Delight and fright

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.