February 2005 Archives

It's also helpful if someone -- trashing or loving some work of art -- gives some space to the other side. That's especially helpful if the art in question is controversial, extreme, not well known, or widely misunderstood.

For instance, when I write about Cage's 4'33", I could reach out a hand to everyone who can't abide the piece, everyone who sits there during a performance, going wild with boredom or nervousness, wishing the silence would go away. (Though, in the '80s, writing my column in The Village Voice, I had no patience with Edward Banfield, a political scientist who wrote a book attacking arts funding from the government. He based a lot of his argument on the silliness, as he saw it, of artworks like the Cage, but when I met him, he turned out to have no idea what Cage thought the point of the piece was supposed to be. He'd made no attempt to understand what he was attacking, which -- to put it mildly -- weakened his argument. And in the end, he turned out to favor public funding of art he thought was good for people, which meant his entire argument was bogus, but that's another story.)

If I get ecstatic over Antonioni's L'avventura (one of my all-time artistic touchstones), I might acknowledge that many people find the film slow, mannered, obvious, or incomprehensible.

And if I ever want to say (again) that John Harbison's The Great Gatsby is an opera that isn't very strong as theater, I should also say that the music is beautifully written and often beautiful, and that the piece is wholly serious, so it's in no way a negligible work, no matter what I think is wrong with it.

Hilton Kramer, and his assault on the poor, harmless gates (linked from ArtsJournal today)…I really have to laugh. Of course the guy's a long-time curmudgeon, but he doesn't say a thing about what's wrong (in his view) with this Christo/Jeanne-Claude artwork -- just that they're a "defacement" of Central Park, an "assault on nature," and a "wanton desecration of a precious work of art." In these last two points, he's incoherent, since the "wanton desecration" comes about because Central Park is a masterpiece of landscape art, which means the gates can hardly be an "assault on nature," since the park -- created by landscaping -- isn't wholly natural.

Mainly, though, the gates are coming down after February 27! So why bother if you hate them? Others love them, and they're going away. Of course, Kramer's real issue is the state of art, as he perceives it, and the crime (in his view) of considering anything like this art…but that's an old tired argument. Let's forget about it.

Today I finally saw The Gates. Walked through Central Park on a gray day, with snow looming. I loved them. They're festive, even in today's weather, and surely more so with sun on them. They make the park smile, or add a special smile to it. It's a little like the feeling you get when you show up for a lavish outdoor party, with a tent pitched on a lawn, and maybe banners or flags flying. That's what The Gates do for Central Park, something really fun, and also temporary (which is part of why it's fun).

But there's more. As you walk along the walkways in the park, with the gates over them (with gaps, sometimes, which makes them not at all routine, even when you're used to them), you see other lines of gates curving elsewhere. So you're aware of more than just the gates you're near. Soon I realized I was seeing what I began to call the circulatory system of the park, the many paths and walkways that curve through it. Of course I've always known they're there. I've been walking on them since I was a child. But I've never been so clearly aware of them. The park took on a new kind of life.

And then the gates are alive. They catch the sunlight, if there is any, and they flap and billow in the wind. If there's enough wind, you hear the flapping. And the wind patterns surprised me. At one point, I saw a row of gates ahead of me flapping lustily, when all the other gates around them were hardly moving. The gates bring the winds of Central Park alive; they make visible something that's always there, but that before now there wasn't any way for anyone to see. ("Visible" isn't quite strong enough; they make the wind almost physically tangible.)

Then finally there's the color scheme -- the orange of the gates floating over all the other colors in the park, especially the colors of the clothes that everyone is wearing. The "saffron" -- as Jeanne-Claude and Christo like to call the color of their work; I'd just say "orange" -- turns out to be a savvy color choice. All the other colors, blues and reds especially, seemed deeper, and more physical.

In all these ways, The Gates transform the park. They make you see and feel it differently. That's art enough for me.

A footnote to the above. When we read someone trash The Gates as Hilton Kramer trashes them, how can we know whether to take the trashing seriously? Or, conversely, if someone praises something, how can we assess the praise?

Here are some ideas. When someone trashes something -- or, at the other end of the spectrum, praises something wildly -- we need to understand whether they actually know anything about what they're trashing or praising. We can judge that from how they praise or trash. Do they mention anything specific about the work they're judging? Do you get a feeling for what it is, and how you might feel if you experienced it? Just about the highest praise I can give to any piece of criticism is to say, "Well, I see what this critic means, but she's described the piece so clearly that I can form at least a tentative opinion of my own."

Second, does the critic hate (or love) everything by this artist, or in this artist's style -- and does he or she hate (or love) it all equally? Can the critic, in other words, judge the work with any nuance? Are all Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's pieces equally hateful to Hilton Kramer, or can he see differences between them, and hate some less than others? Once I looked up several Andrew Porter reviews of music by Elliott Carter, and Andrew -- fine a critic as he is -- failed this test. Each Carter piece, as he described it, emerged as an inimitable masterpiece, and that just doesn't seem possible.

