August 2004 Archives

I'm off for two weeks of rest, play, and composing. I'll blog again after Labor Day.

Before I go, I want to thank Gavin Borchert for a thoughtful and friendly response to my comments on his Seattle Weekly piece, about the future of classical music. Might be worth quoting, if he'd let me do that, when I get back. But above all, it shows that people can debate very sharply and still be civil, even cheerful about it. Gavin seems like a class act.

One thing worth noting, by the way -- his piece is two years old, even though it was linked on ArtsJournal just this past week. Which certainly explains one thing I wondered about. When Gavin quoted Seattle Symphony statistics from the 2000-2001 season, he wasn't simply picking some favorable numbers out of the distant past. He was citing the most recent numbers he had.

Have a good end of the summer, everyone, and thanks, as ever, for all the thoughtful e-mail. We'll resume in September. 

Gavin Borchert's rant in the Seattle Weekly -- linked today in ArtsJournal -- gives me a good opportunity to sum up some reasons why classical music is in trouble. Borchert ratns that classical music is just fine, and that the whole commotion is mostly hype. Here are reasons why he's wrong:

Orchestras that fold [Borchert writes] make headlines; healthy ones don't. A decade ago, it was San Diego and New Orleans; this year, it was San Jose, with Toronto and St. Louis teetering. This is tragic--but it's not the apocalypse. A few baseball teams have recently been threatened with closure for financial underperformance, but I don't recall reading any elegies on the death of spectator sports.

Well, I thought the same thing a few years ago. But it turns out things in fact are really bad. As I've written here, the pessimism among orchestra managers (or at least the many I know) is fairly stunning, even if their own orchestras happen to be doing well. Some point to a long-term problem -- expenses have been rising faster than income, not just recently, but for decades. Now that income has been falling, that spells trouble. Along, of course, with sinking ticket sales, and the aging of the audience (see below).

Borchert notes that orchestras aren't all of classical music, that opera is doing well, and that "the Seattle Symphony posted a budget surplus for its 2000-2001 fiscal year." How about more recent figures? I don't, in fact, know how Seattle is doing (except that they're in bad trouble artistically), but most of the larger orchestras I keep up with have been posting deficits.

Have opera audiences, as Borchert says, "crescendoed"? Certainly not in New York. And how about presenting organizations -- arts centers and other institutions that present touring classical attractions? They book far less classical music than they did a generation ago. At the annual presenters' conference in New York this past January, several people said (speaking from the audience at a panel discussion I was part of) that, at their institutions, the audience for classical performances has grown so small it's hardly worth programming for any more.

About the classical record industry, Borchert says:

Check out the new-release racks at Tower Records, and you'll find one, two, three dozen composers you've never heard of. Right now, more of music history is available to music lovers than ever before. This is dying?

Tower is the only national record chain with large classical departments. It's close to bankruptcy. Its two classical departments in New York -- one of which was downsized this year -- are often nearly empty. How long can Tower support them?

Ten years ago, New York had five large classical record departments; now it only has the two at Tower. And as for the classical recordings themselves, a huge majority of them, even some at major labels, now are subsidized. Either the record companies raise money to support their overall operation, or the artists raise money to pay for their recordings. Even the Metropolitan Opera raised money to pay for its CDs of Wagner's Ring. A generation ago, classical recording was a for-profit business. With very few exceptions, those days are gone.

About the age of the audience, Borchert says this:

A legitimate concern about audience age--since the public schools, by and large, have tossed classical music overboard--has become an obsession. The audience is graying. Soon they'll be dead, taking classical music with them unless they're replaced, runs the conventional wisdom. But is this anything new? Why the panic? Was there some distant golden age when America's concert halls were filled with teenagers?

Figures from far in the past are hard to find, but in the late 1930's, the median age of the audience at orchestral concerts was 27 in Grand Rapids, MI, and 33 in Los Angeles. (See America's Symphony Orchestras, by Margaret Grant and Herman S. Hettinger, W. W. Norton & Co, New York, 1940, p. 227. The authors aren't remotely surprised by these figures, which suggests they believe other orchestras they didn't survey would have reported the same thing.)

