January 2005 Archives

The following showed up in my e-mail today. It was from the New England Conservatory, but (with no disrespect to NEC's public relations department), the animating spirit here -- the person who made the press release so convincing -- is Benjamin Zander, music director of the Boston Philharmonic, whose descriptions of music he's performing have wowed me before.

And maybe what follows is a little over the top, but how many press releases (or advertisements, or marketing brochures) do we see that make classical music even a little bit appealing? The issue, remember, isn't just how we write our press releases. It's how we make our music mean something to the very large part of the world that doesn't care about it.

Here's the press release:

Musical Alternative to the Super Bowl?  NEC's Youth Philharmonic Orchestra Shows its Winning Form, Brilliant Plays, Awesome Teamwork, February 6, 2005

 

Snowed Out by the Blizzard of 2005, Orchestra and Conductor Benjamin Zander Reschedule Concert for Head-to-Head Showdown with the Pats and Eagles

 

Performance at NEC's Jordan Hall Begins at 7 p.m. Tickets Purchased for Snowed-Out Concert will be Honored

 

            When New England Conservatory's premier Preparatory School ensemble, the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, had to cancel its January 23 concert because of the Big Snowstorm, the only makeup date available in NEC's Jordan Hall was Super Bowl Sunday.  While it might seem crazy to schedule a concert that evening, the YPO (composed of musicians aged 13-18) and conductor Benjamin Zander decided to take the chance. 

 

            In fact, for someone who wrote a book called The Art of Possibility and who lectures corporate CEOs on creating new paradigms, Zander is exactly the person to embrace the challenge of competing with the Super Bowl.  Sitting at home the night of January 23, watching the football playoffs when he should have been conducting Holst's The Planets, Zander dashed off a passionate manifesto.  In it, he stated his belief that many people would enjoy an alternative to football-even on the night of February 6.  He argued that the brilliant YPO was exactly the shot of spiritual adrenaline many people need-even if they didn't know it.  And the young musicians deserved the chance to show off the results of three months' hard work

 

"Now, might there be some people around the Boston area who, if they knew about it, would choose (the YPO) over watching the Patriots win the Super Bowl?" he asked.  "It's counter-intuitive, of course.  No one organizes a concert on Super Bowl night, which is why the hall was available.  Give up, Ben.  Just go with the (nay-sayers).  Well, yes, but what if people knew what this experience was going to be like?  I don't mean the real football fans, of course.  But the people who just watch the Super Bowl out of habit, without getting that much out of it. People who are looking to be inspired, moved, touched and entertained.  And those who feel proud that very young people in this area are some of the finest musicians of their age in the world. Proud of being part of a community that has so many superb young string players...For these listeners, hearing the YPO play the concert on February 6 is likely to be just as exciting, perhaps more so, than watching the Patriots shellac the Eagles."

 

            What can such listeners expect to hear at the YPO concert? 

 

            Well, consider the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations.  "The young soloist, Jacqueline Choi, is simply the most expressive cellist to come out of these parts since Yo-Yo Ma appeared at the same age," says Zander.  "...she dances and sings and embraces the audience with sheer love and joy.  There couldn't be a child who could more perfectly embody all we care about most in life. She has the fervor of a preacher, but without the slightest whiff of self importance."

 

            Then there is Gustav Holst's stirring and brilliantly scored orchestral suite The Planets.  "Can any orchestra in town make as much sound as the YPO strings in the motor rhythm of Mars-the Bringer of War?" Zander asks. "These blue-state kids see war as a personal affront and they pour their anger, with crushing ferocity, into every note."

 

            Finally, Ravel's sensuous Rapsodie espagnole.  "In the final movement, the whole orchestra turns into a wild Spanish dancing percussion section," Zander says. "...the whooping horns are led by a French horn principal from the Walnut Hill School who still has three more years in high school!"

 

            The YPO concert begins at 7 p.m.-plenty of time for listeners and players to get home for the final minutes of the Pats' victory and before any rowdiness by revelers in the streets.

