September 2006 Archives

...or, more modestly, the questions raised for classical music by the decline of European culture as the dominant force even in the western world. (See my earlier post.)

There's a striking and important novel that appears to be about this, Richard Powers's The Time of His Singing. I say "appears to be" because I haven't finished it yet. But so far one of its major themes is the meaning of classical music in a non-classical world, as explored through the experience of young black classical musicians making their careers in the 1960s. How do they reconcile classical music with the history exploding all around them?

But what I've just written isn't good enough. It makes the book -- a blazing and also very subtle creation -- seem lightyears more schematic than it really is. The characters, for one thing, are far too real and far too specific to fit into any neat schema. And nothing in the novel is cheapened, not classical music, not African-American history, not (to cite just one example) the famous Marian Anderson concert on the Washington Mall (after she was banned from singing in Constitution Hall), which Powers brings to life in an astounding and deeply touching long section of the book. The theme of the book, in fact, goes a lot deeper than what I've stated. It might also be the persistence of race, whether anyone ever can transcend racial culture in America, with the experience of African-Americans singing classical music as one test case to study.

But still my description seems too schematic. Let me just quote two passages. First, a description of a soprano singing Fiordiligi in Cosi fan tutte at the Met:

The curtain rises on the second act, plunging us back into life or death. Jonah grips the armrest throughout Lisette's second big aria, anticipating the octave-and-a-half swoops, sure she's going to give in and get laid by this pseudo-Albanian, her sister's fiancé, her betrothed's most trusted friend. Everybody does it. Does she love this other man? Why is her fall so much, sweeter than her earlier sworn chastity? His whole body sighs with her thrilling debasement.

Lisette doesn't always soar. Some of the highs lack support, and her rapid, dipping passages take cover. Still, she's supernatural. She inhabits the stage, never having lived anywhere but in this story, never experiencing any time but this one renewing night. Fiordiligi has waited patiently for just such a supple body to reawaken in after long hibernation. Never has a singer taken such shameless physical pleasure in a role. Lisette is wayward, consumed, consummated by the unlikely luck of this part. By her "Per pieta," Jonah [the singer's student] is lost, and even I forgive her anything.

This is some of the best writing about classical music I've ever seen, answering -- or really soaring over -- the question almost always left unanswered in most of what we read: "What does it mean?" Certainly it's better than the blather everywhere in Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, probably the most famous novel in recent years that describes classical music. If you believe Patchett, classical music is just (to quote Johnny Mathis) wonderful, wonderful, with only surface differences between one piece and another. (This is something I'll have to blog more about.)

And then this, in which one of Powers's big themes catches fire:

Jonah was right. Will Hart [an African-American music student] lived on the school's suspect fringe. Juilliard still dwelled in that tiny diamond between London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. Music meant the big Teutonic B's, those names chiseled into the marble pediment, the old imperial dream of coherence that haunted the continent Da had fled. North American concert music -- even Will's adored Copland and Still [William Grant Still was an African-American composer, far too little remembered today]-- was here little more than a European transplant. That this country had a music-spectacularly reinventing itself every three years, the bastard of chanted hymns, spirit hollers, cabin songs, field calls and coded escape plans, funeral rowdiness gathered by way of New Orleans, gutbucketed and jugged, slipped up the river in cotton crates to Memphis and St. Louis, bent into blue intervals that power would never recognize, reconvening north, to be flung out every, where along Chicago's railhead as unstoppable rag, and overnight-the longest, darkest overnight of the soul in all improvised history -- birthing jazz and its countless half-breed descendants, a whole glittering Savoy ballroom full of offspring scatting and scattering everywhere, dancing the hooves off anything whiteness ever made, American, American, for whatever that meant, a music that had taken over the world while the classical masters were looking the other way -- had not yet dawned on these Europe-revering halls.

How should classical music answer that challenge? (Note, by the way, that Jonah, the book's main character, loves the new classical music of his time, Boulez, Babbitt, Berio. So that's not likely to be a good enough response.)

(A quick footnote: The book has two problems. The more serious one is that it's overwritten, as the excerpts I've quoted ought to show. But you get used to that, and Powers's commitment and imagination -- and the force of his characters -- can sweep you away.

(The other problem? Trivial, but surprising, especially considering how deep his historical insight can be, especially into the lives of African-Americans in decades past. (Or so it seems to me, anyway. Someone should quickly correct me if I'm wrong.) But Pwers lets silly anachronisms slip by. For instance, he has High Fidelity magazine publishing a feature article in 1967 called "Ten Singers Under Thirty Who Will Change the Way You Listen to Lieder." Well, I read High Fidelity avidly back then (for the most consistently strong music reviews I've ever seen in a single publication), and I can guarantee you they never ran stories like that. I don't think any magazine did. That kind of breathless story concept -- and headlining -- didn't appear till much later, maybe even the '80s.

