celebrating the things you have identified as possible problems with classical music - changes since the 19th century like the quietening down of audiences, moving away from potpourri-style programming, the growing untouchability of composers. Plus she thinks new music is best sourced from previously neglected old music."

All true. More on some of that in a later post. More generally, here's how Mac Donald summarizes her main point:

...we live in a golden age of classical music. Such an observation defies received wisdom, which seizes on every symphony budget deficit to herald classical music's imminent demise. But this declinist perspective ignores the more significant reality of our time: never before has so much great music been available to so many people, performed at levels of artistry that would have astounded Berlioz and his peers. Students flock to conservatories and graduate with skills once possessed only by a few virtuosi. More people listen to classical music today, and more money gets spent on producing and disseminating it, than ever before.

When I read this, I think I'm looking at an inverse of me in more than one way. It's not just that Mac Donald and I disagree. It's that we seem to inhabit inversely-related universes in the way we use data. I like to analyze it. Mac Donald, for the most part, just exclaims over it.

For instance:

...professional orchestras in the U.S. today dwarf in number anything seen in the past. In 1937, there were 96 American orchestras; in 2010, there are more than 350.

Yes, and in those years the US population increased 238%, from about 130 million in 1937 to about 310 million now (according to the latest Census Bureau estimate).  Wouldn't population growth account for some of those new orchestras, and in fact for many of them?

The number of orchestras predictable for 2010, from population growth alone, would be 228. And the remaining increase might easily be due to increased prosperity, along with the combination of population growth and prosperity that, between 1937 and 2010, brought many cities to a place where an orchestra could sustain itself. (It's interesting here to read Robert and Helen Lynd's seminal 1925 book Middletown, the first thorough sociological study of an American city, in this case Muncie, IN, disguised under another name. What you'll find there is a city with very few resources, compared to equivalent cities now.)

So Mac Donald's statistic, in this case, doesn't mean much more than "wow, there are a lot more of us now than there used to be, and we have more money." I'll grant that a "declinist" perspective might have predicted a slower growth in the number of orchestras, but if all you do is wave numbers in the air -- or, to be fair, if all you do in addition is compare the increase in orchestras to population growth, as I did -- you haven't even begun to analyze the reasons for orchestral growth, or to put yourself in a position where you can safely decide what the numbers mean.

My analysis is only the vaguest beginning, but at least I know that. Mac Donald seems unaware that she hasn't said anything at all. Likewise the last sentence in the first passage I quoted from her:

More people listen to classical music today, and more money gets spent on producing and disseminating it, than ever before.

All she's saying, once again, is that there are more of us, and that we have more money. One thing notably missing is any projection into the future. Will still more of us listen? Will even more money be spent?

Weirdly, Mac Donald gives reasons for answering "no" to both questions. She notes the NEA finding, which I've blogged about (here and here), that over the past 30 years there's been a striking decline in the percentage of adult Americans who go to classical music performances. (Though she wrongly credits the League of American Orchestras, which set out only to confirm the NEA study.)

And she also notes, as so many others have, that the current generation of people with money don't support classical music:

"What is different today is that the nation's elite, the very rich, don't care about classical music," [Leon Botstein] observes. "The patron class is philistine; instead of Andrew Carnegie, we have Donald Trump. Some rich guy with a hedge fund wants to be photographed with Angelina Jolie, not support the Cleveland Orchestra." Bill Gates didn't help matters when he proclaimed gratuitously: "I have no interest in giving to opera houses." Younger philanthropists seem to be following Gates's lead in spurning the arts, write Matthew Bishop and Michael Green in Philanthrocapitalism. The celebrity-bedecked Robin Hood Foundation enjoys extraordinary cachet on Wall Street; organizations that promote classical culture, far less so.

But she dismisses the NEA data by noting that other activities also show a decline in participation, and moves onward from that powerful paragraph about funding without drawing any conclusion from it, or even mentioning anything in it again, leaving me breathless -- or, no, stupefied.

First, how does it help classical music if other audiences -- for movies, rock shows, or sports -- are also getting smaller? If I have a heart murmur, how does it help me to know that you've got cancer? Maybe boxing matches are drawing fewer people (just as fewer people are building model railroads or going fishing), but even so, your local orchestra either has to get its numbers up, or else -- with a smaller audience, and less money coming in from ticket sales -- give fewer performances.

And second: Wouldn't you think, if you'd established that classical music has (or is likely to have) a smaller audience and less funding, that then you wouldn't go around saying that it's in a golden age, or talk -- as Mac Donald does virtually throughout her essay -- as if everything in almost all ways was just super-ducky. Sample, from her final paragraph:

...the present-day abundance of classical music--of newly rediscovered works, consummate performances, thousands of recordings, and legions of fans--is a testament to its deep roots in human feeling.

The italics are my emphasis. Lost in the ether is any thought, based on League or NEA data, that those legions might be getting smaller. But that's how Mac Donald seems to deal with data. She'll sniff it for a moment, and then let it blow away in the wind.

No wonder, when I read her, that I think I'm in another universe.

...in Australia. This finishes my paraphrase of my keynote talk at the Australian classical music summit, as summarized from my notes.

The story so far (you can read the first part here): our culture has changed, but classical music for decades didn't change with it. This is why the field is in trouble, why we're seeing declines in ticket sales, a sharp drop in the percentage of adults who go to classical performances, drops in funding, and other declines.

Implications of all this

First: If classical music's problems are due to how far it strayed from our culture, then people in the classical music world must learn to understand the culture they're in. We have to learn to see the world as it appears to people who aren't into classical music. I don't think we've done that very well, and that -- to me -- is one of the classical music world's biggest failings.

Second: Music education isn't the answer. We're not going to renew classical music by teaching it in our schools. There are many reasons for this, but the simplest is that it won't work. Kids may learn to like classical music, but they'll also -- as is only natural -- get caught up in the larger culture, in which classical music doesn't have much to offer. Maybe some of them will go to classical performances when they're older, but it's hard to imagine enough of them going to replace the audience we have now. (It's also hard to imagine how, in the US, we'll ever get cities and states to put up the money for classical music education, given that money is short, and -- a rather serious stumbling block! -- people aren't interested in classical music in the first place.)

