February 2006 Archives

The most interesting cultural news in today’s New York Times comes not in the business section, where I’d usually expect to find it, but in the national news. There’s a piece on the new popularity of curling, after the Olympics, which I certainly can relate to, because my wife and I got fascinated by it. We’re not alone. As the Times reports, the United States Curling Association’s website actually crashed, because so many people wanted to look at it. (I was one of them.)

So the piece talks about all the reasons people like curling. It’s a game of strategy; it’s all about finesse; you don’t even have to be a fabulous athlete to join a team and play it. Plus there’s a deep vein of sportsmanship, with players (just for instance) calling their own fouls.

And then, at the close of the piece, came this: "This is so cool," said one new curling fan they’d interviewed, and who had signed up for a learn-to-curl session next month. "Plus it's a very obscure thing to say you do."

A very obscure thing. And this is a virtue. Which doesn’t surprise me. That’s one of the trends in current culture. Because there’s so much available — so many tastes, so many lifestyles, so many different kinds of everything — many people don’t necessarily make the popular choices, and in fact there’s great cachet in getting into something other people don’t know about.

And that’s good news for classical music. The very fact that it’s not popular can very well impel some people to give it a try. I’ve been thinking, in fact, that we’re often too defensive about our cultural position. Classical music students I’ve met, for instance, sometimes say they feel they’re going to be looked at as hopeless geeks. But I don’t think that’s true. If you play classical music, and the people you know aren’t classical music fans, that might well make you interesting. So yes, maybe we have an uphill fight to gain wider attention for what we do, and to find a new audience, but that very fact — in today’s culture, or at least among younger people — gives us an advantage.

I said I’d write something about the press reaction to Peter Gelb’s announcements, which amount to the most promising first steps toward a turnaround that I’ve ever seen a classical music organization take. Some of the stories, like two in The New York Times, noted or even stressed skepticism about Peter’s plans. People were quoted saying things like, “What will he [Peter Gelb] do with the core audience while he’s courting this new audience?”

Well, he’ll have star conductors, new productions, and also very likely more star singers, since yet another criticism of the past Met administration has been that they haven’t jumped on rising European singing stars fast enough. The normal excuse goes something like this: “Well, he just got famous, but you know we plan many years in advance.” With no thought (apparently) given at all to tearing up your plans, and spending enough money to get the singers to alter theirs. Peter seems willing to do this.

And beyond that, everyone who worries about the core audience (which very likely includes the worriers themselves) should repeat after me: The core audience isn’t buying enough tickets! The Met can’t survive if it caters only to them. Not, by the way, that this is a new story. Classical music institutions everywhere have to do two dances at once, one for their traditional audience, and another for newcomers. Why should the Met be any different, and why does everyone seem so surprised—and concerned—when Peter points the house in that direction?

But there’s more. At the press concert where these initiatives were announced, one press guy got up and asked why the Met had given the story to The New York Times ahead of everybody else, making everybody else third-class citizens. He got a ripple of applause from his colleagues. One of these colleagues, whom I sat next to, murmured something to me about a news conference without any news. Everybody was angry, in other words, because they’d been scooped, and for them, evidently, this insult scooped anything else that could happen. The guy who asked the question actually wrote a story (for Bloomberg News) in which the main event, as he saw it, was the dis to him and the rest of the non-Times press. Forget the opera house, and its new hopes for survival. Who cares about that, when you think you’ve been insulted.

Now, the Times really did get the story first. Or, rather, second. The Associated Press somehow got hold of the substance of Peter Gelb’s announcement in advance, and distributed a story. This got the Times aroused, and the Met may have felt the worst possible thing it could do was get the Times not just aroused, but annoyed. (There was near-war, some years ago, between the Times and the New York Philharmonic, over a not too different issue.) So the Met gave the Times an exclusive interview.