Humans being what they are, I'd expect some Carter pieces to be more successful than others, but even the possibility of such a thing didn't emerge in Andrew's reviews. I'd have to wonder, then, if he loves Carter so blindly that his descriptions of the music (no matter how full of fascinating insights they might be) really can be trusted. (Kramer's piece about The Gates, of course, fails all these tests with a dull, thick thud.)

I was in Paris this past weekend, and went to the Louvre, where somehow I'd never been. Of course I had to see the Mona Lisa, which turns out to be three art pieces, all happening at the same time, layered on top of each other.

The first, of course, is the painting itself, which is more impressive -- it has more presence, for one thing -- than I'd guessed from reproductions. I wish it were displayed with other Leonardos, especially if its smile is one of its attractions. Other faces in other Leonardos at the Louvre also have sly, surprising smiles.

The second art piece is the crowd around the painting, like nothing I've ever seen in any gallery or museum. People pressing forward to see the great attraction, cameras and cell phones raised above their heads to take photos of it. God help anyone who wants to see the art displayed next to the Mona Lisa; there's no way to look at it in piece, nowhere even to stand where anyone could see it clearly. But the crowd is fascinating, a performance piece in itself, or rather people creating a performance piece they're unaware of. (On April 5, the Mona Lisa is moving to a new location. That will free the art around it now, and, with any luck, supply an even better stage for the crowd performance.)

And the third piece -- the most intriguing of the three (especially since there's no way to look very hard at Leonardo's work) -- is created by the camera flashes. They're reflected in the glass that protects the painting. You see both the flashes, and the red warning lights that sometimes tell you that a flash is about to go off. Some flashes are long, some are short. Some are single flares; some are repeated bursts. You see them flaring up at the corners of the painting, in the center, in every quadrant of it, no two in the same place. Sometimes you see just little points of light.

I stood there, watching all these flashes for minutes on end. I'd love to make a film of them -- just the reflected flashes, not the cameras, the cell phones, or the people in the crowd (though I imagine the film would show faint echoes of the people). If I made this film, the camera wouldn't move. It would be like some of Andy Warhol's films, especially Empire, in which, for just over eight hours, an unmoving camera simply shows us a nighttime view of the Empire State Building from a window many blocks away. I haven't seen all of it (I doubt it's made for that), but in the portion I did see, I was drawn to windows in the other buildings visible in the unchanging shot, whose lights at long, uncertain intervals might wink on or off.

My film would be a lot more active; the flashes (for whatever length the film might last, perhaps whatever hours the Louvre's open to the public, on an average day) would never stop. I'd find them fascinating. (This follows, I think, from the kind of attention John Cage's 4'33" creates in anyone who takes it seriously. I don't mean to toot my horn in saying that, or to praise people who like Cage's silent piece, over those who don't get it. I'm only suggesting that it can open us to many things we might not otherwise notice.)

A painting by Giovanni Paolo Pannini, "Fête musicale donné par le cardinal de La Rochefoucauld au théatre Argentina de Rome en 1747 sur l'occasion du mariage du Dauphin, fils de Louis XV." ("Musical celebration given by the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld at the Theater Argentina in Rome in 1747 on the occasion of the marriage of the Dauphin, son of Louis XV.")

As its title would suggest, this painting shows a large and rather formal concert. There's an orchestra of (by my count) just over 70 musicians, which certainly supports the point I made here earlier about large orchestras in the Baroque era, and how unhistorically paltry the 30-odd musicians in the Met's orchestra for Rodelinda were.

But what's most interesting is the audience. (You can see the painting on the Louvre's site, by the way, but it's hard to make out any detail.) It's clearly full of distinguished people. In the first rows of seats in front of the stage (the seats we'd call the "orchestra"), are cardinals, seen from behind, but identifiable by their red skullcaps. And in the rows behind them are other clerics, whose skullcaps are black. There are also what I take to be aristocrats, finely dressed men with long hair.

And what's happening while the cardinals, bishops, priests, and noblemen listen to this formal, festive music? People circulate throughout the crowd selling drinks. Many members of the audience are talking, especially in the space behind the last row of seats, where aristocrats are standing, chatting with each other. But there's also someone standing between the first and second rows of seats -- standing with his back to the stage, talking to two clerics in the second row.

Clearly this isn't our idea of a formal concert. But, equally clearly (and of course what it shows is borne out by other evidence, including other paintings), it's what happened in the 18th century. Arrayed along the sides of the hall are tiers of boxes, with mostly women sitting in them. (Or, anyway, a lot of the people in the boxes are women; my memory isn't entirely clear on this point, though I remember vividly that there aren't any women either in the seats in front of the stage, or standing in the space behind those seats.)

Some of the people in the boxes are reading, presumably (since the books they're reading are all the same size) following the text of the work that's being performed, which is for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. Others are talking, and many are checking each other out, looking not at the stage but at the other boxes, seeing who's there and what they're doing. Some of the people in the seats below are looking upward at the boxes, also checking out who's in them.

