October 2003 Archives

My Pittsburgh concert seems to have been a big success. But I don't like the way that reads -- so let me change it to say, "Our Pittsburgh concert seems to have been a big success." Because one thing brought home to me by doing this is how much teamwork is involved. The team in this case was pretty small, consisting just of me; the conductor, Daniel Meyer (who's the Pittsburgh Symphony's Assistant Conductor); Genevieve Code Twomey, the Orchestra Manager; Robert Moir, the Artistic Administrator; and a very few other people. In the past, the Symphony has done programs like this -- introductory concerts for people who don't usually go to classical events -- with actors and a director, but this time it was just me and some of their key staff.

Everyone was fabulous to work with, and brought an amazing assortment of skills to the project, including things you might not normally find in their job descriptions, like lighting design and stage direction. And I needed their help. As host for the concert, I was, in a very real sense, doing a performance on stage. I had to follow a script, without adding to it, apart from very short ad libs here and there, because if the concert ran too long, the Symphony would have to pay the musicians overtime. And I had to know at all times exactly where I was on stage and where I ought to go next, because otherwise I'd trip over Dan, or over members of the orchestra, or crash into the stool at the front of the stage, where I sat when the music was playing.

To follow the script, I needed to watch a teleprompter, something I'd never done before, and which can be daunting, because if I stared at it too fixedly, everybody would know that I was reading. So essentially I had to "cheat," as actors or opera singers would put it, glancing often at the teleprompter while I seemed to be looking elsewhere. Opera singers do the same thing when they watch the conductor; they normally face elsewhere, but always know where the conductor is and what he or she is doing. And while I did sing opera on stage many years ago, working with a teleprompter is trickier and also new to me; without expert direction from the Pittsburgh staff, I wouldn't have been as easy or effective as I needed to be. It's impressive to see how much talent an orchestra can field, even backstage, and it's instructive, I think, to see how few people do such a large number of jobs.

The musicians, too, were wonderful to work with. Of course, this is one of the world's top orchestras; I've heard them under their music director, Mariss Jansons, and I've written in The Wall Street Journal about how they just about knocked me out. What I didn't know, though, was how glowing their playing can be even in rehearsal for a concert like this one, under a conductor who isn't Jansons. I've heard other major orchestras rehearse, and they didn't play with this much happiness. The musicians also were friendly and supportive, something you might not get from every orchestra doing a concert of this kind. They were even supportive after I asked them to put up with something unusual -- but more on that later.

What I learned most was something very important for this blog, and for much of what I do elsewhere -- I learned how successful a concert like this can be. We really can introduce classical orchestral music to new listeners in a completely entertaining way, but without dumbing it down, without playing only hackneyed, simple, or sentimental repertoire, and without making cheap jokes that have nothing to do with the music. Or at least Dan, Bob Moir, and I thought we'd done that, and members of the orchestra I spoke to afterward seemed to agree.

The secret? Well, let me step back a little, and introduce the program. The concept behind it (something I came up with, and then fleshed out in collaboration with Bob) was to play music with a meaning that goes beyond the concert hall -- and, in some cases, music that wasn't written with anything like our formal, silent concert halls in mind. So the program was this:

• Handel, Royal Fireworks Music, overture [written for a grand outdoor celebration]

• Rossini, La Gazza Ladra overture [written, with raucous percussion, for an audience who'd scream out their approval or their scorn]

• Mozart, "Paris" Symphony (Symphony No. 31), first movement [written for an audience that applauded the moment they heard anything they liked]

• Mahler, Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony [intended, perhaps, as a secret portrait of Mahler's wife Alma]
• Shostakovich, Tenth Symphony, second movement [intended as a secret portrait of Stalin]
• Ravel, Bolero [thanks to the movie 10, we think it's about sex -- but it had exactly the same meaning in Ravel's time]

The first thing I'd say is that this is all terrific music. It's also very varied, and has an appealing flow that I didn't know would be there, and didn't appreciate until I heard the music played in its proper order at the concert. (The flow owed a lot, I think, to Bob's long programming experience.)

