January 2004 Archives

I'd claim I proofread everything I post here, but obviously I'm not careful enough. The music critic with the Detroit Free Press is Mark Stryker, not Mark Styker, as I mistakenly typed. Sorry, Mark!

Real life, both personal and professional, has dragged me away from blogging, so I haven't posted some thoughtful responses about modernism, James Levine, and the Boston Symphony. Here's one (and I'm grateful for all of them), from Mark Styker, classical music critic with the Detroit Free Press:

Many interesting and complicated things in this discussion and I agree with you on some points. But one thing I really like about Levine's programming for next season is that he's doing what a music director ought to do with any important historical style but especially one that is still widely misunderstood and mistrusted, often unfairly: He's acting as a curator - he's culled the modernist canon and pulled out the works of the highest quality that he truly believes in, and he's saying to the audiences, "Here are specific pieces by specific high modernist composers that I think have held up, that have merit, and if we are to understand them, we need to hear them regularly, in context with the music that came before." This is not the same as saying, "We are going to listen indiscriminately  to every piece of far-out-music-that-no-one-wants-to-hear."

From Eric Bruskin comes this worthwhile note:

Another reason not to hate the season - to give it a chance (and, if you wish, to see it as a further test of a hypothesis): maybe a good performance will help people appreciate this music, because they'll finally hear what the composer wrote.

I love the music he's programming. (I also love the music you've offered as an alternative.) I've loved hard-core modernism since I was in high school. But after moving to NYC and hearing many many concerts over the years, along with repeated listening to items in my record collection, I began to realize that many of those works are poorly performed. (I often followed scores.) Your typical New York Philharmonic premiere, for example: between the lousy acoustics and careless playing, many pieces sounded like a mess. And frankly, many composers simply cannot orchestrate music of the density that they can put on paper.

But over the last (say) 10 years, fabulous recordings of many hard-modernist works have renewed my enthusiasm for the style. Not everyone, but I happen to think that Levine has selected excellent composers who CAN orchestrate and whose music positively glows in a great performance. (Knussen doing Carter and Wuorinen, Levine doing Babbitt, Boulez doing his own music in the past 10 years.)

Levine is one of the few condunductors in the world who could actually bring this off.

From Janet Shapiro, who with her husband Philip Byrd produces fine TV films of classical performances:

I'm not sure exactly how this fits into what you've been discussing on ArtsJournal these past few days re the Boston Symphony’s programming under Levine, but I thought I'd share something that happened just last night.

In an effort to avoid the State of the Union speech while cleaning up the kitchen after dinner (oh, what a domestic goddess I am!) I turned on WNYC-FM and was shocked to hear a performance I'd taken part in.  It was Messiaen's 3 Petites Liturgies, and I'd sung it with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the BSO under Seiji Ozawa back in the 70's.  Immediately I was engulfed by a wave of nostalgia - I remembered woodshedding the notes at my apartment in Watertown with two of my best friends.  And drilling the French text ad nauseam at rehearsals - after almost 30 (gasp!) years I could still recite a lot of it.  And I fondly recalled the woman who sang the choral solo.  She was pregnant with twins at the time, and she threw up after the audition.

After wallowing in those Proustian responses for a few minutes, I started to really listen to the music.  What struck me at once was how accessible it is now. And yet in the mid 70's it seemed to be a very difficult piece both to sing and to listen to.  It was a recording of a live concert, and the sopranos had problems with some of the lines (I of course am an alto) and I don't know if that would be any different today - difficult lines are still difficult lines -  but I'm pretty sure that the conservative BSO audiences would be far more receptive to the piece now than they were then.  Thirty years ago it was a thorny piece of work - last night it was affectingly easy.  My ears have certainly changed in 30 years.

But wait, you say!  The work was written in the 40's.  So 30 years after it was written it still seemed hard.  It took an additional 30 years to soften it to my ears. Yeah, I know - I haven’t heard the piece for 30 years. It might have seemed easy 25 years ago. - that we'll never know.

Is it OK that it can take 60 years for a work to ripen?  I leave that for you to decide. You're in the business of pontificating upon such questions and I'm just an interested bystander.

I wonder if the number of years matters. And for whatever it's worth, I once saw a Friday afternoon audience in Boston (those Friday audiences are, notoriously, quite conservative) respond with avid warmth to a fairly modernist Dutilleux piece. They brought him back for several bows.

From Alex Ross, classical music critic for The New Yorker, some very well-considered words:

Check out this month's Vanity Fair -- they put Paul Kellogg, the man who runs the New York City Opera, in their hall of fame. And for reasons that have everything to do with art, not glitz.

Which brings me back to my post some months ago about Vanity Fair's annual music issue. They'd featured two classical artists, Juan Diego Florez and Anna Netrebko, both heavily pushed by Deutsche Grammophon's publicists. I wondered what it would take to get the magazine to highlight classical people who aren't glamorous, and aren't the flavor of the month.

Well, they just did it. So take note, classical music publicists (perhaps working for the Chicago Symphony, or the Cleveland Orchestra, or…choose your own favorite). Vanity Fair apparently is open to you. How do you get your people on its pages?

Today, linked in ArtsJournal, are two delightful surprises -- daily newspaper pieces that talk in great serious detail about classical music, and in fact talk about music the way professionals do.

One, about how Daniel Barenboim conducts Schumann, is by my wife, Anne Midgette, writing in The New York Times; the other is by Michael Barnes, writing in the Austin (TX) American Statesman, is an explanation of theme and variation form, showing how it works in the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. (There's no point, as I've said before, in inserting a link to Times articles; the Times has somehow set up its site so the links never function.)