Third: There's a tendency, in the classical music world, to beat up on the media, to blame it for not covering classical music, and to demand more coverage. This won't work. Of course the media doesn't cover classical music. People aren't interested in it. To go to the media with an aggrieved sense of entitlement won't -- to put it mildly -- be convincing. If we want media coverage, we'll have to do things vivid enough for the media to want to cover, all on their own. (And this, in keeping with what I said in at the end of the last installment, means doing smarter things, not -- as many people fear -- dumber things.)

Fourth: In our current culture, classical music doesn't seem very interesting. It doesn't come across as a contemporary art, doesn't deal with contemporary life, doesn't probe into the contemporary world with powerful artistic impact, the way a profound TV series like The Wire does. It doesn't reflect the sound, the feeling, the thoughts, the emotions of our current world.

And there's something brain-dead about the way classical music presents itself. My favorite example: the instrumentation of orchestral works, as dutifully listed in orchestra concert programs. ("Three flutes, one doubling piccolo, three oboes, one doubling English horn, three clarinets, one doubling E flat clarinet and one doubling bass clarinet...") At least in our big orchestras, these lists don't correspond with what the audience sees on stage. The composer wrote the piece for four horns, two trumpets, and three trombones, but what's on stage are five horns, three trumpets, and four trombones.

Why? Because the principal horn and trumpet have the royal privilege of not playing some of the ensemble passages in their parts, so they can save themselves for their solos. An extra player sits on stage to play those passages. The top trombone part will sound better, in soft music, with two players on it instead of two.

These are fascinating details of orchestral life. But they're never explained to the audience. And meanwhile the instrumentation lists -- night after night, week after week, year after year -- don't correspond to what the whole world can see on stage, and nobody seems to care. If that doesn't show a disconnect between classical music and the world -- even with its own world! -- I don't know what does. We've ossified. We've forgotten that we're a group of people, doing things for other people, who may have thoughts about what we do, and may notice discrepancies in what we present.

Recommendations

Classical music isn't going to die. It's going to be reborn, which I why I'm calling my book on the future of classical music Rebirth. Though the rebirth might in some ways be painful, because it'll involve some profound change.

The good news, though, is that the process already has started. Classical music has been changing on its own, becoming more like the rest of our culture. We see this in big organizations, smaller ones, and, sometimes explosively, from individuals. Performing musicians, for instance, or composers.

And this means classical music is getting smarter. It's getting more alert, more lively, more thoughtful, less ritualized, less ossified, more in tune with the other arts -- painting, theater, dance, poetry (not to mention more popular arts like film, fashion, and graphic design) -- and more in tune with our current lives.

It's becoming -- at last reflecting changes that started to happen in our culture long ago -- more informal, more transparent, more individual, and more creative.

In the future, I can imagine a classical music world in which at least half of all performances are of contemporary music, music by living composers. A classical music world in which the old masterworks find their place -- and, more important, their meaning -- by constantly being heard in the context of the music of our own time.

I can imagine new classical music that sounds like the music elsewhere in our culture -- classical music that often has a beat (as the works by many young composers already have), that reflects trends in jazz, pop, and world music, just as classical music reflected the vernacular music of past centuries. (Except a lot of what happens in jazz and pop and world music today isn't only vernacular -- it's art.)

I can imagine a classical music world in which people in the audience know what performers are trying to do -- in which conductors and soloists and chamber groups would explain their goals in a performance, state the difficulties each piece gives them, and lets the audience follow their success -- or failure -- in meeting those difficulties.

I can imagine a classical music world that reflects things in contemporary life, a classical music world in which (just for example) competitions take on some aspects of reality shows, because judges would state in public what they thought of everyone's playing, and in which musicians in the competition wouldn't simply play, but would be given challenges -- to play a piece twice, for instance, in two entirely different ways, or to play a new work they'd never seen before, in which the composer hasn't indicated tempo, dynamics, or articulation. We'd then see how much musical imagination the musicians had, not just how well they'd learned to play the music they've practiced.

I can imagine a classical music world that reaches beyond classical music and its standard audience, as my cellist friend Peter Gregson does in London, where he's resident artist at a members-only club whose members are rising, upscale, powerful people in media, exactly the kind of people we don't see going to classical concerts, or funding them. Peter also has released his first album, not on a classical label, but on a series Peter Gabriel curates for the high-end loudspeaker company Bowers & Wilkins. Peter Gregson, in other words, is going outside classical music, to reach an audience attracted by the wide-ranging taste of one of the most artistic musicians in pop music. In the future, I can imagine a classical music world in which everyone reached audiences of that kind -- in which those audiences would be the classical music audience.

And I can imagine a classical music world in which the playing of classical music is reinvigorated and transformed. A classical music world in which musicians discuss performance enhancements -- mood lighting, talking to the audience, projecting thoughts about the music on screens during performances, showing videos. And then decide not to add any of those things, but instead to play the music so vividly that no enhancement is necessary. For the old masterworks, especially, this would be a revelation. To rise to the occasion, to make everything in these pieces so clear, so contrasted, and so dramatic -- or else so quiet, so probing, so rapt -- that nobody needed any education or explanation to follow what's going on, and so that even people (like me) who know many of those pieces by heart would sit up, open our eyes and ears, and hear the music as if we'd never heard it before.

That, to me, would be a profound kind of rebirth, and I'm looking forward to it with the greatest excitement.

This, to me, is the best exposition I've ever given of my ideas about classical music, what's wrong with it and where it's going. I'm available, needless to say, to give this talk (at greater length, if anyone wants that, and with much more detail) anywhere, arrangements permitting. I'll create a single PDF from my two installments of this, and make it available for anyone to download.

I've said I gave a keynote speech at the Australian classical music summit, but I haven't said much more about my presence there -- here or here -- because what they did, I thought, was more important than what I did.