(Besides, nobody in 1967 could have named 10 upcoming lieder singers. I doubt many High Fidelity readers could have named 10 established lieder singers, since Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau so dominated the field. I'm trying to think who I knew about, besides Fischer-Dieskau. Maybe Schwartzkopf, Hermann Prey, Hans Hotter, and Gerard Souzay (of blessed memory; do people still listen to him?). To which I might have added Askel Schiøtz (from a previous generation, but people still listened to him) and Peter Pears (whose recording of Die schöne Müllerin with Benjamin Britten is unforgettable, though nobody's first response to his name would have been, "Oh, he's a lieder singer.") I could easily be forgetting a major name, but it would have been very hard, back then, to list 10 top lieder singers, and I'm surprised that Powers didn't know that.)

Derek Bermel, a terrific composer whom I like a lot, e-mailed a comment on my last book episode, which deserves to be shared. So, with his permission, here's what he wrote:

Sometimes I wonder, in a country which is increasingly South American, Asian, and African, whether it is useful to dwell so strongly on the history of European performance/composition. Because by the time we've 'figured it out', the audience may have mutated so much as to render obsolete the arguments based on 18th and 19th century Europe. I know you - of all people - have thought about this, and that it is not in the purview of this analysis. Nonetheless, to quote Robert Plant, "it makes me wonder".

I think this has to fall within my purview, though I haven't stressed it very much. Ultimately, one of the things going on these days is the end of European culture as we've known it, and the rise of a new world culture. Musically, this started happening early in the 20th century with the rise of jazz, which in some ways isn't western music at all -- jazz drumming evolved from African drumming (nothing even remotely like it can be found in the western classical tradition, except maybe in the middle ages). And the characteristic jazz rhythm, with the emphasis on the backbeat (or, to be more literal, on the offbeats of each bar, typically the second and fourth beats of a 4/4 measure) -- that's not western, either.

To put it more simply, the European tradition has you clapping on the downbeats; in African-evolved music, you clap on the offbeats. Gunther Schuller, in (I think) the first volume of his study of early jazz, intriguingly calls the result a polyrhythm, in which our western clapping is mixed with African-influenced clapping, one kind of emphasis for the strong beats, another for the offbeats.

And after World War II, rock & roll finished the job, infecting even casual western culture with a non-western beat, and ultimately developing its own kind of art music powered by that beat. It's no coincidence, I think, that this happened exactly at the same time as the civil rights movement in America, and decolonization in Africa and elsewhere. The west was pulling back; the non-west was rising.

You can draw big implications from this, as Michael Ventura does very powerfully in his essay "Hear the Long Snake Moan," published in his essay collection Shadow Dancing in the U.S.A. Ventura says that what gets challenged is nothing less than the western distinction between mind and body, with body taking a lower place (and even, in some ways of thinking about this, an inevitably sinful one). Other cultures don't make the same distinction, and when we started dancing to rock & roll, we were on the road to not making it ourselves.

These are big questions. But they're not off-topic here. They're directly involved in the future of classical music. If classical music can't adapt to the world of the future -- probably the world we're in right now -- in which European culture is blending with cultures from elsewhere, it can't possibly survive. Thanks, Derek, for reminding me.

(Derek is, for the next three years, composer in residence with the American Composers Orchestra. He's in charge of their current concentration on composer-performers, which I've mentioned here before. Derek himself is a composer-performer; he's a clarinettist, and also has a rock band. He's one of many young composers whose music goes exactly to that mix of Europe and non-Europe that classical music has to embrace.)

I succumbed to one of the new fifth-generation iPods, a nice sleek black one, which shows video and has an 80 gb hard drive. Quite cool, especially since iPod prices have come way down. I've had an iPod for quite a while, and before that another digital player, but now I'm looking forward to ripping CDs at much higher bitrates, giving me much better sound. (The extra hard drive space leaves plenty of room for the larger files.) And, of course, to watching episodes of Battlestar Galactica when I'm traveling, not to mention that DVD about Poulenc I've been meaning to get to.