And while most of the music is quite well known, and some of it -- Bolero for sure, and maybe also the Adagietto -- might seem too familar, two of the pieces aren't obvious choices at all: the Mozart and the Shostakovich. The Shostakovich also isn't comforting or pretty; it's scary and relentless, meant (if we believe Testimony, Shostakovich's purported memoirs) as a portrait of the dread and ghastly Joseph Stalin. (I do believe those memoirs, in part because two eminent Russians, Yuri Temirkanov, who conducted Shostakovich's music in the Soviet years, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose poetry Shostakovich set to music in his 13th Symphony, told me they heard Shostakovich say many of the things that were printed in the book.) So the program, even though it's of course designed to be easy to digest, isn't as easy as it might be.

And then there's how the music got introduced. I wrote the things I said to introduce it (with very helpful editing by Bob, and lots of cuts and tweaks that all of us made cooperatively when we saw how the script played out in rehearsal, and how long each section took). I didn't follow any plan; all I did was try to find things about each piece that were interesting and sometimes unexpected, and which supported our theme.

But after the concert, I realized that we'd stumbled on something better than we'd planned. Most of what I said seemed to underline things that we can hear in the music. So instead of just telling a few catchy stories about each piece, I found that I'd suggested ways to listen to it, without ever making any overt educational remarks. By some stroke of luck, I think I found a frame for each piece that highlighted the music's essential quality.

Take the Royal Fireworks, for instance. Kevin Shuck, whose title with the Symphony is Operations Assistant, had found quite wonderful pictures to illustrate each piece. Among them was a very self-assured, not to say self-important, portrait of Handel:

As I said to the audience, "He looks exactly like what he was -- a formidably famous man, caught here in a moment when he seems to be very pleased with himsef."

Then I had some fun explaining the history of the piece. It was written for a huge outdoor celebration, which the king staged to celebrate the end of a war. In my first drafts, I'd recounted some amusing stuff about the king and his desires -- he didn't want strings to play, and though Handel wrote string parts in his score, nobody knows whether strings were actually allowed in the first performance. Strings would have had trouble, in any case, making much noise outdoors, especially since (as I'd also planned to explain) Handel had to make sure the music would be loud, and used a giant orchestra, with 24 oboes, nine trumpets, nine horns, 12 bassoons, and three sets of timpani.

The controversy with the king got cut from the script, though, and so did everything about the composition of the orchestra. (It could have led to an amusing dialogue with Dan, the conductor -- how many oboes are we using? -- but the required explanations would have taken too much time.)

So instead we focused on the fireworks. I'd found an amazing picture, an engraving from the time that shows how the fireworks were set up. The king's people built a wooden structure…

…which was 400 feet long and 100 feet high, and on top of it, as you can see, they arrayed the fireworks. But things didn't work out too well. As one observer wrote at the time: "The illumination lighted so slowly that scarce any body had patience to wait the finishing: and then, what contributed to the awkwardness of the whole, was the right pavilion catching fire, and being burnt down in the middle of the show."

As a footnote to my little piece of Mozart history, in my last post, here's a Canaletto painting, done in 1754, called "London: Interior of the Rotunda at Ranelagh." It shows a concert. Notice how informal it is, and in some ways how much like a modern rock club. A few people are gathered by the stage, listening (I'd think) intently. Others are scattered through the space, talking and hanging out. It's easy to see how in an atmosphere like this, people would feel free to clap right in the middle of the music, if they heard something that they liked. Our concept of "classical music" simply didn't exist yet, and people listened quite informally.

This Thursday, 10/23, I'll host a concert on a Pittsburgh Symphony series called "Symphony with a Splash." These are early evening events (they start at 6:45), aimed at young professionals who don't usually go to symphony concerts. Drinks are served, and, as the Symphony's website says, "The coolest networking happy hour mixes with one of the world's best orchestras" (which the Pittsburgh Symphony certainly is).