Of course this wasn't just any musical performance, but a special event, created by an important dignitary to celebrate a great event -- and still the audience didn't have to listen silently. Note also that (if I interpret a note on the Louvre's website correctly) the Cardinal de la Rouchefoucauld commissioned the painting as well as the music. So if he was satisfied with it, as we have to assume he must have been (or else the painting might not have survived), he himself must have found the behavior of the audience absolutely normal.

The disposition of the orchestra, by the way, is very striking. The instruments are placed on stage on several levels, and are arrayed on each level in symmetrical groups. On the lowest level, there are cellos in the middle, with basses on either side of them, and a timpanist next to each group of basses. The next level has strings in the middle, and on the left and right, bassoons and oboes (two of each on each side). On the highest level, flanking the chorus, are trumpets, again on each side.

This is fascinating. We wouldn't think of arranging an orchestra this way, but someone did in 1747. I'd love to hear how it sounded, with the bass instruments in the front, the core of strings in the middle, and the instruments whose sound adds color to the strings -- timpani, oboes, bassoons, and trumpets -- placed along the sides. Clearly the timpani, oboes, bassoons, and trumpets are doubled, which is one way to take what looks in the score like a baroque ensemble, and make it large. That is, the score would call for one timpanist, two oboes, two bassoons, and two trumpets, but in performance they had two groups of each instrument playing the same music.

In the middle of the orchestra stands a violinist, clearly leading the performance on his violin. (The other strings are sitting.)

And what's downright weird is that there aren't any music stands. The entire orchestra seems to be playing from memory. This I find really hard to believe, though I confess that I don't have enough musicological knowledge to state firmly that it couldn't happen. Still -- in an age when performances were (by our standards) barely rehearsed�I just can't imagine that they played from memory. Maybe Pannini just didn't bother with the music stands. Which of course raises issues about how reliable paintings are as evidence of performance practice (an issue raised a lot with medieval paintings that show music being performed). But because this painting shows what both other paintings and written evidence confirm, I believe it's accurate.

We need to revise a lot of what we think we know about classical music and its history. For instance, how the audience behaves. We take for granted our current practice, which of course is that the audience sits silently, not even applauding between movements. Of course, we're starting to ease up on that -- applause between movements doesn't seem completely forbidden any more.

But what most of us don't know is how recent our current rules for the audience are. They may date only from the middle of the last century. I've made a great fuss about Mozart's famous letter, about the audience applauding the moment they heard something they liked in his Paris Symphony. But that's just the tip of this iceberg.

My faithful correspondent Barney Sherman, from KSUI/WSUI in Iowa City, who has educated me about many things, offered these fascinating -- and most important -- bits of history in an e-mail he sent both to me and Alex Ross. With his permission, here's what he said (slightly abridged):

1) Re Mahler: I notice this passage from Fred Gaisberg in a Sept. 1944 article for Gramophone, "Recording from Actual Performances," quoted in the liner notes of the Dutton reissue of the 1938 Mahler 9 by the Vienna Phil led by Walter. Regarding that session, Gaisberg writes, "A switchboard control box was in the charge of the senior engineer, Charlie Gregory, who was advised by a musician who followed the performance with a full score and indicated the traps that had to be avoided, such as sudden forte timpani blows or extreme pianissimos and fortissimos; also when at the end of a movement the current had to be closed off before the applause began."

Wait --applause in Vienna, less than 30 years after Mahler's death, at the end of each movement? Of the Ninth?? Led by Walter????  

 

(2) Oliver Daniel' s book Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View (New York, 1982)  reveals the true culprit. In chapter 31, which recounts in fascinating detail how Stokowski browbeat the audiences in Philadelphia for arriving late etc., there's a discussion of applause on pp. 288-89. First, there's the following, based on the author's conversation with Henry Pleasants:

 

"Henry Pleasants remarked, 'When we go to concerts today and late-comers are not admitted and there is no applause between movements, I think that Stokowski was very largely responsible for that. He objected to applause. He used to say why do they make all that terrible sound and he scared the audience into not applauding between movements and to coming on time and not leaving before the end of the concert, and that was back in the 1920s.'"

 

Daniel continues, based on Musical America in Nov. 25, 1929, and on Herbert Kupferberg's Fabulous Philadelphians:

 

"When the audience burst into spontaneous volleys of applause after the pizzicato movement of the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony during a concert on November 8, 1929, Stoki turned, signaled for silence, and explained that his remarks were not intended as a rebuke for their appreciation. 'But,' he added reflectively, 'I have been considering this matter of applause, a relic from the Dark Ages, a survival of customs at some rite or ceremonial dance in primitive times. When the request program blanks are circulated toward the close of the season I may incorporate a questionnaire on the applause topic and ask for you opinion.' He then proceeded to conduct the last movement , and as if to show their attitude, the audience again applauded lustily.

