July 2003 Archives

Andrew Taylor, my blog neighbor, now gets to inhabit both my blog and his own with this comment he e-mailed about my audience piece:

While I'm sure you're being pilloried for suggesting orchestras consider their audience (at least quietly pilloried), I'd even nudge the argument one step further than your article suggests. I'm a big fan of John Dewey's view of art from way back in 1932, that art doesn't exist until it is received and processed. It's a noise or an artifact in an empty room. Here's how Dewey puts it:

"For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must include relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent.…Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art." (Art as Experience, p. 54.)

So, if the art of orchestral music requires both an orchestra and a listener to become art, then both sides are REQUIRED to be in the room (or at the speaker) and prepared for the experience. It's not that orchestras need to consider their audience, they need to understand that they don't make music without them.

Thanks, Andrew.

And this would be a worthwhile discussion -- why people in the classical music world think music is somehow imparted in a one-sided transaction. Some years ago, a composer who teaches at a big Midwestern university told me how he'd tried to introduce the concept of feedback in his classes. The audience, he'd explain, is always giving something back. Now, any performer knows that this is true. But at the university in question, this concept outraged the music department! Somehow it attacked the greatness of the music -- as if the music stood apart from any use of it, so it doesn't matter how anyone reacts to a performance.

(This was the same music department that objected when I included James Brown in a course I taught as a visiting professor. The course was called "American Music Since 1945," and was more or less my revenge for a course called "Music Since 1945" I took as a graduate student at the Yale School of Music. That course only looked at "advanced" composers -- Cage, Babbitt, Stockhausen, and a fourth I can't remember. Maybe Carter. My revenge in my course was to cover all kinds of post-1945 music, classical, pop, and jazz, Babbitt, Philip Glass, Elvis, and many more people, including James Brown.

No! screamed the faculty. You can teach Elvis, even, but not James Brown. There's nothing to say about him, by which they meant nothing analytical, nothing that music theory can address. Hah. He was the one figure in my pantheon who really needed to be taught. I'd often start a class by playing something I'd assigned to the students, and then asking them to tell me what was going on in the music. They could do that for classical pieces; they could do it for the Beach Boys. But when it came to James Brown they were stuck. They couldn't think of anything to say. I had to draw their attention to the rhythm -- to, just for instance, the way Brown's voice jumps ahead of the beat, then slides behind it.

What this means is that their classical training hadn't taught them how to listen to rhythm. Or, really, even to consider the possibility that rhythm might be where all the crucial things in a piece of music might be happening. So music in which most of what goes on is rhythmic became, in the faculty's view, music in which nothing was going on, simply because they didn't know how to hear the rhythmic stuff.)

From Bernard Chasan, a physicist at Boston University (many thanks to him for e-mailing this, and allowing me to quote it):

I've posted something new on my website -- a piece about the orchestra audience that I wrote a year ago for Symphony magazine (published by the American Symphony Orchestra League). I said that orchestras (and just about all classical music groups of any kind) treat the audience as something passive. It's supposed to buy tickets, maybe donate some money, maybe volunteer to help out here and there, and otherwise receive great music in passive, reverent silence. (Followed, of course, by thankful applause.)

This, I think, is bad for business, bad for art, and also not so great for plain old human decency. Shouldn't orchestras treat the people in their audience as equals, and find ways to get them actively involved?

I hope you'll read my piece, and tell me what you think.

Last week I was in a meeting about a project I'm working on, involving ways to get new people to classical concerts. A lot of good people are directly or indirectly involved in this, along with a lot of performing groups.

And one thing that struck me was that we didn't have any data. None of us knew what draws people to classical concerts, or what kind of concert newcomers might like. Two vague theories floated around -- that newcomers ought to start with easy music, or, on the other hand, that they'd be attracted to something a little unusual, something with substance. The second theory is a lot more fun, and leads people who believe in it to plan more interesting concerts. But maybe the first theory is right. I don't have a clue.

And who's to say new classical concertgoers all are the same? Maybe some like easy music, and some would enjoy something they'd never heard before. One further theory, by the way, says you can program almost anything for newcomers, precisely because they don't have many expectations. (And then there are refinements -- that, for instance, you can program more or less anything, as long as nothing on the program is very long.)

But I wish we knew what we were doing here. Top-grade professionals, working on something crucial to the entire field, shouldn't be flying so blind. (As I trust we'd all agree we were doing.)

Just had a thought -- maybe some of us here can help to get some of this missing information. What drew you to your first classical concert? What might have attracted someone you know?