This will, to say the least, give me a first-hand look at how these efforts to attract new listeners really work. I worked with the Symphony's staff to program the three events, and this one features music that either wasn't written for our notion of a formal concert, or else has extra meaning beyond the concert hall. The scherzo from the Shostakovich Tenth Symphony, for instance, had a secret meaning when Shostakovich wrote it, as a portrait of the dread Joseph Stalin.

For music that wasn't written for a formal concert setting, we're doing Rossini's Gazza Ladra overture, to try out my contention that Italian opera percussion parts ought to be played LOUDLY. Especially, I'd think, at an opera's premiere, when audiences hung breathlessly on every note, ready to scream at the end with approval, or (if they hated the piece) with scorn.

And we're also doing the first movement of Mozart's Paris Symphony, because after its premiere, Mozart told his father in a letter that the audience had burst into applause during the music, the moment that they heard a passage that they liked. And not only that -- Mozart expected them to do it, and made sure to repeat the passage that he thought would please them. I'm going to ask the Pittsburgh crowd to do exactly the same thing, to forget our modern concert etiquette, and let us know the moment they hear anything that turns them on.

I'll be eager to see how readily the audience goes along with this, and how loudly they're prepared to clap. For more on the history of the piece, and Mozart's comments on the premiere, see a page about it on my website, complete with musical examples showing three guesses about which passage the audience liked so much. I teach this little bit of history in my Juilliard course on "Classical Music in an Age of Pop." As classical music moves towards its unknown -- but very likely less informal -- future, it's important to remember how informal it used to be in the past.

Here's still more on concert dress and atmosphere, from Evan Tucker, a student composer who disagrees with Marla Carew. Click his name to e-mail him; he asked me to include his contact info, and I think he'd like to hear from you. "You don't tend to meet too many other classical music nuts on college campuses," he writes, "particularly among other music majors."

And here's what he says about concert dress:

What I think we have here, among much else, is a generation gap (and a culture gap that overlaps with it). Part of the classical music audience likes the formality of concerts, part of it doesn't, and a new, younger audience -- which classical music organizations want to attract -- might not like it at all.

Which leads classical music groups trapped in the middle. To attract a new audience they might have to be more informal. To keep their existing audience, they have to stay formal. How can they resolve this? Maybe by doing two kinds of concerts, and moving gradually to more informality (or a greater proportion of informal events) as their new audience grows.

From my faithful correspondent Marla S. Carew, a dissent on concert dress, one worth taking seriously:

One reader thought I wanted orchestras to still wear formal dress when they play standard repertoire. In an earlier post on concert dress, I'd talked about new music groups dressing informally. Then at the end, I added this: "New music concerts tend to be informal, of course. Their audience tends to dress casually. What you'd wear to play standard repertoire in a formal concert hall for a dressed-up audience -- that's another story." I hope it's clear I didn't mean this wasn't a story that should ever be told. It's just a more complex question. The audience dresses up more -- far more -- than a new-music audience does. The musicians are more conservative. Orchestra managers might be afraid to alienate the conservative core of their audience. Conductors might not like it. Etc.

But on this question, I got two good comments, well worth passing on. One is from our own Sam Bergman, news editor of ArtsJournal, and, not so incidentally, a violist with the Minnesota Orchestra:

News item: When a restaurant plays classical music in the background, diners spend more.

Or so conclude researchers at the University of Leicester, in England. According to a story in the Associated Press, these researchers studied how much diners spend when classical music is playing, when Britney Spears is playing, and when there's no music at all. Diners spend more when they hear the classics.

I'd have been happier -- assuming that the news story is accurate -- if the researchers had also studied the effect of jazz, and of upscale pop, like kd lang. But I can't say that I'm surprised by what they found, or by their explanation of it:

If you hear classical music [said Adrian North, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Leicester], it has got all sorts of connotations of sophistication, affluence and wealth and it makes you feel a bit posh. In a restaurant, this has the effect of making you spend a bit more money.

