July 2004 Archives

A little clarification. One way to define the artistic limits of 19th century Italian opera is by the way works were cast. New operas were commissioned on a commercial basis. An impresario would rent a city's opera house, recruit singers, and find composers to write operas for the singers to sing. The singers fell into established types -- a prima donna, a primo tenore, a baritone, maybe a buffo or serious bass, and a few comprimarios, singers of small roles, who clearly weren't very good.

These comprimarios, and their apparent lack of any real ability, set limits on what opera could be. An opera like a Dickens novel, full of distinct and memorable characters, was impossible. The comprimarios just couldn't handle it (nor would the audience, looking for romantic thrills from the leading roles, be interested, but that's another story). That's why Blind Alice, a memorable figure in Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, turns into Alisa in Lucia di Lammermoor, a typical mezzo-soprano confidante with hardly anything to do, and without a trace of individuality. (Fun fact: Alisa's most notable moment in the opera comes in the stretta of the second act finale, when she has a series of solo screams on high A -- in a passage that's usually cut.)

Even the leading roles tended to be types -- the doomed romantic heroine, the equally doomed romantic tenor adventurer, the regal or priestly bass, the wronged baritone husband. A composer lucky enough to find a striking actor or actress in his cast could write something striking, a role with depth, like Norma or Lucrezia Borgia or Rigoletto. Sometimes operas even had a wide array of roles, as Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia does, but, though the minor characters are numerous, it's hard (as it is in Rigoletto) to tell them apart. Sometimes operas attempted to portray something other than romantic adventure or aristocratic life. Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix has a promising array of rural characters, as does Verdi's Luisa Miller.

But again these operas were exceptions, and what you'll almost never see is a bourgeois figure, a member of the middle class, even though this was the most notable and fastest growing part of society during this period. Germont, in La Traviata, is a notable exception. Opera, in those days, just didn't deal with real life. It was extravagant entertainment, full of what, from a middle class point of view, were Others -- aristocrats, outlaws, and peasants (usually idealized). In the last part of his career, Verdi started to create figures outside this box, like Sam and Tom, the sardonic conspirators in Ballo in Maschera, or Fra Melitone in Forza. Melitone and Falstaff might be in some ways Verdi's most notable characters, or at least the ones that jump outside the frame of what opera characters usually were. Both come from the people; both are, in their way, almost Dickensian.

A whole opera of Dickens characters, though -- that was impossible, even though Dickens novels were routinely adapted for the non-musical stage. Even more impossible would be the range of bourgeois types so slashingly portrayed in Madame Bovary. The title character has her operatic moments, but the clueless husband, the shallow lover, and above all the leading figures in the village all are both too individual and too improper for opera of that time. And for all his depth in adapting Shakespeare, Verdi wouldn't have been able to handle lots of things in Shakespeare's plays -- the bawdiness, for instance, and the full range of everyday characters. Characters like Bardolph, Pistol, and Dr. Caius (all from Falstaff) are barely sketched in, mere shadows of what they are in Shakespeare.

20th century opera composers learned to do what the 19th century couldn't. Composers like Britten (think of the range of village types in Albert Herring) or Janacek (unforgettable cameos in The Makrapoulos Affair) or Berg (the entire casts of Wozzeck and Lulu) learned to do what novelists and playwrights had been doing long before. But 19th century opera, for all its power within its limitations, remained a restricted artistic genre, in some ways more like popular entertainment than serious art. (Or, maybe better, a striking example of the ways art and entertainment can blend, with each side making compromises.)

Here's a scary thought I've been nursing for a few months. Has classical music always been well-bred? More well-bred than other arts, I mean. I'm afraid this might be true. I developed this fear after last season's New York Philharmonic performance of Haydn's Creation, which I blogged about, asking what Haydn's treatment of his biblical text could mean to us today.

And then it struck me. Why, when we deal with old classical music, are we so often dealing with such lofty subjects? Where, in the 18th century, was the musical equivalent of Jonathan Swift? Why didn't anyone write slashing satire in music, an oratorio, let's say, on a subject like Swift's "A Modest Proposal"?