But, for anyone curious, here's what I said in my talk. I'm paraphrasing myself from notes, and giving just a summary. Often I record my talks on my iPhone, but I didn't do it this time, and no other recording was made.

Added later: Forgot to say here that -- in my talk -- I stressed that my thoughts were only about what I've observed in the US, and sometimes elsewhere, in Europe and the UK. I have no authority to diagnose problems in Australia, or to prescribe solutions.

Culture

The biggest problem classical music has now is that it hasn't kept up with our culture. Our culture has changed (has been changing for two generations). Classical music hasn't changed nearly as much. Our culture has become more informal, creative, and participatory. Classical music is only starting to move in those directions. It's still largely formal, handed down from above.

Two other cultural changes stand out.

First, popular culture has developed its own serious art. So we no longer can talk about classical music (and the other high arts) standing opposed to cheap mass entertainment. Classical music now coexists with subtle, complex new forms of musical art, which to a contemporary audience may seem more intelligent, and certainly are more deeply tied to contemporary life and thought.

Second, we're seeing the end of white, European hegemony in the world. This is more than a grandly vague, suspiciously PC statement. White, European-based culture really is losing its dominance, and it's natural that music that still largely reflects only white, European-based culture will lose its dominance, too.

And there's something else. Even western culture has now been infused with music that's largely non-European. That began when African slaves were brought to America. They fused their own music with the European music they heard in their new world, and the result was blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, rock -- the whole array of contemporary nonclassical styles, whose partly African origin shows in the largely nonclassical way they use rhythm. So even white people now take for granted a musical culture that now has a largely non-European core.

(This is the larger meaning of a simple fact, that pop music has a beat.)

Results of the cultural shift

It's because classical music hasn't changed with our culture that we see all the familiar signs of trouble in the classical music world. Often these signs are discussed as if they themselves were the the problem, but to me, bad as they are, they're really symptoms of something different.

It's a familiar list. Because classical music hasn't kept up with our culture, we now see:

• the aging of the audience (which, as I've often said here, has been going on for 50 years; go here for the evidence)
• declines in the number of classical radio stations, declines in media coverage, and in classical recording
• a change in what cities look for, if they want to attract up to date people -- they no longer need an orchestra or an opera company; now they want bike trails, cultural diversity, and a local band scene
• a decline in classical music ticket sales
• the sharp decline, reported by the National Endowment, and confirmed by the League of American Orchestras, in the percentage of adult Americans who go to classical performances
• a decline in funding for classical music, which looks like it will be worse in the future, because (as has been widely reported, most recently on the Crain's New York Business website) younger people with money don't donate to the arts. 

I'll finish this in my next post. (Which now is here.) Note the difference between my approach, and what I think is the more usual classical music point of view. The more usual view is that classical music is wonderful, and the rest of the culture has somehow lost sight of that. So what we need is classical music education in our schools, and lots of outreach. Once people get to know classical music, as they did in past generations, they'll come to love it.

My view is that classical music is way out of touch, and has to get more like the rest of our culture -- which (to allay a common fear) will make it smarter, not dumber.

Today I had the pleasure of talking for an hour with a group of journalists from Siberia and Central Asia -- Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. They asked (in Russian, through an interpreter) terrific questions about classical music in the US.(This was arranged by CEC ArtsLINK, which arranges exchanges of many kinds involving arts people from Russia and surrounding regions.)

The question I found the hardest was a simple one. Which new or recent American classical piece did I think was most important?

For a moment I blanked, and then four answers came to me. I'll share them here, without for a moment claiming that these are the best new American pieces (of, let's say, the past generation), or the most important, or the most influential, or the most representative. Or that your taste has to be mine, or that these are for all time my favorite pieces, or that I couldn't find four other pieces that might do the job for me just as well.

But these are the four pieces that popped into my mind. Maybe they're some kind of guide to my taste. No commentary, no explanations, no excuses. One choice is for a composer, rather than any of his pieces. Here's the list:

Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians

David Del Tredici, Final Alice

Glenn Branca, collected works

David Lang, The Little Match Girl Passion

If I were going to add anything, I'd choose:

Meredith Monk, collected works

Philip Glass, Songs and Poems for Solo Cello

Peter Garrett -- formerly the hard-to-forget lead singer for Midnight Oil -- is Australia's Minister for the Environment, Heritage, and  the Arts. He's hard to forget because he's at least 6'6" (one Internet source says seven feet), imposingly bald, and, when he was a rock star, impassioned.

Now he's a seasoned politician. He spoke at the Australian classical music summit I've been blogging about (scroll back to see). He dressed informally (open shirt, no tie; don't know if that's a rock thing, an Australian thing, or a Peter Garrett thing), and spoke in relaxed generalities, though he charmed us all by building bridges, telling us he'd sung Vaughn Williams in an Anglican choir when he was a boy.

But otherwise he was exactly the guy i remember seeing onstage when Midnight Oil played an LA club, back in the '80s. I was having flashbacks, followed by jumps forward. Flash! Rock & roll! Flash! Cabinet Minister!

I was curious to hear him again, so on iTunes I bought the Midnight Oil album I best remember, Devils and Dust, from 1987. The opening song -- "Beds Are Burning," a top 20 hit in the US -- came right back at me, as if I'd heard it only yesterday.

The time has come
A fact's a fact
It belongs to them
Let's give it back

"It" meaning the land, and "them" being Australia's indigenous people. Good lyrics for a left-wing politician, and in fact the band always stood out for its activism, environmental and otherwise.

But here's why I'm writing this: Peter Garrett's singing voice. The same voice that spoke, with such easy polish, at the classical music summit. Except back then, on the record, it had rock & roll attitude.

And so again I had double vision. Just could not believe a rock singer -- that rock singer, the one I was hearing again after so many years -- could be in the government! I have to laugh at myself. I'm the one who says rock & roll can be art. I'm the one who says the culture has changed, and that we in the classical music world have to learn that rock culture is mainstream. Respectable. Cabinet-worthy.

And I know perfectly well that Garrett had a real political career, that he's not just an activist, that he'd been elected to parliament.