Very interesting story linked in ArtsJournal about John Eliot Gardiner, and how he's making his own CDs. That's a growing trend, of course, and I should have mentioned it in my "dimensions of the crisis" point about classical recording. Musicians can make CDs on their own, and get their music out no matter what happens to classical record companies. The London Symphony does it, the San Francisco Symphony does it, composer Michael Torke has done it, and of course lots of people do it in pop. Why not? Take control of your own destiny!

But one especially wonderful thing about the Gardner story is the cover art for the CDs he's either released, or is about to release. The core of his CD self-production is a series of Bach cantata discs, eventually to include all of Bach's sacred cantatas, linked on CD by where they fit in the liturgical year, and recorded at historic sites. And just look at the covers! (Forgive me -- you'll have to click the link, and go to Gardiner's website to see them.) They might be the most heartstopping classical CD covers I've ever seen, illustrating (among other things, I'm sure) the universal message Gardiner feels is in Bach's music. Go on…click the link. You won't regret it.

I guess it's odd, at least from a conventional point of view, that the covers don't seem to say which cantatas are on each disc. But then if you're lucky enough to be browsing these releases in a record store, you can just look at the back, and find out what you want to know. (I'm assuming the back of the CD has all the usual information.) And if you're browsing them online, then the website will tell you.

Besides, one problem with classical CDs is all the verbiage everybody thinks has to be on the covers, which can make it hard to have striking art. I'm glad to see Gardiner going in the opposite direction, no matter how odd it might seem (at least to some people). One problem with classical music, as I've said over and over again, is that we don't seem to know how to tell people why they should listen to it. Gardiner's CD covers make quite an eloquent case.

Antonio Celaya e-mailed, quite wonderfully, from Oakland, California, about his experience with a wide-awake opera audience. With his permission, I'll share what he wrote. Thanks, Antonio!

Taruskin's description of baroque opera in Italy had much in common with a performance I attended recently.  In fact, after the performance I wrote to friends and compared my experience to what opera must have been like in Venice during carnavale. 

 

I attended the opening night of SF Opera's production of Ligeti's "Le Grand Macabre."  It was the night before Halloween.  Half the audience was in costume.  There was a cross dressing couple costumed as Pinkerton and Butterfly.  Death sat behind my wife and me.  One fellow in combat fatigues had a plastic automatic weapon with an enormous penis sticking out of the barrel.

 

The audience roared with every car horn tocatta.  The audience cheered references to the "Patriot Act."  I waited more than 25 years to hear that opera live, and it was worth the wait to get that bang of an introduction.

For the benefit of my Juilliard class -- and because I don't know any writing that sets forth, in full gory detail, the extent of the classical-music crisis -- I'm going to list some of the ways classical music is in trouble. I'm taking this from remarks I made on a panel at the music critics' conference in New York back in October.

1. There's less media coverage than there used to be, maybe drastically less. In the early '80s, as a critic/columnist for The Village Voice, I could write long and serious classical music essays. They don't run anything like that any more. The New York Times used to review every debut recital; they don't do that any more. Some newspapers don't even have classical critics. In 1980, Time magazine wrote about classical music twice as often as it wrote about pop; by 1990, the proportions were reversed. This isn't some evil media plot, as some classical purists seem to think. It's a change in cultural weather, the natural result of people being less interested in classical music than they once were. The editors who make these decisions simply share the taste of their readers.

2. There's less classical music on the radio, both on commercial classical stations (there are fewer of them) and on public radio. To some extent, this reflects a more competitive -- or, if you like, greedier -- corporate climate: Even if classical stations are profitable, their owners can make more money from pop. But the public radio situation is really dire. At WNYC in New York, fully 80% of everyone listening turned the dial away when "Morning Edition" ended, and classical music began. That's why WNYC cut back on classical programming. Not only were people not listening; they were actively turning away.