In the 19th century, why were operas always melodramas about kings, queens, and other aristocrats? Where was the operatic Dickens, or the operatic Flaubert? It's ironic to see Lucia di Lammermoor figure in Madame Bovary as a romantic fantasy (actually, if you'll allow me a moment of musical dorkdom, I think from the way the opera is described in the book it's actually Lucie de Lammermoor, the fascinating French adaptation). Ironic, because Madame Bovary is a perfect example of things that literature could do in the 19th century, but music apparently couldn't -- create a love story that isn't a romantic fantasy, but instead eviscerates, with searing force, what love was like in French provincial bourgeois life.

It's funny, in a way, to see so many musical scholars reading profundities into 19th century romantic opera, when no one in the 19th century would have done such a thing (opera was considered popular culture), and when what those pieces really were, in our own terms, were movies -- big, splashy Hollywood movies, really good ones, and often with a lot of depth, but still full of limitations, and hardly comparable to the literary masterpieces of the time. (I say this, by the way, as a huge opera fan, so please spare me e-mail about how I just don't understand. I adore Verdi, Donizetti, and above all Bellini, and have buried myself in that music repeatedly, most recently last night, when my wife and I were tracing the tenor Gino Penno's history, and listening to samples of his recordings on the Tower Records site, and then today, when I bought on CD the old Cetra recording of Verdi's Ernani, which I've had for years on LP, and just about creamed, not just to Penno, but to Giuseppe Taddei, for me the baritone of baritones.)

Music caught up with other arts with Wagner, who in his time and right afterward became the touchstone for all advanced art, and of course in the 20th century -- think of Schoenberg and his connection to pioneering abstract painters like Kandinsky (though maybe Schoenberg was closest to other advanced artists in the years when he stopped composing) -- just in time (more irony!) for the rise of new kinds of music in popular culture (jazz, blues, rock, world music in all its variety), which weren't all that compatible with classical styles, and helped to make them marginal in our present age.

But why was music so well-bred in centuries past? My guess would be that it needed such lavish resources for performances -- full orchestras, stage sets for operas, choruses, expensive vocal soloists, virtuoso instrumentalists. These don't come cheap, and you don't find the money to pay them by rocking many boats. Writing a book and getting it published was and is much simpler (and cheaper) than writing an opera and getting it onstage. Composers, therefore, or so I'm guessing, just instinctively became conservative, in order to please their patrons, in the 18th century, and their audience, in the 19th.

Of course there are exceptions, like Beethoven and Berlioz, who came across as flaming radicals, but it's jolting to realize how safe Beethoven and Berlioz really were, at least in their overt subject matter, compared to Dickens and Flaubert. Beethoven, in Fidelio, exposed the plight of prisoners kept in fetters by a tyrant -- though in the end, by a magical deus ex machina, they're all set free without much trouble. Compare that to Dickens, relentlessly exposing the plight of the poor, and showing how they're made even more miserable by society's neglect.

We pay the price for this today. Classical music, despite some really radical moves in the last century, still seems middlebrow and safe. (And -- one small example -- has no place for David Del Tredici's mildly erotic penis songs, based on poetry that had no trouble being published on its own.)

I didn't hear Elvis Costello's orchestral piece at the Lincoln Center Festival, but I don't think I had to. I did hear the three-track sampler Deutsche Grammophon sent out, and it confirms everything I read in the reviews of the complete work -- the music is notably unoriginal. We can all be glad, I guess, that Costello seems to be a competent orchestral composer, but on second thought, maybe I'm not happy about that. If he hadn't been able to write this score, maybe he wouldn't have written it, and then we (and he, too, if he's honest with himself) wouldn't be faced with this failure -- the failure of a wildly original musician, one of the great creators of our time, to meet his own standards when he turns to classical music.

The music, simply put, sounds like other music, like a whole raft of classical scores, and, even more than that, like an abstraction from one style of classical music, like a highly competent rendering of what mildly spicy 20th century music, with a tinge of dance -- think Gershwin, Stravinsky, maybe Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances -- sounds like. It's as if Costello, setting out to write a classical piece, said to himself, consciously or not, "I know what classical music sounds like," and wrote precisely that. What a contrast to what he's always done in pop, where he's forged new paths, referring sometimes back to established pop styles with affectionate irony, not with what sounds, in this new piece, like the obedient conformity of somebody who moves to the suburbs, and says, "Look at how they act out here. I'd better act the same way." There was one passage on the DG sampler, for very high violins, that sounded new, but nothing else grabbed me.