But something inside of me doesn't quite believe it could happen. He's a rock singer!

Old attitudes die hard.

(Reminds me of 20 years or so ago, when rock stars like Mick Jagger were turning 50. People couldn't believe you could be 50 and still sing rock & roll. Wasn't a grownup thing to do, i guess. It was Robert Palmer, the late, superlative rock and blues writer who pointed out to me that no one said this about anyone black. No one thought Ray Charles shouldn't go on rocking,at 50 and beyond. As if African-Americans couldn't be or didn't have to be adults, but -- absurdly, given his character -- we expected something more from Mick Jagger.

(Well, we know better now. Jagger will enter his 70s, still rocking. And African-Americans were way ahead of us white folks, being perfectly easy as adults with a beat. But still my shock at Peter Garrett sandbagged me. Old attitudes die hard.)

More about the Australian classical music summit, where I gave a keynote speech, and which I started to describe (the summit, not my speech) here.

The hard work of the summit was done in five working groups, on these subjects:

• advancing the repertoire
• advocacy and research
• audience building [two working groups on this subject]
• community and regional development
• education: school and community
• education: professional and studio ["studio" means private music teaching]
• media

Go here for a summit document, with details on these groups. It's another example of the thorough preparatory work that helped the summit succeed.

I sat in with one of the audience building groups. More on that in a moment. The other discussions -- and the discussions at the summit generally -- were of course variable. Time was spent on things that don't seem (at least to me) as if they'd go anywhere, or that shouldn't be a high priority.

Under the "media" heading, for instance, some people wanted to confront (I think that's the word) newspapers about either the quality of their classical music criticism, or about why they don't publish any. Good luck with that. How, for instance, will you counter a newspaper's people (assuming that you even get to talk to them), when they tell you they don't publish classical music criticism because they've had to cut staff and think local government reporting is more important, or because they've found their readers don't read  the reviews, or because they themselves -- the editors and writers at the newspaper -- don't care?

"Oh," you might say, "classical music is important!" As I said, good luck with that.

And -- under the banner of advocacy -- some people wanted to recruit prominent political figures to talk about classical music. Seems like a lot of work for a very small gain. People all over Australia are going to start going to classical concerts because a prominent Labour politician says they ought to? The tide, it seems to me, is flowing the other way. People are growing less and less interested. Having the remaining interested people speak up may lessen the decline, at least temporarily, but can't reverse it.

But the discussions at the working group I attended were wonderful, I thought. Here people really grappled with the problems. Why don't people come to classical concerts? Because the concerts don't seem welcoming. Because they're held at inconvenient times, in inconvenient places.

The people in the working group -- mostly younger, mostly connected in some way to Australian orchestras -- really tried to grapple with this. How could concerts be more welcoming? How could they be held in community locations? How can the people giving the concerts learn more about their communities, so they're not simply dumping concerts on the local population from on high, but instead are really communicating with the people they want to reach?

These discussions aren't new. We've certainly had them in the US, and, I know, in Canada and Europe. I'm sure they've happened in Australia before. But this made their eruption at the Sydney summit all the more telling, I thought. As I told the people in the group, it's a sign of real change that they spontaneously raised the same questions -- and found some of the same answers -- that people are looking into elsewhere. This shows a dawning consciousness of common problems, and likely solutions, a consciousness that's dawning more or less everywhere.

That's a good thing. What happens to the eager ideas floated in the working group will be another story. Certainly they can be echoed by the longer-term working groups that will be formed in the summit's wake. This in turn may stimulate many people who weren't at the summit to take action on their own.

But I hope the people in the working group I sat in with won't wait for anyone to lead them, create a structure for them, or give them formal permission to set their ideas in motion. Most things that were discussed can be acted on right now. And I hope they will be!

The following -- a terrific classical music manifesto -- comes from Ken Nielsen, one of the founders of the wonderful Pinchgut Opera in Sydney, Australia. This is a company so happy, internally, that its chorus volunteered to raise money for a production they didn't sing in. And don't be misled because they call themselves a chamber opera company. They currently perform in -- and sell out -- a thousand-seat house.

Ken reads my blog, and posts comments. He and I have emailed for a number of years, and it was a treat to meet him -- along with his wife, Liz, the Chair of the company, and Anna Cerneaz, the Managing Director -- during my Australia visit.

For years, Ken did marketing for the Mars company, makers of M&Ms. His corporate background helps make him -- as you'll see -- impatient with solutions for classical music that aren't entrepreneurial.

That's enough introduction. When Ken and I had lunch, he gave me this manifesto, and said I could put it in my blog. I love every word of it.

1. The classical music industry is in decline, with an aging audience base and a
low rate of new audience entry.

2. Governments, compulsory music education or any other external action will not
solve the problem.

3. To reverse this, the industry should change to make its product more attractive
and accessible. Currently, there are elements that make concerts forbidding and
inaccessible to new entrants.

4. These changes need not be (and in my opinion should not be) to the music, with
one exception, mentioned next.

5. More new music should be introduced to concerts. Any art form that does not
renew itself will become moribund. Because elements of the current audience are
so conservative, a greater variety of concerts and formats, aimed at different
audiences, is probably necessary. Stick with the current stuff for the olds, offer
innovation to those excited by it.

6. Changes to the format and style of concerts should be tried - everything from
getting players out of penguin suits to the length of concerts. Concert models that
have worked elsewhere should be tried.

In this area, as in most areas of business, change comes about not from strategy
meetings but from innovation - new things being tried, some fai ling, some
succeeding. Such innovation, and the risks that come with it would probably be
itself attractive to a different audience. "Are you game to come and hear this just composed
work?"

7. I believe that greater engagement with and involvement of the audience is an
important part of the puzzle. A concert should be more like communication than a
one-sided speech. .

8. Such changes as I am suggesting must be tried at the level of the organisation -
the orchestra, opera company or whatever - others can watch and steal the ideas if
they work but an industry wide approach is doomed.

Can you imagine the rock industry calling a summit meeting to decide how to solve
its problems?