I've been getting e-mail by the ton, it seems -- and from people passionately concerned with the issues I've discussed here. I want to put my own ideas aside for a bit, and let my correspondents speak. I expect to do this regularly, and I must say that my notion of this blog is changing. It's much more an exchange of ideas than I ever dared to hope. (And don't miss the answers Tobi Tobias got, when she asked why dancers like to dance.)

From Robert Wilder Blue, vivid thoughts about musicians talking to the audience:

I attend the San Francisco Symphony's concerts at which not only Michael Tilson Thomas but guest conductors speak from the podium on a regular basis. I can tell you that after MTT introduces a piece such as Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra, one can sense the audience leaning forward and actually listening to the music. What could be better for classical music? The phenomenon of MTT and SFS and its audience has been well documented so I don't need to go on about that. What I will highlight is the utter breaking down of pretension that occurs when the conductor (or a musician) turns to speak to the audience. It makes the concert experience more of a dialogue than a lecture. It also tells the audience why the orchestra has bothered to program the piece and what the audience might find compelling or interesting about it. Finally, it puts the audience on the spot, reminding them that they have come to the concert to listen to the music.

(And check out his web magazine on opera.)

Roger Saydack, most provocatively, starts from the idea of musicians talking, but goes far beyond that:

Marla Schwaller Carew wrote a deeply felt message from Detroit, about how hard it seems to be to get younger people -- like herself -- to go to classical events:

I recently attended two excellent concerts as part of the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival (the Emerson String Quartet played the opening concert in a lovely, smallish hall, where I was able to sit 15 rows from the stage and hear and see like I could never at larger Michigan venues. The second night featured two of the Emersons with other excellent musicians at a very choice, small location). My husband and I, both under 40, were among the youngest people there by far (a few teenagers with parents, us, and the 50-90 year-olds). This pained both of us -- especially regarding the outstanding Beethoven and Shostakovich quartets on opening night. Such beauty, such talent and such disinterest from our peers! We're not huge culture snobs, just products of middle-class parents who wanted us to take music lessons which were enough to instill love of classical music (and neither of us play any longer). I know were weren't the only kids in metro Detroit who took those lessons years ago, either.

Very touched by what she said, I asked Marla why she liked classical music. She took a lot of care with her answer, for which I'm grateful:

First, this is probably not the only area in which my husband and I are demographic freaks. But once again, we're proud freaks (e.g. don't watch reality TV, don't spend our lives at the mall shopping, read a lot and are happier for it), and the other classical music fans my age are the same kind of oddities -- we were probably all nerdy kids (I certainly was) and kept reading and loving things that take a little effort into adulthood. (Some, including myself, came from private schools but not all and that does not seem to be a determining factor in the group I know).…

What do I like about classical music? Good question, it's very hard to explain in many ways (just like explaining why you love your spouse can start to sound like a boring laundry list and undermine what you feel -- "nice, generous, sense of humor, kind to small animals blah blah blah"). I'm not wholly anti-popular music, I do listen to it often during commutes (Detroit no longer has a classical music station and the Canadian and NPR classical shows are often at odd times for me or are too difficult to pull in on the car radio) and feel that it can be better for some things (party and bar background sound, music for the Nordic Track etc.).

But about 8 years ago (mid 20s) I just started to find it all really empty -- like junk food, the enjoyment of it wore off quickly leaving little interest or re-playability.…Also, I got into Bobby Short in college, which led me to broader Porter, Gershwins, Arlen etc., and then into Ella Fitzgerald singing the canon, and once you learn to love Porter, Gershwin etc. you never see pop/rock the same again.…During all of this I was listening to classical music but gaining more and more interest in it as I appreciated the quality and greater pleasures available to active listeners…It can be something bigger than you, not just the guy next door with drums and an amp.

I suppose that is what I like best about classical music (though I still love Ella and Bobby and listen to jazz) -- deeper and more lasting enjoyment that changes through time, benefits from thought and poses an enjoyable challenge to the mind and self. .…The Emersons playing Beethoven's quartet Op. 130, a recent Detroit Symphony performance of the Enigma Variations, Murray Perahia and the Academy playing Bach in 2000 (not to mention Les Arts Florissants and Sequentia's Edda in past years) were just plain inspired.…Many of the above were so moving to me that they brought me to tears, not out of sentiment but more out of recognition of the power of the performance and appreciation of what a special experience it was to be in the presence of such greatness and human talents combined to produce much, much more than their sum.