So once more we learn what classical music stands for in our society. It signifies comfort, affluence, and a kind of undifferentiated sense of sophistication.

As I said, I'm not surprised. Did anyone think classical music would make diners more thoughtful? That with Mozart playing, they'd be more likely to order offbeat dishes, or food that's subtle and full of surprises?

Today's news about Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic is amazing, though not exactly a surprise. Right from the start, as I wrote in my Wall Street Journal piece on the proposed merger, the directors of the two organizations talked very differently about what the merger meant. For Robert Harth, at Carnegie Hall, the merger was an opportunity for adventurous programming. For Zarin Mehta, at the Philharmonic, the merger was all about orchestral imperatives -- the Philharmonic's need to own the hall it played in, and of course the delight of Carnegie's better acoustics. The two men seemed so far apart in their understanding of what they were doing that it was hard to believe they'd been talking (as both told me) for months.

And now the merger falls apart. The public statements are all very reasonable -- everybody learned from the experience, profited from the merger discussions, and now they all can reaffirm their core values. But if you ask me, Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic both look dumb. One issue, as anybody could have guessed beforehand, was how to accomodate all the concerts the Philharmonic gives each year with Carnegie's strong and diverse schedule. To quote one published story:

The Philharmonic's executive director, Zarin Mehta, said in a telephone interview that the main reason the merger did not succeed is that Carnegie Hall could not accommodate the number of concerts the orchestra plays each season, between 120 and 130.

How could it take all these months to figure that out? And how could the two organizations have announced plans to merge -- actually announce that the meger was a done deal, with everything set except for the details -- without settling such an obvious issue before the announcement was made? I can barely believe it.

One problem, I think, was the top-down process of the merger. Even the Carnegie and Philharmonic boards of directors didn't know about the plans until the public announcement. The discussions seemed to take place between Zarin Mehta and Robert Harth, but even more importantly between Sanford Weill and Paul Guenther, the heads of the Carnegie and Philharmonic boards. When the announcement was made, a lot of key people were taken by surprise.

There surely was a better way to do this -- and in fact, far away from New York, the Utah Symphony and the Utah Opera merged, and did find a better way to work it out. Granted, they had an easier task, because while the opera was healthy, the symphony wasn't, and had three major staff vacancies, including the top job of executive director. So the two groups could merge under the leadership of the opera's executive director, with no prospect of any serious power struggle.

Still, there could have been problems. So rather than simply announce the merger, the two groups announced their intention to merge, setting a date months in the future for a vote by the two boards. By the time the vote came around, all the issues involved in the merger had been thoroughly discussed, both in private and in public. The vote was strongly in favor of merging, but even board members who'd been opposed to it offered, after they'd lost the vote, to help the merger in any way they could.

This, in other words, was a merger accomplished in public, with lots of good feeling, instead of in private, with lots of bad feeling and suspicion. Maybe things can't be done that way in New York -- maybe the interests at stake are just too massive, and maybe the players (especially the powers on both boards) are just too corporate -- but a little more openness might have saved Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic from what now looks like a major embarrassment.

Naxos held a competition some time ago for ideas about saving classical music. Now they're running excerpts from competition entries each day on their website. You can find them here.

Today's (credited to "A.A.") is maybe not so helpful:

By catering to the elite, classical music has become too conservative, too formal, too inaccessible to the masses. Only when the performers break off their exclusive relationship with the elite and play for the masses will live classical music achieve true popularity.

A mass audience, pretty obviously, isn't the answer for any art. Though maybe "A.A." doesn't strictly mean that; maybe the idea is just to get classical music out from behind its tuxedo curtain. One goal, I'd think, would be to make classical music more interesting to the many educated, cultured people who don't currently care for it. And that's a tough challenge -- to meet it, classical music needs to be more artistic than it is now: more surprising, more contemporary, less self-satisfied and predictable.