But this isn't why I'm making this post. The new iPod -- along with the new version 7.0 of iTunes -- fixes one well known and really annoying problem. That's the gap that shows up between tracks, a momentary hiccup while (or so I've read) the player reads textual data from the hard drive (like the track's name). This is no fun when you're listening to an opera, or to a symphony like Beethoven's Fifth or Sixth, where movements flow into each other, or, for that matter, when you're listening to live pop albums. But all of us who use digital players have been putting up with this for years.

And now the problem is gone. The new iTunes allows you to specify "gapless playback" for any of the music you put into it, and that music then plays back on the new iPod (though not on my old one) without any hitch or hesitation. A small but significant blessing. So now if only the tagging of classical music -- the labels that tell you what each digital classical track is -- would improve...(I've had a grimly funny time putting the new Mariss Jansons complete Shostakovich symphonies on my iPod, discovering that separate CDs might show up with different versions of, just for instance, the composer's name.)

That was on the Metropolitan Opera's website, less than half an hour before opening night. They'd been running this countdown for days, and I loved it. How to create excitement! Or, rather, one way to do it, along with the free open house they'd had the day before; the announcement of the deal putting the Met on its own full-time channel on Sirius satellite radio. And, of course, the announcement of the video screens in Times Square and Lincoln Center Plaza, allowing anyone to see the opening night performance free.

Here's an institution that knows what it's doing, and especially knows that it needs a new relationship with the city it's part of. I was at the opening performance (I live barely 10 minutes from Lincoln Center by cab, on a good day even less, and so I really could grab that countdown from the website, and then head off to the performance). And it was a triumph. The buzz was tangible, in part because there were celebrities around. My wife and I saw Sean Connery, which almost (though not quite) trumped the opera. I don't mean to gush, but it was fun having stars around. Don't think that some of the most serious music critics you might read didn't enjoy it just as much as I did. And don't think that the excitement doesn't matter backstage. I ran into people from the Met's orchestra, slipping into the house at intermission to look at the crowd. You think this isn't good for the Met? And good for opera? You'd rather have an audience of musicologists, studying their scores?

And the performance was really good. You can quarrel with the singing (a Butterfly who could act the role, but pushed her voice, and still couldn't make an impression at big moments like "Un bel di"; an apparently nervous tenor pushing his voice though he had no need to). But the new Anthony Minghella production (well, new to the Met) was both gorgeous and powerful. It was real theater, something you could take serious people to, who don't usually like opera. There was lots of talk about the puppet that enacted Butterfly's child. Yes, it was heart-wrenchingly grotesque, but at the same time it was heart-wrenchingly realistic, moving and yearning much like a real child (and more than a stage child ever could).

And its grotesque look, to me, at least, was part of the point. In many ways this production tore through the sometimes sentimental surface of the opera, and showed the ugly underside of the story, though without making any great fuss about that. Here's another example. Far above the stage, on the lofty ceiling of the stage space, were mirrors, reflecting the scene below -- but at an angle, so it looked uneasy and sometimes harsh. This paid off wonderfully in the last act, during the scene were Sharpless and Kate Pinkerton tell Suzuki the horrible truth. Butterfly is asleep offstage, but in this production, she was just behind some of the sliding screens that served as the house's walls, and in the reflections above, you could see her sleeping, chillingly present in the production even though she had nothing to do onstage. Later, when she woke up, we could see that, and see her coming toward the door that would bring her onstage to her doom.

Many of the reviews I read were dubious -- some of the critics found the production too modern, too abstract, not emotional enough. This, I think, means that music critics are in a cultural place that isn't where many other cultured people are today. To anyone who goes to the theater, I don't think this production would have seemed at all off-putting or even remarkable, except for its quality. I think of the Medea that was on Broadway a few seasons ago, or the fascinating Sweeney Todd with the actors playing all the musical instruments. Both were at least as abstract as this Butterfly, and nobody seemed to mind. So the question then becomes: Should the Met please the critics (and the more conservative part of its established audience), or should it do things that bring it into the wider world, full of people who aren't yet going to the opera? Surely it needs to do some of both, but in the long run, the new people are more important. The old audience has been shrinking; without a new audience, there won't be any Met. And if, to your hoped-for new audience, you look stodgy and inartistic, you're in big trouble.

One last thing. The Met has revamped its program book:

Note that it now looks like a real magazine, complete with striking cover image, and what the trade calls "cover lines," text that tells you what you're going to find inside. I've been agitating for something like this for years. Program books should look like the kind of magazines people read in the outside world. Or at least they should if we want people to read them. I'm not going to say that nobody has moved in that direction. The New York Philharmonic program book, for instance, has a nicely spacious design, with lots of white space, and smart use of sidebars and other special text.