I asked Marla what she thought would bring more people like herself to classical music. She came up with something I wish more classical music groups would try:

I think that there are some curious, intelligent people out there who don't know what they would respond to in classical music or that there is anything to respond to. I'm not sure that "sexing" up classical music would work for them (i.e. an ad campaign with half-naked actors in pseudo-plot scenarios from operas, or text that reads like a soap or a tabloid -- all real strategies, likely with mixed results). But maybe something that offered a glimpse of context and meaning would help? Rather than stating that an evening's program will be X, Y and Z or Opera X, make it very obvious that there is a theme or meaning -- Carmen, the Danger of Female Sexuality or Shostakovich, An Artist's Response to Tyranny etc. -- something that might show potential listeners that it just isn't pretty sounds.…I bet that responses to political instability, or economic stress, or gender, or whatever could always find a number of interested younger patrons who see the point and might be curious about how it was approached in the past.

Marla, thanks so much for all of this. I had to make some cuts in what you wrote, and I hope you won't mind. I was quoting from three long e-mails, and wanted to get as many of your thoughts in as I could.

As a horn player (no longer active because of a physical disability), I read your comments on the use of assistant principal horns in orchestras with interest. The use of an extra horn players is a necessity for first horn players. A study was done several years ago ranking a wide variety of professions on their stress levels. Being principal horn in a major orchestra was right at the top! Playing those long Bruckner and Mahler symphonies, and many other works is extremely grueling.

The assistant first does not only play passages which the principal decides to stay out of, but also doubles some louder tutti passages with the principal to reinforce the sound of the horns. At the Met, playing first horn on a complete Ring cycle without an assistant would be a fate worse than death!

Before I get too negative, I might take a moment to say why I think classical music should survive. Besides the mere fact that I like it, I mean. That may convince me, but there's no reason it ought to convince anybody else.

So I can think of two reasons:

1. It's the musical heritage of the west. If we still read Proust and Shakespeare, if we still look at art by Klee and Renoir, why shouldn't we listen to music by Mozart, Stravinsky, and Josquin des Pres?

2. Organized, long spans of music are an important form of art. We read novels, watch films, and go to plays; they draw us in over long spans of time, marking their progress with changes in pace and flow, and with details that reinforce each other. Classical music does the same thing musically, and clearly this is something pop songs, however thoughtful, serious, and evocative, don't do. Or world music, or jazz. It's almost shocking to think that this function of music -- so deep and powerful to experience, and so allied to a similar experience in other art -- might disappear from our culture.

And that's it. I don't think classical music makes us smarter, or makes us better people. I don't think it's "better" than other kinds of music (and I put "better" in quotes, because the whole notion of "better," in this context, is so completely absurd; better for what?). I don't think classical music has any special claim to be considered art. In fact -- as it's practiced currently in America -- I think it fails dramatically in one of the most important things that art ought to be about. It's not doing much, right now (if I may borrow the famous last words of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) to "forge the uncreated conscience" of our race.

But still it's pretty wonderful, and deserves to survive. Can anyone suggest any other reasons? Please e-mail me! And maybe I should have added something very simple -- how wonderful classical music sounds. I think that's sufficiently objective (if I cite particular musical details) to stand apart from the mere fact that classical music is something I love.

I've been e-mailing with someone who, among other things, thinks many more people would go to classical concerts if musicians talked to the audience. And of course this is happening, though more at family concerts and events aimed at new listeners than at, let's say, the core subscription concerts of an orchestra. It's also true that innovations like this one tend to divide the audience. Older, more conservative people, and long-time concertgoers might not like them; younger people and new concertgoers welcome the change, which they might feel makes concerts livelier, friendlier, and more communicative.

But one thing does strike me. Anyone who comes to classical music after hearing jazz or pop more or less expects musicians to talk. Or at least to say hello, and introduce the members of the band. So why won't a string quartet introduce itself? In a way, this seems discourteous. And I did once hear a string quartet do it, at a new music event. It seemed utterly natural and right. Of course, new music concerts are usually much more informal than mainstream classical performances, and this string quartet was dressed in normal clothes. If they'd been wearing tails, I don't know how their talking would have come off.

Concluding an opera about make-believe actors acting out a 'real story,' [stage director David] Edwards directed the just-slain Nedda and Silvio stand up when hearing 'La commedia è finita,' shaken but already being themselves (the singers, not the characters), and walk off stage. There were no curtain calls before the intermission; the singers, who portrayed actors, who participated in a 'real story,' now became the singers again, getting ready for the next opera.

If something so self-referential can happen on stage -- something that shows how the performance is just that, a performance -- why shouldn't the conductor talk to us?

I'm delighted to echo what Andrew Taylor says in his blog -- he and I strike sparks in e-mail, and, just as he wrote, we'll be covering a lot of common ground here.