But it's good to see Naxos doing this. They're an enterprising company, in many, many ways.

I hate to keep slamming Musical America, but they've done it again -- raised an alarm where no alarm was needed. One story today reads like this in their summary:

Venerable Instrument Plant Closing -- Kids just don't want those acoustic white elephants any more.

But when you follow the link to the original news item (from WNDU TV in South Bend, IN), things don't look nearly so bad. Conn-Selmer -- which makes wind instruments, and is one of the oldest businesses in Elkhart, IN -- is laying off some of its workforce and closing one plant. But the reason turns out to be competition, not lack of demand. The story on WNDU's website isn't as clear as it might be, but apparently Conn-Selmer's flutes, clarinets, and oboes are expensive. So, as one worker said, "when they saw instruments hitting the market and selling for just $100 to $200, they just couldn't compete."

Classical music has its troubles. But we need to be clear about what's really happening. We need real information, not snappy conjectures.

Yes, the border -- porous, shifting, maybe even nonexistent -- between art and popular culture is tricky to understand. Yes, the role of pop culture in art (and of art in pop culture) is worth debating.

But please, let's be clear about which is which. With near shock today I read this in Musical America, a website (once, in the distant past, a magazine), which I and many others turn to every day for news about the classical music world:

For all the talk of Riccardo Muti's resistance to popular culture at La Scala, the conductor is in talks with Oscar-winning film director Pedro Almodóvar to stage "Così fan Tutte" at the famed opera house in 2006.

The original story came from The Guardian in England, but this summary was written for Musical America, and the pop culture comment (which doesn't appear in The Guardian) is just plain addled. Almodóvar may be a film director, and film may be a popular art, but Almodóvar's films are hardly popular culture. They're art house films, and as serious as any art around. In fact, isn't Almodóvar a far more serious artist than Muti? Muti, glamorous, safe, spends all his time with works from the past; Almodóvar takes chances with every film, and probes deep into uneasy realities. Muti lives in a hall of mirrors, an unchallenging fairyland; Almodóvar, if he succeeds as an opera director, might bring depth to La Scala. And his steady gaze into the whirlpool of men and women could do wonders for the ambiguous passion that makes Così so hard to understand.

We have to know what pop culture is before we can wisely talk about how it dances with classical music. And we should never assume that classical music -- simply by being classical music -- is automatically serious art.

Here's a new idea for concert dress, or new at least to me -- a new (and none too wonderful) thought about what classical musicians should wear when they play. It comes from New York's Eos Orchestra, whom I heard this past weekend playing smart, tactile, wry, and often touching music by Peter Lieberson, a good man and good composer. The musicians wore black pants, and black Eos t-shirts; "Yuck" might be one quick reaction. The whole thing looked to me like a crass promotion, but then I don't have much affection for Eos, which gets a lot of publicity and plays fascinating programs, but plays them badly. Their founder, prime mover, and music director Jonathan Sheffer just can't conduct…but let's not go there. (Insert tirade about vanity operations, led by incapable conductors with either money, or a gift for fundraising and promotion.) (And I do wonder why Eos was chosen to play this concert on a composers' series at New York's Miller Theater, whose events are programmed by George Steel, a good musician, who ought to know better. Lieberson's music, tricky, changing every few moments, needs a lot sharper playing than Sheffer and Eos could give it.)

I can imagine a group that's run by its musicians wearing t-shirts that advertised it. At least we'd know the musicians were promoting themselves.

But the most effective informal concert dress I've seen is wonderfully simple. Everyone wears black below the waist, pants or a skirt, and something colored on top. The musicians pick their own colors, and the result looks both festive and disciplined, free and creative, but also organized. I saw this first at a new music concert by the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and have seen it elsewhere, too, though it's important to really coordinate the look. Sometimes most of the musicians dress this way, but a few people wear all black, which weakens the fun.

New music concerts tend to be informal, of course. Their audience tends to dress casually. What you'd wear to play standard repertoire in a formal concert hall for a dressed-up audience -- that's another story. But it's something a lot of people wonder about, including even major orchestras.