 

"Along with a questionnaire sent out by the management soliciting suggestions for an all-request program that Stokowski would conduct as the last concert of the season, there were ballots on the applause question. Over a thousand were returned: the applauders won by a vote of 710 to 199. When Stoki returned he accepted his defeat gracefully, 'Thank you for the frankness of your vote,' he said, 'I lost. Perhaps you were right. The votes were overwhelmingly in your favor. But it's still a question whether these sounds are appropriate, and next season I should like to ask you some other questions and have your frank thoughts.'"

 

If I had a little more patience I'd look up what happened next. But still, it seems enough to support my listener - Stoki, the man I think of as the friend of Garbo and Mickey Mouse, was the man who banned applause between movements. (The listener also put part of the blame on Theodore Thomas, about whom you know a lot more than I ever will. But I couldn't find any references when I glanced around.) Amazing to hear him call it a relic of "primitive times" - when Robert Philip informs us that even Brahms was not at all surprised or taken aback when the audience applauded immediately after Joachim's cadenza in the first movement of the violin concerto - while the coda was starting. We don't even have to go back to Mozart for that.

Today there's a very important link on ArtsJournal -- or actually links, because the piece shows up both under Music and Theater. (And it was linked yesterday, too, which makes three links!)

Seriously, though, this is something everyone who cares about classical music should read. It's by Nicholas Kenyon, a former critic who now (to his everlasting credit, considering what he's done) runs the BBC Proms; it ran in the Guardian in Britain yesterday.

What Kenyon says is very simple. Classical music ought to be in fabulous shape, because the repertoire has never been more interesting. In fact, there isn't any standard repertoire any more, because so much of the potential audience (and even of the actual audience) has never heard the standard masterworks before. And that means a new audience is perfectly open to new (and very old) music:

What has happened at the BBC Proms as audience taste develops, is not only that the boundaries expand, but also that the centre of gravity shifts. The 20th century is far from being a turn-off: Shostakovich is now a bigger pull for our audiences than Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev is up there with Brahms, and Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony is as much of a thrilling classic as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 are now a keystone of the repertory, as is Shostakovich's 10th Symphony of 1953. John Tavener's 1991 Proms commission The Protecting Veil has reached huge audiences around the world.

This is not special pleading, it is the popular verdict on the power of great music

There's a lot more like this in Kenyon's piece, which in fact is hard to summarize because the whole is more compelling than any of its parts. It gets more convincing, the more of it you read.

Very likely Kenyon is optimistic. He might overstate, for instance, the amount of new music on his Proms events. Certainly when I've looked at them, standard repertoire was hardly absent. But when he talks about London audiences flocking to new stuff, I'm willing to believe him.

He's not wholly practical; he doesn't tell us how we can go from here to the future he sees with such passion and clarity -- from (in America) orchestral concerts dominated by familiar classics to a new paradigm where anything goes, and the repertoire gets really interesting. I suspect we're in limbo right now; the orchestras can't afford to give up their old audience, which wants to hear the old works, and doesn't know how to find the new audience that perhaps can guarantee an orchestral future.

Kenyon does say this:

What the whole classical music world now needs is the confidence, and the money, to experiment and pursue its innovations. Funding for most ensembles is currently so tight that the first thing to suffer is bold risk-taking that may muddy the balance sheet.

That's crucial. Without taking risks, we'll never get anywhere. And we need some encouragement before we'll take them. I don't know how the future Kenyon pictures can actually come into being. But I'd love to see it!

This just occured to me. Classical music purists insist that classical music is valuable precisely because it isn't popular.

Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You define classical music as not popular, and its look and feel starts to reflect that. People -- no fools they -- start to get the message, and classical music actually becomes unpopular. People stop listening to it.

And so the purists get their wish, though not quite in the way they expected. They hadn't figured that if classical music wasn't popular, it might disappear.

So this weekend I finally got around to screening some of the DVD's of the Bernstein Young People's Concerts; it's amazing how far we HAVEN'T come.  Who could imagine a Music Director actually leading a series to help people learn how to listen, and a national TV network broadcasting it?  And they're GOOD. 

 

Then I went to MOMA, and I tell you what, it's hard to leave there thinking art is dead.  It was mobbed.  (My take-away on 'The Gates:' I remember the first time I saw the "Mona Lisa" I thought, 'that's nice.'  Walking through 'The Gates,' though, moved me nearly to tears.)    

 

On the way home I stopped by Ray's Famous Pizza at 88th and Broadway for a meatball parmigiano grinder -- er, hero.  There in the tiny plot of formica tables were two apparent old street bums, arguing over who was the better playwright: Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller or Edward Albee.   

 

Then I got home and learned that the New York Philharmonic had won 3 Grammys for "On the Transmigration of Souls," which will probably lead to 100, maybe 200 people around the country rushing out to buy it tomorrow.

 

I truly believe orchestras have it within their power to become relevant again; the only thing stopping them is themselves.But that seems to be the biggest challenge of all.   

