November 2006 Archives

For the second year in a row, I've been asked -- along of course with many other people in the music business -- to nominate candidates for the Pulitzer Prize in music. Let me quickly note that this isn't any great distinction. Anyone can nominate somebody for the Pulitzer Prize. We can all even nominate ourselves, and why not?

But for the past two years, they've been actively looking for nominations, and I think that's linked to the expansion of eligibility rules that they announced a couple of years ago. And that expansion irks me no end. The idea, as they explain in the material they sent, is to make sure that not just classical music will be eligible to win, but also "jazz, opera, choral, musical theater, movie scores and other forms of musical excellence." Presumably even pop albums are eligible -- they certainly should be -- because now "public release of a recording is accepted as the equivalent of a premiere performance of a work." Or in other words, a work doesn't have to be performed; it could simply be recorded, an innovation underlined by another change in the guidelines, which now say that scores don't have to be submitted for nominated works. Or -- again to put this more clearly than I just put it, and also more clearly than the Pulitzer people do -- a nominated work doesn't have to be notated.

But the whole thing, not to mince words here, is half-assed. They say, for instance, that "we will 'strongly urge' but no longer require the submission of a score." That sends a pretty clear message to people whose music isn't notated (which could include important jazz musicians, who are precisely -- or so it seems -- the people the Pulitzer organization most strongly wants to encourage). Scores aren't required, but we like it better if you submit one. Translation: classical works with notated scores are still our first priority. If that wasn't true, why didn't they simply word the guidelines more or less like this?

The submission of a score is no longer required. Thus, works without notated scores are eligible. If a work does have a notated score, then we strongly urge that the score be submitted. [Or they could even require it to be submitted, which would certainly make sense.]

Any jazz or pop musician reading that would know that they'd get equal consideration.

And the apparent bias is evident elsewhere in the materials they sent me. For instance, there's a note to music critics. The nomination form asks for a lot of mildly specialized information, including the date and place of the entrant's birth, and the entrant's biography. To encourage music critics to nominate music they like, the special note to critics says that some of these requirements can be waived, and that "the following [information] will suffice":

1) Title of work and composer

2) Date and place of first performance in the United States

3) Name of the work's publisher, if known

There's nothing here about recordings being eligible. And the stress on the publisher seems to imply that there's going to be a notated score. (Yes, I know that pop songs have publishers, but the function they serve isn't remotely like the function of a classical publisher, and -- especially since each pop musician forms his or her own publishing company -- nobody considering a pop song for an award would ever need to ask who published it.)

So there goes the back-to-classical reflex: The Pulitzer people mean to expand their guidelines, but keep snapping back toward language that reflects the old ones. They need to get their act together, which means that they should (1) adopt guidelines that aren't biased toward any one kind of music, and (2) make sure they use consistently unbiased language in all materials that they release.

A footnote. If I were going to nominate anything this year, it'd probably be Bob Dylan's album, Modern Times. But -- especially after an exchange with Stephen Hartke some years ago about the Pulitzers -- I'm painfully aware that opening the prize to nonclassical music is a double-edged change. On one hand, the former all-classical Pulitzers couldn't claim to recognize the best American music. They didn't come close. So if the prize been open all these years to nonclassical music -- and if people like Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman and Duke Ellington and Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and Captain Beefheart (why not?) and Patti Smith and John Coltrane and Stephen Sondheim had won -- any award to a classical composer would really mean something. It would really draw attention. It might make people who don't listen to classical music think the winning classical piece was worth something. In the long run, that would be really good for classical music.

But in the shorter run, the old all-classical arrangement was better for classical composers. Sure, nobody outside classical music was going to pay much attention if you won, but inside classical music your career could well have taken off. So I'd have been better off as a composer when the Pulitzer was only for classical works, even though I'm urging that it shouldn't be. (Look how much faith I have, despite my criticisms -- I'm using the past tense, even though nobody knows whether the new guidelines will lead to any surge of non-classical winners.)

I don't have any record of my exchange with Hartke, but here's my blog entry that set it off, in which you can read more of my Pulitzer opinions.

I'm thinking a lot these days about popular culture, and how to compare it to high culture. Many people, I think, would assume that there's some intrinsic difference. And if that's true, we ought to be able to say what it is -- we ought to be able to find some irreducible quality in any sample of popular culture, which wouldn't be found in any sample of high culture. And samples of high culture, of course, would have some irreducible quality of their own, which wouldn't be found in any example of popular culture. (Jump down three paragraphs, if you want to avoid some fairly abstract discussion of this, and get right to my main point.)

When I put it this baldly, the assumption seems fraught, to say the least. Would anyone really put money on being able to nail any quality so unanswerable and absolute? I tend to make the opposite assumption, that there's really no irreducible difference between high and popular culture -- no quality, present in any example of either that we might study -- that we can unquestionably attribute to the high or popular status of what we're looking at. We have to look (in my view) at individual cultural things -- 1970s TV shows, 17th century operas, abstract expressionist paintings -- and find out what their individual qualities are. We then could generalize (carefully!) from what we'd find.

Some people, of course, think the answer is simple, at least in a rough way. Popular culture is shoddy, shallow, and careless. This is easy to refute, as are so many hasty generalizations in the arts, by finding counterexamples. (It's even easy to refute thoughtful generalizations, as the voluminous debate about the nature of a musical work can demonstrate. See Lydia Goehr's essential book, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works.)

But this is a labored introduction to a simple point. Some people, wanting to show how supposedly shallow popular culture is, will say that much of it is produced by formula. TV sitcoms would be a standard example.

So. I've been listening, on and off, to 18th century symphonies written by composers other than Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. That's partly because I've written an 18th century-like symphony myself (more on that another time), and partly for other reasons, which concern someone else, so I won't go into them here. And so the other night, driving from New York to the country, I put on a CD of symphonies by Leopold Kozeluch, who more or less ruled musical Vienna in Mozart's time, and had such a high opinion of himself that he'd point out passages in Haydn that he himself, Kozeluch, thought Haydn shouldn't have written.

In spite of that presumption, Kozeluch isn't a bad composer at all. And as the first movement of the first symphony on the CD unfurled, I sort of leaned back in the driver's seat, savoring all the standard sonata form moves. First subjects...transition...second subject in the dominant...