Now, pieces like these, in daily papers, aren't supposed to exist. Daily papers don't want to cover classical music very much (even the Times is cutting back). Daily papers like pop culture. They want bright, eager writing, aimed at younger readers. So if they do print anything about classical music, they tend to want it glossy.

And here, instead, are two very serious pieces. The Austin article explains musical structure, in considerable detail -- and with musical examples, actually printed in real music notation. The Times piece discusses details of composition and performance: Why Schumann's symphonic works are oddly awkward, why they have to be played differently from Brahms, and how German musicians have their own performance style. I've seen subjects like these touched on in other newspaper pieces, but here they're treated in depth.

Both pieces are wonderfully readable, or at least I think so. And so I wonder: How will civilian readers (people who aren't classical music professionals, or avid, educated fans) react? I'd like to think that some of them, at least, will be fascinated. I think classical music has reorient itself in two ways -- it has to be more accessible, but also more artistic. I'd argue that the current ways in which it's presented (in advertising, marketing brochures, on the radio, on public TV, in program books, even in the concert hall) isn't truly artistic. Either classical music comes off as brisk and glossy, full of empty excitement and meaningless invocations of assumed profundity, or else -- for instance in far too many program notes -- it seems too scholarly, weighed down by history and musical analysis.

Rarely do you see classical music discussed as something you listen to seriously -- with reference, I mean, to exactly the things that, as you hear them (not think about them, not analyze them, not meditate about their historical significance), make classical music such a powerful and interesting artistic experience. These two articles do just that. So again, I'm very curious to know what people reading them will think. In my own experience, many people in the new audience we hope to attract think of classical music as, despite its artistic claims, somehow middlebrow -- too bland, too predictable, too sentimental, too unchallenging. In part, that's because we do too much music from the past, which really can get bland and predictable through too much repetition.

But it's also, I think, because we haven't yet found a way to tell people what we ourselves enjoy. These surprising and welcome newspaper pieces do exactly that -- and with any luck will show readers some of the reasons classical music can be gripping and meaningful.

Here's yet another view of modernism and the BSO -- well worth taking seriously -- from a reader who'd prefer I didn't use his name:

Here's the comment I mentioned in my last post, from Scott Spires, with whom I've been having a friendly e-mail exchange. What he says is worth taking seriously:

This is in response to your article decrying Levine's programming of "hardcore" modernist pieces with the Boston Symphony. In the article you assert, I believe, that these hard modernists have never really gained an audience beyond the typical academic new-music crowd.

I'm a 39-year-old non-musician, just a listener, and I can say that I regard such composers as Lutoslawski, Ligeti, Messiaen, Schnittke, etc. as the natural successors to the great composers of the past. Their music has certainly inspired me, and people I know who are likewise non-specialists. What's more, a lot more of my listening is focused on these composers nowadays than on the more popular composers. Evidence that I'm not alone is that I've been to many concerts featuring music of these composers, and have found that 1) the audience is younger than the norm for "classical" concerts, 2) they are more engaged and enthusiastic, 3) the house is often full.

Beyond that, let me say that much of this music isn't hard at all! Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra isn't any more arcane than Bartok's. Dutilleux sounds more like Debussy or Ravel than like any modern atonalist. (I'll grant that Carter is pretty tough.)

Furthermore, your alternative list (Reich, Adams, Torke etc.) was oddly unsatisfactory. For a  start, some of the composers on the list are pretty old (some born before 1940), hence hardly representative of truly new music. Personally, I see a decline in quality too: I would only rank Adams (and in his own weird way, Reich) as the equal of the greats from the older generation of modernists.

Finally, there is one group of composers that I feel truly suffers from unjust neglect: the basically conservative composers, mostly from northern Europe, who never broke with the old forms. To hear a symphony by the likes of Holmboe, Simpson, Tubin, Arnold, Martinu, Rubbra, Englund, or Sallinen played by a great American orchestra would be a breath of fresh air.

A little more on the subject of my last post, the modernist music that dominates next year's Boston Symphony programs.

Start with why I criticized that, and did it very strongly. Earlier today, I finished next month's copy for my column on the NewMusicBox webzine. My subject -- titled, tongue in cheek, "How We Can Save the World" -- was about how the spirit and mood of new music concerts could change the classical music mainstream. In this piece, I said that people in the new music world (that includes me) should redouble our efforts to get more new music performances in the mainstream classical world:

If mainstream classical concerts had more new music, they’d change their tone. And yes, of course this is a battle we’ve been fighting for generations now, but the crisis in classical music gives us an opening we never had. And, I think, creates an openness inside the classical music world. So when we make our various pleas for more new music (not that all of us want to bother; for some of us, it’s just enough to do what we do—and without that, we wouldn’t be anywhere at all), we should insist that this is how classical music should be saved. (We should also protest loudly when any mainstream institution—like the Boston Symphony, in the upcoming first season under James Levine—picks new works exclusively from the old high-church school, Carter, Babbitt, and the like. We should yell, even scream, that this isn’t representative, that it’s not where new music is now, and can only alienate any possible audience, existing or new.)

You'll be able to read the whole piece on February 1. After I finished, I thought, "Have I practiced what I preach? Have I protested those Boston Symphony programs?" The answer was no, so I thought I'd do it.