Here's something -- in the spirit of finding meaning in classical music, and also in keeping sight of the reasons we love it -- that classical music does, and non-classical music can't.

It's a wonderful moment in the last act of Wagner's Siegfried. Siegfried has come through the fire, and emerged on the mountaintop where Brünnhilde lies sleeping. The music that shows him braving the fire -- an interlude between the first and second scenes of the last act -- is irrepressibly Wagnerian, huge, grand, and unmistakable. I once walked by a classroom where students were taking a final exam in a music appreciation course. They had to identify the composers of passages their teacher played for them on records. One was this interlude. The students laughed when they heard it; the composer couldn't have been more obvious.

But when the curtain rises again, and Siegfried emerges on the mountaintop, everything changes. The music grows quiet, and at last there's a long passage for the first violins alone, 23 measures in slow tempo (with the trombones playing softly in two of them, but that only emphasizes how quiet the violins are on their own). The violins rise high, soft and alone. Nothing could better evoke the bright light and stillness of the mountaintop, and nothing could be more economically written. No need for the lavish colors of the full orchestra; Wagner makes his point with just violins.

As a musical analyst, I might draw a moral here about Wagner. He's famously lavish, but he also can be intimate. Along with this passage from Siegfried, I might cite the first scene of Die Walküre, where for an enormously long time the music is quiet and hesitant, written only for strings (and not even the entire string section, since much of the time the contrabasses don't play) and two horns. And then there's his mastery of detail. The Tristan prelude is of course a deep surge of passion, but it's also a treasury of meticulous workmanship. I remember having a reaction like Ysaÿe's (see my last post) when I first heard it as a teenager. Now I'm just as likely to be overcome by Wagner's craft, the intricate but always clear weaving of the instrumental lines, when I look at the full score.

But if I want to explain what classical music can do, I might look at something else -- the Siegfried moment in its context. I can imagine someone writing a pop song about a mountaintop, and arranging it for just his or her own singing voice, with no accompaniment, as a way of conveying more or less what Wagner does. It could work beautifully. But because classical music develops over time, the Wagner passage can be more surprising, and in a way more eloquent, because it contrasts so much with what came before it (and then, looking forward, with what will come next). It becomes part of what's arguably a more complex experience, with the mountaintop all the more vivid because it emerges in world that has more than mountains.

I guess the pop song could do that, too, because it exists in a world of many pop songs, almost all of which have instruments along with the voice. It, too, could make a quiet statement about its context. But the Siegfried passage might do that more vividly, since the context is part of the same musical experience.

Classical music isn't better than pop (or jazz, or world music). But it's certainly different.

I've had some correspondence about my last post, and now I think I may have tangled two issues that ought to be separated. One is what cultural things classical and pop critics refer to in their writing. I said that pop critics often have a wider range of reference than classical critics do, and that sometimes my Juilliard students can't follow what the pop critics talk about. Maybe that's true, but obviously there are people who write about classical music who have a wide range of cultural reference -- Charles Rosen, a profound scholar (at least of the past), would be one obvious example.

And really the range of reference in pop criticism (the best pop criticism, of course) is irrelevant to my main point, which is that pop criticism relates music to the present day. Here we can get in endless discussions. Who defines the nature of "the present"? What's the relationship of what we might call purely musical discussion -- the form of a Beethoven sonata movement, the shape of the long acoustic piano introduction in Ani DiFranco's "You Had Time" -- to discussion of music's cultural meaning?

Here, I think, people in classical music cherish some misconceptions, chief among them the idea that classical critics talk about "the music itself," while pop critics talk about its meaning in our culture. One problem with that is that pop critics do talk about purely musical facts (and, not quite the same thing, but related, there's now a growing academic practice of pop-music analysis, using the same analytic tools -- study of pitch relationships, for instance -- that for generations have been applied to classical music). The other problem is that "the music itself" is quite an amorphous concept, one that itself is culturally determined. It's usually allied to an idea that classical music is timeless, and that classical compositions live, ultimately, in their notation, which can be examined objectively.