But the Met's cover takes things to the next level. I'm not going to pretend that everything is terrific inside the book; the Philharmonic's inside layout is often better, and in the Met's book (or at least in this first edition this season) there are blocks of text in what I'm not alone in thinking is too small a typeface. There's also an unfortunate photo of Peter Gelb, one that manages an improbable trick -- making it hard even to imagine what he really looks like, while at the same time making him look older than he really is.

These things, though, should be easy to fix. And what's most important about the program book is its content. A lot of it addresses the Met's central problem, which is also the central problem for classical music. I can't do better than quote Peter Gelb's introductory essay, written in a wonderfully informal but also very direct style. These words are highlighted in a pullquote: "My greatest challenge is to keep the Met -- and opera, more broadly -- connected to contemporary society."

And that, in many ways, is the theme of the program book. There's an interview with Beverly Sills, titled "The Opera Singer as Pop Star," with a teaser saying that Sills is going to talk about "the changing place of opera in contemporary culture." Which she does, sometimes in pretty strong language. Best of all might be an essay by Andre Bishop, "The Case for Opera," bearing this teaser: "Does the art form have a relevant place in contemporary culture?"

Bishop is the artistic director of the Lincoln Center Theater, and will be working with the Met on developing new works. And while his ideas about opera's relevance are worth thinking about, his most provocative thought is about new operas:

And we must break away from what I call 19th-Century Thinking: not every good play or novel should be adapted for the musical stage. Most of them should be left alone. My favorite new operas (works like Adams's Nixon in China and Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles) have been totally original; my least favorites have simply taken an old book or play and set it to music, to no real purpose beyond a stab at respectability.

Can you believe that? Serious artistic discussion in a classical music program book -- and serious discussion that takes strong issue with the Met's own most recent commissions, John Harbison's The Great Gatsby and Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy (not to mention William Bolcom's A View from the Bridge, which the Chicago Lyric Opera premiered, but which the Met also staged). If we're going to have talk like that right out in the open, the Met could be a very interesting place.

The new episode of my online book is now online. In it, I outline changes that happened late in the 18th and early in the 19th century, in the way that music was thought about. Amazingly, maybe, from our point of view, music wasn't considered a major art until this time. Before the concept of classical music, as we now know it, could evolve, the status of music had to change -- people had to decide that it was supremely important. Which they did, thanks to many factors, ranging from romanticism, German nationalism, and Beethoven, who as the historian Peter Gay writes, was "virtually deified."

Gay, by the way, starts The Naked Heart -- the fourth volume of his series of books about the bourgeois experience from Queen Victoria to Freud -- with a chapter on listening to music. It's an invaluable, and supremely readable, source for the change from 18th to 19th century listening -- from talking during musical performances to paying rapt attention. Much cited by musicologists, and absorbing reading for anyone. The book apparently is out of print, but I had no trouble getting a copy through one of the booksellers on Amazon.

I can hardly say enough about Eric Edberg, a cellist and professor at the DePauw University School of Music. He's one of the people I've met through this blog (and through my online book), and he and I have been giving each other lots of encouragement. Among much else, he's writing an online book himself (which I've mentioned here before), about how important improvisation is -- or should be -- for classical music. It's important reading.

On August 30, he gave a quietly important concert. Well, maybe "quiet" is the wrong word; the concert was anything but that. This was an explosive event; by "quiet" I just meant that it wasn't publicized all over the country. It was a cello and piano recital, with the very fine (to judge from recordings on Eric's website) Stephanie Gurga. And Eric, too, is pretty terrific.

This concert wasn't a normal classical event. But let Eric describe it himself. Here's the e-mail announcement he sent out:

Wednesday Aug. 30

7:30 PM Thompson Recital Hall in the PAC
The Romantic Cello: An Informal and Interactive Musical Event
Eric Edberg, cello and Stephanie Gurga, piano
featuring short, entertaining pieces

one hour max
performers in jeans
clap whenever you want
and dance in the aisles if you feel like it

Ever think classical concerts are too formal and have too many intimidating rules? Could one of the reasons classical audiences are growing older and smaller be that the whole stuffy ambience, in which newcomers are shamed if they do something natural like clap between movements or during a movement, be part of the problem? (Did you know that before the 20th century, audiences clapped between movements and even during them, and composers like Mozart encouraged it?)

Stephanie Gurga (a recent SoM grad and brilliant pianist) and I think so. So we're trying an experiment. To make the atmosphere unintimidating, we're going to dress very casually in Wednesday evening's recital. I'm wearing jeans.