And then it hit me. What is all that, if not a formula? This summer I listened to 40 or so Haydn symphonies, from number 22 up through the late sixties. All of them follow various formulas (most noticeable in the minuet movements, of course, whose form seems just about invariable).

And here was Kozeluch (just like Vanhal or Rosetti), using the same formulas. Of course I'll get a big objection from the hardcore classical music crowd -- it's not the formula itself, they might say, but how you use it. And so why isn't that true of a sitcom as well?

I'll formulate my own principle. If you like a formula -- or the artworks using it -- you'll look at how skillfully it's used. If you don't like it -- or don't like the works that use it -- what you'll mainly see is the formula itself. And you won't like it. Which is perfectly fair. We all have our tastes.

But if you use the existence of a formula to bash an entire genre, that might be dirty pool. (I say "might be" because there surely are genres so ruled by formula that they're largely hopeless -- pornography, maybe. But even then, someone's going to give me counterexamples, and I think it's better to avoid the question completely, and not the existence of formulas as any criterion of aesthetic judgment. Especially since the genres you think are too formulaic are probably genres you haven't spent much time examining!)

Because this history isn’t well known, I thought I’d summarize some of the data I’ve uncovered about American orchestras in the past, and their audience. (Even at the risk of repeating myself.) This first post shows the data on the audience’s age. This data teaches two lessons:

We can no longer say the orchestra audience has always been the age it is now. That’s just not true.

We can’t assume that younger people will start going to classical concerts when they grow older, as past generations did.

Here’s the data.

In 1937, the average age of the orchestra audience apparently was — believe it or not! — about 30.

Source: America’s Symphony Orchestras and How They Are Supported, a 1940 book by Margaret Grant and Herman S. Hettinger, which records the results of a study of American orchestras conducted in 1937. The study only looked at the audience of two orchestras, the Grand Rapids (MI) Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But Grant and Hettinger report the results with no apparent surprise, which makes me think the data reflects what anybody at the time would have noticed at more or less any orchestra event. Besides, this finding is consistent with the next entry on this list, as you’ll see.

In the early 1960s, the average age of the orchestra audience apparently was 38.

Source: a study conducted by the Twentieth Century Fund, and reported in The Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, who were in charge of the study. The age statistic is actually for all the performing arts, taken together. But Baumol and Bowen explicitly say that the data for all the performing arts was remarkably similar, and they also make a point of stating, with much emphasis, that one of the most notable characteristics of the performing arts audience is that it’s young. At one point they even speculate that people simply stop going to performing arts events as they grow older. This makes amazing reading nowadays; we make the opposite assumption.

From 1982 to 2002, the age of the classical music audience kept increasing. The source for this is various studies, partly based on census data, conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1982 the average age of this audience was 40, in 1992 it was 45, in 2002 it was 49. Of course, this is the entire classical music audience, not just the people who go to orchestra concerts. But the orchestra audience would surely be about the same age (if not older, though I think the chamber music audience — at least now — might be older still). And it would surely be aging at about the same rate.

Some of this age increase is due to the aging of the population as a whole, but not all of it. And note this very telling finding, quoted from the Executive Summary of a 1997 NEA  report:

The classical music audience is aging faster than the population as a whole. In 1982 those under thirty years of age comprised 26.9 percent of the audience and by 1997 comprised just 13.2 percent of the audience. [By 2002, they’d fallen to 8.8 percent.] Over this same span of years, those over sixty years of age rose from 15.6 percent to 30.3 percent of the classical music audience.

Here’s a graph I made, showing how the audience aged between 1992 and 2002. (I adjusted the data to reflect changes in the age distribution of the population at large. See the end of this post for more about that.) The trend couldn’t be clearer:

 

 

All this later data of course tends to confirm the admittedly fragmentary 1937 data. If the audience has been aging so strongly since the early ‘60s, it could plausibly (though, I admit, not inevitably) have been aging since the 1930s.

Some lessons from this:

We have to stop saying that the orchestra audience has always been the age it is now. Clearly that isn’t true. And we don’t even have to go back to 1937 to make this point. The orchestra audience has aged during the past 30 years.

We have to stop thinking of age groups, and think instead about what demographers call “cohorts.” A cohort is a group of people born around the same time. The cohort that was under 30 in 1982 made up 26.9 percent of the classical music audience. (I’m speaking very roughly here; demographers define cohorts more precisely than I’m doing.) The cohort of people under 30 in 1997 was only 13.2 of the audience. So the two cohorts differ greatly in their interest in classical music (or at least in their interest in going to classical concerts). The 1997 cohort was much less interested.

And look again at my graph of the aging audience. Doesn’t this suggest that (very roughly speaking) one cohort somewhat dominates the classical music audience, forming a bigger part of it than any other cohort? These are the people born between 1948 and 1957. In 1992, they were 35 to 44 years old, and formed the largest part of the classical music audience, as the graph shows. And in 2002, they still formed the largest part of 1992the audience, but now of course were 10 years older.

Note, by the way, that their dominance is even greater in 2002 than it was in 1992. And the chart shows why. It’s because younger cohorts weren’t coming into the audience as much as they once did. The younger age groups sag in the 2002 graph, which then makes the 45 to 54 group and the 55 to 64 group a bigger proportion of the audience than they used to be.

All this has consequences. One of them, I’d think, is that we have to stop assuming that people now in their younger years will start coming to orchestra concerts as they grow older. Or at least we’ll have to stop assuming that they’ll do it at the rate that earlier generations did. Just go back to my summary of the NEA data, and think about the under-30 cohorts in 1982 and 1997.

Can we really expect both to show an equal interest in classical music as they age? I don’t think so. The 1997 under-30 cohort didn’t have as much interest as the 1982 under-30 cohort did. So isn’t it likely — or at least very possible — that as they grow older they’ll continue to show less interest? Now, in 2006, they’re nearing 40. Conventional wisdom says they’ll start buying tickets in another 10 years, when they’re nearing 50. But why should we expect them to, given their striking lack of interest — compared to past generations — when they were young?