As for the classical music group I mentioned in my "Snapshot" entry on July 24, I hope it's clear that I wasn't deploring them. Andrew is right when he says it can frightening to see what counts as innovation in the classical music world. But the group I mentioned is totally sincere. It really wants to see things change, and one change it contemplates -- having its musicians look at the audience and smile when they take their end-of-concert bows -- is something many orchestras around the country talk about.

Of course, that might be still more frightening! To have musicians smile would be a revolution not just for one small group, but for everyone, including some of the biggest and most self-important classical music institutions in America. The changes so many classical music people say they want are still in a very early stage.

And the field is playing with a stacked deck, because its habits, structures, thinking, and even or maybe especially its outright necessities all combine to make change difficult. Most classical music groups I know, including some of the very biggest, use just about all their available resources -- staff, energy, and money -- simply putting on their concerts and making sure that people come to them. Even groups that want to change, I've found, have trouble even finding time to talk about it. Which doesn't mean it can't be done. But maybe classical music needs to get in even more serious trouble before we'll see any large-scale innovations.

It happened in the summer of 2000, I believe, although it could have been 2001. It was a summer season concert of light classics - operatic stuff, mostly. On the podium was a conductor of some international reputation. Since I like my job, let's call him Gus.

Anyway. One of the works on the program was the omnipresent Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana. So we're slogging through it in rehearsal, and suddenly, Gus stops us, and snaps, "Where is the organ?" Well, none of us knew that there was an organ part for that piece, and apparently, neither did our keyboardist, because he wasn't even in the building. Gus insisted that there was an organ part doubling the strings in the middle section (the main melody), and that he had to have it, or the show could not go on. So the personnel manager arranged for the keyboardist to come in that afternoon for a special one-on-one rehearsal with the conductor, and we finished the morning rehearsal without incident.

Now, we don't have a real, full-size organ at Orchestra Hall, and the really high-quality electronic one takes quite a long time to set up, so our keyboardist would be playing a high-end synthesizer pumped through the house sound system. You wouldn't want to use it for anything important, but it sounds like an organ, so no big deal. But we would later find out that, during the afternoon one-on-one, Gus continually insisted that the organ was not nearly loud enough. Our tech people tried to explain that it would be much louder that evening, with the board operator controlling the volume level from the back of the hall, but he would have none of it, and was reaching over the keyboard player to turn volume knobs and generally do anything he could to make the little keyboard louder.

None of us knew any of this, and that night, we arrived at the Intermezzo, and began to play, with the synthesizer stationed near the door at stage right. We in the strings played the introductory segment, took a hefty luftpause, and began to launch into the slow, sweet melody that everyone knows. Immediately, it was clear that many, many, many things were horribly wrong. First of all, the organ, which had joined us in unison as requested, was playing at approximately the level of a jet engine, causing about half the audience to jump as if they'd been shot. But this was not the worst of it. It seems that, in his rage at not being able to get the instrument loud enough in rehearsal, Gus had begun turning knobs more or less at random, and he had unknowingly turned the transposition knob one half-step to the sharp side. We had 60 string players sawing away in F major, and one impossibly loud organ doubling us in F#.

Even worse, the chaos of the moment utterly flustered our keyboardist, who…kept…playing. Gus was so apoplectic that he couldn't even signal a cutoff -- he just stood there on the podium, his arms fluttering and his face turning purple. The keyboardist knew something was wrong, obviously, but he wasn't entirely certain if it was him or not, and he figured that, with the organ turned up so loud, he'd better not just stop dead. So he kept on going. My friend Kevin, one of our percussionists, was turning pages on the organ part, and considered pulling the power plug on the synth, but decided he'd better not chance it. Meanwhile, our friendly, supportive Minnesota audience was plastered against the back of their chairs by the dissonant noise.

After a couple of bars, when it became clear that the organ wasn't stopping, those of us with perfect pitch worked out what key it was in, and slid on up to join it, in the hope of salvaging something from the piece. But around that time, Gus cut through his near-paralysis with a mighty slash of his baton directed at the keyboardist, who, stunned, stopped playing immediately. So now, we had -- along with a significant decibel loss in the hall -- 30 string players in F, and 30 in F#. It took a full beat for us all to slide back down to the original key. By this time, one second violinist and one cellist were laughing so hard that they had had to stop playing entirely. The rest of us weren't too far behind. Gus was the color of a Minnesota Vikings helmet.