I've gotten one response, from someone I know -- this came in conversation, not online -- saying that at least Levine's programs are interesting, better than most symphonic programming, representing a real point of view. And yes, they do have a point of view, but one, I think, that doesn't help new music or the orchestra. Levine of course should conduct the music he believes in -- and then guest conductors should do new music of a different kind.

And then there's something else. Critics and other musical sophisticates are too quick, I think, to support new music programming more or less on principle, without regard for which works are being played. Well, not quite -- if programming seems too easy, or too accessible (too much Philip Glass, let's say) -- then it'll be criticized, but not if it's too modernist. But let that be. What I most want to say is that I'm tired of supporting new music on principle. It's like the old line about the talking dog -- eventually you get over the shock of finding out it can speak, and start wondering what it has to say. So enough already with praising people simply because they play new music. That's a hangup from what I take to be a highly abnormal situation, namely an art form -- classical music -- founded, as it's practiced now, overwhelmingly on works from the past. One way to get past that is to treat new music as if it were normal, as if it's just like music of any other kind. Do we like it? Then praise it. And if we don't like it -- say so.

Finally, there's my own experience with modernism. I've long been seen as someone who doesn't like modernist music, but that's not strictly true. There's some of it I like a lot, or even love (Webern, for instance). But what I don't like -- and I'm hardly alone here -- is modernist dominance. That used to be the rule, back in the '70s, when I was in music school, and into the '80s. If you were a composer, you were supposed to write atonal music. If you didn't, you were rejected, ignored, marginalized.

This has been discussed a lot, and the modernists -- Milton Babbitt, especially, and Charles Wuorinen -- have responded by saying they couldn't possibly have had any power, because their works weren't played very much. Well, their works weren't played by mainstream classical music groups. But within the specialized world of contemporary music, they had lots of power. They and their colleagues had a lot to say about who got grants, who got teaching jobs, and who got performed on the specialized new music concerts that composers depended on for their first and often only chances to be heard.

It's hard to understand what those days were like, if you weren't there. Composers like Britten and Shostakovich were almost totally ignored. They didn't write atonal music; they weren't legitimate. (Boulez to this day treats Shostakovich as if he were some third-rate trifler.) Composers almost never talked about what their music felt like; instead, they'd analyze its structure, especially its pitch relationships. The whole scene, in retrospect, was repressive. You could call it anti-musical, in some ways even anti-human, despite the power and even the delight of some of the music (Webern, Babbitt, some of Carter, late Stravinsky) that was favored. I've had correspondence with one leading composer who's a woman, was part of that scene, and feels, looking back, that in some ways it was anti-woman, too.

One composer I know, talking to the audience at a retrospective of her work, said that when she first started her career, she wrote serial music, because that's what composers then were supposed to do. Then she heard Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, and had her mind blown. Here was another way to write music that sounded radical and new. She started writing pieces inspired by that recognition, and all at once felt isolated, disapproved of. This pressure was real; it was difficult and ugly. I never suffered from it much, I want to say, just in case anybody thinks I'm making some personal campaign for the tonal music I've come to write. I opted out early, and threw my lot in with the so-called "downtown" composers, of whom the minimalists were the most famous. I wrote strong attacks on what I came to call "the complicated music gang," but not because I had them on my own back. And now it's easy to write tonal music. George Rochberg and David Del Tredici led the way, breaking with the modernists many years ago. Philip Glass and Steve Reich forged a new kind of style. In their wake, and Rochberg's and Del Tredici's (not to mention the excitement of Cage, Nancarrow, Lou Harrison, and others not part of any "uptown" or "downtown" school), we at last are free, both in theory and in practice, to write anything we like.

But that Boston programming, all those modernists -- for me just reading all those names brings those bad old days back. I feel the chill of compulsion, the compulsion that we used to feel, in the contemporary music world, to like only modernist music, to write only that. That's even true for composers like Ligeti and Lutoslawski, whose music is much freer than the modernist norm. They were embraced by the modernists (and in Ligeti's case, emerged from the modernist, or more stricly speaking serialist cocoon), and when I see them on the Boston schedule, I don't think of them as interesting or lively; I'm reminded of the pall the modernists cast over music, with their lists of who was and wasn't legitimate.

On another note, though, I got e-mail -- almost immediately after I'd posted my screed -- from someone who says it isn't true that modernists have no audience. This is something I'd be happy to be wrong about, and I hope my correspondent will let me post his thoughts in full.

I want to protest, really loudly, the Boston Symphony's newly announced programming for next year. This will be James Levine's first season as music director, and he's packed it with bristling modernist works:

• DUTILLEUX Tout un monde lointain
• LIGETI Lontano
• CARTER Micomicón
• CARTER Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei
• CARTER Sonata for flute, oboe, cello, and harpsichord (on a Boston Symphony Chamber Players concert)
• LUTOSLAWSKI Cello Concerto
• LUTOSLAWSKI Concerto for Orchestra
• LIGETI Cello Concerto
• BABBITT Concerti for Orchestra
• HARBISON New work (world premiere; BSO commission)
• WUORINEN Piano Concerto No. 4
     (world premiere; BSO commission)
• BIRTWISTLE The Shadow of Night

There are also older modernist pieces -- Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, for instance, and Stravinsky's Movements for Piano and Orchestra. And then there are two new or newish pieces that don't fit the modernist mold, one by William Bolcom, and a world premiere from Yehudi Wyner. Plus something by Michael Gandolfi, a Boston composer whose music I don't know.