In recent decades, the audience has gotten older. You can see that in the following graphs, which I made from statistics published by the NEA. They show what percentage of the audience came from various age groups in 1992 and  2002. Compare the two decades: You'll see the curves shift to the right, toward the older age groups, which means that older people make up a larger proportion of the audience now than they did 10 years ago. That's true even in opera, which supposedly had an upsurge of younger ticket-buyers:

(I adjusted the NEA's figures to reflect population shifts. The proportion of the population in each age group changes from decade to decade, and my comparison reflects those changes. That is, if a higher percentage of the population fell into the 45-54 age group in 2002 than did in 1992, I made a downward adjustment in the proportion of people 45-54 in the audience in 2002.)

Borchert then rants that "the classical establishment would rather buckle under to our society's market-driven credo: If white males aged 15 to 29 don't want it, nobody gets it." But that's just silly. Classical music institutions aren't looking for people in their teens and 20s; they want to attract people in their 30s and 40s. Borchert, though, has solved the problem of the younger audience, whatever age anybody thinks it might be:

Incidentally, there is an easy way to attract the young: Program new music. In my observation, between a third and a half of the audiences for the Seattle Symphony's "Music of Our Time" concerts and the majority of the Seattle Composers Salon audiences are under 30. Problem solved.

It's not that simple. These audiences are smaller -- by a lot, I'd guess -- than the audience for normal Seattle Symphony concerts. (Some, moreover, may be music students attending the concert because they're involved in new music themselves, or because attending these concerts is a course assignment.) The orchestra couldn't begin to sustain itself on the diminished ticket income it would get if it mostly did concerts like these. Or, for that matter, on the diminished ticket income it mostly likely would get it if simply did a lot more new music on its mainstream concerts. We're in limbo right now; yes, orchestras can attract younger people if they do new music, but they can't draw enough young people to make up for the older people who'd stop coming.

And the donors -- the all-important individuals, corporations, and foundations that give the money any orchestra needs to stay alive -- mostly give to support the standard repertoire. An exciting new audience of younger people, even if it existed in great numbers, wouldn't give nearly as much money as the present audience does.

And if classical music institutions decide to go for broke, forget about the old ways, and only do new music, how are musicians going to make a living? Strange to say, the classical mainstream supports new music, by giving musicians a chance to make a living. Many new-music specialists in New York -- the musicians who play in new music ensembles -- actually make their living playing mainstream classical events.

I don't mean to come down hard on Borchert. He looks around, sees what looks to him like a lot of classical music activity, and then asks, "How bad could things be?" But if he'd look a little deeper, note the current trends, and project them into the future, I things might not look so good.

Here's a piece I wrote this summer for the Aspen Festival program book. Comments welcome!

We hear that there's a crisis in classical music, that the audience might disappear and that in fact it's getting smaller. We hear that classical music institutions, even some of the major ones, might be in trouble, and that they aren't selling enough tickets, or raising enough money.

 

But here I don’t want to look at the complex facts and figures of the apparent decline, nor the innovations in performance (video screens at orchestral concerts, conductors talking to the audience, musicians in informal dress, and so much more) that have been tried, to turn things around.

 

Instead, I want to look at some very basic things about the classical music world, things that aren’t often questioned but might in fact be a part of why classical music is having so much trouble.

 

I'll do this by asking questions, starting with this one:

We hear that there's a crisis in classical music, that the audience might disappear and that in fact it's getting smaller.

 

Why isn’t the audience more active in the classical music world?

 

Now that might seem odd to ask, because of course the audience really can participate in many ways, by donating money, joining boards of directors, attending pre-concert lectures, and volunteering to do all sorts of useful things.

 

But that’s not what I mean. Instead, I want to ask why people in the audience don’t get more deeply involved with music itself. Someone, very likely (and of course understandably), might reply, “But we can’t do this—we’re not musicians!”

 

But I think the audience really isn’t given a chance. Here’s a small but telling example. Once, at the New York Philharmonic, I read program notes for some large-scale piece—I think it was a Bruckner symphony—that among much else told me that the work was scored for four horns. But right up there on the stage, in plain sight, were five! Any musician could tell you why that was. The horn is a difficult instrument, and the principal player has a sovereign privilege, to not play everything in his or her part. Thus a fifth horn sits in reserve, to fill in when needed.

 

But do people in the audience know this? Not likely, and the Philharmonic—along with just about every other orchestra—wouldn't think to explain, even when they face a stark contradiction between their program notes and what they put on the stage.