***

Footnote on the adjusted data in my graph: The age distribution of the population as a whole changes over time. Generally we’ve been getting older. (I’m speaking as an American, about the population of the United States.) And this means that changes in the age distribution of the classical music audience have to be looked at more carefully.

For instance, in 1992, people 18 to 24 years old made up 13 percent of the population. In 2002, that percentage hadn’t changed. So when we see that this age group declined during that period from 10.7 percent of the classical music audience to 8.8 percent, this decline means something. It reflects a real change in the classical music audience.

But now suppose the percentage of these people in the general population hadn’t stayed steady. Instead, suppose it had declined in the general population by the same percentage that it declined in the classical music audience. Then the lower percentage of people 18 to 24 in the classical music audience wouldn’t mean anything. Or, more precisely, it wouldn’t tell us anything about anybody’s interest in classical music. We’d be seeing fewer people of this age at classical concerts only because there are fewer of them everywhere.

Making these adjustments doesn’t lead to giant changes. The data stays pretty much the same. But it’s good practice to make these adjustments, I think, and I find it makes the trends a little clearer. Here, for anybody curious, is my earlier graph, but now with the data not adjusted for population shifts:

And by the way: some of you might have noticed that the percentage of 18 to 24 year-olds in the classical music audience actually rose between 1992 and 1997, from 10.7 percent to 12.8 percent. And then it fell again in 2002. What’s that about? Does it reflect an oddball, temporary jump in interest, or instead does it reflect some change in the NEA’s methodology? I haven’t studied this nearly enough, but my instinct is to trust the 1997 data less than the 1982, 1992, and 2002. Those last figures come from the U.S. census, so I believe they ought to be generally comparable. Note, though, that the 1997 data doesn’t make any change in the overall trends.

Thanks to the kindness of the archivists at the New York Philharmonic, I've gotten a copy of a report on the state of American orchestras in 1972, written by the big management consulting firm, McKinsey.

And actually what I've gotten is two documents, one a 1969 McKinsey memo to the presidents of the Big Five orchestras, the other the longer, more formal 1972 report. Both are fascinating, even revelatory.

What's in them? Try this: the Big Five routinely sold out all their concerts in 1969. This was so much taken for granted that, to calculate the income from ticket sales, McKinsey simply multiplied the capacities of each hall by the number of concerts and the average ticket price. (Which was $4. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $20 in current money, a good deal lower than the average price of a Big Five ticket today. Orchestral ticket prices, as I'm sure everyone knows, have risen far more than the inflation rate.)

That, to me, is a revelation. Maybe it suggests a declining interest in classical music, in the culture at large, since those bygone days. Though rising ticket prices might play a part, as well. This is something we ought to learn more about.

And then there's the percentage of orchestral revenue that came from earned income, which in turn mostly came from ticket sales. Now it's somewhere around 25 to 30 percent, for large orchestras. But in 1972 -- based on information McKinsey gathered from 28 orchestras --it was 47 percent. Orchestras, in other words, funded their operations very differently back then. They earned more of their money. The immense development apparatus we know today -- the constant, intense, organized fundraising from individuals, foundations, government, and corporations -- must have been in its infancy.

And this, the report helps show, was a snapshot from a longer history. McKinsey notes that in 1962, the earned income had been 58 percent of revenue. In 1937 (according to a study of American orchestras reported in a 1940 book, America's Symphony Orchestras and How They Are Supported), earned income was 70 percent of revenue for most orchestras, and fully 90 percent for a few of the largest ones.

So from 1937 to the present, we can see some long-term trends, though they started at different times. Orchestras sell fewer tickets; orchestras raise prices far higher than the inflation rate. (Perhaps because they're selling fewer tickets?) And ticket sales make up a steadily smaller part of orchestral revenue. This is one aspect of what seems to be a long-term financial crunch -- orchestras constantly need to find more money.

Which brings me to the central part of these McKinsey reports, and also to my next post.

Why did the Big Five commission McKinsey to make these reports? (See my previous post.)

Because by the end of the 1960s, orchestras were having bad financial problems. The Big Five first pondered this alone, then convened a conference of many orchestras, and brought in McKinsey. I learned this from Howard Shanet's book Philharmonic, a history of the New York Philharmonic. I then asked the Philharmonic's archivists if they had the report, and they got me a copy. (Thanks, Richard and Barbara!)

And what the report says is fascinating. Large American orchestras, McKinsey decided, were in a financial bind in part because of their expansion to 52-week operation early in the '60s, and in part because they'd raised the weekly minimum musicians' pay. This last, of course, was a double whammy. The musicians were getting more each week, and they were also being paid for more weeks. The report notes, however, that this wasn't the only increased cost from the 52-week operation, so expenses ballooned even more than musicians' salaries would account for. The basic point is pretty clear. Concerts didn't pay for themselves; ticket sales didn't cover their costs. So the more of them you gave, the more money you lost, and the worse your finances looked.

What solution did McKinsey propose? Here we breathe the air of another era. They mention, more or less in passing, the revenue from "private support" (a category they don't break down into further subdivisions). But they don't suggest that it could be increased. And they reject raising ticket prices, because that, they say, "would be inconsistent with [the orchestras'] objective of making orchestra performances available to a wide range of people."

Instead, they offer what now seems like a fantasy, an increase in federal government support. The federal government, they say, should pay 25 percent of all orchestral expenses. This, they add, ought to seem perfectly reasonable, since European governments pay 90 percent!

Needless to say, this never happened. Instead, orchestras increased their private support. I'd love to know more of that story -- how it happened, what stages it went through (and when those stages happened), how hard or easy it was, what people thought of it.

But here's a reason why this history is especially interesting now. I've sometimes been told that the current classical music crisis can't be as bad as I and others think, because "people always say classical music is in trouble." I've even had the orchestral financial crisis in the 1960s thrown in my face. "See? They thought they'd die then, and they didn't! So why should they be dying now?"

The reasoning here is sloppy, to say the least. How do we know there's any relationship between the two crises? Maybe they had different causes. We have to look carefully at the facts in each era, before we can draw any conclusions. And we also have to look at the challenges faced each time. Even if the problems were similar, what were the solutions last time? Will they work now? Are other solutions possible now?