3. Major classical record labels hardly record classical music any more. Again, this to some extent reflects a changed corporate climate. Major record labels are owned by huge media companies, which expect serious profits from each of their divisions. Plus, looking back a generation, record companies learned in the late '60s and the '70s how much money they could make from pop (when bands started selling millions of albums, instead of just millions of singles). The companies may well have wondered why they should settle for smaller profits from classical. But this is more than corporate greed; again we're talking about a change in cultural weather. Back in the '60s, and of course earlier, it seemed natural that large record companies should support serious classical divisions. They did this not simply for money, but also for prestige, and out of genuine interest. In the '40s, after all (and in earlier decades), classical radio broadcasts had reached millions of listeners, and NBC (one of the big radio networks) had even created an orchestra for Toscanini. Some of that spirit lived on into the age of television, but as the decades marched on, the record companies cared less and less. Not long ago, a spokesman for BMG, commenting on the Sony/BMG merger, turned out to have no idea that BMG had legendary classical artists in its catalogue. Classical music, it seemed, didn't matter to him at all.

4. Going along with a decline in major-label classical recording is a decline in classical record stores. Only a decade ago, there were five serious classical record departments in New York, at the two Tower Records branches, at two HMV stores, and at J&R Music World. J&R has decimated its classical department, the two HMV stores have closed, and Tower teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. The classical department at its downtown store is smaller than it used to be. More to the point, though, is the complete disappearance of stores selling any large number of classical records in smaller cities, and even some large ones. There simply isn't a market. And when I go to the Tower Records classical departments in New York, and see how comparatively empty they are, I wonder how Tower can sustain them. How can any store -- especially in a city where real estate costs as much as it does in New York -- afford to maintain so much space that generates so comparatively few sales?

5. Classical records are now largely subsidized. This is the dirty little secret of the classical record industry. Look at a serious classical recording -- especially something large-scale, like an orchestral performance, or an opera -- and you'll usually find private sponsors. Even the Metropolitan Opera's commercial recording of Wagner's Ring was at least to some extent privately funded. (Or so the Met's press department once confirmed to me, while remaining cagy about exactly how much of the cost the private donors paid.) What this means is that very few classical recordings are actually commercial, as, back in the 1950s and 1960s, almost all classical records (even on small labels) once were. It's important to remember this when you look at the vast array of small classical labels, many of them putting out notable, even compelling releases. How many of these labels are actually paying for those recordings? Or, maybe more to the point, how many of these recordings earn what they cost to make? Most, from everything I've heard, aren't even expected to earn much money. Instead, they're financed by the musicians who make them. Or else the record companies themselves are non-profit entities, supported by private funds.

6. There's been a decline of state support for classical music in Europe. There's also been a decline of government support here, but that doesn't matter so much, because it was small to begin with, not much more than 3% or so of large classical institutions' budgets. (Often, though, government support has supplied a higher percentage of what small institutions spend, so they're hurt by the decline in arts funding). But in Europe and especially in the former communist countries, the decline in government arts support has sent orchestras and opera companies scrambling to find new sources of funds. (And, again, whatever the economic factors might be -- governments, for many reasons, are finding it hard to pay for all sorts of things -- there's also, once again, a change of cultural weather. Classical music, which often draws small audiences even in Europe, isn't as important to people as it used to be.)

7. Nonesuch, once an exclusively classical label, now records many things that aren't classical. This is worth mentioning for many reasons, the first one being that Nonesuch is one of the few labels that really does have commercial success with classical music. But maybe it's better to put this a little differently, and say that Nonesuch is one of the few commercially successful labels willing to record serious classical stuff (almost everything John Adams writes, for instance). Behind this different phrasing lies the reality that Nonesuch doesn't necessarily make money from its classical releases. Instead, it makes money from things like the Buena Vista Social Club, its wildly successful Cuban band. Not that there's anything wrong with Buena Vista Social Club, or with any of the Nonesuch pop artists, like Sam Phillips and Emmylou Harris. And this is the second reason the change in Nonesuch is important. Nonesuch, formerly a classical label, now has become more generally an art music label, with art music not necessarily defined as classical. (And, in fact, largely defined as not classical.) This doesn't only reflect realities in the market. It also reflects changing tastes, and changing artistic realities, including what ought to be obvious to anyone who takes music seriously -- that pop long ago evolved its own forms of art music, and that this is what educated, cultured, intellectual people tend to listen to. Listen to, that is, instead of classical music.