Funny -- I forgot to ask Ken if that last paragraph was his reaction to the classical music summit I raved about in my last post. I share his suspicion of industry-wide approaches, but even so I think there's a point to the summit. If, that is, it prods individuals into action. The classical music sector (as they'd say in Australia) has been so stuck that many people in it won't quite dare to act on their own. Giving them a push -- permission from the top, so to speak -- might help. I saw that happen at the summit, as I'll describe in my next post.

But even if Ken and I disagree on this, his manifesto -- including doubts about collective action -- is far healthier than anything I've yet seen the industry come up with.

The peak of my Australia visit -- I got back on Friday night -- wasn't the warm hospitality so many people offered me. Or how seriously people took what I had to say, when I spoke to two groups in Sydney, and one in Melbourne.

Or, for that matter, eating kangaroo, which I would have thought would be an absurd visitor's stereotype, but which Australians really do, and highly recommend. (It's leaner than beef, and kanagaroo feed has a lower carbon footprint than cattle feed. I found it on a Chinese takeout menu; it was tender and tasty.)

No, the high point was the event I was invited to Australia for, a classical music summit in Sydney at which I gave the keynote speech, and where classical music people from all over the country gathered to start a move for classical music change.

This isn't to minimize my sessions with staff at the Australia Council for the Arts, or with a group of classical music people in Melbourne.

But the summit -- at least in my knowledge and experience -- was unique. A national classical music gathering to spark change. And not a gathering where people listened to speeches. Instead, the approximately 100 people there broke into working groups, to come up with usable ideas.

This was only a start, of course. Going further will depend on strong leadership, which I think will be there. Dick Letts, executive director of the Music Council of Australia, who sparked the summit, is a doer, not a talker. And Kim Walker, the dean of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (in the US, we'd say "conservatory"), gave a tough-minded closing speech, notably free of feel-good or self-serving boilerplate. The greatest danger, she bluntly said, was that nothing would happen. And so she was going to make sure that the strategy committee (to be chosen in the wake of the event) would meet regularly, in space she'll make available at her school.

There might be some danger of frustration, in the short run, as people on fire with ideas they generated at the summit want something to happen right away. But anyone  who feels that way should be encouraged to start work immediately, even on their own. (More in my next post on what they could start work doing.) And with any luck, they'll find that the framework to be evolved will make their ideas and enthusiasm even stronger.

As I said, I don't know of anything so ambitious -- and grounded -- being tried anywhere else, certainly not nationally or regionally in the US. Though I'd be happy to be wrong about this. Please tell me, if something comparable has happened elsewhere.

More in future posts about what happened, and about my other meetings. But you might want to go to the summit website, and scroll down to look at the preparatory documents offered to participants. I've never seen such a comprehensive and useful set of materials in advance of any conference. In fact, I've never seen anything that even came remotely close. Props for Dick Letts, who chose the reading (and whose personal hospitality to me warmed my heart).

Finally, about the flagrant pro-classical bias in the music Pulitizer prizes...(go here and here for my previous posts on this)...

There really is a problem -- and I believe the powers in charge of the Pulitzers would agree -- because the top nonclassical artists aren't nominated for the music prize.

What would change this? Beyond, of course, the absolutely essential, long-overdue change in the guidelines that I called for in my last post.

Well, I'd support affirmitive action. For the next three years only give the prize to nonclassical music, and only consider nominations for nonclassical artists. I'm sure many people in the classical world will hate this, and maybe get violently angry with me.

But what could be more convincing to nonclassical musicians -- what could more strongly make them believe that they had a shot at a Pulitzer prize -- than seeing nonclassical music repeatedly win it?

Failing that, I'd suggest putting people on the Pulitzer jury  who don't know anything about classical music. I'm serious. There have been plenty of people on the jury who don't know much, or don't know anything, about pop. And who may believe it's simplistic, non-artistic music, unworthy of the prize.

So let's balance that. Yes, the Pulitzer people have tried, in recent years, to find jurors (like John Rockwell, well known as both a rock critic and a classical critic) who know both pop and classical music.

But that's not enough. I think they should also choose some deeply cultured rock critics who don't know classical music at all. Greil Marcus would be a perfect example. How would he judge the classical nominations? That's up to him, just as it's up to the pure-bred classical jurors how they judge nonclassical work.

Besides, wouldn't it be fascinating to see what kind of appeal new classical pieces might have to someone with a finely honed musical sensibility, who'd be coming to them fresh?

Or do we think -- and let's be honest about this -- that classical music is more difficult than nonclassical stuff, that it requires special knowledge and long experience, and that therefore a classical musician can judge a pop nomination without knowing anything about pop, while a rock critic could never, never, never judge a classical piece.

I think that's bigoted, myself. But I think some people in the classical music world -- and, maybe, some people involved with the Pulitzer Prize -- in fact think that way. They don't mean any harm, and hold this view with great sincerity. But still it's at the very least ignorant -- proof, of which, i fear, you can find in the astoundingly ignorant things that some of my critics say about pop music right here in the comments on this blog.

Until I get back from Australia on July 17, I can't guarantee that I'll post or reply to comments every day. I'll do some blog posts. But if time is tight, and I don't get to the comments, I do apologize, but that's just how it is. I value the comments, and will do my best to post them as soon as I can. Apologies to all who post something, and have to wait a bit before seeing it online.

Here's where this started, with some thoughts on the Pulitzer Prize in music, and how, though theoretically it's open to nonclassical music, in practice almost all the awards (and all of the runners-up, who almost got the awards) are classical.

One measure of how bad this is: If you look at the winners and runnersup during the past decade, many classical composers who normally wouldn't be ranked in the top tier of their field show up on the list. While almost none of the top names in rock, jazz, and other nonclassical genres are there. Clearly the music Pulitizers look biased.

Which wouldn't be an issue if the Pulitzer directors themselves hadn't said the prize was open -- ever since 1997 -- to nonclassical music! But since they did say this, the radical slant in favor of classical composers becomes a serious issue.

So why do the prizes lean so far toward the classical side?