 

The audience, in other words, is almost never brought behind the scenes; rarely is it told what's really going on in a performance. And there’s more to that than merely counting horns. Not long ago, the music director of a small-city orchestra told me that—at least in his opinion—the people in his audience had no idea of what he wanted to accomplish in the music he conducted, and never would.

 

But had he ever told his audience what they ought to be listening for? Why shouldn’t he share his goals with the audience? “In Beethoven’s Fifth,” he might say, “I worry a lot about the transition into the last movement. There’s a huge, dramatic crescendo, and then the last movement starts like a burst of sunlight. But I can’t let this transition overpower everything that comes afterwards!”

 

I’m making that up, by the way; I don’t know what that conductor thinks about Beethoven’s Fifth. But here’s something I really did hear from a musician, the principal bassoon of one of the country’s largest orchestras. He was telling me about his solo at the start of Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps. “It’s easy to play,” he said (and isn’t that alone worth knowing?). “We all learn it in music school. But I don’t think Stravinsky wanted it to sound easy. When he wrote it, bassoons didn’t usually play so high, and it probably sounded rough and raw. I’d like to do it roughly, but I worry that the conductor and the audience would think I don’t know how to play.”

 

So why not share these thoughts with the people in the audience? Why not ask them if they’d really be shocked to hear a raw bassoon? The opera world, we should note, has websites where fans debate performances. The American Composers Orchestra—which plays mostly new and recent American works—has a website where members of its audience offer uncensored opinions about everything they’ve heard.

 

Why don’t we see more of this?

 

 

Why don’t people inside classical music institutions talk about music more?

 

This winter, I was invited to give a keynote speech at an orchestra’s retreat. On the Internet, I’d noticed a review in the orchestra’s local paper, saying that their handling of ornamentation in Baroque music didn’t seem quite right. “Did you all agree?” I asked the orchestra’s staff, board, and musicians. “Did any of you talk about that issue?”

 

I wasn’t surprised to learn that they hadn’t. The staff and board surely thought that proper ornamentation—a constant concern for anyone who plays Baroque music—was something they couldn’t understand. And the musicians, typically, would have thought it was the conductor’s responsibility, for better or worse. So even if they thought the conductor did things wrong, they’d never discuss it openly.

 

But then won’t the staff and board—and even the musicians—feel only passively involved in orchestral performances? How can an orchestra fix its musical problems, or even identify them? I know an arts consultant, a man who's smart and sensitive, and works with both orchestras and theater companies. And he’s told me he’s amazed that orchestra staffs don’t talk about music more. When a theater company debuts a new production, he says, the staff can’t stop talking about it—talking about the acting, the directing, the sets, and the concept and meaning of the play.

 

Some orchestras are beginning to think about postmortem sessions, where musicians and conductor could talk how a concert went. Staffs and boards could have these, too. And why not the audience?

 

Why do we advertise classical music so badly?

 

The average classical music press release—not to hold back my opinion here—is disastrous. Either it gushes about how wonderful the music is going to be, or else it offers blank and empty facts about the musicians involved, about their training, and all the fabulous (or even sometimes not so fabulous) places where they’ve performed.

 

What you’ll almost never read is anything that might make an intelligent person want to go to a concert—something about how the music is going to be played, what it will feel like to hear the music, or why this concert might be different from any other.

 

The musicians’ biographies we read in program books have the same problem; they’re almost always empty, blank, unreadable. Of one famous name, we might read (to quote a real example), that he’s “widely regarded as one of the most talented virtuoso pianists performing today.” Yes, and if he weren’t, he wouldn’t be playing at the major concert hall that printed this weak and empty prose in its program book. The entire biography was dull, blank, unreadable blather. We almost never hear how anyone plays, what they think about music, what they try to accomplish when they perform.

 

And when we advertise our concerts to the public, these problems get worse. Mostly we brag that we offer “acclaimed” musicians, predictably playing—no surprise here!—“great” music. I’m so tired of hearing about “great music” that I start wishing someone would play something violent, vulgar, or crazy. Every concert, if you believe our advertising, seems more or less the same—uniformly “great” and uplifting. Why should anybody care?

 

What do we ourselves get from all these concerts?

 

I teach a course at Juilliard on the future of classical music. Often I’ve asked my students to tell me what classical pieces mean to them—what messages they convey, and how they make the students feel, not just as musicians, but as people. In response, they tell me how valuable classical music is as part of western culture, and how it carries powerful emotion. I don’t disagree. But how does one piece in the classical repertoire differ from another?