Whether this was right or wrong I can’t say, but it certainly got the rest of the press mad. But now I have to ask: Does that make it right for the press to ignore the real news from the Met, and in effect make itself the news? And I have to dissent from what my colleague murmured to me. There really was news at the news conference, as follows:

• Joseph Volpe wasn’t there. Well, OK, maybe that’s gossip, not news. But it certainly shows something about how the power transition is working out. Normally the old guy would go to the new guy’s press conference, or at least issue a statement full of hope for the future. The old guy then would get duly thanked by the new guy, for all he’d done while he held power. So here we have a situation where the old and new guys are both in residence, and the old guy stays away. Talk about a dis — that looks like a major one. And from that moment on, Volpe was obliterated, or so it seems to me. He’s now clearly the past. Peter Gelb is the future — and Volpe wasn’t even present when the future began.
• James Levine (who spoke at the press conference) talked about the Met’s “major financial problems” (his words) as casually as he might talk about the weather. That the Met has these problems is well known to people in the business, but very little reported in the press (and even what little reporting there’s been came long after the problems were common knowledge). But if these problems were supposed to be some kind of dark secret, nobody told Levine. He didn’t hesitate to mention them.
• Levine also slipped in something that I, at least, had never heard about — that the Met orchestra needs rebuilding once again. Not because it’s deteriorated, but because it now has many young players who need to learn what the older ones learned the first time through. This happens, as time passes, and orchestras change personnel. But you rarely hear it talked about.
• The longest part of the press conference was a presentation by the six stage directors of next season’s six new productions, talking (some live, some on video) about what, exactly, they were going to do. Some of them went into quite a bit of detail. So the press conference talked more about art than it talked about anything else! This was quite wonderful to see, and it also registered as a smart political move. Peter has been damned by many critics as the shallow king of crossover, all because he made a speech when he took over Sony Classical in which he was honest about what classical record companies had to do. Critics then assumed that Peter had no taste at all. By letting more of his press conference be about art than about anything else, he gave a quiet signal that art is something he cares about. Very savvy, I thought. (And when he announced that one of his own new productions, in a future season, is going to be Janacek’s From the House of the Dead, conducted by Salonen and directed by Patrice Chereau, who directed the famous Ring at Bayreuth that Boulez conducted…that was yet another quiet sign that Peter knows what art is.) One curiosity, though. All the art talk was about theater. Maybe sometime we’ll have some talk at a press conference about music. Which won’t be easy. Not because music is technical (though talk about it can be), but because normally the technical side of music is all that gets talked about. The stage directors all talked about the artistic meaning of what they wanted to do. I’d love to see a musician get up and talk about music just that way.

On another note, I got a long e-mail from someone prominent in the classical music business, discussing many fascinating money issues involved in Peter’s announcement. Certainly Peter plans to spend a lot of money. I can only assume that either he thinks he can get it, or understands that he can’t transform the house without spending money, whether he knows where it’s coming from or not. Or, most likely, a combination of both these things. I’ll ponder these things, see if there’s anything in the e-mail that can be shared, and maybe post more about this in the future.

I've been hearing a lot about empty seats over the past year or so. I meet people out of town who come to New York, go to the Met, and can't believe how empty the house is. They ask me about it. (People in New York often ask the same thing.) Or I get e-mail from people who've been to concerts in their own cities (most recently a Philadelphia Orchestra program), and they wonder why the house is so sparse. I've seen the same thing myself, in Pittsburgh last year, for instance. At one Pittsburgh Symphony concert I wanted to sit with a friend in the balcony, but only had one ticket. (My friend had a seat downstairs.) I asked an usher if he could find us two empty seats. He looked at me sadly, and gestured at the empty rows. "Sit anywhere," he sighed.

Now, I'm not saying that the Met or the Pittsburgh Symphony or the Philadelphia Orchestra are empty all the time. But I do think there are nights when, in many places, empty seats start to be unavoidably noticeable. And I have a theory to explain that.

For any organization that gives a lot of concerts, ticket sales will go up and down, influenced by all the obvious things -- program, day of the week, weather, competing events in town, soloist, conductor, you name it. Obviously a concert with a lot of new or recent music (like the one in Philadelphia I got e-mailed about) will sell fewer tickets than one with Rach 3, played by Lang Lang. So sometimes it's obvious why a concert will be emptier than another event the week before.

But now suppose overall sales have been steadily declining. That's the case in the orchestra world -- the biggest orchestras have seen a steady decline in ticket sales since around 1990. (And maybe the decline started earlier; I haven't seen the figures.) Very likely the same sales trend is mirrored in other classical music genres. Certainly opera companies are selling fewer tickets than they were just a few years ago.