8. In Britain there's been a decline in people studying the less popular orchestral instruments, like the viola and the bassoon. This has been documented in several British newspaper stories linked here in ArtsJournal. According to some of these stories, the decline has been drastic. No such thing has happened in America, as far as I know (and I've made some inquiries). But if it did happen, that would be bad. Where would orchestras be a generation from now, without violists or bassoonists?

9. Performing arts centers don't book as many classical performances as they used to. This was documented in the '90s by a story in the New York Times, written by (if I remember this correctly) a former Times culture editor who seemed absolutely shocked at what he learned -- that arts centers, in order to attract an audience and pay their bills -- had to book non-classical music. Last year I was on a panel about the future of classical music, at the huge annual conference of the Association of Arts Presenters. Several people who came to this panel discussion got up to say that at their arts centers, chamber music concerts were attracting smaller and smaller audiences, and that if the trend continued, it simply wouldn't be cost-effective to present chamber music at all. (This year I was on a panel again, this time to talk about the relation of high and popular culture. Everybody at the discussion, panelists and audience alike, seemed to agree that high culture wasn't a useful concept any more.)

10. For 20 years or more, there's been a steady decline in subscription sales. Orchestras, which once sold around 80% of their seats by subscription, now sell around 60%. Some orchestra marketing directors (and other people involved in selling tickets to other performing arts events) think this decline is speeding up, and may have reached the proverbial tipping point, at which the trend becomes a stampede. Whether that's true or not, a decline in subscription sales is a serious problem for orchestras and opera companies (and, I think, for dance and theater companies, too), because these institutions aren't all that good at selling single tickets -- which would cost more, and probably require a larger marketing department. Even as things stand, orchestras spend more money (even adjusted for inflation) than they used to, to sell fewer seats (see below).

11. There's been a steady, 10-year decline in orchestral ticket sales. At some orchestras (Baltimore, for instance, or Pittsburgh) this has been quite dramatic (though sometimes there are special reasons for the decline -- in Pittsburgh, for instance, the population of the city has been shrinking). Some orchestras, of course, have done well, and figures I saw for the Big Five (New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston) showed sales generally declining only one or two percent. But for orchestras generally, sales have been slipping, and recently that's become true for opera companies as well, despite the notion, left over from the boom of the '90s, that opera companies are thriving, and even appealing to a younger audience. That, I'm afraid, is yesterday's news. (Some orchestra people I've talked to, marketing directors included, simply say that fewer people want to go to classical concerts. Once again, we're talking about a change in the cultural weather.)

12. The audience does seem to be growing older. I've massaged some National Endowment for the Arts statistics to show, at least to my satisfaction, that both the classical music and opera audiences (broken out separately by the NEA) have gotten older in the past two decades -- and, most crucially, have aged more than the population at large. The American Symphony Orchestra League says that the orchestra audience is now, on the average, 57 years old, as opposed to 55 years old not long ago. Subscribers, I'm told, are older. And while people in the classical music business tend to believe that the audience has always been this old, there isn't much data to support that. Nor is there much data to say it isn't true, but for whatever it's worth, a study of American orchestras in the 1930s reported that the average age of the audience was around 30! This news was based only on information from two orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the orchestra in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but the authors of the study didn't seem surprised by it, leading me to believe that they knew (from their own experience at concerts, for instance) that audiences, generally speaking, were more or less that young.

13. I've heard rumblings about a very troubling trend -- a 20-year pattern of orchestras' expenses rising faster than their income. I don't know how well documented this is, but I certainly know sober people in the orchestra world who think it's a fact. Along with this goes talk of "structural deficits" -- a long-term trend for orchestras to spend more than they take in (or could possibly take in). This trend, if you believe the people who talk about it, was masked during the '90s, by the economic boom, but now has returned with a vengeance.