The McKinsey report shows that the 1960s problems had a different cause from the problems now. In the 1960s, orchestras got in trouble because they expanded their operations. Now they're in trouble because they're having problems simply staying where they are. Today's troubles, we might conclude from that, are very likely worse.

But in one very basic way, the problems are similar. Both now and in the '70s, orchestras need to find more money. In the '70s, they did that by increasing private contributions. Can they do that now? I spent some time recently with one very well-run orchestra, which looked into its future and concluded that it couldn't thrive unless it increased private donations to a rate for which there isn't any precedent in orchestral history. They were talking specifically about the percentage of subscribers who contribute money. The industry average seems to be -- we need better stats for this -- between 35 and 40 percent. This orchestra thinks it needs to raise that far beyond those numbers. Can they do that? How can they do that? And is there a limit to how far they can go?

That last question is very important, because of a theory floated many years ago by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, and published in their 1966 book, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. According to this theory, the performing arts don't show the increased labor productivity found in other sectors of the economy. That's clearly true of orchestras -- while manufacturing concerns keep making more and more goods with the same number of workers (or fewer), orchestras still need the same number of musicians to play the same concerts.

And so the performing arts over time get more and more expensive, compared to other activities. Corporations can pay their workers more and more, because the workers produce more and more. (Well, unions played a part, too; the corporations would have been happy to keep paying their workers at the old rates.) Orchestras have to pay musicians more and more, too, over time, to keep up with the income other highly qualified professional people earn. But their activities can't sustain these pay increases, because the musicians aren't producing any more than they previously did. (And there of course are other cost increases, too.)

So there's always a struggle to find new revenue. A corporation just sells more, or introduces new product lines. An orchestra has to find new and previously unheard-of ways to get money. We've seen them struggle with that over time. That's one big reason why the orchestra business has recurring crises.

But the present crisis, I'd suggest, is particularly bad. Orchestras now have two problems they never faced before. One is declining ticket sales. Wouldn't you rather have a crisis when your halls, at least, are always full? And the other new problem, surely related to the first, is a decline in interest in classical music throughout our society. In 1972, when McKinsey made its report, Time magazine wrote far more about classical music than it did about pop. I mention Time only because I once sat in their library, counting the number of classical and pop music articles in every issue from 1980 to 1990. In 1980, there were approximately twice as many classical articles as pop; by 1990, the proportions had reversed. And now, of course, Time hardly mentions classical music at all.

We can all supply other examples. There are far fewer classical radio stations than there used to be, big classical record labels can't make a profit any more from classical music, classical record stores are dying out. And pop culture rules our world today in ways that nobody could have imagined in 1972. I'm not going to say that orchestras can't solve their problems now, but at the very least, they're up against barriers they never had before.

My post on how to attract a younger audience -- a way that really works - -has gotten an unusual number of comments. Apparently it struck a nerve, both for people who like the idea I offered, and for people who don't.

But one of the most important comments came to me in a private e-mail from Molly Sheridan, the managing editor of NewMusicBox, an important webzine published by the American Music Center. Molly herself is AC/DC, audience-wise -- a classical person by training, and by disposition a member of exactly the group the concert I described attracts. (Hope that sounds right to you, Molly!)

Here's what she wrote:

I was thinking the same thing about the show last night [meaning that she agrees that this is a proven way to attract a new audience to classical music], but don't you think it's even more that the audience is filled with serious listeners, and they want the perks of hearing their favorites in a classical music setting. It sort of turns the whole excuse that "it's the venue, stupid" that's keeping them out of our classical music sandbox on its head. They want the quality listening environment. Andrew Bird is a phenomenal player, but you can't always hear the depth of that in a club. Fans want small, quiet environments in which to commune with the music they love, and if they have to sit through Bach to do so, they will. That's not to say they won't be into the Bach as well, but looking at the former is an important point not to miss, I think.

I'll take off from this to emphasize something else I think is crucial. We can't -- musn't -- think of these events in patronizing terms, "Oh, it's all very nice, the kids get their music, and we slip in some classical, which is the part that really matters." Forget that. What matters -- for marketing, for the future of classical music (or any kind of music at all), and above all artistically -- what matters is the concert as a whole. These are serious events, involving serious music. The crucial understanding (without which we'll never get anywhere in the current world) is that serious, artistic music can be found in many genres. This is, currently, the operating principle of Nonesuch, formerly a classly classical music label, and now a classy art-music label, on which much of the art music isn't classical.

Same with these concerts. They're art-music concerts, in which some of the art music is classical. This is fine with their audience, who've shown (in many ways, including downloads and playlists on iTunes) that they like music in many genres, including classical. (Classical music of all periods, in fact.) Thus a multi-genre concert makes perfect sense.

And it'll make most sense when what starts to get attention isn't individual concerts, but organized concert series. Each series would have its own identity, its own mix of artistic music, its own favored styles. Any concert still would need some kind of headliner, who could attract an audience (as many concerts in many genres do), but increasingly the series itself would become an attraction, as people started to say, "Yes, I like that series. I've got to be there because XYZ is playing, but I always like most of the music these concerts do." The variety itself would be yet another draw, along with the pleasure of hearing things you'd never heard before.

So let me say it again. We've got to stop thinking about how to attract people to classical music, but instead start to think of what kind of serious concerts make most sense in the current world. And since classical music belongs on those concerts, as far as anyone can see, people who care most about classical music shouldn't have anything to worry about.

(Except, of course, the future of the kind of all-classical concerts we're used to now, but that's another story. I wouldn't assume they'd disappear entirely. They might -- if they faced competition for their audience -- even get smarter, and more interesting.)

Not a theory -- instead, a way that really works. I've heard about it working, and I've also seen it myself, twice.

You combine classical music with alternative pop (an umbrella term that may not really exist, but which I'm using here to mean all kinds of pop music that isn't on the pop charts, including alternative rock and electronica). The London Sinfonietta (as I've written here before) has done this several times, and (or so I've been told) has gotten 1000 people in their 20s cheering for Xenakis. There's a double CD set on Warp Records
(Warp is the Sinfonietta's pop collaborator) documenting some of these events. There's no Xenakis on it, but you can hear people screaming for Ligeti, Steve Reich, and the John Cage Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. (Aphex Twin, a Warp artist, uses prepared piano on his album Drukqs.)