These declines aren't absolutely steady. The sales for any individual organization will go up and down, year by year. But the overall trend is down. So now, after many years of this, the average level of sales for individual concerts is down, too. Of course, the concerts themselves vary. Some sell more, some sell less. But now that the overall level is lower -- this is what my theory comes down to -- the concerts with the lowest sales are really low. They've passed some threshold, below which empty seats just stare at you. So that's why people talk about empty seats. They're much more noticeable than they were five or ten years ago (even though some concerts still are pretty full).

Yesterday was a red-letter music day for me. I heard two things I just loved.

One was Janine Jensen's recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. I was interested in it because Universal, which released it, has been successfully marketing it on iTunes, and selling a lot of downloads. That got me curious.Turns out it's a sensational performance, alert, vivid, sweeping, fun. It's done as chamber music, with only one string player per part in the ensemble, which gives it extra intimacy. Plus some very lively continuo playing, using harpsichord, theorbo, and a small organ. This is the kind of performance that could revitalize classical music. Everything in the music -- phrasing, dymanics, pure sheer musicality, Vivaldi's scene-painting special effects -- is realized about 125%. But it's never fancy, posed, or overbearing. It's just music, the way I always long to hear it.

Then in the evening I went to see Jonathan Demme's Neil Young movie, Heart of Gold. Mostly it just shows a concert Young gave to launch his current album, Prairie Wind. And it couldn't be finer music, or be more life-affirming. The experience and wisdom in every moment of the music, and in the lyrics, and on Young's face; the friendship among the musicians; the obvious delight they have in just about every moment of the show; Demme's fluid filming, which somehow, I'd swear, followed the path of my listening; it all adds up to something really deep and at the same time (like Janine Jensen) very natural and relaxed. You had to love (just for instance) Young's love song to his daughter, who's leaving home for college. "I used to sing songs like this to women my own age." "You've still got a few of 'em in you," calls out one of the backup singers, a woman who looks around 50. "I call this empty nest music," Young says. "It's a whole new genre. Maybe there'll be radio stations that play it." And then the song, so full of affection and respect. The songs are wistful, looking back toward the past (Young's father had just died, one more clump of feeling to throw into the mix).

Great musical moment: He's singing "Harvest Moon," in what strikes me as a far richer version than the lighter (but still pretty wonderful one) on the old "Harvest Moon" album. Twice the camera moves in on the backup singers (one of whom -- and looking drop-dead gorgeous, too -- is Emmylou Harris). The first time, they're simply rapt; everybody, obviously, is caught up in the mood of the song. The second time, they're grinning; they're having fun. That's what the whole show is like; full of moments I can't forget.

My friend and I had two reactions, both of us simultaneously, when the film was over. First, if now we're going to see DVDs released in stores on the same day movies get released in theaters, this film would have been a perfect candidate. You walk out of the theater, and you want to buy the DVD, immediately. And second, we wondered what would happen if Jonathan Demme filmed an orchestra, not just moving in on an instrument because it happens to be playing, but finding the genuine, surprising, completely human moments that happen unpredictably during the performance, even when you're not playing the main melody. Plus, of course, bringing the touch of a major filmmaker to the work. I'd love to see that!

Is it just me, or did Peter Gelb, the incoming general director of the Metropolitan Opera, just announce the most substantial turnaround plan ever seen from a major classical music institution?

It’s not just me. Peter did exactly that—or at least he announced the most impressive first stages a turnaround plan that I’ve ever seen. And yet some noticeable portion of the press doesn’t seem to get it. More on the press later, though. (My colleagues weren’t having their best day, I fear.) First let’s see what Peter announced, first in stories from the Associated Press and The New York Times, and then at a press conference on February 13. (I was very friendly with him when he ran Sony Classical, but I want to stress that I haven’t spoken to him since he got the Met job, and had no advance word about anything I’m writing about here, except for all the usual rumors dashing around in the underbrush.)