14. And that leads directly to my next point, that orchestras are asking their musicians to accept lower pay. We see this over and over, when orchestras, even the largest, negotiate new contracts, though it's sometimes (or maybe all too often) hidden by settlements in which the musicians agree to take lower pay, or the same pay, for a year or two, followed by increases later on. Privately, though, you'll hear people in the business saying that orchestras can't afford those settlements. And a long-term struggle seems to be taking shape, in which orchestra boards and managements are starting to insist that they simply can't pay what musicians have made in the past -- pay levels that musicians have understandably come to expect (and have built their lives around, incurring mortgages, as anybody would, based on what their past salaries lead them to believe they can pay). Something to watch in the future -- the 52-week contracts most large orchestras give their musicians. How long will these be affordable?

15. Speaking in private, orchestra managers strike me as more pessimistic than they let themselves be in public. In fact, throughout the classical music there's a sense of crisis. This becomes, in a way, a kind of tautology -- there's a crisis in classical music because the classical music world thinks there is on. But people in classical music really do think the field is in trouble, and the classical music world is honeycombed with people looking for, and generating, new ideas. The radical stuff I've been saying for years now goes over far better than it used to. In fact, people now hire me to tell them things or suggest ideas that used to seem vastly surprising. This, too, is a measure of how things have changed -- the classical music world now expects change to happen, and is trying to figure out what the changes ought to be. As I've often (and very happily) said, the most widely read piece of classical music writing in years was Alex Ross's long and excited piece about the future of classical music, which appeared in The New Yorker almost a year ago. It's as radical as anything ever written on these subjects, and people in the field just ate it up. I haven't heard anyone disagree with it. And why, in a field as conservative as classical music, would people be so eager for change if they thought things could still work the way they used to? Not, of course, that people don't look to the future with some excitement, as well as worry. Echoing still in my mind is something a dean at a major music school said some months ago, at a small, private discussion about the future of professional music education (I've quoted this here before): "Classical music is like East Germany a month before the wall came down."

That's a good note to end on. Someone I know, who writes about classical music but isn't sure there's a crisis, asked me to include some hopeful things if I ever published the list you've just read, and I'm happy to oblige. The delight in change I just mentioned is one hopeful thing. So many people I've spoken to, some in very high positions in the classical music world, can hardly wait for change, not just because it will save their careers and their institutions, but because it will make classical music more lively, more fun, and even more artistic.

And then there's the younger generation. No, young people aren't buying tickets to classical concerts (and it's fair to ask whether -- given the way classical music is receding in our culture -- they'll ever buy tickets in the future, even when they're 60). But some of them still study classical music. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of young musicians. Youth orchestras, from everything I've heard, are thriving; there's no fall-off in kids applying to music schools.

Combine that with the new longing for change, and classical music might just have a future.

I knew something was wrong -- at least to me -- just a few bars into the overture, when I saw Handel's Rodelinda at the Met last month. I feel a little churlish saying this, because the production was lovely and serious, and the Met orchestra, in part simply because the strings played without much vibrato, transformed itself into a passable version of a period instrument ensemble.

But still I thought something was wrong. The orchestra sounded too thin. At intermission I did exactly what I later found someone else in the music business had done (a Handel and bel canto expert who used to work closely with the likes of Joan Sutherland) -- I rushed down to the orchestra pit to count the players. By my rough count, there were just over 30.

And I submit that this is drastically wrong. The Met is a huge opera house, seating just under 4000 people. Handel never saw a theater like that, but if he had, he wouldn't have been happy with 35 musicians (or whatever the number was) in his orchestra. He and other Baroque musicians had that many or more in the smaller halls they played in. If he'd produced one of his operas at the Met, he'd have doubled or even tripled the orchestra.

Of course, that would have made a far more assertive sound than the Met orchestra made. And maybe someone thinks that's wrong in Baroque music. Somehow we've gotten the idea that Baroque music is purer and more restrained than everything that came after it. And this, quite simply, is nonsense. The very word "Baroque" should suggest the opposite. It means elaborate and flamboyant, sometimes even with grotesque overtones, and with more than a small a suggestion of wild ornamentation and unabashed theatricality. "Really, I can't stand her new house. It's insanely overdecorated, positively baroque!"