I felt the same thing about Billy Joel's classical CD some years back, even though I liked it more than most classical critics did (and more than I like the Costello piece). I thought it was full of notable affection for classical composers, especially Chopin, and also structured with some originality. But, even more than Costello's piece, it was music by someone who (consciously or not, once again) had decided in advance what classical music was, and stayed within those boundaries. Nothing in it had one-fourth the force of Joel's pop songs.

So why do these terrific musicians -- really lively spirits, in their own area -- put on handcuffs when they write classical music? There might be two reasons. First, classical music is too well-bred. Or, at least, the classical music world is. People come to it from outside with genuine respect, and do what the Romans do. Second, classical music is largely defined by older repertoire, so when people from outside come to it, that's what attracts them, and that's what they move towards.

I interviewed Billy Joel when I wrote about his classical album for The Wall Street Journal, and one thing I noticed was his striking lack of interest in new classical music, or even 20th century pioneers like Schoenberg. He thought maybe he'd listen to Schoenberg one day. Now, it's not that he (or anybody else) should write like Schoenberg, but you'd think -- as someone with an inquiring musical mind, coming into a new field -- that he'd want to learn everything. You'd think, as a composer starting to write classical music, that he -- and Costello, too -- would want to know what classical composers are writing now. But in a way I can't blame them. The classical music world doesn't foster that kind of curiosity, even though, when I look at current orchestral programming, I have to say that things are getting better. But the dominant classical mood involves older music, and a lack of curiosity, so it's not surprising that newcomers would pick up on that -- even if it makes them half the artists they used to be.

Very interesting -- and, I thought, very melancholy -- piece by Stephen Hartke on the Pulitzer prizes, linked here yesterday.

Or maybe it's not the piece itself that's melancholy, but me, as a result of reading it. Hartke's subject, of course, was the recent change in the Pulitzer music guidelines. No longer, said the Pulitzer board, will only classical pieces be eligible. According to the new rules, jazz, musicals, and even movie scores -- maybe even pop albums -- can be nominated.

And that, says Hartke, is a bad idea. Nor is he alone in saying so. Other classical composers, most notably John Harbison, were outraged by the change, and said so with fabulous hyperbole. Just listen to Harbison:

If you were to impose a comparable standard on fiction [comparable, that is, to the standard the Pulitzer board now mandates for music] you would be soliciting entries from the authors of airport novels.

If he'd taken half the risk he takes here -- been willing to leap this far out on a limb to make an unmistakable statement -- in his Great Gatsby opera, it would have been 10 times a better piece. Still, he's being ridiculous. Does he really think that great jazz -- Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington -- is some musical form of beach reading? Does he think Stephen Sondheim writes Top 40 pop songs? Can't he tell the difference between Celine Dion and Max Roach?

Hartke, as we'll see in a moment, has more or less the same problem. Because what's really going on here -- if you ask me -- is a last-ditch defense of the obsolete and snobbish idea that only classical music can be art. Or, maybe, something even worse. Since just about everybody knows by now that this old idea is totally and completely wrong, I wonder if Hartke, Harbison, and others aren't (whether they know it or not) simply trying to protect their turf, trying to preserve some distinction, some chance at prestige and momentary fame, that might elude them if the Pulitzer prize were given simply for artistic merit. Which, I'll quickly say, isn't to say that they write bad music. Not at all. (Even Gatsby is fine, sometimes terrific music; it's just -- in the best tradition of Haydn's works for the stage -- a terrible opera). But have classical composers created the best and most important American music of the past 50 years? That's the main question we ought to ask.