There's a lesson for classical music -- and especially big classical music institutions -- in the Arts section of today's New York Times. One of the lead stories (by Julie Salamon, whose byline is always worth looking for) is about Warhammer, a cult wargame played with intricately hand-painted toy soldiers. There was a Warhammer tournament in the visitors' plaza at NASA's Space Center in Houston.

And why there? Listen to Mike Wampler. the sales manager at NASA's Space Center:

Sixty percent of our visitors weren't born when NASA accomplished the man on the moon. I want our guests to leave saying, "That's one of the coolest places we've ever been." You have to do Warhammer events; you have to do Purina dog events. These are the links to the future.

Can't orchestras and opera companies think this way? What events could they have in their own halls?

I'm reminded here of something my friend Elizabeth Streb said, when I was on a panel with her at the annual presenters' conference in New York last month. Elizabeth started as a choreographer; now her name for what she does with her company is POPACTION, because it's so intensely physical, and because it's aimed at the widest possible audience. Her people throw themselves through the air, hurl their bodies through panes of glass. On the panel, Elizabeth said she'd learned her company could sell anything -- meaning not any kind of performance, but anything at all. Why limit yourself to selling your performances, and a limited collection of related items that you stock in your gift shop?

There's also a lesson in the recent history of Krispy Kreme. These, many people would agree, are the best donuts in America. (Or doughnuts, to use Krispy Kreme's preferred spelling.) In fact, Krispy Kreme is almost a cult.

So when the chain expanded from the south into the northeast, anybody would have predicted huge success. When the first store opened in New York, late in the '90s, there was massive publicity. I myself was on line for the opening.

And what happened? Krispy Kreme has taken a nosedive! To me, they made Dunkin' Donuts seem ordinary, but Dunkin' Donuts makes much more money. Why? Because they sell more than donuts, a little detail Krispy Kreme apparently never thought of. The northern expansion, as I understand this, was quite expensive; the new stores never sold enough donuts to pay for it. Dunkin' Donuts, with its strategy of selling breakfast, bagels, and muffins, and with its branded coffee, does a lot better. How do we know orchestras aren't like Krispy Kreme -- with high-status and a kind of cult audience, but without much chance to pay the bills unless they diversify? (Into, for instance, other kinds of classical performances, and even non-classical music. And even non-musical events.)

Finally, I think there's a lesson in The Gates, the triumphant Jeanne-Claude and Christo piece in New York's Central Park. (And yes, it's a triumph, no matter how many people go around asking, "Is it art?" So many people find it exhilarating that it doesn't matter if others don't like it.) The Gates is an installation -- saffron fabric hanging over all the many pathways in the park.

What could an orchestra or opera company do to get as much attention, and have an equal triumph? This is worth thinking about, even if you couldn't match the clout, joy, and publicity that all came naturally to Jeanne-Claude and Christo. What if an orchestra had small groups of its musicians playing all over town, in public places, even on the street, for an entire weekend? Or every Saturday for a month. Or for an entire week.

And there's sound art -- sonic installations that can be set up anywhere. Max Neuhaus is one of the leading sound artists. His current installation is "Suspended Sound Live," set up on a footbridge in Berne, Switzerland:

Because it is outside, because it is so seamlessly integrated into the sounds of the city, of the neighborhood, one wonders where the sound is coming from. It is a part of the structure; it is a "footbridge lined with sound," as if the sound was another element of construction, like steel and concrete.

I remember a piece of his, set up in the '70s, beneath a subway grating in Times Square in New York. You walked over the grating, and from under your feet came a metallic roar. You probably heard the roar before you got there, but it registered (just as Neuhaus says about the footbridge sound) as part of the noise of the city. The day the piece opened, I watched people walk over the grating. I asked one of them what he thought the sound was. He said, "That's the power that keeps the subways alive!"

Why can't orchestras set up sound installations?

And there's a wonderful composer in New York named Phil Kline, who currently has a CD called Zippo Songs, haunting music that's especially potent live (the sound has almost a physical presence in the concert hall). But he's especially famous for "Unsilent Night," which he's presented yearly in New York since 1992. It's

an outdoor ambient music piece for an INFINITE number of boom box tape players. It's like a Christmas carolling party except that we don't sing, but rather carry boom boxes, each playing a separate tape which is part of the piece. In effect, we become a city block long stereo system!

Strangely, I've never heard it (or, rather, been part of it), but I've been in another boombox piece Kline did, and it was lovely, both as sound and as an experience. I felt like I was part of a community, as I walked along the streets with the procession, the sound radiating all around us. And at the same time, I felt like I was part of the city.

Orchestras might think that Phil Kline, Max Neuhaus, and Jeanne-Claude and Christo have nothing to do with them, but they'd be wrong. All these things happen in the same world that orchestras inhabit, in the same cities. They touch the people orchestras would like to reach. These people hear about Phil Kline, and say, "Interesting!" They hear about The Gates, and say, "Wonderful!" They hear about an orchestra -- assuming that ever happens -- and they say, "Who cares?"