But of course pop music also can be written down and analyzed. I've had fun doing that with two of my favorite doowop songs. If I were a musicologist, I would have published papers on "Thirds and Fourths: Recurrent Pitch Relationships in the Penguins' 'Earth Angel'," and "In Search of B Natural: An Ascent from G to B as the Structural Spine of the Dells' 'Oh What a Nite.'"

And classical music also lives in performance, which means that it takes its place in the world around us. In fact, I'd say we only study its notation, and all the inner structure we find in it, because the music is performed. Which means that it has some value in the outside world, a value that might be connected to its inner structure (just as the value of "Earth Angel" bounces in some ways off those inner thirds and fourths), but takes tangible form in the very social, very cultural realms of sound and hearing.

In the end, it's easy to make this discussion too complicated, and lose sight of the simplest things, which are also the most important. Why do we listen to classical music? Why do we like it? Why do other people not listen? What can we say to these people, that might make them want to listen? What do I get from classical music, that enriches my life, that helps tell me who I am and where I fit in the world, which might also enrich someone else?

The answers aren't as obvious as we might think. This is ground I've been over here before. If, for instance, I say that classical music is "beautiful," that's true enough, but doesn't help anyone who doesn't respond to the beauty. In my post on criticism, I wrote about Nick Hornby's Songbook, which is full of lovely and thoughtful observations on why Hornby likes his favorite songs, and what role they've played in his life. What's notable, from the classical vs. pop criticism point of view, is the ease with which he can make connections between musical facts and cultural facts. He does it so easily, in fact, that I feel embarrassed writing such a nerdy sentence as my last one. I might as well say it's notable how easily Hornby breathes.

Classical critics, once more, don't do this, though I imagine some of them very easily could. One critic I know admires Haydn, and from reading him it's easy to see why. He likes balance, wit, and discretion, and looks uncomfortably at music that veers off toward excess. We could ask, then, how his admiration functions in his life. Does it come into play when he hears Haydn, or are there times when he turns to Haydn to give him balance that he needs for other things?

In the past, nobody hesitated to find real-world value in what we now think of as classical masterpieces. Nobody in the 19th century worried whether Lucia di Lammermoor was timeless. Instead, in a memorable passage in Madame Bovary, Flaubert's character is transported by the opera, which embodies all her hopeless romantic longing. Around the turn of the century, a New York matron could confide to her diary that Wagner aroused passions she could barely name. Earlier, the violinist Ysaÿe, after hearing Tristan und Isolde, went back to his room, and threw his shoes in the fire, thinking that shoes were an impossible bother, if music like that could exist.

Pierre Boulez, at another emotional pole, is fond of saying that tonal music evokes only nostalgia, at least when composers write it now. Atonal music, by contrast, expresses contemporary emotions (though Boulez, to my knowledge, has never said what those are). Years ago, someone asked me what Steve Reich's music meant, and I said it was about joie de vivre and hard work. Webern's 12-tone pieces show me the deep meaning of discipline -- the willingness to discover and embrace treasures you would never have known, if you hadn't restricted yourself to the patterns of musical notes your 12-tone row lays out for you.

Richard Strauss's later work seems terribly sad, even at its most involved and bustling, as if he's in mourning for a world that's gone. (Of course that's the overt subject of the Four Last Songs, where mourning for the lost world mingles with the sadness of approaching death. This implicit meaning in Strauss's later work may help explain why the music was better accepted in our era than it used to be -- our era being one in which all classical music might be shrinking toward the past, which makes Strauss's long look backwards more sympathetic than it seemed when the ascent modernism made people believe in musical progress.)

I don't think it's hard to relate classical music to our present life, though I've made only the smallest beginning here. I'd love to see others try. I can dream of a book, in which many writers do for classical pieces what Nick Hornby does for pop songs…