And the answer, pretty clearly, is no. Or, to be more careful, that classical composers have created some of the most memorable music, but very far from all of it. Because if we made a list of the most important -- and most lasting -- American musical creators of the last half-century, who'd be on it? Who made the most unforgettable musical art? Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane. Bob Dylan. Duke Ellington (even if he might have done even more memorable work earlier). Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Sondheim, for sure. Public Enemy. Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys. Or add your own names. These are people, by and large, whose artistic preeminence not many people dispute. Why, then, shouldn't they be eligible for the major musical artistic prize?

(And before anybody writes me e-mail disputing any of my names, let me establish one small ground rule: If you tell me one of my names isn't artistically valid, and you don't give me good reasons, based on some reasonable knowledge of that person's work, I won't even answer you. You don't think Springsteen is a serious musical artist? Fine, but tell me why. Tell me what's wrong with specific songs and albums. Too often I've gotten complaints from people who don't like it when I say pop music can be art, and who also, when even mildly questioned on the subject, turn out not to know pop music at all. So they don't really have a clue what they're talking about.)

And if major pop, jazz, and Broadway figures are some of our top musical artists, less major ones might qualify for the Pulitzer, too, since in the past the prize has gone to classical composers who aren't exactly household names.

This, then, is why I get sad reading Hartke. Let me quote him:

On the face of it, the changes instituted are small. The Prize will no longer be for a musical work of "significant dimension," as the Board seems to feel that such language has tended to prevent composers of shorter pieces from submitting their work. The press release also states that the changes are intended to broaden the types of works available for review to include jazz, musical theater, movie scores "and other forms of musical excellence." Never mind that such works have actually been eligible since the last overhaul of the Music Prize's rules, the real problem that I have is how this restated emphasis on broadening the scope of musical works under consideration bespeaks the essential discomfort that the Pulitzer Prize Board has with art music.

Having served on the Music Nominating Panel last year, I had the opportunity to observe the workings of the Pulitzer Prize first hand. It is important to remember that the individual Nominating Panels for each category, from Investigative Reporting to Non-fiction Books to Music, do not pick the final winner, rather they submit three names, generally unranked, and the larger Pulitzer Prize Board reviews the work of all the nominated finalists to select the winners. The Pulitzer Prize Board itself currently comprises 17 members, ten of whom are newspaper editors or administrators, the remaining seven being academics (five administrators and two scholars). Not one of these people is a musician of any description—nor, for that matter, a published poet, playwright or novelist. In the two intensive days I served on the Music Panel, I was able to sit in on an informal meeting with one of the members of the Board to discuss the future of the Music Prize. It was clear that the Board feels uncomfortable in its role judging works of art music, and is genuinely puzzled as to why more 'popular' forms of music are not included in the mix. The point was made by one of the musicians that the Poetry Prize often goes to work which is as abstruse and rarified in its treatment of language as the Music Prize winner can be, but that no one has suggested that the Poetry Prize be eliminated or broadened to embrace, for example, songwriting.

Now, this is all sober, responsible, and well informed. And when he goes on to say that the prize has too often gone to East Coast insiders, and that widening the nominating jury to include performers and presenters (instead of just critics and composers), I can't disagree. His idea of creating separate prizes for jazz, film scores, musicals, and classical music sounds reasonable as well.

But I don't like it. I don't like giving classical composers special, protected status. I shudder -- sometimes I even get angry -- when I see terms like "art music" applied to them, apparently to the exclusion of everyone else. And my feelings here come precisely from my passionate love of art. I get angry in the same way when people talk about "high art." I think that's essentially a social category -- a sort of class distinction that has no more to do with real quality than a similar social judgment would (as if, let's say, someone would say that rich people are more serious, more ethical, and smarter than poor people). And I say this when Proust is my favorite writer (as people who've read my NewMusicBox column know), and Webern one of my all-time favorite composers, both true "high art" choices. But the same instinct that makes me respond to Proust and Webern makes me recognize Bob Dylan as a great musical artist, and I just refuse to draw quality distinctions based on social categories. (Here, by the way, is a link to NewMusicBox columns I've written on Proust and Dylan, if anybody wants more on how I feel about these two.)