And the usual rules of audience deportment are suspended for one night. Clap between movements (well, there's only one multi-movement piece). Clap after a good lick, or shout out an "amen" or a "boo." Dance in the aisles or in front of the stage.

I made a deal with my first-year seminar class (which is looking at the future of classical music): I'll wear jeans and make the concert as fun as possible if they'll bring someone new to classical music to the recital. So I'm making the same invitation to all you music majors. Our future as classical performers is dependent on getting young people to start coming to classical concerts again. Let's see if this helps.

Bring a friend who's not a classical concert-goer, and let them know they don't have to worry about clapping at the wrong time.

And the result? A huge crowd came, compared to the normal faculty recital. You can read more about it on the DePauw website, and on Eric's blog (here, here, and here). Plus there's a video of part of the concert on the DePauw site, and many, many comments on Eric's blog from people who were there, plus one from the pianist. Very thoughtful comments, not all favorable; you read them, and you get a very clear idea of how unusual an event like this is, in the classical music world, how tricky it can be to make the event work (or at least to please everybody with it0, and how wonderfully valuable even the attempt is -- not that I'd rank this as any kind of failure. People really did dance in the aisles, as you'll see in the video. You might also get the idea that the concert was complete chaos, but that's misleading. See Eric's own assessment, which is well worth reading. This is the last of the links I gave above, to his blog posts about the concert. Here's part of it:

So my experiment with this concert was not about a new way to experience music for people who already love classical music the way it is. It was about creating an experience for non-musicians in which they could experience classical music in an interactive way. One in which their aliveness would not be deadened, but enhanced. I always hope that an audience will leave a concert more alive than when they came. As this concert approached, I decided I wanted to remove all the fear, all the inhibition, and let whatever wanted to happen happen. How enlivening can we make it for the audience?

Sure, there were times in which the audience participation reminded me of all the carrying on many new college students do: no rules, so let's run wild, let's do it because we can. OK. But really, so what? As the concert went on, there was less and less of that, and I think if we have more events like this a new culture will develop.

This concert was not for the classical music lovers. The concert was for the people who don't go to classical concerts and came because this one was different. Who came because someone invited them.

So I asked my seminar class this morning what the friends they brought thought. "My friend said, 'Oh my god, it was absolutely orgasmic,'" one told us.

There's much more. It's all worth pondering. Many kudos to Eric and Stephanie Gurga for doing this, for bringing it off with such panache, and for getting so much attention for it.

Which leads to a question? Who else has done anything like this? One of my Juilliard students, years ago, tried to get people to clap during the music (if they felt like it), during her graduation recital, but with no luck. I got people clapping during Mozart's Paris Symphony at one of the Pittsburgh Symphony's now-defunct "Symphony with a Splash" concerts, just as the audience at the symphony's 18th-century premiere did. But surely others have done what Eric and Stephanie Gurga did, or something in at least the same direction. I'd love to hear about it!

Apologies to all -- there were some broken links in the curriculum for my music criticism course. I've now fixed them. Thanks to those who pointed them out!

I've been preparing for tomorrow's session, so this class is on my mind. It's a graduate course at Juilliard, about music criticism. Last year my students were half classical musicians, and half jazz musicians; it looks like the mix this year will be pretty much the same. Which, if I'd expected it, might have led me to change what I teach a little. But on the other hand, the curriculum I made up seems to work, and the jazz students last year seemed to get into it. And apparently they recommended the course to their friends, which is really flattering.

If you'd like go see what goes on in the course -- and even do the reading yourself -- go here. You'll find the class schedule, with links to the reading. I haven't finished putting all the reading online yet, so if you want to read something that isn't yet there, check back in a couple of weeks.

I love teaching, by the way. I probably learn more from doing it than from anything else.

And, also by the way, what I was preparing tonight was to talk about some of my own writing that I assigned. I don't hold myself up as a model; that's not why I start by assigning my own work. I just think that the students -- since we're going to be dishing criticism all semester long -- have ought to know (for better or worse) what kind of critic their teacher has been. And you, too, can read my old reviews, if you follow the links.

I'm part of a long podcast from Radio Allegro in Canada, interviewed by a very smart and lively guy, Ashley Foot. The podcast is called "The Sounds of Summer 2006," and I'm one of several people who pick a piece of summer music we love. And, OK, I picked a piece of autumn music I'd heard in the winter, "Harvest Moon," the deeply beautiful Neil Young song (from his '90s album of that name), as he sings it in the Jonathan Demme concert film, Heart of Gold. I've raved about that film here; it's not just an unforgettable human and musical document, but a model example of how to put a musical performance on film. We in classical music would just about drop dead with joy if we did one quarter as well.