Orchestras need to show that they're interesting, too. They need to connect to the world around them, and especially to new and fascinating art in the world around them. If they can't do that, they're dead. (And if they were constantly in contact with new kinds of art, what would that do to their programming, and even to the way they play?)

(Phil Kline, by the way, has presented "Unsilent Night" not just in New York, but in Atlanta, Tallahassee, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Vancouver, Cleveland, and Middlesborough, England.)

There's a lesson for classical music -- and especially big classical music institutions -- in the Arts section of today's New York Times. One of the lead stories (by Julie Salamon, whose byline is always worth looking for) is about Warhammer, a cult wargame played with intricately hand-painted toy soldiers. There was a Warhammer tournament in the visitors' plaza at NASA's Space Center in Houston.

And why there? Listen to Mike Wampler, the sales manager at NASA's Space Center:

Sixty percent of our visitors weren't born when NASA accomplished the man on the moon. I want our guests to leave saying, "That's one of the coolest places we've ever been." You have to do Warhammer events; you have to do Purina dog events. These are the links to the future.

Can't orchestras and opera companies think this way? What events could they have in their own halls?

I'm reminded here of something my friend Elizabeth Streb said, when I was on a panel with her at the annual presenters' conference in New York last month. Elizabeth started as a choreographer; now her name for what she does with her company is POPACTION, because it's so intensely physical, and because it's aimed at the widest possible audience. Her people throw themselves through the air, hurl their bodies through panes of glass. On the panel, Elizabeth said she'd learned her company could sell anything -- meaning not any kind of performance, but anything at all. Why limit yourself to selling your performances, and a limited collection of related items that you stock in your gift shop?

There's also a lesson in the recent history of Krispy Kreme. These, many people would agree, are the best donuts in America. (Or doughnuts, to use Krispy Kreme's preferred spelling.) In fact, Krispy Kreme is almost a cult.

So when the chain expanded from the south into the northeast, anybody would have predicted huge success. When the first store opened in New York, late in the '90s, there was massive publicity. I myself was on line for the opening.

And what happened? Krispy Kreme has taken a nosedive! To me, they made Dunkin' Donuts seem ordinary, but Dunkin' Donuts makes much more money. Why? Because they sell more than donuts, a little detail Krispy Kreme apparently never thought of. The northern expansion, as I understand this, was quite expensive; the new stores never sold enough donuts to pay for it. Dunkin' Donuts, with its strategy of selling breakfast, bagels, and muffins, and with its branded coffee, does a lot better. How do we know orchestras aren't like Krispy Kreme -- with high-status and a kind of cult audience, but without much chance to pay the bills unless they diversify? (Into, for instance, other kinds of classical performances, and even non-classical music. And even non-musical events.)

Finally, I think there's a lesson in The Gates, the triumphant Jeanne-Claude and Christo piece in New York's Central Park. (And yes, it's a triumph, no matter how many people go around asking, "Is it art?" So many people find it exhilarating that it doesn't matter if others don't like it.) The Gates is an installation -- saffron fabric hanging over all the many pathways in the park.

What could an orchestra or opera company do to get as much attention, and have an equal triumph? This is worth thinking about, even if you couldn't match the clout, joy, and publicity that all came naturally to Jeanne-Claude and Christo. What if an orchestra had small groups of its musicians playing all over town, in public places, even on the street, for an entire weekend? Or every Saturday for a month. Or for an entire week.

And there's sound art -- sonic installations that can be set up anywhere. Max Neuhaus is one of the leading sound artists. His current installation is "Suspended Sound Live," set up on a footbridge in Berne, Switzerland:

Because it is outside, because it is so seamlessly integrated into the sounds of the city, of the neighborhood, one wonders where the sound is coming from. It is a part of the structure; it is a "footbridge lined with sound," as if the sound was another element of construction, like steel and concrete.

I remember a piece of his, set up in the '70s, beneath a subway grating in Times Square in New York. You walked over the grating, and from under your feet came a metallic roar. You probably heard the roar before you got there, but it registered (just as Neuhaus says about the footbridge sound) as part of the noise of the city. The day the piece opened, I watched people walk over the grating. I asked one of them what he thought the sound was. He said, "That's the power that keeps the subways alive!"

Why can't orchestras set up sound installations?

And there's a wonderful composer in New York named Phil Kline, who currently has a CD called Zippo Songs, haunting music that's especially potent live (the sound has almost a physical presence in the concert hall). But he's especially famous for "Unsilent Night," which he's presented yearly in New York since 1992. It's

an outdoor ambient music piece for an INFINITE number of boom box tape players. It's like a Christmas carolling party except that we don't sing, but rather carry boom boxes, each playing a separate tape which is part of the piece. In effect, we become a city block long stereo system!