Now, let me dispose of one possible misunderstanding. I'm not saying I don't like these pieces. Some of them might be to my taste (or yours), and some might not. It's what they represent as a group that bothers me. They're all examples of a modernist style of composition that hasn't been current for decades. To suddenly jump in a time machine, and present them all as important, presumably cutting-edge contemporary programming -- God, it's so out of date, so retro, so 20th century! By announcing these programs, the BSO turns its back on the current state of new music.

(In fact, come to think of it -- what's the average age of these composers? Is the BSO playing anything by anybody under 40? Michael Gandolfi, born in 1956, is, by far, the youngest of all of them.)

New music is far more varied than you'd guess from the BSO's programs. It's far more truly contemporary, and -- no small thing, as I'll explain in a moment -- far more accessible. Orchestras, I'll insist, have a serious responsibility to present the full range of contemporary work, not just one old-fashioned slice of it. The BSO audience is drastically misserved here. And so is all of classical music. One problem we have is that new works don't get around; hardly anyone (except, I think, artistic administrators of orchestras, and possibly music publishers) is in a position to hear or sometimes even hear about every significant premiere. Orchestras could make things a little better by programming pieces that had big success elsewhere, or at least by letting their audiences hear composers who'd begun to make a splash. The BSO, by turning the clock back 30 years, is making things worse.

And then there's the problem of accessibility. I'm not -- absolutely not -- saying that orchestras should play only easy pieces. But this modernist style has absolutely no audience. It doesn't appeal to mainstream classical concertgoers. They don't have modernist taste. (Neither, for that matter, do the people who run orchestras. Once, at an American Symphony Orchestra League conference, I spoke about new music on a panel, and polled the people who came to listen about their interests in art, film, and literature. They didn't spend much time reading Finnegans Wake, or seeking out films by Godard and Antonioni. Why should anybody think they'd listen to Birtwistle, Carter and Babbitt?)

Nor does this modernist style appeal to the new audience classical music is looking for. In my experience, this new audience wants things with (among many other things) more rhythm.

And worst of all, this modernist stuff never even appealed to the one audience it conceivably might have had, which is artists in other fields, and intellectuals. If this audience for Carter et al existed, the BSO could proudly say it was doing something for music that, admittedly, few people appreciated -- but those few people were some of the most important artists and thinkers alive. But this isn't the case. In fact, as it happened, when the minimalists came along in the late '60s and early '70s, they had this audience, or anyway a part of it; so did John Cage, in the '50s and '60s. Stockhausen, a modernist who's now out of fashion even among other modernists, and isn't on the BSO's programs, once inspired musicians out on the edges of rock and jazz. But the BSO's modernists never, as far as I know, inspired anyone. (Though it's true that Ligeti got wide exposure on the 2001 soundtrack -- which I don't think made the rest of his pretty lively work work more popular).

Now, this lack of an audience is, when you think about it, pretty interesting. Some modernist composers (Ligeti, Stockhausen, Webern, Babbitt, Boulez) can by my lights be pretty wonderful, even if the school as a whole is deadly. So why didn't they find any audience? You could even argue, if you liked, that their failure to find any audience might be a powerful virtue, or at least an intriguing curiosity. What power could their music take on, from being composed in such privacy? (Or, on the other hand, what power could have been leeched out of it, because it was composed to please other composers, and to get grants -- though this, I think, applies more to minor, strictly academic modernists, not to anyone the BSO is playing.)

But this conundrum calls for a symposium, or maybe a museum show (as I once suggested for serial music, in a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education), not a full-bore assault from the Boston Symphony, which I bet won't even acknowledge the problem, in any of its press material, or in program notes.

And what happens if these pieces -- especially in such bristling profusion -- alienate the BSO's audience? What service to new music will that be? The BSO might actually make its audience think it hates new music, a possibility that makes me feel sick. Far better to proceed the other way -- program pieces by Steve Reich, Michael Torke, John Corigliano, Christopher Rouse, Michael Daugherty, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, David Del Tredici, Tan Dun (his wonderful piece, with video, about his Chinese musical heritage, which the BSO itself premiered), Philip Glass, George Crumb, Louis Andriessen, Ingram Marshall, John Adams, Joan Tower, Todd Levin, and a whole host of other current composers, whose work the audience might respond to. And then, having established that new music can be stimulating, introduce the modernists. That way, the audience might listen with open ears.

But as things stand, I fear that the BSO's programming will go down like unleasant medicine: "This is good for you. Shut up and listen." We've been there before. That's what contemporary classical music used to be like, a couple of decades ago, and no one who remembers those days -- and who isn't a modernist composer, or one of those composers' few acolytes -- wants them back.

(Footnote: How do I know this is Levine's own programming? It might surprise some people, but music directors don't always plan everything their orchestras play. Sometimes they only program the concerts they themselves conduct. But in the BSO's case, the programs are clearly Levine's own work. Modernism is well known to be his taste, and the programs he's conducted with the Met orchestra -- and, to a lesser extent, with the Munich Philharmonic -- look fairly similar.)

Last week my Juilliard course on the future of classical music began ("Classical Music in an Age of Pop). Some of the students talked about friends they'd introduced to classical music -- people who didn't know classical music, but who came to a concert, and found they liked it. That led to talk about what could attract more people to come, and, most crucially, about what happens when newcomers do show up.

I talked about a friend of mine who impulsively bought a ticket for some orchestral concert at Lincoln Center (could have been the Philharmonic, or a visiting orchestra; he didn't remember), because he saw they were playing the Beethoven Sixth, a piece he loves. I wondered what might have brought him back for more concerts -- and whether anyone addresses that problem.