Here are Peter’s public plans:

• He’s going to bring in major conductors, and announced two of them. In future seasons, Muti will conduct Verdi’s Attila, and Salonen will conduct Janacek’s From the House of the Dead. For decades we’ve all complained about the lack of major conductors at the Met, apart from James Levine. So immediately Peter has addressed one of the bigger problems serious opera fans have had with the house.
• He’s going to do many more new productions, eventually, he says, one each month. That’ll help create interest and excitement. (It will also be expensive, which means he must think that he can find the money—and, what’s most important, that he knows he has to spend money to get the Met where it needs to be, despite the current financial troubles.)
• He’s going to reposition ticket prices, lowering the cheapest seats from $26 to $15, while raising the price of the most expensive ones. This is brilliant. With one stroke, he addresses the problem of ticket prices, which everyone knows are one of many factors keeping people away. (The mere perception, correct or not, that tickets are expensive plays a part here, too. Peter’s move—with all the publicity it’ll get—addresses both perception and reality.) And he does this, he can hope, without losing money, which ticket-price reductions typically do. As he said at the press conference, he wants the wealthy patrons to subsidize the poorer ones. We’ll have to see how this plays out in practice, especially on the balance sheet, but it’s a terrific step to take.
• He’s going to collaborate with the Lincoln Center Theater. Apart from some uncomfortable joint efforts some years ago by the Lincoln Center Festival and the New York Philharmonic, there hasn’t been any collaboration that anyone can remember among Lincoln Center’s constituents. Not even cross-promotion of related events. This is ridiculous. With one stroke, Peter shows that collaboration can be possible.
• The collaboration involves development of new works, with nine composers. Some of these composers aren’t classical, which already has caused some furrowed brows. Doesn’t matter. Tony Tommasini, chief critic of the Times, wrote a piece wondering if the composer choice was truly artistic, but the message I think he mostly conveyed was something different: The Met is doing something we have to talk about. Besides, nine composers! The house has been justly criticized for not doing enough new music. Getting nine composers—not one, not two, but nine—to work there can’t be bad.
• He’s going to produce a 90-minute version of last season’s Magic Flute production, which was a hit with ticket-buyers. Of course this is aimed at families who might not otherwise attend. Again a very good idea, since the Met—with ticket sales really low—needs to find a new audience.
• He scrapped the plans for next season’s opening, which was going to be—as so often in recent years—a gala. Instead he’s going to bring in a Butterfly production from Britain, one that caused a sensation. Very likely this was only possible because Butterfly was already on the schedule for next fall, but this change is major news. First, it potentially starts next season—Peter’s first in full command—with a bang. But even more than that, it shows that Peter is a strong, decisive manager. Opera seasons, as everybody knows, are planned years in advance. Anyone would have said, “No, you can’t possibly change next year’s opening. It’s far too late.” But it wasn’t, and by bucking the inertia of conventional wisdom here, Peter shows he’s firmly in charge, and willing to go against the grain if he has to, to do what needs to be done.

One thing that these initiatives accomplish—both separately and (most of all) together—is create some buzz. And look at who’ll be buzzing. The lower ticket prices and the 90-minute Magic Flute speak to the new audience the Met needs to attract. The new productions and the top conductors all speak to opera fans, and to people in the music business (who’ll also be impressed by the nine composers). The change in next year’s opening and the theater collaboration speak to insiders, and also to the Met’s own staff, who can see the difference a decisive leader makes. (Not that everything else won’t send that message, too.)

Add it all together, and it’s tremendously impressive. A first step, maybe (or a collection of first steps), but more than I’ve seen any other major classical music institution do.

I have some big posts coming, about the dramatic turnaround plans at the Metropolitan Opera, and (as promised) about the British research on a young audience. But no time for anything big today, so here’s something smaller.

In my Cleveland hotel room, I worked for a while on some piano pieces I’m writing, little musical embodiments of Weegee photos (Weegee being the now-famous New York tabloid photographer from the ‘40s). I’ve finished the first of these pieces, a musical setting, if that’s the word, of the Weegee photo I’ve uploaded here, called “Gunman Killed By Off-Duty Cop at 344 Broome Street.” (Which would have been the caption printed with the photo when it appeared in a newspaper.) It’s an odd, abrupt little piece; I’ve been drawn to miniatures lately. It ends quite suddenly, with a shock, if I did my work right, creating surprise that it ends so suddenly, and then (again if I got this right) a realization that, yes, this really had to be the end. Like the gunman’s life…

You can see a score of the piece here, as a PDF file. And here's a rough computer demo of the music.