Strangely, I've never heard it (or, rather, been part of it), but I've been in another boombox piece Kline did, and it was lovely, both as sound and as an experience. I felt like I was part of a community, as I walked along the streets with the procession, the sound radiating all around us. And at the same time, I felt like I was part of the city.

Orchestras might think that Phil Kline, Max Neuhaus, and Jeanne-Claude and Christo have nothing to do with them, but they'd be wrong. All these things happen in the same world that orchestras inhabit, in the same cities. They touch the people orchestras would like to reach. These people hear about Phil Kline, and say, "Interesting!" They hear about The Gates, and say, "Wonderful!" They hear about an orchestra -- assuming that ever happens -- and they say, "Who cares?"

Orchestras need to show that they're interesting, too. They need to connect to the world around them, and especially to new and fascinating art in the world around them. If they can't do that, they're dead. (And if they were constantly in contact with new kinds of art, what would that do to their programming, and even to the way they play?)

(Phil Kline, by the way, has presented "Unsilent Night" not just in New York, but in Atlanta, Tallahassee, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Vancouver, Cleveland, and Middlesborough, England.)

My wife was walking through Central Park, looking at The Gates. Perched on top of one of them was a hawk, eating its prey -- something large, my wife said, maybe a pigeon or even a squirrel.

And down below stood a crowd of people, watching the hawk eat. Only in New York!

Someone from an orchestra suggested that I shouldn't have talked about changes in cultural weather. If classical music isn't so popular now, or people aren't buying subscriptions to orchestra concerts, this isn't (my correspondent thinks) a change in cultural weather. It's a change in cultural climate. Weather changes daily; climate changes last for centuries. So a change in climate is far more serious -- and that, my correspondent feels, is what we're facing now.

I've since found that this distinction is much debated among orchestra marketing directors.

I want to thank many people for their responses -- both by e-mail and in person -- to my January 20 post on the classical music crisis. Perhaps the most striking came from two highly placed people deep within the biz, who both thought things were worse than I'd said.

And very informative comments came from people who either corrected me, or added crisis points I hadn't thought of. I knew, of course, that I was only taking a preliminary measure of the crisis, subject to modification and elaboration later on.

So thanks to Lisa Hirsch, an acute critic and blogger, who told me I should add the decline of music education to my list of classical-music difficulties. I tend to avoid music education, because I'm tired of seeing the lack of it treated as the main cause of our difficulties, and its restoration treated as the cure. (Even if music education was restored immediately to its former glory, how long would it take to educate our future audience? How many of our institutions would have died by then?)

Still, the decline of music education is a dimension of the crisis, and I should have included it.

Lisa also corrected me about Nonesuch, which I'd said once was exclusively a classical music label. But even back in the '60s, as Lisa said, they had their Explorer Series of world music releases. I had some of them on LP then, and have some on CD; of course I should have remembered that.

But as Bob Hurwitz, the president of Nonesuch, pointed out (he also e-mailed after my post), the Explorer Series recorded the traditional music of various countries, while the current Nonesuch world music releases are of individual artists. These -- this is me speaking now, not Bob -- could just as well be considered a refined form of pop.

Bob also said that the proportion of classical and non-classical Nonesuch recordings hasn't changed since 1986. But there, too, there's been a change. The current classical releases are almost all new music, which wasn't true in 1986. So if we take current Nonesuch releases as a measure of what art music is now, it's Emmylou Harris and Steve Reich, with standard classical masterworks strikingly absent.

And then there's another crisis point, which I learned about this week in conversation with an artists' manager. She says there are fewer bookings than there used to be. So A-list soloists take some B-list gigs, making work for B-list people harder to find. The business in every way has gotten more difficult, this manager thinks, and even her stars might have to work hard to keep their heads above water.

Suppose orchestras knew they were in desperate trouble -- trouble so bad that they could see extinction looming. Or if not extinction, then at least a sharp cutback in their operations. Should they talk about this publicly?

Maybe not. It's hard to raise money when extinction looms. "We're asking you [says the orchestra to a wealthy donor, or corporation or foundation] for two million dollars. Oh, and we might be out of business three years from now." Understandably, orchestras might not want to go there. They might think, "Well, we've got a year or two, at least, and maybe more, before the trouble really hit. Maybe we can fix things before anybody notices how very bad they are."

But maybe they really should go public. If they don't, what happens if the truth gets known? Suppose things suddenly got even worse, and an orchestra was forced to make dramatic cutbacks earlier than it expected. Its donors might feel betrayed. "Last year I gave you two million dollars. But you never told me how bad things were!" The orchestra could lose its credibility. The entire field could, including the American Symphony Orchestra League.

And there's another possible advantage to going public. If you say that things are bad, you have to find solutions. I mean serious solutions, whose viability you can demonstrate to everyone.

But of course -- always speaking hypothetically -- that could also be a reason (though a sad one) for keeping quiet. If you don't announce your problems, then you don't have to find solutions. You can stay in denial, understanding that things are very bad, but not quite admitting (even to yourself) that you don't know what to do.