 

“Well,” one musician once told me, “I like Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ quartet because it’s Schubert’s only quartet in a minor key.” Which might be fascinating if you knew all of Schubert’s quartets, but how many people do? Doesn’t this musician have any stronger, more personal, more individual feeling about the piece?

 

So it’s not just our advertising that makes problems. Even in passionate, personal conversation, I’m not sure that many of us could say exactly what we get from hearing (or even playing) Debussy tonight, and Brahms tomorrow. And if we can’t explain it to ourselves, how can we explain it to a new audience? What, exactly, are we offering at our performances?

 

The Boston Philharmonic—Boston’s second orchestra, with a strongly devoted following—put this on its website, describing an upcoming concert:

 

Of all Mahler's works, it may well be the astonishingly “modern” Seventh Symphony that most fully expresses the mayhem of living in the contemporary world. It lays out the conflicts and contrasts, then offers a kind of alternative refuge—dream-like, entrancing “night music.” In the end, though, it is in this world, not some remote afterlife, that this symphony finds its true victory. It seems to say: “This is life. It's rough—but I am going to look it square in the face, and win.”

 

That’s not just a description of a piece; it’s an artistic credo, a reason for caring, a reason for being alive. Why don’t more of us talk this way?

 

Why doesn’t classical music get closer to pop?

 

Yes, some pop is cheap and commercial. But some of it is deeply serious.

 

And if we don’t understand that, we don’t understand the modern world, and we especially don’t understand the new audience we’re trying to attract. Smart, serious, educated younger people listen to serious pop, and we won’t impress them if we insist we’re the only artistic music around.

 

Besides, in past centuries, classical music always embraced the outside world. Why not now? What do we gain from living in a protected palace of distant, irrelevant art?

 

And in any case, our competition is way ahead of us. Rock criticism has always done what the classical music world can’t seem to do, which is to say what music means. They say what they think life is about, and what view of life each kind of music might represent. They describe, in other words, a world their readers can recognize, in which music takes an recognizable place.

 

Classical critics, by contrast, tell us that the tempo of the Brahms was too slow. Is that really what the concert was about?

 

Why don’t we play more new music?

 

Yes, we’ve had a new music crisis. A lot of new music written in the past few decades hasn’t pleased the classical music audience—or, conversely, the audience hasn’t caught up with what composers want to do. And it’s also clear that new works can have trouble competing with established masterpieces.

 

But then shouldn’t composers and the audience talk? Can’t both change? And, if new music has trouble competing, shouldn’t we play more of it, so it sets a tone that doesn’t need to compete with anything else?

 

And wouldn’t new music help us understand what music means, and how it connects to the world outside? New pieces come from the contemporary world, and are composed by people who are right there to tell us what they had in mind. New works might even help explain what the older repertoire means, by setting it in sharp relief.

 

And, best of all, mew music be marvelous to hear. It’s time, in fact, for the classical music world—and especially its most refined sophisticates—to stop pushing new music as something we need to hear on principle. Which, let me quickly say, is not at all what I’m doing. I think we should play more new music, and then react without inhibitions, cheering the pieces we like, and ignoring (or even booing) the ones we don’t.

 

I’ve been inspired by new music—by hearing Steve Reich, for instance, when he was first getting famous, with hundreds of people absolutely transfixed by his work. Or by hearing a piece by Glenn Branca for 100 electric guitars, echoing outdoors at a dramatic site in New York. And of course I know that Reich and Branca stand just a little outside the normal classical experience, but that’s part of my point. Some of the best new music doesn’t fit classical models, and the concert hall ought to expand to welcome it. Though I’ve also seen a Friday afternoon crowd at the Boston Symphony warmly applaud a purely classical (and very touching and delicate) piece by Henri Dutilleux, bringing him back for bow after bow.

 

Someday (as Miles Davis remarked many years ago, about the classical music world) we’re going to have to stop playing the same music over and over again. Why not now?

 

Why aren’t we part of contemporary life?

 

Some people, of course, say that the classical music world don’t need to be contemporary, that it could function mainly as a great museum. But performing music—for musicians and listeners alike—requires more focus and emotion than hanging paintings, or walking around a gallery looking at them.