To understand that, we have to understand how someone gets to be considered for the Pulitzer prize. You have to be nominated. Which means that the music jury, sitting down to its deliberations, can't decide that Lucinda Williams had a terrific album this year, and ought to be considered. Only if someone nominates her would she be eligible.

Though of course you can nominate yourself, which makes the process more favorable to you. Or to Lucinda Williams, if she decides she's interested.

Are the leading names in nonclassical music being nominated, by themselves or others? From what I hear, they aren't. So there we have the first big problem. People outside classical music aren't oriented toward the Pulitzer Prize. And it's hard to blame them. If they look at the list of recent winners. they'll see what we see. Which might make them skeptical, make them think they have a chance for the prize in theory, but that they're not likely to get it. So why bother?

Adding to this are some phrases in the official music guidelines. First, they keep talking about "works" and "premieres." That's how classical composers talk. But not people outside classical music. They'll record albums, which don't have premieres. Instead, we say they're released. So while the guidelines do mention that a work submitted for the prize might in fact be a recording -- as it would be for pop or jazz nominees -- the language of the guidelines keeps reverting to classical usage, as if all nominees composed "works" which would then get "premiered."

And how about this? All submissions must include "a note indicating the length and instrumentation of the work." Again that's classical talk. If Paul Simon submits an album, who cares how long it is? And he'd never talk about the "instrumentation" of music he made. Instead he might list -- as CD notes for pop albums often do -- the musicians playing on each track.

"Instrumentation" is a classical concept. I write a piece, and I can say which instruments it's for. It's a string quartet, or it's written for an ensemble of flute, glockenspiel, contrabassoon, and tuba. Whatever. In pop, you go into the studio and see what works out. Maybe you add a horn section or a Hammond organ late in the production process, instruments you originally hadn't thought of using. The Pulitzer guidelines don't seem to have been written by anyone with any knowledge of how nonclassical music is made.

And finally this. "A score of the work is strongly urged [to be submitted with your nomination], but not required." Classical pieces have scores. Nonclassical pieces don't. A few details of a  pop album might be jotted down -- go to the Hard Rock Café or the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and smile at the lyrics for famous songs, scribbled on napkins -- but the details of the music (and often enough the lyrics, too) are worked out in the studio.

Again the person who wrote the Pulitzer guidelines doesn't seem to know how nonclassical music is made. And again the language suggests a strong bias against nonclassical music. You're "strongly urged" to submit a score. Could you blame Lucinda Williams if she read these guidelines, and decided the deck was stacked against her?

Recommendation to the people who run the Pulitzer operation: if you really do want the top nonclassical names to be nominated for the music prize, change the guidelines. Do it today!

Or else I, for one, simply won't believe you're serious.

[Cultural funding] may be losing some cachet. It's not in vogue with the tech billionaires on the West Coast, where Bill Gates famously funds such developing-world causes as greater access to fresh water and vaccinations. Instead of a night at the opera wearing Oscar de la Renta, it's a week in Malawi sporting khaki safari vests. And younger donors often seem more interested in pursuits like fighting poverty or improving educational opportunities for inner-city kids.

"Tech guys and hedge fund guys would rather develop electric cars and eradicate malaria, and you can't criticize them for that," [Michael Gross] says. [He's a writer who's chronicled New York high society.] "There is a new model being created, and it doesn't bode well for traditional cultural philanthropists."

Or, more to the point, for traditional cultural institutions, including -- obviously -- the ones we all know in classical music. I think we're nearing the end of two eras, not just the era when the arts in their traditional form get universal deference, but also the era when wealthy people can be counted on for support.

Which means it's a new ballgame. Time for classical music to change.

(The quote comes from "It's a philanthropy thing," by Miriam Kreinin Souccar, posted on the Crain's New York Business website on June 27. Rather incoherently, the theme of the piece is that funding the arts is more glamorous than funding hospitals or universities, because you get noticed more, and you get entreé into the top ranks of society. And then comes the passage I quoted, with which the piece shoots itself in the foot. Apparently younger donors don't buy what Ms. Souccar -- along with Reynold Levy, the president of Lincoln Center, who's prominently quoted -- is selling.)

I did some posts not long ago about the belief in classical music superiority -- and how damaging it can be. Here's one last approach to that. (Well, last for now. Previous posts:

Think of the prestigious Pulitzer prizes, and how the people who run them decided that the music prize should be open not just to classical music, but also to jazz. And, I guess, even to pop, because this year they gave an special award to Hank Williams (senior, of course), and in 2008 they gave one to Bob Dylan. Which -- with admiration -- I'd think opens the door to all music.

(Though why Dylan shouldn't win a normal Pulitzer is beyond me.)

Clearly, though, this isn't working. Go here to see a list of winners and finalists in music over the past many years. Granted, award shows (which, for all their high-church dignity, are what the Pulitzers at bottom are) are faulty. Won't always give their awards to the best people.

But the music list! From 2000 to 2010, 11 winners, of whom only one -- Ornette Coleman, who won in   2007 -- isn't classical. Worse still, not one of the 22 finalists (the second- and third-place finishers) comes from outside classical music.

So the prizes are, despite the purported change in direction -- which began as far back as 1997, when Wynton Marsalis won -- still overwhelmingly biased toward classical music. Nobody with a full understanding of current culture can look at these names (the winners and finalists since 2000), and say they represent the best in American music.

I say this with all respect for the classical composers involved, some of whom are friends, and most of whom I respect and admire. But what I'm saying is true. Much (if not most) of the best music in America for quite a while now hasn't been classical, and it's just not showing up in the Pulitzer Prize judgments.

Why is this? What can be done to fix it? (Assuming that the Pulitzer directorate wants it fixed, which -- despite expressions of good will that have reached me -- I'm not sure I fully believe.)

A curiosity -- or else a perennial annoyance -- about the liner notes for the Haydn boxed set that includes the surprising "Surprise" Symphony I blogged about. (First post, second post.)

Well, really a case of brain-dead habits.

The performance is unusual, to say the least. The orchestra making no sound when the loud surprise chord is supposed to come, and then, the next time through, shouting instead of playing the chord.