Last week, I did the second concert this season in the "Symphony with a Splash" I plan and host with the Pittsburgh Symphony. These are concerts for people who don't normally go to hear the orchestra; we do short pieces (including single movements of long pieces), with commentary from me.

This time we tried something really challenging -- John Cage's famous silent piece, 4'33", with the second of Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra coming just before and after it. We could get away with this because our theme was "Are You Crazy?" -- and we could say Cage was crazy for writing silent music, while Webern was crazy for writing short pieces. The piece we picked is less than 30 seconds long.

Of course, we meant "crazy" affectionately. The idea of combining Cage and Webern was simple. It's helpful to have something leading into Cage's silence. And the Webern, by itself, is hard to listen to, not because it's atonal (I was proud, by the way, that we didn't even mention atonality), but because so much happens in so short a time. By the time you settle down to listen, the piece might well be over. So the long John Cage silence can prepare the Webern, create a quiet space in which Webern's little twists and turns might be easier to hear.

I think this happened. But the Cage, I thought, was in itself extraordinary, and I learned a lot from it. First, though, some basic points, for anyone who doesn't know the piece. The title is the piece's length, four minutes and 33 seconds. It can be played on any instrument or combination of instruments. (Many people think it's a piano piece, because it's most often played that way, but Cage doesn't specify a piano.) And the score says the piece is in three movements, with no sound made in any of them, indicated as follows:

I

Tacet

II

Tacet

III

Tacet

("Tacet" is a musical term meaning "silent" or "doesn't play." If, for example, you're a contrabassoonist and you play only the third movement of a piece, your part will say "tacet" under the titles of the other movements.)

The length of each movement is up to the performer(s). But you have to do something to show where each new movement begins. All of this, I'm sure, seems crazy to some of you reading it. Certainly people make fun of the piece.

But in performance 4'33" can be wonderful. Cage (as we explained to the audience in Pittsburgh) knew that there's no such thing as silence, that sounds of some kind are always being made. So the sounds in this piece are the ones that take place naturally while it's performed. I knew Cage a little, and at least in public, he was one of the most joyful people I've ever encountered. I've often thought that 4'33" (and other silent pieces he composed) were one way that he expressed the joy he felt about even tiny things in the world, in this case sounds that happen unintentionally.

I can go to that place myself, or to a place very similar: I've noticed that when I'm really relaxed, I start hearing all the sounds around me. In fact, it's my way of telling when I really am relaxed. If I hear all the sounds, then I'm not tense any more.

All this, of course (except the part about me), is very well known. Any book on Cage or on 20th century music will tell you everything you've just read. But all of it was new, I'm sure, to most people in the Pittsburgh audience. Certainly when I talked to many of them afterwards, I didn't hear people saying that they'd heard all about this piece.

And what was wonderful was how much so many of them liked it. I'm not going to say some didn't hate it, or simply were baffled. In my role of host, I asked two people in the front row what they thought, both of the Cage and the Webern, and they simply said, "I don't know!" (And yes, with that much animation.)

But afterwards -- in the hall after the concert, in a private discussion with a group of students from the University of Pittsburgh, and even with a woman I met at the airport the next day, as I was heading for the gate to fly home -- I kept hearing how much people liked it. Many of them even made a point of thanking me for programming the piece. (Though I think the idea really came from Robert Moir, the Pittsburgh Symphony's VP of Artistic Planning.) The woman in the airport -- who saw me passing by, and came up to say how much she'd liked the concert -- said the Cage made her think of music paper with nothing but rests on it.

And here's what I learned about the piece. For many people, I'm sure, the division into three movements seems arbitrary, and also a little forced. I mean, sure, a silent piece, but a silent piece in three movements? What's the point of that?

But there's a lot of point. The job of the performer is to frame the silence. And, as part of that, to set the mood of the piece -- to provide an example of attentive listening, and, for people knew to this kind of art, to convey something of the unforced dignity that Cage himself could bring to his own listening.

This isn't so hard if you just sit or stand there. But if you have to divide the silence into three parts, your job is harder. You have to maintain your unforced dignity while you move. And what positions should you take? How much moving should you do? What should you feel like while you move? You have to focus your attention much harder, and also -- if you're really being honest -- ask yourself why you might, at any given time, feel a sudden urge to move. Where should the movements start and end? It's up to you, but the decision should be spontaneous, unforced, and irresistible.

All of which might sometimes be easy, and sometimes not, but certainly required more of me than simply sitting still. I imagine it made 4'33" easier for the audience, because everyone could roughly measure the progress of the piece by how many movements were left. And it taught me -- a lesson I didn't learn, actually, until right now, as I'm typing this -- that it wouldn't be legitimate to play games with the movement lengths, to deliberately make (let's say) the first movement last almost the entire piece, and then rush the second movement and the third, thus making the audience giggle. Even pieces with no notated events have their own unwritten rules (and if you're curious to know more about this in Cage, see my 1980's Village Voice column on "The Cage Style," on my website).