So on the podcast, I talk about the song, and, bless me, I just about start crying. It's not just the beauty of the music, or of the idea behind the song, a deepening love story involving people who aren't youthful any more. The people involved are right on the film, too -- Young and his wife, who's one of the backup singers. At the end of the performance, he sings "I'm still in love with you/I want to see you dancing." And he turns around to look at her, and all the backup singers start smiling, and I just lose it. You might, too, if you see the film, now available on DVD.

But you can hear the song on the podcast, and hear my talk about the future of classical music as well. I do a lot of radio, from time to time, but this session, with someone I'd never known of before, for an organization I'd never heard of, is one of my happiest radio experiences.

I start at around an hour and 18 minutes into the podcast. You can hear it on the Radio Allegro website, or on iTunes. (The iTunes link won't work unless you have iTunes on your computer.)

I mentioned a while ago that I'd been on the radio in Houston, on KUHF, talking about the future of classical music. Turned out there was great response from the station's staff, and so they broadcast more of me than they'd at first planned to.

But then the broadcasts, I was told, were a great success. The response was "overwhelmingly positive" (this is from an e-mail from someone at the station), with phone calls and requests for more information pouring in. Less credit goes to me, I'd think, than to the station, for featuring this subject. There's intense interest in the future of classical music.

You can hear my interview here. Many, many thanks to Chris Johnson for making this happen, and for being such fun to talk to.

I want to amend what I wrote in previous posts about the American Composers Orchestra. I mentioned (and very happily) upcoming events featuring composer/performers, September 27 at Joe's Pub in New York, October 13 at Zankel Hall (New York again), and October 15 at Irvine Auditorium in Philadelphia. See their website for details.

I think this is important, and very positive, for the future of classical music. But what I didn't say is that their entire season is devoted to composer/performers, branded under the title "Composers Out Front." Why does this matter? Because other arts have grown very flexible. Visual art, for instance -- people don't (as if this was news!) just paint paintings, draw drawings, and sculpt sculptures. They do all kinds of installations, create all kinds of objects, make films, you name it. And they've been doing it for well over a generation. The creations can be anything an artists likes (little dollhouse rooms, collections of pink objects, mazes you walk through), and can be displayed in all kinds of places. Just think of the miniature adobe-style buildings you see on the stairway in the Whitney Museum in New York (which I remember as something like tiny Navajo pueblos).

And this happens in music, too, but not usually in the classical concert hall. There, we still hear pieces in somewhat traditional style, for traditional classical instruments. Even electric guitars are rare. And, sure, the forms of new pieces may be modern, or modernist (we don't hear many symphonies with movements in sonata form, though I'm happily writing one; more on that later). But those new forms themselves have developed traditions, so while many new pieces may surprise some people in the traditional classical audience, they don't surprise anyone who knows new music.

And meanwhile, for more than a generation, composers have been creating other things. It started in the '60s (well, there was some of it in the '20s, too, but the current version of this started in the '60s). Composers do their own versions of art installations -- musical performances involving all kinds of personal ways of creating sound. Often the composer is the performer, or one of the performers. I used to review performances like that when I was a critic for The Village Voice in New York in the '80s, and some of them still are my happiest musical memories.

But while we see installations of all kinds at major art museums and galleries, and see them given featured reviews in major media, we don't see their musical equivalents featured in major concert halls, or (with rare exceptions) given lead reviews in The New York Times. In this way, music lags behind visual art. It needs to catch up, so that a wider audience can see the full explosion of musical creativity in our time, and also so that a wider audience comes to the classical concert hall. And the ACO's season this year is one important step.

The new episode of my book (about the future of classical music, of course), went online last night. As I said in my last post, I'm writing now about the things that happened, in the 19th century and the 20th, to make the classical music world what it's like today. I realize that I'm going at this a little backwards. The changes I'll detail bear some responsibility, I think, for the decline that classical music now has to fight its way out of. But I haven't yet stated the statistical measures of that decline -- most obviously the falling ticket sales over the last decade or so, picking up speed in the last few years. Of course I've talked about these ever since this blog began, but I need to put them all in one place again, for the book, of course, but also for other reasons. They're not as well known as they ought to be, and because they're not, people can (as we've seen) write all sorts of things about classical music and its future, without quite knowing what the situation really is.