Or as the Chambers Dictionary (my favorite) defines the word, it's "a bold, vigorous, exuberant style in architecture, decoration, and art generally…degenerating into tasteless extravagance in ornament." Of course, "tasteless extravagance" is very much in eye (or, musically, in the ear) of the beholder, and we know that singers in Baroque opera seria -- and especially the castrati -- ornamented their music far more than anyone does today. Let's not forget what I quoted a few posts ago from Richard Taruskin's new five-volume history of Western music:

The liberties singers were expected to take with the written music, and had to take or lose all respect, would be thought a virtually inconceivably desecration today. [His emphasis.]

And if you believe René Jacobs, one of the best early-music conductors around, Baroque orchestras did much the same thing. On his recording of Handel's opera Rinaldo you can hear all kinds of orchestral improvisation, with some passages written in the score for all the violins played instead by a soloist, precisely to allow for elaborate ornaments.

So the Met's Rodelinda, even if it was careful and artistic, was from any true historical point of view a travesty. You could even say it became a travesty precisely by being -- from our point of view, which is not the Baroque era's view -- artistic and careful. The singers, for instance, used only very modest ornaments (and Renée Fleming, in the title role, sang cadenzas that sounded like they belonged in a Verdi opera, but that's another story).

And the plot, God help us, was set forth as if it was supposed to make sense! That's yet another problem. One admiring person in the audience said, deeply impressed, that she'd learned to accept and even loved the slow dramatic pace. Now, a slow dramatic pace certainly seems to be inherent in opera seria, which was made up for the most part of inflexible da capo arias, one after another after another, stretching out for hours. A story told in that fashion certainly isn't the kind of story we're used to.

But in the Baroque era, hardly anyone -- maybe nobody at all -- paid anything like that kind of attention! Handel was very good at writing arias that fit (and sometimes even deepened) each character onstage (even if he borrowed some of them from other operas). He even sometimes abandons the da capo format, as he strikingly does in the prison scene in the last act of Rodelinda, where an aria suddenly dissolves into accompanied recitative, as if to underline the pathos of a character who's been imprisoned.

So Handel wrote with at least an occasional eye toward drama. But mostly he was creating a spectacle for a commercial audience, which, if all went well, would yell and scream its approval. From what I've read, contemporary accounts of these performances never talk about the characters. Instead, they describe what the singers did. They were like somebody in our time talking about some fabulous movie classic like Gone with the Wind: "So then Clark Gable says to Vivien Leigh…"

And because the point of the da capo arias was singing, not drama, nobody wondered, when one of the arias began, how it would advance the plot, or deepen any sense of character. Instead, people wondered how the singer would ornament the repeat. They wondered what kind of dresses the women would wear -- the more scandalously low-cut, the better. Sometimes they wondered whether the singers would get into fights onstage (which memorably happened when Handel was foolish enough to star two prima donnas in the same opera -- and we're talking here, by the way, of a wild physical fight, not just a shouting match).

Most of all, the audience marveled at the castrati (though I'd think that in Handel's London almost all the singers seemed fabulously exotic, because most of them were Italian). We may think that the presence of castrated men on stage, singing heroic leading roles, represents some kind of Baroque-era taste for strong high voices, but there's much more to it than that. People in the 18th century, after all, had healthy appetites for both sex and sexual gossip, and the castrati were living, breathing -- and, very often, lustily fornicating -- sexual scandals. Some were gay, some were straight; none could get a woman pregnant, so they made very attractive lovers.

And beyond that, they were illegal. From what I've read, it wasn't legal to castrate boys for musical purposes, so the castrati had to have ridiculous cover stories. "Oh, a goose pecked me when I was a boy." So the castrati, in a way, were like bootleg liquor during Prohibition, omnipresent, despite laws against them, but (because they weren't legal) always racy and titillating.