And it's especially bad to draw these distinctions, I think, because new classical music has had such a ghastly track record. Again, I'm not saying that none of it is good. How could I? I write it myself. Not to mention how excited I've been by so much of it -- Steve Reich and Philip Glass (lots of pieces by both), Berio (hearing his Coro performed by the Cleveland Orchestra years ago was one of the great musical experiences of my life), Boulez, Diamanda Galas, Michael Gordon (his new album Light Is Falling delights me no end), George Crumb (when I first heard Ancient Voices of Children back in the '60s, I ran out and bought the record), and so many others, most recently Joan Tower's Tambor, which wowed me no end when I wrote Concert Companion commentary for a performance of it with the Pittsburgh Symphony.

But the ghastly track record is obvious. How many new classical pieces have made any impact on American culture? How many even get noticed? I can think of one major classical premiere, during my professional life in music, that became a serious cultural event for people outside classical music -- the American premiere of Glass's Einstein on the Beach, in New York in 1976. Otherwise most of this music, no matter how good it is, makes almost no impression even on the classical music world. Try naming the top five orchestral premieres of the last five years -- you probably can't, because you haven't heard most of the candidates, and probably don't even know what plausible candidates might be. (I know I couldn't do it, and I'm supposed to be something of a specialist in new music.) New classical pieces just don't get around, not even inside the classical world, and certainly not outside it.

So, paradoxically, I think new classical music has a better chance if it competes for the Pulitzer with music that more people notice. Or at least with other kinds of music. If the Pulitzer Prize, over the years, had recognized (within the limits of the usual award-show mistakes) the people we now consider the leading creative musical figures of the past 50 years, wouldn't the classical composers who get the award stand out more, and maybe therefore get more recognition?

Incidentally, Hartke is exactly right when he says the Pulitzer guidelines already changed years ago. They were publicly changed for the 1998 awards, and privately changed the year before that, which led to Wynton Marsalis winning the 1997 music prize, even though nobody knew that jazz could be considered. If this sounds a little irregular, it certainly was, and the irregularity was compounded because the winning Marsalis work -- his oratorio Blood on the Fields -- was premiered in 1994, and thus shouldn't have been eligible in 1997. I wrote about all this for the Wall Street Journal, and recapitulated much of it in my NewMusicBox column on the current Pulitzer changes, where I wonder if the mess back then was so embarrassing that the Pulitzer prize people forgot, when they announced the change this year, that they'd made much the same change before.

One last thought. Hartke says it would be hard to judge competing Pulitzer nominees in varying genres: "[A] case could easily arise where the three final nominations included a symphony, a musical, and a jazz set—talk about mixing apples and oranges!"

But I disagree. In the '80s, I served on panels for the NEA's Opera-Musical Theater program and for the National Institute of Music Theater, on which I and the other panelists had to give grants to new operas, new musicals, and new works of (for lack of a better term) avant-garde music theater. Thus we could have Dominick Argento, Stephen Sondheim, and Robert Ashley all competing against each other, along with pieces by young composers in comparable styles. It's true that we didn't have to pick just one winner, but I never found it hard to balance all these apples, oranges, and plums. Each piece made its own individual impression, and, as I look back on all my experience in this field, I don't have any trouble saying that Ashley's Public Lives/Private Parts (just for instance) has meant more to me -- both now and when I first heard it -- than Nixon in China, or, to be honest, just about any new opera I've ever heard, apart from Louis Andriessen's Rosa.

Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, the NPR ombudsman, says (in a piece linked here) that he finds many of NPR's music reviews "incomprehensible to some listeners, and I confess, to me."

And then he gives some examples, one of which, from a review of Wilco, is this:

These extended explorations and others, like the five minutes of abrasive dental-drill feedback drone near the end of the disc, give Wilco's music an entirely new dimension. The guitar isn't here to make things pretty. Tweedy uses savage, wild lunges to punctuate the verses and sometimes to inject a little danger into otherwise lovely songs.

But what's hard to understand about that? As long as you realize that Tweedy is somebody's name -- which is easy to tell from the context -- what's difficult about this passage? What's hard to understand about abrasive noise injecting danger into what otherwise would be lovely songs?