In the book, I think, I'll put that early, in the first chapter. But for the moment, in my online book improvisation, I'm having lots of fun suggesting how things got this way. In a couple of episodes (there's a new one every two weeks), I'll finally put the stats together. And I think I might just put that episode in this blog as well.

On Monday, I'll be posting a new episode, the first since last spring, of my in-progress online book on the future of classical music.

In the last few episodes, all still available online, I looked at the days when composers like Haydn and Mozart were active, but the concept of classical music didn't yet exist. Concerts were lively; audiences reacted freely; most of the music played was new; and the musicians often improvised. I don't claim that this was a golden age (concerts also weren't well rehearsed, and the sound of all the first violins in a German orchestra improvising ornaments independently would surely shock us, if we heard anything like that now). But we could use something of that spirit, which in any case informs much of the music written back then, which we now play with too much reverence. And with not enough fun!

Now I'm going to show how all this changed -- how the concept of classical music emerged in the 19th century, and how concerts began to be formal, solemn, and removed from everyday life. And, not least, full of old music. Add two 20th century developments, the rise of modernism and the rise of a popular culture far removed from any form of classical art (but often very artistic), and we've got major trouble, an art form cut off from the world around it.

Which is not, by the way, to say that modernist music is awful. But the idea that it ought to be the norm for new classical composition, and that audiences have to hear it, whether they like it or not -- that's disastrous. And it grows in part from the very concept of classical music, which helped create the idea that the audience can't possibly know what's good for it.

All this, and more, starts on Monday.

Two items -- and not small ones -- that I should have included in my honor roll of new directions for classical music institutions, in my last post:

First, the Metropolitan Opera! Details have now been announced about Met productions being streamed live to movie theaters, something Peter Gelb announced in the spring. Now it's a reality. Not to mention the open house, free for everybody on September 22 (though you have to get tickets in advance), which includes the final dress rehearsal (free, as part of the open house) for the opening night Butterfly. Or the new marketing campaign, which will make the Met visible throughout New York. As someone said in an admiring e-mail this morning, "Peter Gelb gets it." I agree.

And on September 13, the New York Philharmonic will show its first concert this season on a giant video screen in the plaza outside Avery Fisher Hall, "free for all," as a press release underlines. Inside the hall, the orchestra plays; outside the hall, anyone can see and hear them, with chairs provided for those who get there early. This is possible, in part, because the concert being is telecast as one of PBS's Live From Lincoln Center shows, so the feed can go directly to the screen outside. Not that other institutions haven't shown free video of performances without PBS around to help, most notably the Houston Grand Opera, under David Gockley's leadership (and soon he'll be doing the same thing in San Francisco, where he now runs the opera company). The Philharmonic showed its special performance of the Brahms Requiem free on a giant screen, just after 9/11, but that, too, was shown on PBS. Still, if PBS can help the orchestra to project itself into New York, that's a very good thing -- and what's most important is that a rather conservative institution is now taking a step to bring down some of the barriers between itself and its city. (One curiosity, though. There's nothing on the Philharmonic's website about the video showing in Lincoln Center's plaza. If you dig a little -- if you're on the homepage, and click on "more info" under the laconic description of opening night -- you'll learn, equally laconically, about the telecast. But there's not a word about the video screen. Why not? Shouldn't this be splashed on the homepage? Shouldn't at least the telecast be? The Met's website certainly includes all the things I listed above, though not as prominently as they might.)

One caveat, though. Opening the doors -- getting out into the city -- is only the beginning. The biggest change has to be in what classical music institutions actually present. Performances have to feel like living art, or more generally like real human experience, and not like religious rites or some kind of gushy romance novel, where the content doesn't get much beyond "isn't it beautiful!"

My apologies to the Met and Philharmonic for not including them in my original post! What was I thinking of?

In my last post, and often earlier, I've said that the biggest orchestras have suffered falling ticket sales to their core classical concerts for well over a decade. But now, on the grapevine, I've heard something hopeful--sales were slightly up last season. Not all of the biggest orchestras showed an increase, I hear, but most of them did, and their aggregate sales were definitely up.

This is wonderful news. And what's the cause? I'm going to make a hopeful guess. I'll guess that sales are up because the orchestras--and of course especially their marketing directors--decided to do something to reverse the falling sales. And figured out something that began to work, even if it wasn't wildly radical. Not that they hadn't tried hard before, but years of trouble, combined with financial problems and a troubled landscape (see the American Symphony Orchestra League's new strategic plan--go here and scroll down), have a way of stimulating even greater and more thoughtful efforts. One goal, from what I hear, is to sell more single tickets, since subscription sales have been falling for many years. It's encouraging to see that this might work.