And in New York, Ronen Givony, a grant writer with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, has staged two events of this kind in a church. I just came from one. A band called A Hawk and a Hacksaw -- with two people in it, playing violin and accordion -- opened the show, to cheers from the crowd. The church was packed with people who seemed to be in their 20s.

Then Steven Beck, a very good pianist (who took one of my Juilliard courses some years ago), played the Bach B flat Partita, to more cheers. And in fact the crowd cheered him twice, breaking into spontaneous applause after the Courante, and then cheering even more after the Gigue.

At the first of Ronen's concerts, last month (if my tired mind remembers the date correctly), members of Wilco played some free jazz improvisations, not by any means easy listening, joined from the classical side by Jenny Lin, another very fine pianist, and Elliott Sharp, who's been an out on the edge guitarist and composer for many, many years. Jenny also played some Shostakovich, which the crowd (even larger than the one tonight) seemed to love.

This really works. And the best part is that this audience is serious. You don't need to shorten, sugarcoat, or simplify the classical pieces. The people hear them just as easily as they hear the pop stuff. It really works. And, maybe best of all, it takes classical music off its pedestal, and makes it nothing more (but also nothing less) than something terrific to listen to.

Sometime in the past year I heard an indifferent performance of a familiar symphony, by a major orchestra. Doesn't matter where or when, doesn't matter who the conductor was. There was no nuance, no joy or excitement, no real connection between one moment and the next, though maybe there was at least a certain amount of vigor and efficiency.

I asked a musician in the orchestra what he thought of the conductor. He said, "Look, there are some pieces we just shouldn't play unless the conductor can really make something of them." This piece was one of them. When I asked what the others were, he answered in a single breath: "All the Brahms symphonies, all the Tchaikovsky symphonies, the Beethoven symphonies, the New World Symphony, the Symphonie Fantastique."

Which made me wonder: What if orchestras simply wouldn't play these works, if the performance wasn't going to be their best? What if they -- and their music directors and artistic administrators -- just refused to let it happen?

Impossible, everyone will say. Of course orchestral artistic administrators will try to avoid pieces they really don't want someone to conduct, but they'd be the first to say that compromises must be made. To please the audience, there's normally a standard work on every program. And since you can't always get the guest conductors you want...and can't always tell them what to do...and since (with more than 20 programs a year to juggle, in the case of big orchestra) you may not have much room to maneuver, for all these reasons (and probably more) you're often enough stuck with something you don't fully want.

I have to accept these practicalities. But along with them, shouldn't we accept their consequences? Orchestras play too many concerts that they know aren't their best. And they know this, much of the time, in advance. They go into many concerts cynically, or at least somewhat cynically, knowing in advance that they won't be able to play their best.

Is this a good thing? What would happen if orchestras didn't accept the current limitations, and tried to make every concert special?

Another new episode of my improvised, in-progress book -- on the future of classical music -- is online. In the last few episodes, I've been discussing classical music's past, both what it was in the 18th century (when it wasn't classical music yet, and therefore didn't have any aura of sanctity), and how it started in the 19th century to turn into what it is now.

The present episode is the second in a series that looks at the effects of modernism. In my last episode, I showed how vital new music could be -- how closely connected to the audience -- even in the 1890s, when the percentage of new works on concert programs had badly declined. (Declined, that is, from what it had been in the 18th century, when it was nearly 100%, and throughout the 19th century.) Now I'm going to talk about what happened when modernism hit, and new works started seeming unfamiliar and uncomfortable. You'll see that I defend modernism very strongly, but I also use some strong language to describe the bad effects of this, which -- at their worst -- were that uncomfortable new music was forced on an unwilling audience, and also (something I'll discuss much more fully in future episodes) that modernism in music got to be quite different, far stiffer and more opaque, than modernism in the other arts.

James Joyce, for instance -- surely the leading modernist in literature -- could write Finnegans Wake, which makes up its own version of the English language, and can be incomprehensible to many people. But the book is full of joyful takes on everyday life, references to drinking, popular songs, opera arias, smells, tastes, sex. And now look at two composers who both say they owe a lot to Joyce, Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter. Do we ever hear snatches of popular songs in their works? Forget it! They've entirely divorced themselves from everyday life, something Joyce never, ever did.

Subscribers to the book will get some extras, as always. (Look for them next Wednesday or Thursday.) Anecdotes, extra thoughts, whatever comes my way. Subscribers also get notified immediately when new episodes appear. To subscribe, click here, and in the subject line of the e-mail form that'll appear, please write "subscribe to the book." Or anything you like, really, except "subscribe book," because that's the language that appears when spammers harvest the e-mail address online, and send spam subscriptions. I'd also be grateful if you'd write a brief message, telling me who you are and why you're interested in the book. I find this enormously helpful, and I've also made some friends. You'll see that I answer you, though maybe not immediately.

One further note. My friend Jorge Martin, a fine composer, wrote an important comment to this new episode, pointing out that when I say "modernisim," I really mean atonal modernism, an important distinction. Everyone should read what Jorge has to say.

So there's a new movie, Copying Beethoven, about the premiere of the Ninth Symphony. And in the New York Times review (by Manohla Dargis) comes the following:

Onscreen is the Kecskemet Symphony Orchestra of Hungary, but what we hear is a 1996 Decca recording of Bernard Haitink conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. Purists may object to this strategy, but Ms. Holland's filmmaking in this scene is so sensitive that only quibblers will notice if the bowing doesn't match the sound.

Well, this non-purist has another objection, and -- more fun -- a suggestion he really loves.

Movies don't do well with classical music, generally speaking. In Amadeus, we're treated to the sight of conductors standing up in front of orchestras, waving their arms around, something that didn't happen in the 18th century. The same thing shows up in Sofia Coppola's intriguing Marie Antoinette. And I must say it irks me that the people who plan these films do extensive research on costumes and furniture, but don't trouble to find out even the most basic things about how music in the eras they depict was actually performed.