 

And museums, too, have to attract an audience. If you look around, they do it better than we do. They show new art, and they’ve found new ways to make the old art interesting. So if the classical music world decides to be a museum, won’t that lead us right back to contemporary life?

 

So one last question:

 

Why are we in crisis? Why haven’t we attracted a new audience?

 

By now, you know part of my answer. But it’s only my answer. What do you think?

In today's New York Times, Paul Griffiths -- a very poetic academic critic, if that mélange of qualities makes any sense -- writes about doubts in playing music. He's explaining Brice Pauset, a French composer, who, since he's an early-music keyboard player,

spends a lot of time with Couperin, Bach, and Schubert, who for him offer no safe haven. Like other practitioners of "historically informed" performance, he lives in a world where important questions -- of ornamentation, tuning, authentic text -- must remain forever uncertain…

Nicely put, and quite evocative. Except that, to me, it's a good example of classical music staying timidly inside its own boundaries. The "important questions" Griffiths mentions may be uncertain, in the sense that there's debate over them, but they're also quite objective. That is, you can talk about precise choices in ornamentation (starting trills from above or below, to pick a very simple example). You can talk about the precise frequency that musicians in the 18th century might have tuned to. You can point to published editions of old music that, in your view, come closest to the printed text.

But what's far more uncertain is how the music ought to feel, and what it means. Why are we playing it at all? How do we feel about it? Why should anyone come to hear us? How do our 21st century emotions differ from 18th century emotions, and what should we do about the differences? Why, with classical music's future possibly doubtful, should anyone care what we do?

Those, to me, seem like greater uncertainties. I used to tease my sister, who for many years was a professional violinist, specializing in Baroque violin. She'd work out her own path through the uncertainties Griffiths talks about, and others like them. She did this expertly, and with great artistic honor, but I thought she only touched the surface of the many questions older music raises. Since she specialized in French Baroque music, I'd tease her about the way the aristocrats at the king's palace in Versailles used to pee behind the stairs. What would that tell us about how they played music? How can we understand how they played music, when so many things about their everyday lives are almost inconceivable to us?

I also think of younger classical musicians I know (my Juilliard students, for instance, or younger players in major orchestras), who'll often say that their friends don't understand what they do. These friends don't care about classical music. So this is another uncertainty -- how do you understand your professional life, when it involves public performance for people who conspicuously don't include your friends?

What kills me, though, about Griffiths's piece is that he goes on to say that Pauset's "own music has come to have the same shadowiness" as Baroque music. And in saying that, he turns out to be addressing precisely the questions I thought he ignored about Baroque pieces. "Urban melancholic is the tone" of Pauset's composition, he says. "City streets turn out to be just as dimly lighted, dangerous and seductive as candle-lit chambers…"

He's painting a picture of what Pauset might mean to us, moving far beyond the technicalities he thought were so uncertain when Pauset plays older stuff. It's curious, in fact, to see how Griffiths shifts his ground. When he talks about uncertainties in older music, they're all factual. We don't know exactly what pitch to tune to. And when he talks about uncertainties in new music, they're aesthetic -- the music sounds dim, seductive, and dangerous, with a tone that sounds, at least as I read what Griffiths wrote, a little bit like film noir.

I'd like to hear Pauset's music (which means, by the way, that Griffiths did his job as a critic; he got me interested). But I wish we'd move beyond a largely technical understanding of older music, and start addressing its artistic uncertainties, which to me loom far larger than anything uncertain about music being written now.

"Handel operas are boring," said someone I know. And I agree -- or rather current productions generally are, despite the fad for Handel operas, despite how well some singers sing them, and despite all the clever ideas that directors have.

They're boring because Handel operas aren't any kind of drama we readily understand. Mostly they're strings of arias, each in the same undramatic form, A-B-A, the point being, first, to express two contrasting affects (Baroque Music 101), and, second, to give the singer a chance to put on a show. Contrasting affects, marching in pairs, aren't any modern idea of drama; they're highly stylized, more like a procession of paintings hanging in a gallery than an exposition of plot and character. And singers putting on a show -- responsible opera is supposed to condemn that! The singers shouldn't think of themselves; they're supposed to think of their character, the meaning of the story, and all the fine musical and dramatic details the composer wrote into the score.