That led us to talk about ways it could be addressed in the concert hall. How about a kiosk in the lobby, with a big banner: "First time here? Come talk to us!" Or greetings from the stage. Or, somebody said, how about something attached to the back of the seat in front of you, as you might find when you go to a new church for the first time?

That last is probably difficult in concert halls, since you'd have to retool the way the seats are built, but all the ideas are worth considering. If you buy a ticket by mail or phone or online, and your name isn't on the database, why not give you a little brochure for new attenders along with your ticket? Or there could be greeters in the lobby, welcoming people to the concert, which the Baltimore Symphony says it might have in the future. These people might not have much trouble identifying people new to the concert hall, and could welcome them with special warmth.

There's a lot to be done. It's not very complicated. How many classical music organizations are doing any of it?

In my Joseph Volpe post, I said the Metropolitan Opera might not really do marketing, at least as serious marketers understand the term. Here's an example to show what I mean.

In 1996, I talked to the marketing director of the Met (whose current title, as one of their top executives, is Assistant Manager for Finance, Planning, and Marketing). At the time, he was quite happy with ticket sales, which he said averaged 92% of capacity. There was only one thing he'd change, he said. Each year, the artistic staff decided to produce four or five operas that didn't sell tickets -- things like Wozzeck and Lulu. That, of course, was their business, and the marketing director didn't mind, because his overall sales were good. He only wished, he said, that Wozzeck would be staged during the time of year when many European tourists typically come to New York. Europeans, he said, would buy tickets to Wozzeck; American tourists wouldn't.

Compare the Chicago Lyric Opera. In the '90s, they typically sold more than 100% of their seats -- which can happen if subscribers turn in tickets they can't use, and the company resells them. Now, I won't necessarily fault the Met for not doing that; it might be easier for the Chicago Lyric to sell tickets, because, compared to the Met, they do a shorter season in a smaller city, making them perhaps more visible.

But the Lyric Opera worked for every ticket that they sold. They didn't want to have a single empty seat. Typically, they did a new or contemporary piece every season, and if they had unsold tickets for it, they also had a plan. They kept a database of people who'd bought single tickets to 20th century or contemporary works. If empty seats were available for an opera by Shostakovich or Philip Glass, they'd call the people on this list, and try to get them to attend.

Compare the Met, which (if I'm to believe what I was told in 1996), never bothered to market tickets for unpopular operas, because the overall sales seemed good enough. And now imagine a time -- which we're in right now -- when ticket sales grow soft. Which company (if the Met persisted in its lazy ways) would be more prepared to fight the trend?

Already one friend has e-mailed me, expressing horror at the upcoming BBC broadcast of John Cage's famous (or is it notorious?) silent piece, 4'33".

I'm thrilled, then, to see the radiant story linked in ArtsJournal today from the Guardian, the British newspaper, putting Cage in a fuller context. Please read it. Cage was a great man and a great artist. I understand why a lot of people don't see that -- he was very far from the way most of us live and think -- but I've found that many people who think he's nonsense don't know much about him. Here you can read what he was about before you form any opinion.

It's amazing, by the way, and a delight, that any daily newspaper would take this much care with an offbeat arts story.

Has anyone read the Financial Times interview with Joseph Volpe, the man who runs the Metropolitan Opera? Extraordinary document. You could, if you wanted, make a case after reading it that Volpe should be fired right now. The Met, it's widely known, is having trouble -- not selling enough tickets, accumulating a deficit. And Volpe, if this interview is accurate, has no plan to deal with that. Nor does the interviewer ask him what his plan might be, in this almost-a-crisis situation. I kept thinking of Casey Stengel's famous line, when he managed the hapless New York Mets -- "Can't anybody here play this game?"

Here are the particulars. Volpe is more than happy to describe the Met’s problems. After 9-11, people stopped coming to New York, and ticket sales fell. As the economy got bad, donors stopped giving money. In other bad news, Chevron-Texaco announced plans to stop broadcasting Met performances. And the fabled Lincoln Center reconstruction seems, Volpe thinks, to be stalled.

So what’s he going to do about all that? Nothing, apparently. "He says the financial situation has stabilized, to the point that the Met is expecting to break even this year," says the story. "But there have been two years of losses, leaving it with a $9 million deficit." Have the donors come back? Volpe doesn’t say they have. Nor the audience -- "the one thing I don't see any improvement in is tourists coming to the city. They tell me that they are, but they are not coming to the Met." (Odd phrasing, since, again, Volpe doesn’t specifically say there’s been any improvement anywhere else.)

What does he offer instead of plans? Jokes. He makes fun of Luciano Pavarotti’s name. He slams Chevron-Texaco. "[O]ne of the reasons they gave me for not continuing was that they were not a global company. My response was -- 'Now I know why.' Heh, heh, heh. I said, 'Your chances of becoming global aren't great.'" He slams some of his biggest donors. "There are some big donors feeling the pinch," he’s quoted as saying, "but if you've got $4 billion and you lose $1 billion, I can't be very sympathetic."

He slams The New York Times for stressing popular culture; he slams Frank Gehry for wanting to build a dome over Lincoln Center. Everybody, it seems, is full of spit except him, and all he’s going to do, if I read between the lines, is just run the Met the way he’s always run it -- as if he believed (even though he doesn’t seem to have any new marketing plan, or any new artistic vision) that the audience and donors will somehow return. "I don't think opera is under threat at all," he says, "unlike symphonic music which is having an extremely difficult time all over the world."