So now Beethoven. He did in fact stand up in front of the orchestra when the Ninth Symphony was premiered, so if the movie shows that, it's accurate. The proper purist objection would be the sound of the instruments -- they should have used a period instrument ensemble, not a performance (however powerful) on modern instruments.

But even that is just a technicality. The most fascinating historical point is surely that the performance -- by our standards today -- must have been a mess. The music was new and difficult. It wouldn't have been rehearsed enough. Performances back then (again by our standards) almost never were. And the performance took place on a monster concert, on which not just the Ninth was heard, but also movements from Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, just as new, even more gigantic, and at least as difficult to play and sing.

The solo singers (getting back to the Ninth) weren't happy with their parts, and asked Beethoven to rewrite them. He refused, of course. But he must have been an impossible conductor, as he was when, years earlier, he'd tried to conduct Fidelio. On that occasion, he caused such confusion that a friend finally spoke to him in private, and led him away. Why would the Ninth have been much different? Beethoven's conducting motions were, by all accounts, confusing. And he couldn't hear the music!

So surely the first performance was full of errors. But it also was a triumph, so the essence of the music must have come through. Could a movie show us this? Could anyone stage a performance full of mistakes , and not quite sure of itself, but still triumphant? That would require lots of imagination, and, maybe above all, musicians who, in their performance, would in effect be actors, pretending that they didn't know the music as well as they really do.

This would be very hard to pull off. But wouldn't it be wonderful?

In my "How not to think" post, I threw some words around a little carelessly. At one point, batting some ideas around, I said "nobody asks about this." This was a grandly rhetorical use of "nobody," meaning, in an exasperated tone, "hardly anyone." Surely it was unfair to fellow-bloggers like Drew McManus and Andrew Taylor, who do ask the kind of questions I like to see asked. Sometimes I just get carried away.

It sounded like a terrific idea, when the Met announced that it would promote its new Barber of Seville production last night (November 8) on Letterman. Since I've been a big fan of their new promotions, I made sure I watched the show. But the opera didn't come off very well, and the Met may have made a mistake.

The first problem, which of course wasn't the Met's fault, was that the show last night was especially goofy. Letterman's first guest was Dustin Hoffman, who seemed to be playing the "I'm such a big star that it doesn't matter what I do or say" game. And Letterman joined right in. Hoffman started out talking about a recipe he'd learned from a Sicilian prostitute. Later he told a story (allegedly true) about two opera singers (both fat, both women) who were making love in a bathtub and got stuck. When it came time to show a clip from the movie Hoffman was on the show to promote (Stranger Than Fiction), Letterman asked what scene from the movie was on the clip, and Hoffman, in a bored voice, said, "I don't know."

Next came a celebrity chef, who tried to prepare linguine alla carbonara while Letterman asked (in exactly these words) if he'd learned the recipe from a whore. Then he seemed to want to distract the guy from his cooking. Finally Paul Shaffer walked over, took a bottle of wine the chef had opened to cook with, and started chugging it.

By the time the Met came onstage -- to speed through the end of the Barber's first act finale in last few minutes of the show -- it was hard to take anything seriously. Letterman did introduce the opera with the slightly overdone respect he often shows for classical music ("This is as good as it gets, folks," or words to that effect. "You're not going to hear this on a streetcorner somewhere.") But he didn't talk to anyone from the company, apart from a rushed thank-you after the performance -- and so the performance, coming at the end of a really crazy night, seemed like a half-forgotten throwaway.

But then there were problems that really were the Met's fault. They brought a lot of people, to perform live -- star soloists, their chorus, a conductor, and 22 members of their orchestra, who played a skilful reduction of Rossini's score. I'm sure this looked impressive to the studio audience, but on TV, it didn't look like a live performance at all. It was shot with so little sense of place that what we saw could just as well have been a film.

And why choose the end of the first-act finale? Nothing happens. Here we had a production that the company is promoting -- in ads in the New York Times and Playbill (and surely elsewhere) -- as music theater. But what we saw was not just static, but silly, people dressed for no apparent reason in military uniforms, standing still and singing. (If you know the opera, you know the reason for the uniforms, but most of the TV audience wouldn't know it.) The performers looked like tin soldiers doing a really boring half-time show.

And all the stars were wasted. Caught in the middle of the screen, once or twice, was none less than Juan Diego Florez, who would have knocked the audience dead both vocally and visually if he'd had any chance to sing a solo. And then sure, the others in the cast might have been miffed that they didn't get their own chance to star, but isn't the point of the promotion to make people want to see the opera? Maybe using Florez alone wouldn't be the answer (though, quite honestly, it's what I would have wanted to do), but surely the lead singers would make a far better effect singing solo.

And there's more. The performance wasn't very good. The orchestra played thrillingly, as could be plainly heard in the few bars they had alone at the very end. But the singers -- doing rapidfire patter -- got out of sync, and for one bad moment the whole thing seemed to be heading for a train wreck. (If you want to know what it was like, listen to the old Decca recording of Rossini's L'italiana in Algeri, the one with Teresa Berganza in the title role, where the singers aren't quite together in the pattern parts of the first act finale. Then multiply that by 20.) Maybe picking one of the trickiest spots in the score, and expecting it to go like clockwork with no warmup wasn't such a great idea.

Finally, the text was translated in subtitles, and this, I fear, made the opera seem very tired. The text has everybody -- in what's meant to be a state of great confusion -- singing about the noises banging in their heads. This wasn't original even in Rossini's time; it's what everybody sings also in the L'italiana first act finale, though there at least the words are crazy enough to be worth a giggle. In Barber they're just trite, and repetitious.

This didn't matter much in Rossini's time, because nobody would focus on the words. To find out what the opera was about, people in the audience would buy little booklets with the text, and quickly skim them. Then, while the opera was performed, they'd talk. So when the first act finale came along, they'd know in a general way what everyone was singing, but wouldn't -- and couldn't; they were talking -- focus line by line on every word.

Which, unfortunately, was what the TV audience was forced to do, with results that, I fear, were hardly very gripping. And here we come to one big problem, if you're an opera house that mostly does old operas, and wants to find a new audience, and -- especially -- tries to find that new audience by announcing that these old operas are really music theater. By doing that, the company sets up expectations that the works can be compared to the theater we have today. And in the case of this Barber first act finale -- with far too close a focus on uninteresting words -- those expectations may not have been met.