But baroque opera composers just didn't think like that, and -- at least in my view -- wrote operas that demand spectacle, on stage, in the orchestra, and in the singers' throats, before they'll work in any way at all, including dramatically. So my idea of a Handel opera production would look something like this (with most of my thoughts drawn from what Handel himself did in the opera companies he ran in London):

1. The audience should be able to see the orchestra.

2. The musicians should be extravagant virtuosi, each with his or her own approach to the music, and of course a wild flair for improvising.

3. To give these virtuosi scope for all their extravagance, parts of the orchestral music should be played as solos, whether or not that's written in the score. (Listen to René Jacobs's recording of Handel's Rinaldo to hear what that could be like.

4. The cellist who plays the bass line in recitatives ought to improvise, extravagantly, spectacularly. (Again, you can hear that on Jacobs's Rinaldo.)

5. The orchestra should be led by a spectacular improvising harpsichordist -- Handel himself, when he put his operas on. He was one of his opera company's great attractions, and current Handel productions should find someone who can draw as much attention as he did.

6. The singers should wear unusual, fashionable, attention-getting costumes. That happened in Handel's time; people talked about the dresses that the prima donnas wore.

7. The singers should sing about four times as many ornaments than we normally hear today, with cadenzas that go on forever. Ideally, these ornaments -- and certainly the cadenzas -- should be improvised. If this happened, we'd all look forward to da capo aria repeats; we'd all be on the edge of our seats, wondering what the singer would do.

8. A ramp should be built from the stage out into the middle of the audience, so that singers can walk down it, stand in the middle of the opera house, and entertain. (That happened in Handel's time.) Think of a Handel opera production almost like a cabaret show. The singers should perform more as themselves than as their characters; since a long series of da capo arias makes no sense unless the singers are showing off, showing off is the best way for singers to bring their characters to life.

9. The lights should be on in the opera house. (As they were up to the middle of the 19th century.) The audience should be free to talk, to come and go, to take breaks from the performance, to walk around. That way, the performers would have to grab our attention; if they didn't, we'd stop listening.

This approach of course wouldn't work for later operas, for Wagner, for instance -- Wagner assumed that the audience would listen to every note, and his operas reflect that. Handel assumed no such thing, and his operas reflect a very different assumption, that the audience will only pay attention if they're given something worth paying attention to. The operas should be performed with that in mind -- which will make them dramatic, and lots of fun.

A while ago, driving into New York, I listened to the start of the broadcast of the opening concert of Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart festival. I heard one complete piece, the overture to Mozart's opera La clemenza di Tito, along with commentary from Margaret Juntwait and Fred Child, top radio personalities from, respectively, WNYC (New York's public radio station) and NPR's Performance Today.

And the commentary made me itch. Juntwait and Child sound like smart, humane people, and when they started praising Mostly Mozart's new music director, Louis Langrée, I didn't disagree. He sounded like a real live wire, a vigorous, driving conductor.

But why were Juntwait and Child praising him at all? Why did they all but gush as they told us how he leaned forward as he led the music, almost melding with the orchestra? (Caveat: I'm paraphrasing all this from memory, and may not have the details quite right.) Should it be their job to tell us -- either explicitly or by implication -- how wonderful the concert is?

No, I say, unless, of course, they're also willing to say when a concert is bad. And if they're going to offer any evaluation, they ought to go further. How well does the orchestra play? This they didn't tell us, and in fact the playing wasn't first-rate. The strings didn't articulate fast notes very clearly, certainly not with the joyful precision of their colleagues in the Orchestra of St. Luke's. Shouldn't Juntwait and Child tell us this, something any musician would notice, at least as a footnote to their praise of the conductor?

Now, I'm sure I'm asking the impossible. What I'm talking about just isn't done. The broadcast is in some sense a collaboration between the performing group and the broadcaster, and Lincoln Center won't be happy if their moment in the sun is sabotaged by negative comments, even if they're well deserved. Juntwait and Child -- whom I have nothing against; I'm sorry if my words here offend them -- may well justify their praise, saying they wouldn't offer it if it weren't honest. If they didn't like the concert, they might say, they'd just keep quiet.

Certainly situations like that aren't unknown. In the '80s I did a piece for the Wall Street Journal about reporting on audio issues in Stereo Review magazine. Its editors had no problem telling me that Stereo Review never ran negative reviews of audio equipment; if they didn't like something, they just wouldn't run any review at all. Maybe, given all the interests involved (in Stereo Review's case, the editors didn't want to offend any advertisers), that's a reasonable, even honorable way for announcers of classical music broadcasts to behave.