I'd love to see a production that reflected all this, that showed us what Baroque opera was really like. Of course, we could imagine that Handel didn't want it that way, that he really wanted everything to be sober and dramatic. But there's no evidence for such a belief (or at least none that I've ever read or heard about); I'd think that, to the extent that we can realistically judge his intentions, Handel expected to convey drama through the existing conventions of Baroque opera, which meant flamboyant craziness.

Oh, and why does this matter? Quite apart, that is, from the fun we'd have with a truly Baroque (and, not capitalized, baroque) Handel production. Well, we take classical music so damn seriously. We imagine that it ought to be serious and, for lack of a better word, respectful. And in doing that, we trample on its past -- a past that ought to show us the opposite of what we've come to believe, namely that classical music often ought to be loose and wild and fun.

Here's something that happened at a concert at Symphony Space in New York, given jointly by the Ying Quartet and the Turtle Island String Quartet. It was a brave event for the Yings. The Turtle Island String Quartet plays jazz and improvises, the Yings normally don't. But (though only their cellist improvised at this concert) they stretched themselves very happily into Turtle Island territory. This in itself is a sign of changes happening in classical music, but that's not the only thing I want to mention here.

What especially struck me is what happened during the first piece on the program, a Mendelssohn quartet that the Yings played alone. After the first movement, there was lusty (and well-deserved) applause from the audience. And who was that audience? A large part of it was people from the annual Chamber Music America conference, being held a few subway stops downtown. So if the professionals are applauding between movements -- well, I'd say that's another very big nail in the coffin of the idea that we're not supposed to do that.

On January 8 I spoke on a panel at the National Opera Association convention. This was a panel of very diverse composers -- myself, Ned Rorem, John Eaton, Eric Salzman, and Jack Beeson. I don't want to diminish what anyone said (Ned, as always, was adorably Ned; Jack was wonderfully witty; Eric had forceful things to say about music theater that isn't opera, and doesn't use operatic singing), but I was especially taken with John, whom, alone of this group, I'd never met before. His presentation fell into three parts. First a fetching anecdote about a priest who didn't want him to play electronic music in church, because "God doesn't like it."

"You talk as if God has rigid taste," said John.

"He does!" said the priest.

Then, without warning, John presented his views on microtonal music, which he's written extensively. And then he played excerpts from two of his operas. It was quite wonderful to hear music, actual music, on a music business panel. And, as I said at the start of my own remarks, if by playing his music John was doing self-promotion, bravo! Composers need all the help they can get.

I talked about my own return to composition, and also to the opera world, which in the 1980s I was very much part of. But then I left it, first to be a pop critic, and then to concentrate on new music and orchestras. Recently I've returned, now and then, and can spend very happy times with singers and conductors, dishing the opera world (especially the Met), and (of course) promoting my own work.

But I also see the opera world from outside. I had to drive into New York from my country place to be on this panel, and on the drive I listened to Jonathan Schwarz's show on WNYC, New York's public radio station. (It's also on Sirius satellite radio.) Schwarz is a New York radio legend, and I'm very late in discovering him for myself. I could say that he plays pop standards, but that would be like saying Mozart wrote a few tunes. On the afternoon of my panel, Schwarz played part of a Sinatra recording session, including a first take of "Days of Wine and Roses" that sounded just about as good as anyone could be, and then a second take that, for sheer craft, artistry, ease, and attitude, wiped the first take out.

Then, to celebrate what would have been Harold Arlen's 100th birthday, Schwarz played Aretha Franklin singing an Arlen song -- breathtaking, sassy, triumphant -- with expert jazz piano accompaniment, recorded live. And then, to celebrate Sondheim's 75th birthday, the beginnings of three Sondheim shows, each indelible, each different from the others. Then Dolly Parton (!), some world music Schwarz heard on John Schaefer's "Soundcheck" show on WNYC, Peggy Lee and Judy Garland singing a duet on TV…all this singing, I said on the panel, was so much sharper, both rhythmically and in the way the singers handled words, than opera singing. I'd rather have my music sung this way than the way opera singers -- with their often measured, portentous tread -- usually sing it.