Weegee’s photos are of course a lot like film noir, and for both reference and inspiration I recorded (from DVDs) some excerpts from film noir scores — from Out of the Past and Too Late for Tears ­— and saved them on my hard drive. In my hotel, I was listening to them and doing a little editing; I’d recorded them quickly, without bothering to give the excerpts beginnings or ends. So I was fixing that, and something started to dawn on me. The studio orchestras play these scores vividly. In fact, they do everything I complained a while ago that serious classical orchestras don’t do enough, which here I’d summarize as making all the effects the score calls for. If the film scores are supposed to be menacing, they sound menacing; if they slide into love music, it’s drenched with ambiguous romance. So bravo to these long-ago studio musicians…and why can’t we play Mahler like that?

***

Roy Webb wrote the score for Out of the Past, with a terrific tune as the main theme. R. Dale Butts wrote the score for Too Late for Tears, full of menace and atmosphere. Here's a sample of his work, and of the vivid, even slinky musical performance. This little excerpt from the film's soundtrack, with music, dialogue, footsteps, and the creak of a rowboat, makes a fine little piece of sound art. The people you hear talking have just killed the woman's husband…

I'm very happy to say that I've launched the new version of my book on the future of classical music. I trust that it's tighter and more focused than the last one. I invite you to read it, and then feel free to post comments.

I'm back from Cleveland, and since it's now 5 AM -- that new book episode needed some last-minute (well last-hours) work -- I'm not going to say much about my trip. Except that we had an unexpected program change. Garrick Ohlsson, after playing the Barber Piano Concerto on Thursday and Friday, had to leave unexpectedly. So Jon Kimura Parker came in, and did a terrific job, substituting the Beethoven third concerto for the Barber. That gave my conversations with conductor and soloist a delightful glow. Parker arrived at 3 PM the day of his first concert. I turned out to be the first to tell the audience that, and I could tell Parker, when it was time to talk to him onstage, that when he took his bow after playing the concerto the night before -- on no rehearsal -- he was grinning like he'd just won a gold medal in the Olympic ski jump.

But on a very different note, here's a thought that a friend of mine offered me recently: High-ranking staff members at major orchestras could be making a lot more money doing something else. But they stay because they're devoted -- devoted especially to the music. I wondered if this was a good thing. Not necessarily, said my friend, because it's precisely their devotion that often makes people buy into classical music orthodoxy, whether they realize they're doing it or not. And that becomes yet another obstacle standing in the way of change.

Two quick musical thoughts, about pieces I heard in Cleveland. The Barber Toccata Festiva, for virtuoso organist and orchestra, is a strange piece, harmonically -- it's quite static, both in its lush and tonal sections, and when it's busily dissonant. Both types of music don't really go anywhere harmonically, and the piece breaks down into chunks of harmonic stasis, ending finally on a triumphant major chord, which to my ear has no special harmonic significance, since it's not the goal of any forward-moving cadence. (I'm not saying that this is a problem, please note. But it's a curiosity.)

The Sibelius Fifth Symphony keeps doing the same thing for amazing lengths of time. It unwinds itself slowly, unfolding variants on more or less the same material. This continues through all three movements, though the last movement finally generates a really striking, vaguely climactic and triumphant motif (which Jon Kimura Parker, backstage, said made him think of a ship rocking on ocean waves). But still the piece keeps unrolling itself forward, until finally nothing can stop the motion except those five famous chords at the end, with the long pauses in between. To me, that's one meaning of those pauses. Without them, you couldn't bring the music to any kind of halt.

I'll be in Cleveland on Sunday, stepping out on stage at Severance Hall to lead some conversation during a Cleveland Orchestra concert. I've done this once before, last season, and will do it again on March 26 and April 23. (I'll also be in Milwaukee from March 17 to March 19, speaking about the Milwaukee Symphony's Brahms festival, and about some other things, along with my old friend Tim Page from The Washington Post.)