But then there are changes all over classical music. I'm amazed--and heartened, and impressed--by how fast things seem to be moving. Here are some straws in the wind, chosen simply because I happened to notice them:

• Last year, the New York City Opera started its season with a gala, which included a party at which the East Village Opera Company did its arena-rock versions of opera tunes. Then they did a regular opera performance, with all seats on sale for $25. I praised that at the time; I went to the opera performance, and saw that it really did attract a new audience. So how are they starting this season. With the gala again, and three performances with all seats costing $25. I don't know how many of the new ticket-buyers they were able to retain, but it's good to see them expanding their new approach. (And raising the money to pay for it.)
• EMI is releasing Gabriela Montero's second CD, on which she plays improvisations on Bach. I don't call this crossover. Montero is a serious and quite good classical pianist, and her first EMI album had one CD of straight classical performances, and a bonus CD of improvisations. She's a good improviser, and a dawning era in which top classical musicians are also featured improvising--making their own music, as individuals--is an era in which classical music is far more human and far more approachable. (For musicians, let's note, as well as audiences. For more on Montero, see the end of this post.)
• Lincoln Center staged some late-night, relatively informal concerts in its Mostly Mozart festival this summer. And there'll be more on its regular schedule this fall. I'm not the only one who thinks we need varied concerts--some shorter than usual, some earlier, some later--to attract a new audience. In fact, any study of current event-going patterns shows that this should be essential. (See Richard Florida's seminal book, The Rise of the Creative Class, just for instance.) It's good to see Lincoln Center doing it. My wife Anne Midgette reviewed one of the late-night Mozart concerts for The New York Times, and thought the informal atmosphere spilled over, quite wonderfully, into the next night's more formal Avery Fisher Hall event.
• Outside the Royal Festival Hall in London this summer, the Philarmonia Orchestra set up a sound installation called PLAY.orchestra (collaborating with Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, South Bank Centre Education and, not least, six elementary schools, whose students provided the graphics; ). You really should go to the orchestra's website to read about this; there's more than I can easily describe. Outside the hall, on a space the size of the stage the orchestra plays on inside, were 58 cubes, each with a light and a speaker, representing one instrument from the orchestra. Or not just representing it -- actually creating its sound. If you sit down on the cube, you hear that instrument. People were invited to bring friends and sit down on many of the cubes. Then, if you've got a Bluetooth phone, you can download a ringtone of the sound you've created. There's much, much more. The music the cubes play changes each week; there's always one standard rep piece, and one new piece. People were also invited to record sounds on their phones, and send them to the Philharmonia, to be added to the orchestra's sample library. This all sounds just wonderful -- a famous orchestra opening itself to the outside world in terrific, inventive ways. (Many thanks to regular reader Sam Richards, for e-mailing me about this.)
• The American Composers Orchestra has moved way past its many years of presenting American music (mostly new) only in formal settings. They now welcome a far wider range of music creation, including (just for instance) a series of composer-performers, who'll be presented 9/27 and 10/20 at Joe's Pub, in New York, a terrific New York cabaret. Where Gabriela Montero will also be playing, on September 21. The ACO is also featuring composer-performers in its first regular concert this year, on October 13.
• Plus the venerable Concert Artists Guild, giving its awards (with concerts attached) to more adventurous musicians, and putting the concerts in far more informal places.

It all adds up to one absolutely crucial and ongoing project -- putting classical music back into the world most people live in. More than anything else, that's what classical music must do, if it's going to survive. I'm thrilled to see it happening, and gaining such momentum.

But I'm sure I've only cited a few of the things that are going on. Please let me know about more!

And about Gabriela Montero...here are some excerpts from a a press release about her new CD, starting with a quote from her:

"Because improvisation is such a huge part of who I am it is the most natural and spontaneous way I can express myself. I have been improvising since my hands first touched the keyboard when I was just eight months old, but for many years I kept this aspect of my playing secret. Then Martha Argerich overheard me improvising one day and was ecstatic. In fact, it was Martha who persuaded me that it was possible to combine my career as a serious 'classical' artist with the side of me that is rather unique. Improvisation is so natural for me that it was something of a relief to be able to finally 'come out of the closet.'"

These days, after performing a concerto Montero often invites her audiences to suggest a melody for improvisation by way of an encore. They ask for themes anywhere from Haydn symphonies to Star Wars, or they come onto the stage to play a melody that Montero might or might not know. "When improvising," Montero says, "I connect with my audience in a completely unique way - and they connect with me."