But I don't like it. Classical music suffers from the notion that all of it is wonderful, that every work is a "masterpiece," and that every performance is "great." Or inspiring, acclaimed, exciting, moving…take your pick. Or that, even if some performances aren't as good as they should be, the overall enterprise still is inspiring, exciting, moving, and of course acclaimed, not to mention central to civilization.

Life, of course, isn't like that; nothing is uniformly wonderful or even mostly wonderful, not even ice cream or fudge. (Exercise might come closest.) So -- because classical music is too cut off from everybody's normal life -- it's best to be honest, to admit that classical music varies just like everything else, and not to praise it unless there's also room for criticism. If Juntwait and Child aren't prepared to point out any problems they might hear, then their praise of concerts they broadcast, even if it's completely honest, helps undermine classical music by making it seem like some kind of fairyland, glowing, untouchable, and of course completely unreal.

I'd never heard this guy, who entrances audiences at Lincoln Center with programs called "What Makes It Great?" in which he explains classical masterworks. He's also got some CDs of his explanations.

And he pretty much entranced me, explaining Mozart's Jupiter Symphony with the Mostly Mozart Orchestra. He really has a knack for getting under the hood of a piece, and getting everybody -- even people new to classical music -- hearing fabulous details of how the piece works. I learned a lot.

But at the same time, there's something very retro about what Kapilow does. He concentrates on analytical details -- how Mozart's phrases don't go where you expect them to, how they rarely repeat without spinning off delicious changes. And while these things really do tell you something about why Mozart is a great composer, they're not the whole story. Imagine somebody lecturing on The Great Gatsby, and only talking about Fitzgerald's sentence structure, with no reference to story, characters, or meaning.

That wouldn't happen, outside of deepest academia. But in classical music, it happens right in the bright glare of day. People -- smart, highly respected people -- often talk as if structural details were all that mattered. Or, at least, as if they were what matters most. But what about Mozart's soul? What happens to us when we hear his music? Doesn't Kapilow have anything to say about these things?

To be fair, he may well go in these directions when he talks about other pieces. But he didn't venture there at all the night I heard him. Brilliant as he is, irresistible as he is, even though he's able to vividly articulate some of the trickiest, most technical things in music, he still seems mired in classical music's impossible past, and becomes an example of what we need to get beyond before classical music can save itself.

Rob Kapilow finished his presentation with a Q & A, involving both him and some of the musicians. One question was about the future of classical music -- the person asking was afraid we might not have any future.

Kapilow and the musicians answered very seriously. One of the musicians said we needed to restore music education in our schools, and the audience applauded. From the warmth of the applause, it's easy to see that the classical music audience is worried that classical music might disappear, and that restoring music education is a warmly favored remedy.

I hope, then, that I won't offend anyone when I say that it's not a remedy at all. For one thing, it'll take too long. Suppose music education is restored, in all its glory, in schools all over America, starting in September. Suppose these music classes build a new classical music audience. How long will that take? Decades! (Especially if, like many people, you believe that people don't fully join the classical music audience until they're in their fifties.) Classical music could be extinct by then.

And how, exactly, are we going to restore music education? Where will school systems find the money for it? How will they transform themselves into institutions that will give classical music a high priority? We can campaign for these things, of course, but then we're knee-deep in politics, engaged in a massive political task. What if we fail? Then we're really stuck.

Instead, I think, we ought to work in areas that are under our own control. Classical music institutions should roll up their sleeves, and go out and sell classical music. Not easy, but at least we're in control. If we fail, it's because we didn't do the job right, or because we didn't work hard enough, or because the job is impossible, not because (like school reform) it's mired in a thousand other considerations that have nothing to do with us or with music.

Besides, at least to me there's something uneasy about asking other people to find our audience for us. Or, in this case, to manufacture it. Do we really think -- to put this very crassly -- that people have to be brainwashed into liking classical music? Yes, sure, I know that's not the way to put it; the idea, really, is just to give kids a chance to hear the music we love, and trust that some of them will love it, too. But still we're asking government to use its heavy arm on our behalf. I'm more comfortable (even though, in politics, I'm hardly a rabid free marketeer) with action we take on our own.