The Association of British Orchestras conference I went to was held in Newcastle, a lively, thriving city. Or pair of cities—it promotes itself as NewcastleGateshead, Gateshead being a sister city right across the River Tyne. I happened to spend time with two people from the UK the day before I left, and both of them raved about how fine a place it is.

And I could see that for myself. I had a hair-raising connection between two of the three flights I had to take, to get to Newcastle, and while I managed to get to the plane on time, my luggage didn’t. So I had the pleasure of walking through Newcastle, looking for a chemist’s (as they say over there), to buy some toiletries. It’s clearly a lively town; you can tell just from looking at the people and the shops, not to mention the life sciences center and the fabulous performing arts facility, the Sage Gateshead.

Which brings me to the Northern Sinfonia, the local orchestra. They play in the Sage Gateshead’s main concert hall, which seats 1700, and is airy, modern, comfortable, but also has an easy elegance, and sounds terrific. And the musicians, almost all (if not absolutely all of them) fairly young, dress in a way that fits both the hall and the lively cities. They wear black—without tails or fancy dresses, without even jackets or ties for the men, if I remember correctly. I asked Anthony Sargent, who runs the facility, if the orchestra always dresses this way, and he said they did, even when the Queen came to a concert a month or so ago.

And that did it. As far as I’m concerned, I never want to see an orchestra wear tails again. The Northern Sinfonia looked so crisp, so alert, so contemporary, and at the same time so friendly…who wouldn’t want to see musicians dressed like that? Of course, their youth fit their outfits, or their clothes fit their youth. An older orchestra, or one less visibly enjoying itself, might have looked out of place wearing what the Northern Sinfonia wore.

Something else to think about: the orchestra has a late-evening new music series, which apparently attracts a sizeable young audience. Obviously it wouldn’t make any sense to wear tails for that. But by wearing (as I’ll guess they do) the same clothes for the new music concerts and for their regular gigs, they help build their brand, and help make people who come to the new music shows feel comfortable if they come to the main events.

The concert seemed well attended. The audience wasn’t notably old, and really seems to love the orchestra. I know it’s not quite so simple here in America; I’m sure that older subscribers might well hate it if orchestras started dressing more informally. But it’s got to happen sometime. Do orchestras want to look like they come from some high-church dreamland, or do they want to be part of the world their future audience lives in?

I’ve been at the annual conference of the Association of British Orchestras, where I spoke on two panels, and gave one of the wrapup speeches. Very, very interesting in many ways, which I’ll blog about in the next few days. Among the things to talk about:

the informal dress of the Northern Sinfonia, which I heard play

the lack (as I was told) of older musicians in British orchestras

the tone of a conference — and of an orchestral scene — where government subsidies are still the mainstay of orchestra funding, and therefore trustrees (people from boards of directors) don’t play a major role

some striking initiatives to support new music, taken by the London Symphony and the London Sinfonietta, and unlike anything I know of in the US

some even more striking research on the new music audience, far beyond anything I’ve seen in the US, and successfully put into practice to draw people to new music performances at two major venues, the Barbican in London and The Sage Gateshead in Newcastle (well, really Gateshead, Newcastle’s twin city — hope I’m not treading on any sensitive toes by how I’m stating this…) This research completely supports everything I’ve been saying about younger audiences, though I’m thrilled to see how much further they’ve taken their studies.

More to come.

Episode Five of my book on the future of classical music is now online. It talks about form in classical music — and why form has become such a fetish. Comments always welcome!

My iTunes shuffle just brought up the “Pas d’action” (“Apollo and the Muses”) from Stravinsky’s Apollo, one of the most beautiful pieces of music I know. Given what I’ve just been writing, how does its beauty strike me? As deliberately clsasical beauty, an assumed serenity, serenity that implicitly honors all the 20th century reasons not to be serene. (Too bad for Theodor Adorno, who absolutely did not get that, and thought Stravinsky dishonestly tried to make the world go away.) Which makes the music all the more beautiful, and helps me understand why I respond to eagerly to Stravinsky, with no sense of puzzlement or uneasy nostalgia.

There’s a beautiful passage in Bjork’s song “Jóga,” the refrain, with intricate string music weaving around her voice. But look at the words:

Emotional landscapes,

They puzzle me,

Then the riddle gets solved,

And you push me up to this

State of emergency,

How beautiful to be,

State of emergency,

Is where I want to be.

So again we’re in a modern realm of beauty, where beauty has an edge.

And now let me clarify what I’ve been saying, in case it hasn’t been clear. I’m hardly arguing that beauty no longer exists. Instead I’m saying that it isn’t simple. And unfortunately it’s presented—in classical music, these days—as if it was simple. You see this in marketing copy (“come hear the most beautiful music ever written”), in criticism, in program notes, even in academic writing by musicologists. The connotation is that beauty is pure, that it needs no explanation, that it’s calming, ennobling, transfiguring, radiant. This tracks with surveys of the orchestra audience, where you can find people saying they love orchestra concerts because there’s something spiritual or transfiguring about the music.

And this also tracks with something you hear a lot in conversation, that people like classical music because it’s “calm.” Classical music beauty, then, is completely good, with no alloy of trouble. And here’s Bjork, saying—with more aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional depth, if you ask me—that beauty can be a state of emergency.

Love…beauty…heightened perception…emergency. This is where the world is now. Classical music, where beauty is calm or transfiguring, is a refuge from the world.

You can read something parallel in Michael Shurkin’s valuable essay, “Why We Still Need Beethoven: Why Modern Art Survives in a Postmodern World,” which appeared in Zeek, a Jewish journal of art and culture in 2002. He says, but from the opposite side, exactly what I’m saying, that classical music speaks to a purer, more untroubled, more hopeful vision of the world than current culture does, and that this is why we need it. The counterargument might be that this older vision can be unrealistic, and sets us up to fail, because it doesn’t show us what the obstacles might be. In that way, though it’s painful to write this, classical music becomes like Top 40 pop, too simple to be realistic.

Curiously, as I was writing this past paragraph, my iTunes shuffle brought up the second of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, 20th century classical music shaking with angst. Which should remind us that this beauty-filled view of classical music—Shurkin’s, the marketers’, to some degree the audience’s—doesn’t track with classical music’s history. Beethoven didn’t seem so noble or untroubled to people in his time. There was wildness, despair, and mania mixed in. And the romantic era was underlined with sadness, as the certainties of the 18th century disappeared in the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the growth of industry. Nothing was certain any more, and artists started to depict themselves as isolated, expressing only themselves, in opposition to society.

How “beautiful” was that? Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, one of the most influential books ever written, provides one answer. Werther is so dislocated that he kills himself. The influence of the book was that young men started dressing like Werther, and killing themselves. This leads us to Schubert’s Winterreise, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, and other works of romantic emotional extremes, which don’t affect us as they affected their contemporaries. We hear Schubert, and we think he’s beautiful. His contemporaries heard him, and burst into tears. How do we bring the classical repertoire back from a realm uncomfortably close to new age music, and put it back in touch with both itself and us?