We finished the piece, somehow, and Gus stalked angrily offstage, with most of the audience sitting in stunned silence, and a few hardy Minnesotans offering polite applause. Before the door had even closed behind him, Gus was yelling in German at whatever unfortunate soul happened to have been standing in the wings. The orchestra burst into peals of laughter, except for the poor keyboardist, who had already made his escape from the building. A minute or so later, Gus stalked back out onstage, without a word or a smile or an apology to the audience, and continued the concert as if nothing had happened.

To this day, whenever we play the Intermezzo, at least 4 or 5 string players are guaranteed to start the middle section a half-step high in the first rehearsal.

I can see that I'll be finding fault a lot with the classical music business. That's part of moving toward the future; we have to clear away some of what's going on now.

And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Last night I had dinner with someone who runs a classical music institution, who said -- about the entire field, but especially orchestras -- "We're just starting to open our eyes." This isn't someone with a radical reputation; the group in question is best known for fine performances of standard repertoire.

And here's a proposal that's been talked about inside this group: Maybe the musicians, when they stand up to take their bows, should look at the audience and smile. There you have a snapshot of where things stand in classical music. A simple, almost elementary idea, something taken for granted in any other performing art, comes off as a surprising innovation.

Terry Teachout, our champion blogger, wondered the other day about artistic musicals. Why don't they just bill themselves as operas? Terry quoted something he wrote in The New York Times a while ago about Michael John La Chiusa's musical Marie Christine (which, he says, failed in its Broadway run): "Had ‘Marie Christine’ been billed as ‘a new opera’ and produced by, say, Glimmerglass Opera, it would have drawn a different, more adventurous kind of audience, one better prepared to grapple with its challenging blend of pop-flavored rhythms and prickly harmonies."

Well, maybe. La Chiusa did try out a later piece a year ago in the same New York City Opera showcase that did a piece of mine in May. But as an opera composer myself, I can give some wry and melancholy reasons why I might be better off on Broadway:

1. I'd get produced faster. If a major opera company decided to produce a work of mine, they plan so far ahead that they'd probably be talking about some date in 2007. But if someone were producing me in the musical theater world, on or off Broadway (or outside New York), I'll bet I'd get on stage much sooner.

2. I'd get more performances. Marie Christine (or so I learn from the Internet Theatre Database) had 40 previews and 44 performances. Not much by Broadway standards, maybe, but for an opera composer that would be just breathtaking. Bright Sheng's Madame Mao, a major new opera premiering right about now in Santa Fe, will get performed just four times.

3. I might make more money. Or at least I might not lose as much. Though, to be honest, I don't know a lot about the financial arrangements in musical theater, and poor La Chiusa, Terry says, had to pawn his piano. But the financing for opera composers can be ghastly. One composer I know -- negotiating with two major American opera companies about a premiere -- was asked to raise $100,000 toward the cost of the production. That's right; they were asking him to pay for part of it himself. And one unspeakable expense will always be the cost of copying and printing musical materials (more than 20 vocal scores for the singers and production staff, a hefty full orchestral score for the conductor, and 40 to 80 separate parts for the musicians in the orchestra). Opera composers have been known to face a painful choice. They can do the copying themselves, which even with music notation software can take months of full-time work (I'll show you the scars on my own typing fingers). Or they can use their entire commission fee -- the amount they're paid to write the piece -- to pay a professional copyist. Assuming their fee is large enough, of course. (And one thing I do know about musical theater: Because the orchestras are smaller than an opera orchestra, the copying and printing costs are smaller, too.)

4. I might get a better audience. Terry says, and of course he's right, that "Broadway today is about ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Footloose,’ not complex scores that demand your full attention at all times." So complex music might get a better hearing in an opera house. (After you've paid for the orchestra parts.) But what about complex theater? Opera audiences are notably conventional. So are Broadway audiences. But maybe the small part of the Broadway audience that bought tickets for those 44 performances of Marie Christine would be more thoughtful than the people who showed up for the five performances this year of Mark Adamo's Little Women at the New York City Opera. (Some of whom wouldn't specially intend to see it; instead, they'd be subscribers, who found themselves at Little Women as part of their subscription package. I could add that if a new piece were produced off-Broadway -- or, like Philip Glass's latest opera, at a regional theater, maybe the audience would be more thoughtful still.)