Tell that to other opera companies; tell it to the San Francisco Opera, or the Chicago Lyric, both of which are having problems (and the Lyric used to sell far more tickets, as a percentage of seats available, than the Met ever did). Volpe sounds just blind. If Coke lost 10% of its market share, and its CEO gave an interview in which all he did was make fun of Pepsi, shareholders would be screaming for his blood. If the New York Philharmonic announced a substantial deficit, coupled with declining ticket sales, and Zarin Mehta, its executive director, gave an interview like Volpe’s, the music world would be abuzz.

And yet Volpe gets away with it. Maybe, of course, he’s like Dwight Eisenhower, who, when he was president, made sure he looked dumb in public, to keep the press off his back. But I doubt it. I think Volpe profits here from his reputation for being outrageous. People eat up the quotes -- "Can you believe he said that?" – and don’t notice that the interview offers no solutions. I think, further, that the Met profits from its grandiose reputation, which I’d guess is also turning Volpe’s own head. The Met -- famously aloof from other Lincoln Center constituents, and from the American opera world -- pretends that classical music’s famous problems don’t affect it, even when they clearly do.

Does the Met have a marketing plan? I don’t see one. They do have a billboard in Times Square, aimed at tourists -- which, if the tourists aren’t coming to New York in the first place, won’t do them much good. A marketing consultant I know says, “The Met does sales; it doesn’t do marketing.” It knows, in other words, how to sell tickets the way it always has, to the people who’ve always bought them; it doesn’t know how to reach out to anyone new.

Does the Met have artistic vision? Not a chance. They put on opera. They hope people come. Why should people come? Because the Met puts on opera, presumably on a scale grand enough to be dazzling. It seems, though, that this isn’t working the way it used to. So what can the Met offer in its place? How can it generate some electricity? How (as I asked some time ago in this blog) can it make us feel that something exciting is going on, and that the excitement might strike any night we show up there?

(In which, as promised, I start from the top, measuring the subject of my blog…)

Lots of us say that classical music is in crisis. But what exactly do we mean?

Well, we might start with what I might call the commercial problem, or, more simply, the objective, measurable side of what's either a crisis now, or soon might be one: Many people worry that classical music will simply disappear. There won't be any audience to sustain it. The current audience, average age at least 50, will grow old, fade away, and never be replaced. Orchestras will wither, opera companies will die, music schools will fold; that'll be the end of us.

Will this happen? That's a complex question, which can't easily be answered now (I'll return to it). But there are other measurable signs of trouble for classical music. Not long ago I reported that Columbia House isn't selling classical CDs any more; that's typical of many things we've seen in the past few years. The main areas of decline might be:

• less media coverage for classical music
• the decline (surely too weak a word) of classical recording
• the shrinking of classical radio

To those we could add related phenomena: the disappearance of stores that sell classical sheet music (as the term goes in the business; of course I mean piano music, orchestral scores, opera scores, and so on). And the disappearance of classical music from record stores (not many years ago we had five serious classical record departments in New York record stores; now we have two, both in Tower branches, and the chain is bankrupt).

To these objective signs of trouble we could add some common sense: Classical music obviously plays a far smaller role in our culture than it used to. Go back to the '60s -- CBS TV commissioned music from Stravinsky, Life magazine published a new Copland piano piece. Nothing like that happens now. Popular culture has swamped classical music, and, most significantly, has developed art music of its own. It figures, then, that classical music is losing influence and market share -- and might lose them drastically in the future, when the generation now growing up takes over. Already, the newspaper editors classical music critics have to deal with, smart professionals in their 30s and their 40s, don't have classical music in their backgrounds. What will their successors be like, 30 years from now?

But common sense isn't always right, and developments don't always (or even often) unfold in straight lines. Going against everything I've just said is something else -- there's no shortage, at least in America, of young people studying classical music. Youth orchestras flourish; students still flock to conservatories to study the bassoon. As a result of this, orchestras (including the very biggest ones) are now younger than their audience! What this means is hard to say, but it certainly means something. One thing it very likely means is that musicians themselves will be demanding changes in the field.

I'll write more on all these points in future weeks. But next: Why the crisis goes beyond numbers; why there's rot even inside the classical music sanctuary.

Not long ago I was having dinner with some reasonably substantial people in the orchestra world. And as often happens when people inside the business get to know me, the conversation turned to critics. Why, I’m regularly asked, do critics…and here we can fill in the blank with whatever odd behavior some critic recently exhibited. (Though the question people really want to ask is a lot simpler, and eventually they get around to it: Why don’t critics know how the music business works?)

This time, though, my dinner partners wanted to ask something much more dangerous. Why, they asked, do critics so often and so strongly praise a musician widely said to be a pedophile? Though “widely said,” in this context, isn’t putting the case strongly enough. This musician is an international celebrity, one of the most famous names in the business. He’s wildly popular in New York and elsewhere, and has worked for years with one of the most powerful institutions in classical music.

And yet people in the business don’t just whisper rumors that he’s a pedophile. They take for granted that he is, and that his pedophilia takes especially disgusting forms. This man forces himself on boys, people confidently state. He’s been arrested for it, they add, and on more than one occasion has been bought out of trouble, allegedly with enormous sums of money. Since everybody knows this, my dinner companions asked, why do critics (especially in his home city) so strongly praise the man? Shouldn’t they deplore him and expose him?

This question was asked very seriously, with a lot of moral fervor. I had to explain that neither I nor my critic colleagues -- or, for that matter, my dinner companions -- have any evidence for all these charges. We don’t know the dates or places of the supposed events, or the names of anyone involved. In all my years in the business, despite all the conversations I've had on this subject, I’ve never spoken to anyone with firsthand knowledge of these things, or even to anyone who claimed to know someone with firsthand knowledge.