Similarly, someone I know was coming out of a Tosca performance at the Met, and encountered some people who looked like they were in their 20s. "I could see that coming," one of them said, talking about the climax of the final act, where the bullets used in the supposedly fake execution turn out to be real. My friend reports that this person didn't sound pleased.

In Aspen two or three summers ago, there was a concert performance of Strauss's Intermezzo in the music tent. Someone on the staff, in his 30s, thought that -- for what's essentially a sitcom -- the opera moved with leaden feet, so much so that no amount of masterful music could save it.

These are honest reactions, not surprising when old and sometimes creaky melodramas are trotted out in our modern world. How can an opera company perform these pieces (which, by the way, I myself mostly love), and still attract a modern audience?

That's a question that I don't think the Met answered very well on Letterman. (At least they might have tried what was done with great success in the Baz Luhrman production of La bohème on Broadway, and made the translation in the titles lively rather than accurate.)

Here's the start of a breathless piece in the Wall Street Journal, linked from ArtsJournal today:

HERE'S A TEST for symphony orchestra lovers. True or false:

1) To woo younger audiences, which are bored by Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, orchestras must play more contemporary works, even at the risk of alienating their aging core audience.

2) By offering free concerts, orchestras will expose more people to classical music and generate new ticket-buyers.

3) Orchestras can create new audiences by designing and offering educational programs for the vast numbers of Americans who know little about classical music.

4) To ensure the survival of orchestras over the long-term, schoolchildren must be exposed to classical-music concerts.

The answers are false, false, false and false.

From there the article goes on to summarize, more or less incoherently, a report from the Knight Foundation that I haven't yet read. The nub of it all is that alternative attempts to pull in new audiences haven't worked, because ticket sales continue to decline. But how well have orchestras done those alternative attempts? Not so well, on the whole, and especially without much followthrough. That is, new kinds of concerts are given, and do in fact (in some cases) draw in new audiences. But how long are these concerts continued? And what's the standard for success? That the new people eventually go to the old-line core subscription concerts? That may never happen. How many orchestras have taken this bull by the horns, and established entire new product lines, which is to say new kinds of concerts that they give equal priority to, and heavily promote? Not very many.

I'll be interested to read the full report. What it ought to look at, in my opinion, is specific stories of success and failure. Success: Red, an Orchestra, in Cleveland, attracting large numbers of young people to its concerts. Failures: the Baltimore Symphony, which did one "Dance Mix" concert in a club, attracting a young audience to hear new dance-oriented classical pieces. But then the orchestra never tried to go back to that audience, though I've heard their "Symphony with a Twist" series, aimed at people who don't usually go to classical concerts, has been a great success.

But the main point would be: If orchestras keep focusing on their core classical concerts, and ticket sales for them keep declining, then doing a few alternative events won't make any difference. You have to make the alternative events a larger, more visible, higher-priority part of your product mix. (As I already said.)

One point in the Journal story deserves further comment:

The research showed that predicting who will buy tickets is difficult, except for one variable: 74% of ticket-buyers had played an instrument or sung in a chorus somewhere, sometime, in their lives. Rather than large-scale concert programs for schoolchildren, it seems to be the active, participatory educational efforts that produce concertgoers.

This is very old news, known for a very long time. And I'm not sure it means very much in the current climate. Buried inside it is one crucial assumption, that the future classical music audience will be much like the current one. And unexamined is one crucial piece of data. If someone's going to go to classical concerts, they have to like (or at least accept) the ambience of the concert hall. So all that instrumental study won't mean a thing if somebody doesn't like how the concert hall feels when they get there. Nobody asks about this, because we take it for granted. Of course people who go to classical concerts like them. The statistic in question here, in fact, may be tautological. Maybe the people who studied classical instruments or sang in choirs already were the ones more likely to enjoy a classical concert.

And what happens when someone likes classical music and doesn't like the feeling of a concert hall? Current indications are that there are many people who feel this way, no matter how they feel about classical music. It's possible, these days, even to be a professional classical musician and (if you're younger) not enjoy classical concerts. The Journal story actually ends up saying that, in fact, all kinds of people like classical music but don't like the concerts, which is why I call it incoherent. It spends all its time saying that the Knight Foundation debunks alternative concerts, and then seems to end up saying that these in fact are necessary.

God, do we need some clear thinking on these subjects. My guess is that nothing that attracted or prepared in audience in the past -- including playing an instrument or singing in a chorus -- is going attract many people from any new generation.

I'm going to read the Knight study, by the way. I'm sure it's better than the Journal article.

In today's New York Times, in the business section, is a brief little story I can't find online. It talks about a paper in the Journal of Marketing, which reports the results of two studies. In each study, people were given the same food to eat -- in one study a cracker, in the other some mango lassi (an Indian yogurt drink) -- and then were divided into two groups. The people in one group were told the food was healthy; the people in the other group were told the food was unhealthy.

Then they were asked to rate the food's flavor. You guessed it: people said the food labeled unhealthy tasted quite a lot better.

The moral of this story (for classical music, that is)? We're always starting educational intitiatives, trying to teach people about classical music. Some of us also cherish a belief that classical music is somehow ethically or culturally pure, and is therefore good for everybody. What these studies suggest is that appealing on these grounds won't work. People will assume the food tastes bad -- or, in our case, that they won't really enjoy the music -- and all our efforts might very well backfire.

Which, by the way, is only common sense. Why do we keep trying to teach people things about classical music, as if lack of knowledge was the barrier that keeps people away from us? Why don't we just make performances such compelling events that nobody can resist them?

I'm always delighted by the variety of people who subscribe to my online book on the future of classical music. (The next episode comes out on Wednesday [advt.]). Recently I've gotten, just for instance, the marketing directors of two important orchestras, one in the US and one in the UK, a music student exploring new ways to describe classical music in Banff, in Canada, and someone in charge of program notes with an Australian orchestra. Plus a professor of piano and piano pedagogy at a small Bible college, not to mention an assortment of musicians and long-time classical music listeners.