5. I might get a better production. Opera singers are good at operatic singing, and if that's what I want -- along with the grand surge of an operatic orchestra -- I'd better get my work produced in an opera house. But if what I want is good theater, maybe I'd be better off elsewhere. I used to write a lot of incidental music for plays and was delighted with how quickly actors got to the heart of any music they were involved in. They went straight for what the music meant, something that, in my experience, happens much more slowly in opera, and sometimes might not happen at all. I loved La Bohème on Broadway. I'd never seen all the moments of the drama -- every change of mood, all the shifting of relationships -- so vividly realized (or, most of them, realized in any way at all). When I write an opera, I'm creating theatrical moments. Sure, I love to write surging vocal lines, but what I work hardest on are the shifts in feeling, the precise weight and flow of character and mood. To get those realized, I might happily sacrifice (if I had the choice) the richness of operatic orchestration and singing. Shortly after Bohème premiered on Broadway, I was talking to a well-known composer who'd loved it as much as I had. He'd been commissioned by a big American opera company, and had just been told that the company was backing out -- his project, he says they told him, required costumes that would be too expensive. His reaction was something like, "Who needs them? Maybe I can take my piece to Broadway, and get it produced much better than it would have been."

The other person's half-empty glass can easily seem half full…

Why don't classical music magazines -- the few that still publish -- run features like "The 10 Worst High C's Ever Sung"? Opera fans love making lists like that, and they'll share them on Internet sites like Opera-L. Or why not "The Weirdest Chamber Music Performances on Records"? Or "The Five Worst American Orchestras"?

Somehow, in the stuffy old world of classical music, stories like these seem undignified. We're supposed to boost the field, not laugh at it. Except that in the real world, people do laugh at things. Tenors really do sing bad high C's. Some orchestras play really badly. And classical music professionals talk about all that, sometimes uproariously. Why can't we share our talk with our audience, and, even more, with the people we wish were in our audience? Wouldn't people like us more if they knew we lived in the same world they do? Or are we better off conning them, so they'll believe that classical music lives in a special lofty world of its own? (If the answer is "yes," then I'm in the wrong business.)

The arts are supposed to be good for our culture. Classical music, we hear, makes people smarter, and also teaches (or at least encourages) tolerance, curiosity, and critical thinking.

So why did major league baseball have its first black player in 1947, while nobody black sang a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera till 1955?

Just asking. Maybe we should teach baseball -- or at least baseball history -- in schools, instead of the arts.

Here's one.

Program notes at orchestra concerts often list the entire instrumentation of each piece being played. "Two flutes, one doubling piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons," etc., etc., sometimes at mind-numbing length.

But sometimes what you see on stage doesn't match the printed list. The score calls for three trumpets; on stage, you'll see four. The score lists four horns; five are playing. Why? Because the principal trumpet and principal horn reserve the right not to play all the notes in their parts. Let's say there's a difficult horn solo, and after that an ensemble passage in which all the horns play together. The principal horn might want to rest after the solo. He or she won't play the ensemble passage, and that's why five horns are needed, so all four horn parts are covered when the principal doesn't want to play.

That's accepted orchestral practice, common in the world's top orchestras. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. But I doubt you'll ever see any orchestra explain to its audience what's going on -- even though anyone can see more horns on stage than the program notes talk about.

My fellow blogman Andrew Taylor raises a smart and sensible point about orchestras -- that there's a "panic" in the press about their threatened demise, which might distract us from serious problems elsewhere in the arts.

And I'd add that the orchestra thing has very likely been blown up more than it ought to be. Yes, we're hearing all the time about orchestras in trouble -- and always the same ones, Florida, for instance, or Louisville, or San Jose. But what does that tell us about orchestras as a group? There are lots of orchestras. Some are weaker than others. In a bad economy, the weak ones suffer. (All non-profits are likely to.) If the entire field were seriously hurting, I'd have expected to see, long ago, the list of the next candidates for death. Where is it? Has anybody even thought to look for it? Maybe it doesn't exist! Maybe orchestras, as a group, aren't in very bad trouble.

The serious news about orchestras is something different, which you won't much read about. (Though James Oestreich did a good job in a New York Times piece, which ran next to the Bernard Holland one Andrew mentioned; you can search for both of them on the Times website, but because they ran more than a week ago, on 6/29, you'll have to pay to read them. it does no good to link to them, by the way; the links come up blank.) Some of the better people in the field are quietly saying that orchestras spend too much -- that they're spending more than they take in, and have been doing so ever since the '90s, though they didn't notice because of the economic boom. This has to be parsed carefully. What it means is that orchestras are spending more than they can reasonably expect to raise, and that those spending patterns got locked in place in the '90s, when money seemed to be available. But the money really isn't there, so orchestras, as a group, will have to cut their spending.

How that will work out over the next few years is what we ought to watch. One model might be the recent deal between the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and its musicians. The musicians take a pay cut, but get more artistic control.

I'll start with a practical question. Will there be an audience for classical music in the future? People debate this all the time, but the debate's not very satisfying.