The answer, surely, is that Dvorkin hasn't thought much about abrasive noise being part of any kind of music. Certainly I'd guess he hasn't listened to abrasive, noisy music. As he says at the start of his complaint, "For some listeners, the music sounds harsh and the journalism that attempts to explain it, sounds equally irritating (and impenetrable)." But comments, as the one I've quoted shows, are written in plain, simple language. (The other two are no different.) They can only seem impenetrable because the music itself comes from a place that Dvorkin and these other listeners aren't used to -- and, I suspect, don't want to enter.

That said, there's still a problem. How are music reviewers supposed to talk, when even things they say in simple language seem -- at least to some people -- to come from another planet? If they stop to explain the most basic concepts ("Wilco's latest album may seem to be full of horrible noise, but there's a reason for that"), they'll sound ridiculous to the many people who do know the music. ("The Beethoven symphony that the Philharmonic played last night is very long, but that's how classical pieces are.") One thing this shows is that music, in spite of all the sentimental talk about it, is anything but a universal language. Instead, it seems to divide us -- to mark subcultural boundaries -- far more than it unites us.

Never, in all my musical life, have I talked about anything as much as I've talked about the Concert Companion. And not because I start the conversations. At the ASOL conference at Pittsburgh, people wanted to talk about it with me. And the press does, too. I've never done so many interviews about anything before.

Obviously, there's lots of interest. But one interviewer, a very smart and serious music critic, said something interesting. He said the Concert Companion is "controversial." I'd never thought of it that way. I know there's some objection to it, largely on the grounds that it would distract people from listening to the music. But controversy? The objections, in my experience, aren't nearly widespread enough to be called that. Inside the orchestra world, I only see a lot of interest, whether it was from orchestras visiting the Concert Companion presentations at the conference to find out what the fuss was all about, or from the people (many from absolutely top orchestras) who wanted to talk at length with me.

If there's anything that could be called controversy, it's largely among critics. And this makes me think, not for the first time, that critics -- whatever other virtues they might have -- are largely cut off from the classical music profession, or rather that they're a separate strand within the field, one that doesn't mix very much with people in any of the other strands. Critics certainly don't talk the way musicians do, or the way music administrators do. Beyond that, I'm not sure many of them are aware of how musicians or music administrators talk. There's nothing wrong with people in a profession having that profession's point of view (it's inevitable, in fact), but if the profession includes writing commentary about classical music, then the people writing the commentary at least have to know how other people in the business think. Obviously this doesn't apply to all critics. But it applies, I think, to enough of them for this to be a problem.

(And I don't mean this as a special criticism of the critic who interviewed me. He was very impressive in many ways, and I liked him.)

Something else I thought about: that classical music has spent too much time in its familiar ivory tower. Some people who don't like the Concert Companion have in mind, I think, an idealized conception of what goes on at concerts -- that the concert halls are full of people listening intently, following each unfolding nuance of the music. Or at least that this is an ideal, in principle attainable, which we should be working towards.

But who knows what's really happening? Studies of the audience, as I've said before, seem to show that people at orchestral concerts drift into what they feel is some kind of transfigured realm. That's completely compatible with losing track of the music for minutes on end, which I'll confess that I sometimes do. (My wife will tell you that I even have been known to fall asleep.) We've all seen people reading program books. I'd love to see studies on how many orchestra subscribers can identify all the instruments, and can follow standard musical structures, like sonata form. I suspect the number would be lower than we think, but the most important thing, I think is that we simply don't know. The audience studies I've seen don't address those questions. (If anyone knows of a study that did address them -- orchestras sometimes do private studies, whose results they don't publicize -- I'd love to hear about it.)

And so here we have the Concert Companion, whose users -- as I heard some of them say in focus groups after the New York Philharmonic tests of the device -- suddenly found themselves listening with more concentrated attention than they'd ever brought to music before. This is a bad thing? Some said that even though they'd been going to concerts for many years, they couldn't identify all the instruments. So maybe this device is more needed than we think.

In Pittsburgh, the focus group was very strongly positive. All the people there save one loved using the gadget. And the one who didn't like it, asked if he'd recommend it to his friends, said he definitely would -- because the other people in the focus group had liked it so much!