And is there even a word about this in the liner notes? No. They're just the usual (and maybe in this case more than usually turgid) musicological exegesis. When, right before our ears, something not usual is going on. Wouldn't we want to know something about it? Mark Minkowski is the conductor. What were his thoughts about playing the surprise that way? Has he done it before? Will he do it again? Does he have other surprising plans for any standard repertoire piece? What did the musicians think?

But then classical CD liner notes are mostly brain-dead. Almost never do they talk about the performance. Only the piece. As if the only purpose and only meaning of the performance was to reveal the glories of the piece, and (implicitly) as if any difference from one performance to another -- and any ideas the musicians had -- mattered very little.

Which -- metaphorically, at least -- begins to show why the many recordings of all the standard pieces seem to blend into a blur. Especially for all the newcomers we hope to attract.

I'll be flying there on Thursday, arriving in Sydney Saturday, Australian time. On July 12 I'll be speaking at a classical music summit, organized by the Music Council.of Australia. Not a public event, I'm sorry to say, though privacy is also a good idea, to focus discussion, and encourage people to speak simply and honestly.

Then I'll be in Melbourne, on July 15, for at least one meeting organized by the Music Board of the Australia Council.

I'll be staying in Sydney at the Four Seasons, and in Melbourne at the Travelodge Southbank. I've been in touch with so many Australians, here on the blog and on Facebook and Twitter. Some I know I'll be seeing during my visit, but everyone else -- feel free to get in touch! I'm thinking I may have some free time.

As usual, when I visit somewhere new to me, I expect to learn a lot. I'm flattered that some people I know in Australia think I have something useful to say to them, but I'll offer one caveat, right now, before my visit: I can speak with some confidence about what's going on with classical music in the US, but I don't claim to know what's happening in Australia, what problems they might (or might not) be having, and what solutions to their problems might be. I hope whatever distillation of US experience I can give them will be helpful.

I posted a little while ago about a recording of Haydn's Surprise Symphony, as reviewed in the Washington Post. At the surprise -- the sudden loud chord in the second movement -- unexpected things happen.

Now I've heard the recording -- part of a four-CD set of all Haydn's London symphonies, conducted by Marc Minkowski -- and it's even more fun than the review suggested.

Here's what happens. The slow movement, as Haydn wrote it, begins with the simplest of melodies, played very quietly. (And on this recording, it really is quiet.) The melody is then repeated, but at the end comes something we didn't hear the first time, a very loud chord. Surprise!

Except that in our time, it's not a surprise anymore. But in this performance -- recorded live -- when it's time for the chord, there's just a tapping sound. And then silence.

Then the melody starts again. It plays just once. We've now departed pretty definitely from Haydn's, repeating music he didn't tell us to repeat. And the surprise this time, where the chord would come, is that the orchestra shouts. Loudly. The audience laughs, with what sounds like real delight.

Then the melody starts again. This third time, we do hear the chord, and it's explosively loud. One problem with many orchestra performances -- and especially in music from the classical period, where contrasts of loud and soft are really important -- is that loud and soft don't sound very different. Not here.

After the chord, the music goes on, continuing exactly as Haydn wrote it, with no further deviations, right to the end of the movement. For a while I listened with refreshed ears. But then I sank into the familiar non-expectation with which I listen to so many performances of standard repertoire. I know the music. The performance sounds fine, but it doesn't show me anything.

I thought Minkowski and his orchestra -- Les Musiciens du Louvre -- should have added one more surprise. Right near the end of the movement, there's a diminished seventh chord, a perfect moment to introduce a cadenza. Haydn didn't write one, but he didn't write the shout or the silence. I thought a few seconds of whispering, maybe, from the musicians would have made a nice return to surprise. And then the movement could finish normally.

I've listened to the rest of the symphony, and to one of the other ones, No. 98 in B flat. No surprises. Fine performances, but nothing new.

But the adventure in the surprise movement is a lot of fun. I've uploaded it, and you can here it here. (Keep your volume down around 50%. The recording has a wide dynamic range, and the loud bits are loud.)

(Someone, maybe, will say that the surprise -- by repeating music Haydn didn't say to repeat -- destroys the proportions of the movement. Well, duh. Of course it does. But because something new is added, the proportions have to change. And now if anything it's the rest of the movement that sounds out of proportion, because we keep wondering, or at least I do, whether anything else that's new will happen.)

One more thought about bringing classical music to minority kids, as Carnegie Hall and the Berlin Philharmonic did, when they taught "inner city youth" (their phrase) to dance to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. (See my previous posts on this, the first, second, and third.)

It's easy to do.

And yes, of course it can be done well or badly, that of course you have to learn some things before you can do it well, and that some programs -- like maybe that Berlin/Carnegie enterprise -- might be inspired.

But at bottom, this isn't much of a challenge. If you go into schools, you can get kids interested in many things. At least twice, dedicated teachers have developed powerful chess teams in New York inner-city schools. (Go here and especially -- such a lovely, powerful story -- here.)

Last night, on TV news in Washington, I saw an item about kids at an inner-city school transformed by a drill team. Again, one inspired teacher was responsible. I'm sure there are many stories like this, from all over the US.

Bring kids something new, do it in an inspiring way, and very likely they'll take off with it. The arts have no special virtue here. Kids are hungry to learn, hungry for new things, hungry to succeed in something.

What wouldn't be easy? Bringing the Rite of Spring -- and classical music generally -- to younger people, not as outreach, but in the marketplace, alongside pop music and the movies, as an arts and entertainment choice they'd willingly make, without the need of any special program designed to reach them.

Why -- for instance at music schools -- do we see so little of what I've just described, and so much outreach to the schools? Because outreach to the schools is easier. Because no one quite believes that younger people could be reached by normal means.

Now, granted, concerts would have to change, and be marketed in new ways. But isn't it time for big classical music institutions to learn to do this? To let classical music stand on its own feet, and not depend on special pleading, special programs to reach what -- if we're honest with ourselves -- is a very easy audience.