And that, I think, is partly because we don't have enough information. Many people in classical music think, for instance, that we don't have to worry about the classical audience getting older. The age of the audience --in its fifties, on the average -- isn't a problem, these people say, because the audience for classical music has always been that age.

But there are two problems here. First, how do we know how old the classical audience has always been? The evidence I've seen is pretty sketchy. And by chance I uncovered a study of American orchestras in the late 1930s that says, straight out, that the median age of the audience then ranged (depending on which orchestra you looked at) from 27 to 33!

Well, to be precise, the study only looked at two orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Symphony. But still this is the only data I've ever seen from this period, and it strongly seems to contract today's prevailing wisdom. (Source: Margaret Grant and Herman S. Hettinger, America's Symphony Orchestras and How They Are Supported. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1940, p. 277. Long out of print, but in the Juilliard Library, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress.)

Second, how do we know this next generation of people coming into their fifties will go to as many classical music concerts as the present one? My own inclination is to say they won't, because popular culture -- some of it quite serious, including thoughtful, serious music -- has taken a slice of the attention, ideas, and audience that used to be reserved for high art.

But this, too, isn't based on real data. Sure, Bruce Springsteen is playing 10 sold-out concerts at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, reaching half a million people, who range -- or so I'd guess from newspaper reports and my own experience at Springsteen events -- from their thirties to Springsteen's own age, 53. And sure, musical choices like that weren't available 30 years ago, when rock concerts were mostly for people a lot younger. But why does that mean that people (maybe even some of the same people who go to Springsteen) won't go to classical events? Or, more precisely, why shouldn't some small fraction of people in their thirties and forties go to classical concerts -- a small fraction, maybe, compared to the number of people who don't go, but still large enough to keep classical music alive?

Data I'd like to have: comparative studies of musical taste in college students now and in -- let's say -- 1960. If a lot more college students listened to classical music back then, maybe that tells us something. Specifically, maybe it tells us that today's college students are less likely to be symphony subscribers when they turn 50. (And don't we all know in our gut that this is precisely what the study very likely will show?)

Missing in all of this: a discussion of what classical music actually offers. Why should anybody go to hear it?

Which brings me to my second thought for today…

What does classical music offer now? Or, rather, what could it offer?

These are ideas inspired by the Kirov Opera's performance of Verdi's Macbeth at the Lincoln Center Festival, which I saw July 12 with my wife Anne Midgette, who's a classical music critic for The New York Times. (You can read her review -- which I certainly I agree with -- right here, from the Times website.) What struck me first was Valery Gergiev's conducting, which was in many ways stupendous. At first I thought it was (along with the playing of the Kirov orchestra) like Italian opera performances, conducted by Italians, in the 1950s -- big, rough, imprecise, but dramatic and alive. Then I realized that it also in many ways was, for lack of any better word, contemporary, or maybe postmodern, but in any case not at all classical.

Let me explain. If you look at the orchestral scores of early Verdi operas (like Macbeth), or for that matter operas by Verdi's predecessors Donizetti and Bellini, you can see that the music is very noisy. Piccolos scream, cymbals crash, bass drums thunder; in loud, fast music you'll often find the bass drum, cymbals, and the timpani bashing along on every beat. This isn't very refined, so most conductors -- as if they thought the music had to sound like Art -- will suppress these noises, blending the piccolo and crashing percussion into a smooth orchestral wash.

But not Gergiev. He let it all hang out (God, here I am, sounding like the '60s!), and in fact, at least to my ears, made a virtue of all the noisy orchestration. (Of course, he tends to do that in any music he conducts.) That made the music tensile -- physical, wild, arresting, just as operas like Macbeth were meant to be. Even softer sounds (because of course not all the opera is a crash of noise) were physical, as if Gergiev realized that the noise can't be separated from the rest of the score, and let everything evolve from it. (Or maybe he just feels all music that way.)

As I thought all this, I backtracked a few steps. What would Macbeth look like if we forgot about operas, opera houses, tradition, and even history, and just approached the work as if it were new? Three things might jump out at us.

1. Noise. Which I've just talked about. And it ought to make the piece immediately accessible to the 21st century. Surely an age that produced the new Metallica CD can figure out how to play Macbeth.

2. Singing. Yes, that's the basis of Italian opera. To say so is -- obviously -- not to say anything new.

But from the point of view I'm taking here, it really is remarkable that everybody sings. It's stylized, even mannered; it's unusual, in contemporary art; it really is new. And the singing, by and large, is pretty static; nothing changes, as a rule, once an aria, duet, or ensemble gets under way, and its melody begins. Oh, sure, the singers might move around while they sing these pieces, but they don't have to (except, I'd think, for Lady Macbeth's Sleepwalking Scene, where of course she's supposed to wander restlessly around, something the Kirov soprano didn't bother with, but don't get me started on that). In the big ensembles, the singers, chorus emphatically included, pretty much can't move, because moving a lot would lead to physical and, even worse, sonic traffic jams on stage.