The Cleveland conversations will be short, but if past experience is any guide, pretty interesting. I'll be talking to Jahja Ling, who'll be conducting, and Garrick Ohlsson, who'll play the Barber Piano Concerto. The program is unusual, and very effective: First Sibelius, "The Chase" and "Scena" from his Scenes Historiques (pieces you certainly don't hear every day, and which are far more discursive, in their short span, than Sibelius usually is). Then the Barber Concerto, and then his Toccata Festiva for Organ and Orchestra, a wildly crazy piece, with a killer solo organ part (Joella Jones will be the soloist). And then the Sibelius Fifth. Two supposedly conservative composers, with some not so conservative music.

If you read this blog, and you happen to be there, find me and say hello!

Is it just me, or did Peter Gelb, the incoming general director of the Metropolitan Opera, just announce the most substantial turnaround plan ever seen from a major classical music institution?

It’s not just me. Peter did exactly that—or at least he announced the very impressive first stages of the most substantial turnaround plan I’ve ever seen. And yet some noticeable portion of the press doesn’t seem to get it. More on the press later, though. (My colleagues weren’t having their best day, I fear.) First let’s see what Peter announced, first in stories from the Associated Press and The New York Times, and then at a press conference on February 13. (I was very friendly with him when he ran Sony Classical, but I want to stress that I haven’t spoken to him since he got the Met job, and had no advance word about anything I’m writing about here, except for all the usual rumors dashing around in the underbrush.)

Here are Peter’s public plans:

• He’s going to bring in major conductors, and announced two of them. In future seasons, Muti will conduct Verdi’s Attila, and Salonen will conduct Janacek’s From the House of the Dead. For decades we’ve all complained about the lack of major conductors at the Met, apart from James Levine. So immediately Peter has addressed one of the bigger problems serious opera fans have had with the house.
• He’s going to do many more new productions, eventually, he says, one each month. That’ll help create interest and excitement. (It will also be expensive, which means he must think that he can find the money—and, what’s most important, that he knows he has to spend money to get the Met where it needs to be, despite the current financial troubles.)
• He’s going to reposition ticket prices, lowering the cheapest seats from $26 to $15, while raising the price of the most expensive ones. This is brilliant. With one stroke, he addresses the problem of ticket prices, which everyone knows are one of many factors keeping people away. (The mere perception, correct or not, that tickets are expensive plays a part here, too. Peter’s move—with all the publicity it’ll get—addresses both perception and reality.) And he does this, he can hope, without losing money, which ticket-price reductions typically do. As he said at the press conference, he wants the wealthy patrons to subsidize the poorer ones. We’ll have to see how this plays out in practice, especially on the balance sheet, but it’s a terrific step to take.
• He’s going to collaborate with the Lincoln Center Theater. Apart from some uncomfortable joint efforts some years ago by the Lincoln Center Festival and the New York Philharmonic, there hasn’t been any collaboration that anyone can remember among Lincoln Center’s constituents. Not even cross-promotion of related events. This is ridiculous. With one stroke, Peter shows that collaboration can be possible.
• The collaboration involves development of new works, with nine composers. Some of these composers aren’t classical, which already has caused some furrowed brows. Doesn’t matter. Tony Tommasini, chief critic of the Times, wrote a piece wondering if the composer choice was truly artistic, but the message I think he mostly conveyed was something different: The Met is doing something we have to talk about. Besides, nine composers! The house has been justly criticized for not doing enough new music. Getting nine composers—not one, not two, but nine—to work there can’t be bad.
• He’s going to produce a 90-minute version of last season’s Magic Flute production, which was a hit with ticket-buyers. Of course this is aimed at families who might not otherwise attend. Again a very good idea, since the Met—with ticket sales really low—needs to find a new audience.
• He scrapped the plans for next season’s opening, which was going to be—as so often in recent years—a gala. Instead he’s going to bring in a Butterfly production from Britain, one that caused a sensation. Very likely this was only possible because Butterfly was already on the schedule for next fall, but this change is major news. First, it potentially starts next season—Peter’s first in full command—with a bang. But even more than that, it shows that Peter is a strong, decisive manager. Opera seasons, as everybody knows, are planned years in advance. Anyone would have said, “No, you can’t possibly change next year’s opening. It’s far too late.” But it wasn’t, and by bucking the inertia of conventional wisdom here, Peter shows he’s firmly in charge, and willing to go against the grain if he has to, to do what needs to be done.