Then, I said, we could look at opera's past, at the way opera seria was performed in 18th century Italy. We imagine that Baroque music was restrained and dignified, but nothing could be further from the truth. Because, I said, nobody would believe me if I described in my own words what opera seria was like, I quoted Richard Taruskin, from his new, formidable, and feisty Oxford History of Western Music. Here's some of what Taruskin says:

The liberties singers were expected to take with the written music, and had to take or lose all respect, would be thought a virtually inconceivably desecration today. But that was the very least of it. [One castrato] was actually arrested and imprisoned…for "disturbing the other performers, acting in a manner bordering on lasciviousness (on stage) with one of the female singers, conversing with the spectators in the boxes from the stage, ironically echoing whichever member of the company was singing an aria"…

[The] audience…was famed throughout Europe for its sublime inattention.… [As one writer reports] "noise levels astonished diarists from abroad, nobility arrived with servants who cooked who meals, talked, played [at cards[, and relieved themselves in the antechambers that stood in back of each lavish box.…

There is no comparable genre in classical music today. The modern counterpart of the opera seria castrato is the improvising jazz ("scat") or pop singer.…However inattentive during recitatives…the audience sprang to attention when the primo uomo held forth, egging him on with applause and spontaneous shots of encouragement at each vocal feat.

I wasn't saying all this to make a sensation, I said. Instead I wanted to suggest that if opera was more like this today, then things would be better for composers. Opera would be more informal and more contemporary. It would be more popular; there would be much more of it; and no matter how populist the operatic mainstream might be, there would be plenty of room on the fringes for art (just as there is in pop music today).

Happy new year, everyone. I didn't think I'd be coming back from my holiday to news of a strike (or lockout). St. Louis, everybody always says, is a happy orchestra, and at least, in the middle of this sad news, it preserves its reputation in one way -- all the reports I've gotten, from the press and from personal sources, tell me that management and the musicians have remained friendly.

I'm hardly going to take sides, or try to sort out every major detail of all the issues involved. But one thing seems clear. Management thinks it's more important to shore up the orchestra's longterm finances; the musicians think it's more important to keep their salaries reasonable. This summary isn't completely fair, because both management and musicians would say they share both goals. Still, there's a certain sum of money that's in dispute, because management wants to put it to long-term use, and the musicians either want it put toward their pay, or else have more money raised.

Both sides, obviously, have their points. Ideally, both would get what they want. The orchestra, if that happened, would only be stronger.

But what if there's a larger issue? What if orchestras -- with their current budgets, and current sources of income -- just can't sustain themselves? What if major orchestras have no business playing 52-week seasons, with their musicians making the salaries they currently make? What if the support for that -- ticket sales, donations -- just isn't there? What if, behind the current crisis, is a cultural shift, slowly gathering speed in the past decade, but now maybe moving faster, away from classical music? What if people just don't care about classical music as much as they used to?

Only yesterday I talked with a high-ranking staff member of a major orchestra, who agreed that a cultural shift might be going on. We'd been talking about how badly ticket sales had gone for his orchestra this fall. And his orchestra wasn't alone, he added. Many orchestras had a hard time in the past few months, he said (something I've heard elsewhere as well). Could a cultural shift be the reason? I asked. Very possible, he said -- and, again, he's not alone in saying that.

Of course, there could be other, more immediate causes for any current fall in ticket sales. People who're afraid of larger trends might be overly alarmed. Some orchestras are doing well. Maybe they've got secrets nobody else has yet figured out.

But maybe the larger trend is really dire. Maybe all the graphs point downward. And if that's true, what then? Let me be very clear that I'm not supporting management in this. I'm not writing this as some sort of lecture to musicians, telling them to moderate their demands, so they won't force their orchestras out of business. Musicians have every right to be paid the way other top professionals are, and if orchestras say they can't do that, musicians have every right to ask why.

But what if the trends are really downward? What if even major orchestras can't sustain themselves (and their musicians)? What will happen then?