That puts a journalist in a tough position. You can’t just write a story saying, “X is a pedophile -- everybody says so.” You have to name your sources, and show where they got their information. You need hard facts -- documentary evidence (arrest records, perhaps), or else eyewitness reports from people who’ll let you print, with their names attached, that they saw something -- saw a child molested, saw the musician in police custody, know the parents of a molested child, once worked for a corporate CEO who ended one of these affairs with money, and who once came into the office and indiscreetly said, “I just paid $5 million to get charges dropped against X. Don’t tell anyone!”

This wouldn’t be easy; to find these sources (if they could be found at all) might take months of work, and even then you might never persuade them to speak on the record. It’s no wonder no music journalist has written this story.

And yet I think it could be written, by someone who isn't a music journalist, but instead is an experienced investigative reporter. We're not talking here about military secrets; if these things really happened, eventually somebody will talk. I don't claim to have much investigative experience, but I might start with a major orchestra that not too long ago considered this musician for an important job. (With what result I won’t say.) Some board members were said to oppose the appointment on moral grounds. I could call each member of the board, in search of someone so outraged that he or she might talk. (And then, of course, there are staff and board members, past and present, from everywhere this musician has already worked; employees, past and present, of his management; and, if we learned the place where any of the alleged events had happened, the police department wherever that might be).

But even without a full investigative study, here's a question worth asking. Never, in all my years in this business, have I talked about all this with anyone who thinks the stories aren’t true. Why, then, do we treat this musician with such respect? If we praise his performances, why don’t we do it with reserve? How can we support him for major appointments, as many of us have done? Including me, I have to say; I need to rethink my own behavior, just as much as anybody else.

One thing at stake here is classical music’s credibility; our need, which I think is very urgent, to show we live in the same world as everybody else. So enough with the artistic piety, the pretense of loftiness, the wish to be judged by higher standards than those of everyday life. Which is more important -- the glory of classical music, or the safety of our children?

This weekend a press release came in the mail, announcing what it called the "first commercial recording" of Carlisle Floyd's opera Of Mice and Men, recorded by the Houston Grand Opera on the Albany label.

But this isn't a commercial recording, or at least it's not what most people commonly mean by commercial. Nobody invested huge sums of money in it, hoping to make a profit. Instead, this recording -- like many classical records today -- was subsidized. The fine print at the end of the press release says:

This recording is made possible by major grants from The Ford Foundation, The Wortham Foundation, Inc., and Louisa Stude Sarofim in support of the Houston Grand Opera's electronic media initiatives.

The opera company, in other words, raised money to pay for the recording, then took it to Albany Records, which now can release it without much risk. Albany might be paying to manufacture the CDs, but the overwhelming expense in a project like this is recording the music -- and that, I'm sure, was paid for by the two foundations and Ms. Sarofim.

Not that there's anything wrong with any of this. None of it reflects badly on the Houston Grand Opera, the record company, or the recording. Subsidies, in fact, are a fact of life in classical recording these days, and have been for quite a while. Even CDs by very famous artists might be subsized; some Metropolitan Opera recordings on major labels (including Wagner's Ring) were paid for at least in part with donated funds.

So I'm just struck by the language of the press release. "Commercial recording" --not at all. The use of that language only serves, ironically, to underline how noncommercial classical recording has become.

Another reader, Jason Stewart, contributes some provocative thoughts (along with a compliment to me, for which I'm grateful):

Saving

The key to saving classical music is to let go of all the dead weight in that genre. There are so many hour-long classical "masterpieces" out there that don't have any more to say than a three minute pop song. People are bombarded by these musical barbiturates on the classical station, and the truly great works are being passed over because of the "guilt by association" factor. If we make it so that the virgin listener is more likely to be exposed to the exceptional, more people will recognize this music as exceptional and value it accordingly.

 

Of course, this is easier said than done. It requires discretion to choose what to keep and what to get rid of. I think the key to doing this properly is to replace the culture of pseudo-intellectual intimidation with the kind of thoughtfulness you show in your columns. I can't keep track of how many times I've seen well formed criticisms of a "masterpiece" (music, painting, poetry, etc.) countered with knee-jerk accusations of philistinism by people who should really know better! Many people in the arts are so confident in their own taste that they don't feel obligated to question it or defend it. They just shove what they deem valuable down other peoples' throats. Under the circumstances, who could blame the public for losing its appetite?

 

Defending

 

Many people factionalize themselves by the music they listen to. Back in school, some kids would fashion themselves after their favorite musicians, and they could spot fellow fans by their clothes and hairstyle, and entire groups of friends were held together by their love of a certain popular genre. This is stupid. The world is so filled with excellence! To focus all of your attention and love on one art and a few performers will stunt your development as a human being, and you will miss out on a lot of pleasure in the process.

 

Great pop musicians may not have that much professional training (if any at all), but they make up for it with persistence, and belief in their own innate talent. Pop is also a young person's game, so they've usually got things rattling around in their heads that more experienced musicians have long since forgotten. It is also music of the times, so pop musicians have some common ground with their audience right out of the starting gate. Pop has something to say, and great pop says it well.