So if the singers just stand there and sing, that means -- from our modern point of view -- that their singing, the physical act of it, is what we watch them do. So they'd better deliver. They have to project their singing, physically, musically, and emotionally, something that didn't happen nearly enough in this performance, except maybe when the tenor singing Macduff -- a very tenor-like tenor, all force and not much subtlety -- threw himself across what looked like half the huge Metropolitan Opera stage, to mark the striking moment when his aria changes musical and emotional gears, moving from a minor key into major.

From a high-art opera standpoint, that was silly. But in the "what does this piece look like today?" conception that I'm playing with, it was completely appropriate, exactly the kind of thing we needed more of to make the opera come to life on stage. Which is not to say, by the way, that tenors have to lurch. But something has to happen, whether it's movement, an arresting arrangement of people on stage, or just the intense focus of a singer so completely at one with the music that he or she rivets our attention without moving at all.

(Gergiev, by the way, fell down in his conducting whenever people sang long melodic lines. Granted, the singers weren't making anything happen on their own. But that's no reason for the conductor to simply let them hang there doing nothing, and in fact, in Italian opera, it's precisely the conductor's job (or one of them) to inspire and energize the singers in any way possible. You can't just treat them as if they were instruments in the orchestra, some oddly fleshly kind of oboe or trombone, that can be counted to get caught up in the flare of your conducting. They're soloists, and, more to the point, singers, which means that they may very well go their own wandering, sometimes not so energetic way. What you need, then, is to give them energy from their accompaniment -- to goose the Italian-opera oompahs the orchestra plays while they sing, so that those oompahs push them forward. That can be especially important when the singers are holding long notes and might appreciate some collaboration, some extra juice, as they keep their sound alive, and move it toward its goal.)

3. Gore. There's a lot of it in Macbeth -- the murder of the king, the blood afterwards on Macbeth's hands and knife, the blood that Lady Macbeth says should be smeared on the king's attendants (and which she finally smears on them herself). And also Banquo's murder; Banquo's bloody ghost, which terrifies Macbeth during the big banquet scene; and the imagined blood on Lady Macbeth's hands, when she rubs them as she sleepwalks.

So what do we know about gore in these latter days? We're swimming in it, whether in the movies (walking corpses with their riven eyeballs slopping down their cheeks) or in real life (TV shots of bloodstained Iraqi children, which we read about, and the rest of the world saw). So any gore in a production of Macbeth should acknowledge its everyday presence in our culture, as, for instance, Deborah Warner did with the shocking splash of blood in her Medea, at the moment when the children die.

The Kirov production was feeble, bloodwise; Banquo's hapless ghost wouldn't have scared a kindergarten class, let alone Macbeth. And the worst moment was the removal of King Duncan's body during the final ensemble of Act 1, which was gratuitous to begin with, because -- since the music is so powerful -- you don't need anything on stage (assuming, of course, that your stage picture is as gripping as it should be) to turn the screw any tighter. But if you're going to cart out Duncan's body, at least make it ghastly to behold, so it enhances what ought to be already a baleful scene. The way it looked in this performance was only a distraction.

Finally, though, what's crucial is this -- that all three factors I've cited here, noise (and physicality), singing (and physicality), and gore (more physicality), amount in the end to aspects of the same thing. Macbeth, like any Italian opera of its period, is intensely physical, and should be almost physically searing to experience, a devastating hit to our emotions. All the elements I've listed say it ought to be that way, and can help to make it so. But the traditions of the opera house most likely hide the devastation from us, as a brand-new reading of the piece might not.

Disclaimer! I'm not mandating any one kind of staging of Macbeth. Art doesn't work like that; it's dumb to rule out possibilities. I only mean to point out one path that we might take.

And here's sometihng I love: Macbeth has the most wonderful expressive marking, in Verdi's score, that I've ever seen in any music. Over the music in the witches' chorus that begins the piece, Verdi writes nè dimenticarsi che sono streghe che parlano. Or, in English: "Don't forget that these are witches speaking." A comment, to judge from many letters he wrote about the first production of the opera, on the lazy drama habits of Italian opera houses. And one we might remember when we look at the opera freshly. These are witches, and if everyone in the opera house doesn't know that four seconds after they appear, and doesn't have it reconfirmed the moment that they open their mouths to sing, something's badly wrong.)