(And not a long-lasting one. What programs are in place to turn those Stravinsky-dancing kids into Carnegie Hall subscribers when they're older? Has there been any followup at all? I hope there has been, but anyone who's followed classical music's outreach over many years knows that there often isn't.)

That's the name of an early music vocal group in Washington.

You can read the meaning of the name on their website. There's a Tallis motet called "Suscipe quæso Domine," and from that you get...

I also like the start of their group bio, the part that says their founder "had the typical American dream of wanting to sing Thomas Tallis' Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah."

And they sing well.

But of course what charms me here is how they make classical music part of regular culture, by naming themselves (I hardly have to say it) the way a band might. They're not alone. Think of Ethel, the terrific new music string quartet. I'm sure people posting comments will bring us other examples.

Which means that the old hierarchies have fallen, and that, more and more, classical music can breathe, not the air of other planets (to quote the famous line from Stefan George with which Schoenberg entered atonality in his second string quartet), or the air of the past, but the air of normal life.

That can only make it more vivid, more authentic, and more deeply true as art.

From a Washington Post review of Mark Minkowski's new recording of Haydn's London Symphonies, on the Naive recording:

Want to be surprised by No. 94, the "Surprise"? Minkowski borrows a joke from the Hoffnung Music Festivals of 50 years ago: When it is time for the famous fortissimo, the orchestra delivers exactly -- nothing. And that really is a surprise, although not the one Haydn intended. So Minkowski plays the lead-in to the "surprise" again, and this time the orchestra shouts instead of playing. Only on the third go-round does the music proceed as expected.

Here we see -- once more -- classical music adapting to the present day. One issue, and I think it comes up more often than it's acknowledged to, is how the old masterworks can make their intended effect. Here Haydn wanted to surprise his audience, with a sudden loud chord in the middle of softer music.

But now everyone knows the piece, and -- if truth be told -- orchestras aren't likely to make the chord surprising, because the whole idea of surprise doesn't often enter our concert halls, either in the seats where the audience sits, or on stage

So Minkowksi, for better or worse -- I haven't heard the recording -- but at least for something, decides to play some games with this. I take this to be more or less a meta game, the goal being not simply to surprise us, but to amuse us by doing something new when we don't expect to be surprised. The trick is self-referential, which it pretty much has to be, because just about all performances of the old masterworks are -- in our time -- by nature self-referential.

A tired old issue: How dare we change the notes Haydn wrote? Isn't our job to realize his intentions? Even assuming that was true (and I think -- speaking as a composer myself -- that it's a very limited idea of what performance is), Haydn's most important intention here was the surprise. The notes are only his way of achieving it. So if the notes no longer can surprise us...do we really honor his intentions by stubbornly playing exactly what he wrote?

(And by the way, that review isn't by my wife, Anne Midgette, the Post's classical music critic. It's by a freelance writer, Mark Estren.)

Added later: I've got the recording now, and I'll be eager to hear it.

As an important adjunct to my posts on this year's Bang on a Can marathon -- this post and this one -- I should add that what in the end makes the event so fabulous is the music. Without music that people want to hear, no crowds, no year after year success, no event.

Of course, just because large crowds enjoy this music, that doesn't mean the music is necessarily good, that you'd like it, or that I'd like it. But I've always liked it very much. Not every piece; of course not; life doesn't work that way.

But overall I'm happy to hear what shows up, and I get in the same head I found myself in tonight, at a National Symphony concert, which ended with a Golijov piece, Azul. I just loved that music. Abandoned myself to it, was happy to go wherever it went, had no impulse to judge it.

Same with much that I hear at Bang on a Can. In the short time I was able to be at the marathon (I'm busy with life changes in two cities at once), I heard a piece by Fred Frith, played by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a chamber ensemble piece that lives in the same universe as a lot of new classical music (of the non-concert hall sort), and a lot of jazz and blues and improvisation.

That's a congenial part of creation for me, and I'm sure for a lot of people in the large audience. A friend I talked to after it was over thought it didn't hold together, but somehow I wasn't looking for that. I was happy to follow all of its thoughts, wherever they went.

Then came the piece I mentioned in one of my posts, by Fausto Romitelli, which the composer said would last 40 minutes, and which sounded at first like an assault of noise. (From a large-ish ensemble.) I like assaults of noise, but I had to work with this one. I did what I'd always advise to me or anyone else, when we can't get with some music we're hearing: listen much harder.

I did that, and soon I began hearing gestures in the music that should have been clear to me earlier, gasps and spasms, the piece moving forward in shudders, often with a downward fall from one prominent note to a lower one. Now I got really caught up in what I was hearing.

When I left, two women on stage, calling themselves Buke and Gass, were crashing and wailing and sing-shouting their way in a wonderful sonic space that rock, new classical music, and pure noise have together opened up.

One thing I love about all this is that I never know what to expect. Contrast your normal symphony concert. The National Symphony quite brilliantly paired Golijov with Ravel (three familiar orchestral works), but the Ravel had no surprises. When the Golijov work began, I felt like the walls fell away. Just as at Bang on a Can, I didn't know what to expect, and that stayed with me all through the piece.

Which is the experience, isn't it, that we have when we go to a movie we haven't seen, when we read a book we haven't read, when we go to see a new play, when we listen to a new pop album. Not till classical music rejoins the real world, and lets me, day in and day out, have a musical life like that, will the classical music world seem normal, or healthy.

(And yes, sometimes I read a new book and it's bad. Predictable. Nothing in it I haven't read before. But I didn't know that before I starting reading, did I? While when I look at the programs of most classical concerts, I pretty much know what to expect.)

(And yes, someone will say that classical concerts, even when the most familiar works are played, are full of surprises, because new things can happen in performances, people can play familiar phrases in a subtly different way, or even widely different way. But these are small surprises, I think, and, worse, audible mainly to initiates, people who've heard the standard masterworks often enough to appreciate small departures from various norms. I'm not going to put down the value of that -- we've all seen a movie for a second or third or tenth time, and noticed things we hadn't noticed before -- but if that's the main thing that musical art holds for you, aren't your horizons terribly limited?)