 

Classical music also has something to say. Even though the great classical composers are decades and centuries behind us, we still perform their works and hail them as geniuses. I'll admit that part of this is just thoughtless tradition, but the greater part of it is truly earned. Why do we still perform the religious works of a devout Lutheran like Bach in a world of waning faith? Why do so many Jewish conductors and musicians aspire to perform the operas of the rabid anti-Semite Richard Wagner? These men, and men like them, had their own trials, their own circumstances, and their own screwy ideas just like the rest of us, but what sets them apart is that in their art, they were able to boil it all down to something meaningful and communicate it with the kind of clarity and detail that just can't be done in a short pop song.

 

Neglect the old masters of any art at your own risk.

I'd add that classical programming often gets too scholarly. Pieces are played for historical or analytical reasons, without anyone asking whether the resulting concert makes sense as an evening out hearing music. The worst case I've ever heard was at a festival of early American orchestral music. One concert -- featuring pieces by Chadwick, McDowell, and Busoni (not American, but he wrote a piece with alleged Native American themes in it) -- sounded to me as if it should have been a collection of musical examples, illustrating a lecture. Except that then the examples would just have been a few minutes long, which is all anyone would have needed (especially for the endless Busoni piece) to get the point. The Chadwick and McDowell pieces might have been OK on a concert with other, more compelling music. But this program, taken as whole, was gigantically boring, no matter what historical interest the music might have had -- and the festival, unfortunately, was put on, not for a specialized schoarly crowd, but by a mainstream orchestra for its regular audience.

From reader Lang Thompson I've just heard some striking news -- that Columbia House (one of the two big record clubs) has stopped selling classical music. Here's what Lang wrote me:

A little over a month ago I went to place an order for some items that included classical and those weren't there. In fact the whole classical section was no longer listed. I emailed Columbia House and after a few days they replied that since they can't provide the "level of customer service" that they would like then they've discontinued all the classical and suggested I contact another company (whose name I would have to look up). Obviously this "customer service" issue just means money because really there isn't much customer service in a business like that, at least not the genre-specific type. They aren't, after all, discussing with customers the merits of various Beethoven recordings, if only because they usually offered just one.

And indeed this is true. Go to the Columbia House home page, and click the "join the Music Club" link (I can't link there directly to save you that step). You'll see a long list of musical genres to choose from, and classical isn't one of them.

Lang later told me that the club -- never announcing openly that it had cut out classical -- does address the problem on its FAQ page. This is something else I can't link to from here. To find it, you have to click "join the Music Club," then scroll to the bottom of a very long page, and click "Club Help" in the very fine print way at the bottom. Once you've done that, you can read what follows. When you're a member of the club, you pick a favorite genre, which you then have to stick with. Apparently classical music members got a surprise:

8. I am a member of Columbia Music Club and receive classical music. I cannot log on to my account. What happened?

 

Your membership with the Columbia House Music Club has been transferred to the Musical Heritage Society. You will not receive any future club mailings or automatic shipments from Columbia House.

Rotten corporate behavior. Columbia House stopped selling classical music, and (as Lang's experience confirms) never even told its members. They even reassigned club membership, without asking permission (something members probably agreed to in advance, without knowing it, by signing off on some fine print when they joined).

But of course the bigger issue is that Columbia House gave up on classical music. Add this to the red flags going up in so many places -- classical music, in some ways, is fading. For what it's worth, you can still buy classical music from the BMG Music Service, the other major record club and Columbia House's chief competitor. Of course Columbia House didn't send any members there!

(Musical Heritage, which only sells classical music, isn't a bad operation, and maybe is the best choice for people who only want classical. But back to rotten corporate behavior -- suppose you want a full-service record club, so you can buy both classical and pop? Columbia House shunted you down the all-classical track, without offering a choice, or even a warning. Musical Heritage, by the way, offers its own FAQ for Columbia House members, which doesn't say much more than the Columbia House one does.)

Happy new year, everyone. Next week I'll start my systematic look at classical music's problems, with the first post coming a week from today, Monday, January 12. This week I'll gather up some odds and ends, things I've been thinking about for a while, but haven't posted.

I'll start with a Renée Fleming footnote. Just before Christmas I said she should have given the profits from her holiday promotion to charity (see my last post). But here's some clarification. Of course she doesn't have to do it. That's her choice. But wouldn't it have been a classy move -- and (to be both cynical and realistic) wonderful publicity? Sometimes I think people in classical music don't understand how to promote themselves.

Pop music, of course, understands charity (and its PR value) far better than classical music does. But here's the interesting part. Many people in the business don't see why classical music ought to be involved in charity work -- or at least not on any large scale -- because classical music itself is a charity!

And of course that's factually true. Classical music organizations need to raise money in order to exist. But even so, many of them (the big ones, obviously) look opulent, especially to that elusive new audience we're all trying to attract. Opulence, in fact, is often one of classical music's selling points. The Metropolitan Opera attracts people in part by offering a lavish evening out, in what are supposed to be gorgeous surroundings. Renée Fleming and Placido Domingo, with their Rolex ads, don't exactly present herself as members of the working middle class.

So with this image in full effect-- classical music as upscale and lavish -- our field needs to do some charity work. One survey I've heard about reported that people in their 20s actually complained that classical music didn't do enough charity. Their expectations, naturally, had been formed by pop music, where charity (for whatever purpose) is almost a way of life.

One last point. Many years ago, I got a call from a New York city agency, which was looking for advice. This agency had to decide who qualified to live in lofts reserved for artists. A rock star wanted to buy one. Did I think he qualified?

My answer was that he ought to qualify. And if he didn't, how could they justify making these lofts available to top-rank opera singers, who make plenty of money, even if they're not as rich as rock stars?