I felt a one reservation, writing text for the Pittsburgh texts. We used the Companion for two pieces, Afternoon of a Faun and Joan Tower's fabulous Tambor, a virtuoso piece that features the percussion section. I worked with Joan on the text for her piece, so I know that, whatever anybody might have thought about it, it describes the music the way she herself hears it. In fact, I often simply quoted her.

But for Debussy, I of course was on my own. And it doesn't seem possible just to write objective text about his music. It's too evocative, too flavorful. I'd betray it if I just listed the instruments that play, and outlined the music's structure (which in Afternoon of a Faun is fairly ephemeral in any case). So I wrote about the feeling of the music, as well as about more objective musical facts. I can see some people objecting, because they, understandably, might feel the music a different way. Do the winds, pulsing in the background of the second statement of the wonderful D flat major melody, really pulse with "helpless passion"? I think they do, but someone else might not.

The Concert Companion, though, is aimed mostly at people who haven't gone to many concerts. My working theory goes something like this: For some, at least, of these people, classical music seems something like a blur. It all sounds very nice, but at first it's hard to separate one moment from another. The more I describe the essence of each moment, at least as I feel it, the easier it will be for people to get some handle on the music, and begin to hear what's going on as the sound flows and changes. The people using the Companion don't seem to object to this. What some of them did object to, at the New York tests, was me telling them that certain moments were wonderful or dazzling. That struck them, I was fascinated to learn, as either gushing or patronizing. So I learned (with thanks to all the people who spoke so honestly about their objections) to write more calmly, but still with plenty of personal feeling.

The point, after all, is to call attention to those background woodwinds, so that people hear more than just the surface of the music. And I can't see any way of doing that without saying something about what the woodwinds are doing. I can't just say, "Listen to them." Because then people might ask, "Listen to them doing what?" A precise technical description of what they're doing in that passage would be very hard to write, very verbose (far too long for a single Concert Companion screen), and also, come to think of it, not precise at all, because there aren't any technical terms to describe what's going on. The winds don't play a counterpoint, but are something more than an accompaniment -- which, by the way, I can't say in Companion commentary, because the people the Companion is for won't know what these words mean. (Or even the concepts. The idea that there's material that stands strongly on its own, even if it's subordinate, and other material that simply fades into the background to accompany the things it's subordinate to -- you need a fair amount of musical experience just to think in these terms.)

So I find the Concert Companion very promising. And useful, too, based on the simplest of criteria -- the people it's designed for (orchestras, and the audience) find it useful. What its future is, beyond all this, is hard to say. I'll just repeat something I've suggested before -- as classical music starts to change, it's not helpful (and maybe even dangerous) to try to guess how the changes will work, or which of them will turn out to be lasting. We just have to try things, and see what happens.

Some thoughts on the news from Seattle, about that city having the highest concentration of arts-related business. That, the story suggested, had something to do with Seattle being a smart place, and might say something about the quality of Seattle's art.

Well, Seattle has one of the absolutely top opera companies in America, a really high-quality operation, and one of the worst music directors of any major orchestra. The larger issue here, though, has nothing to do with the intelligence of any city, or the concentration of arts anywhere. I think it's something really odd, that unfortunately speaks to the weird situation of classical music these days -- there's often no relation between the quality of a classical music enterprise and its success. It's as if many of the people who buy tickets for classical concerts don't know how good or bad anything is, once it reaches a decent professional level.

Look at the Boston Symphony under Ozawa -- an artistic desert, shunned by Boston-area musicians. But they had no trouble selling tickets. Likewise the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta. Or look at the Pittsburgh Symphony, with declining ticket sales for many years, even while, under Mariss Jansons, it reached artistic heights.

It would be interesting to study this in some formal way. Do the best classical music performances sell the most tickets? But wait, that's not really the question, since the best movies don't sell the most tickets, and the best books aren't the top bestsellers. The question might be whether a decline in quality -- at an orchestra, let's say -- gets noticed by the audience, and leads to a decline in ticket sales. It's a complex question, and I'd love to know more about it. I do know that declines in orchestral quality aren't always noticed by the press. Did the main Boston and Seattle papers say anything about the problems there?