One thing that these initiatives accomplish—both separately and (most of all) together—is create some buzz. And look at who’ll be buzzing. The lower ticket prices and the 90-minute Magic Flute speak to the new audience the Met needs to attract. The new productions and the top conductors all speak to opera fans, and to people in the music business (who’ll also be impressed by the nine composers). The change in next year’s opening and the theater collaboration speak to insiders, and also to the Met’s own staff, who can see the difference a decisive leader makes. (Not that everything else won’t send that message, too.)

Add it all together, and it’s tremendously impressive. A first step, maybe (or a collection of first steps), but more than I’ve seen any other major classical music institution do.

In a separate post: the press.

Here's something from a faithful correspondent, who wants to be known simply as a music student from Missouri. She liiked my list of young-audience characteristics, and adds something important:

May I just add to the list that a lot of younger people find the whole classical music scene hugely pretentious, in ways that those of us inside the circle may not even think about? I took my sister, who is really just a huge music fan and goes to a TON of non-classical concerts, to a SLSO [St. Louis Symphony] concert not too long ago. At the end of the concert, the conductor and soloists came took their bows, left, and came back to take another bow. She leaned over to me and said, "Cool -- are they going to play some more?" I told her no, orchestras being practically forbidden to do encores by union rules. And she said, "Oh, so they're just coming back out because they're full of themselves." And, honestly, I was a little shocked by the comment, because, of course, in Classical Music World, we see the bow in a completely different light -- a gesture of appreciation to the audience, respect for the music we've played, etc. I hadn't even considered how pretentious it might look! And it occurred to me that this tradition and the reasons behind it are something we don't even question anymore, and we just assume everyone in the audience assumes our good intention, when, in fact they may very well be thinking that we're just pompous asses basking in our own glory. Seems that the better plan would either be to ditch the tradition or explain the intent behind it.

To resume this thread, which I started a while ago…

A month or so ago I was asked to speak to members of the board of a major orchestra, about how to attract a new audience. I was especially interested in talking about how to attract younger people, because I think it's a subject we talk about a lot in the classical music world, but not always with much thought about what younger people actually are like. Unless, of course, we trot out those old bromides about their alleged short attention span and alleged need for visual stimulation.

As I'm sure I've said here before, I think the problems go the other way -- that is, rather than being too shallow or too unprepared for classical music, younger people instead tend to be too smart for the way classical music is currently presented. So here's some of what I said in my presentation:

Younger people are cultural omnivores. They pick their art and entertainment from a smorsgasbord of high and popular culture.

They expect culture to be intelligent. That's what they're getting from popular culture, as Stephen Johnson so unmistakably demonstrated in his ironically titled book Everything Bad is Good for You

They're openminded. They're ready to give anything a chance. Including classical music! Never before have so many people been interested in so many different kinds of music, a trend of course greatly helped by downloading, because now you can sample music before you buy it, and -- no small thing -- buy something you're curious about for just 99 cents, on iTunes. So it's both cheap and easy to try out music you think you might like.

Younger people are selective. They often gravitate to niche markets. They make their own, highly independent choices about what they like, and they stick with them.

Younger people are critical, and prone to irony. They see through hype and bullshit. Which, I'm afraid, in classical music means that they'll have no patience with pious talk about great masterpieces. They want to know what's really going on.

They may not respond to romantic music. Though of course some of them will. But the sweep and passion of 19th century classical music, which some people might assume to be a selling point, will make many younger people think they're hearing a cheesy movie score. The movie score, of course, is very likely a knockoff of romantic classical works, but this new, younger audience doesn't know that, and "cheesy movie score" may well be their first association when they hear Tchaikovsky.

They don't plan their lives around what I might call "appointment events," adapting that term from a marvelous expression I ran across in discussions of new trends in television: "appointment TV." Appointment TV is the old watch-it-when-they-broadcast it paradigm, according to which you're stuck watching shows when the networks put them on. Thanks to TIVO, and now video downloads from iTunes and other sites, you can watch many shows whenever you like. The parallel development for the performing arts is that people don't leave work at 5 PM, go home, have dinner, and then head out the door for an 8 PM concert. They leave work at 3 PM or 8:30, make time for the gym or rides on their mountain bikes, and may well head out of the house at 9. Then they might well look for something going on in a neighborhood full of clubs and other street-level places that you can walk in and out of ad lib. The classical concert hall, most obviously, doesn't work like that at all, which from a younger person's point of view might well make it too rigid to be an attractive night-life option.

Though of course there are challenges to classical music expectations all the way through this list. Next: how marketing research in Britain strengthens and amplifies many of these points.

Here's the view from my front door in Warwick, NY, after the snowstorm today:

It's peaceful here; silent; hardly any cars on our road. (Which you can't see from our front door; our house faces away from the road, toward woods and a field.) This is a rare moment of peace for me. I've been buried in work and travel for the past few weeks. Each Thursday I've been flying from New York to Rochester, to teach a course on the future of classical music at the Eastman School of Music. On Wednesdays I teach the same course at Juilliard. I flew to England for the Association of British Orchestras conference, and have been sitting home obsessively writing marketing copy for four American orchestras…plus more, including some consulting and project work with the Cleveland Orchestra. It's hard to explain exactly why all this is so strenuous, though part of it comes from taking these courses I'm teaching very seriously, and rethinking each year how I'm going to teach them.

And then there's also the book I've been writing here on ArtsJournal, in installments. That takes a lot out of me every other weekend. I'm not complaining, you understand. These all are loads I'm willing to carry. But it adds up to a lot.

And on top of everything else I've been composing, most recently a slightly crazy piece for cello and piano which was premiered last Wednesday. I'll have more to say about that in a bit. All this, as I've said, adds up. Some days I'll have work in several categories piled up, including maybe two hours of polishing the cello and piano score (maybe just correcting the inevitable mistakes that find their way into the notation; even that can take a long time). Teaching in Rochester is a full day's effort -- up at 6 to catch a morning flight, lunch at a terrific Chinese place around the corner from Eastman, then teach, then back to the airport for a 5 PM flight back to New York, then a cab ride through rush hour traffic from the airport back home. No complaints here -- and in fact the students in the class are terrific, as are my Juilliard students, so that teaching this semester is a real joy. If anyone's curious, you can see the class and assignment schedules for the Juilliard and Eastman courses, and even read some of the assignments. The Eastman course meets just seven times, the Juilliard course a lot more than that. But they cover the same ground.

And in the middle of all this, some great pleasures from films I've watched on my flights -- Godard's Masculin Féminin, and Wong Kar-Wai's 2046. Godard's film, besides being a lot of fun and very touching, is a modernist landmark, self-referential to the max, and full of moments when the actors break through the screen to speak for themselves. To say this seems more lively and, really, more lasting than the modernist music from the same period (the film came out in 1966) would be the understatement of the month. That's because the movie touches both everyday life and crucial social concerns of its time, which modernist music back then generally didn't.

2046 is a quiet treasure, a look at buried passion (a big subject for Wong, as I understand his films), beautiful and heart-rending. Tony Leung, in the leading role, has the charm and charisma of a 1940s film star (to me he seems like a Chinese Clark Gable), and in fact one wonderful thing about this film is the way all the cast has that special quality film stars used to have, but now gnerally don't. "Beautifully sad," is the way one viewer on the IMDb film site describes the film, and I agree; that's exactly right.

And as night falls, the snow is still mostly untouched…

I've finished another episode of my ongoing book on the future of classical music, and it's online at the usual place. It wraps up the discussion that started two episodes ago, about form and structure in classical music.

And in two weeks, on February 20, the next episode comes out. It's going to mark a new departure. Quite honestly, I'm not happy with the way the book has been going, and I think I've learned how I should have proceeded. So, beginning on February 20, I'm going to start the book all over again. It'll be more orthodox, more focused, and much more clearly centered on the classical music world and its problems -- and on whatever solutions I can offer. I'll keep the old episodes online for anyone to read, but I look at them now as a false start, an ambitious sprint down what turns out to be the wrong path.

Comments, as ever, are welcome. And thanks to all of you, once more, for your interest.