But Eric Davidson really touched my heart. Along with his subscription request, he sent this message (which, as always, I'm posing with his permission):

I'm a 24 year old law student from the US who loves "classical" music, though I have no particular talent for playing or composing. Enjoying this music is often a lonely pastime, and it's interesting to hear how it became so.

I responded with some encouragement, which I mention only because Eric told me he really found it encouraging. I suggested, for instance, that he look into starting a classical music listening group, along the lines of the book groups that have sprung up everywhere. I've seen this done successfully by the owner of an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, and it's an idea I'd love to see catch on.

But above all, I understand Eric's loneliness. I often hear something similar from classical musicians, and from classical music students. Of course they know other people who like classical music -- their colleagues, or their fellow students. But they also have friends who aren't involved in their field, and these people, they often say, don't know anything about classical music. So in a way it's the same thing Eric is saying.

One piece of good news, surely, is that there are many people in the same position. So if someone they could meet each other...and maybe if people like Eric could meet some younger classical musicians...

(The next book episode, by the way, will be about modernism, which -- without at all rejecting modernist music -- I see as a kind of pathological development inside classical music, because of the way it grew inward-looking, formalist, and even dictatorial, imposing itself on mainstream audiences who had no taste for it. But what I'm writing about in this next episode are the reasons why modernism, when it first arose, was not only strong and important, but necessary. And I'm going to look back with wistful interest at the days (in the 1920s) when modern music was hot, and seemed to be on its way toward developing what we'd now an alternative audience all its own.)

Not long ago I looked up the biographies of all kinds of people who worked with Motown in the '60s -- stars (Diana Ross, Mary Wells, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye), members of vocal groups (the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Marvelettes), songwriters (Lamont Dozier, Brian and Eddie Holland), and sidemen (James Jamerson). I wanted to know where all these people lived when Motown found them, and thought that I could guess the answer.

And my hunch was right. Almost everybody lived in Detroit, where Motown was located. Most were born there, or nearby; the rest moved there, many when they were children.

Which means that Motown found people who became some of the greatest names in pop music -- people who created new styles of singing and songwriting, people who jumped to the top of the pop charts, people who invented new ways to use recording studios, people (thinking now of James Jamerson) who invented new kinds of instrumental playing -- right in its backyard.

So maybe Detroit was exceptional. But I don't think it was. I think the same thing could have happened in just about any other large American city, if those cities had had record companies even half as sharp as Motown. After all, Stax Records recruited world-class talent right at home in Memphis, and in the 1950s, doowop groups sprung up everywhere.

This makes me happy. Isn't it wonderful to realize just how much musical talent there is in our world?

Brian Wise, the producer of the Soundcheck show on WNYC in New York, brought up a worthwhile point in a comment to my music education rant. He notes that classical music -- or maybe more specifically classical concert etiquette -- requires people to sit in one place when they listen, while at a Grateful Dead concert, even if the jams were as long as a Haydn symphony, people could get up and walk around.

That's true. But when I read it, a little light bulb went off in my mind. That classical audience -- are they really paying attention? I don't believe it. I think their minds are drifting all over the place, not because there's anything wrong with them, but because they're human. My own mind has been known to drift at concerts. But the people in the classical audience -- unlike people at a Grateful Dead concert -- have been socialized to keep on sitting still when their minds wander. And they like that. They like being at the concert. They like the atmosphere, the civilized air of it all, the sound and power of the music (even if their minds drift away from it). Think of the scene outside the music tent in Aspen. Inside there's a concert, with an audience sitting quietly. Outside, people sit on the grass, with friends, lovers, family, dogs; they eat; they sip wine; most notably, they read. Of course they like the music; if it weren't for the music, they wouldn't be there. But many of them (maybe most) are clearly not listening in any focused way.

One last piece of evidence. I've been in focus groups with people from the orchestral audience, some of them subscribers for many years. And some of them say they can't even recognize which instrument is playing! Do we think they're following the tasty subtleties of sonata form? Not a chance. Many of them, as far as I can see, just let the music wash over them. Let's remember this, next time someone starts blaming younger people for not having attention spans long enough to let them listen to classical music. It's not your long attention span that keeps you interested. It's your love for the sound of the music, and the mood of the concert.

Or, rather, the myth that people have to be educated to like classical music.

This is a common, and deeply held belief. I ran into it a couple of times during the visit my wife and I made to Bowling Green State University. We took part in panel discussions on the future of classical music, and sometimes people said -- speaking with pure, and deeply felt sincerity -- that people wouldn't start liking classical music until they learned about it, maybe even learned to play a classical instrument.

I sympathize with the people who believe this. It's a lovely myth. It says that classical music is something very special, something not encountered in the common run of life, and that therefore people have to be specially exposed to it. They have to hold a violin or a clarinet in their hands, perhaps, before they can listen to a Mozart symphony. There's also something protective about these beliefs. Inside them, I think is a longing for classical music to be preserved, not to be damaged, to stay pure. Thus people must be taught to come to it, rather than the classical music world do anything -- maybe something harmful to the music -- to get anyone to come to it.

But I don't believe that the core belief here is true. Not that I'm against people learning about classical music. Of course classical music should be part of every school curriculum, along with other kinds of music most people don't know about. (See below.) But I don't think this will guarantee the future of classical music, and I don't think its absence will cause us much trouble.

Here's some evidence I'd cite. It's easy -- child's play, just about -- to think of music, often new and challenging music, that people came to without any preparation at all. Bebop, for instance. There's a style of music that in many ways is harder to understand than the mainstream classical repertoire (the harmony is harder to follow, as is the motivic development of musical material in solos). Plus the complexity, especially rhythmic, of all the members of even a small group playing together can be really wild, quite difficult to take in. And yet people gravitated to it in the late 1940s and early 1950s, not in gigantic numbers, maybe, but certainly in numbers large enough to launch the style as a crucial new movement in jazz. These listeners weren't trained in music. Just look at the beat generation, at the way Jack Kerouac (for instance) writes about jazz. He doesn't know music in any educated way, but he got into bebop without any trouble.

Another example: current electronica, people like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Clark (to cite three artists on the Warp label I've been listening to). This music, too, can be harder to follow than the mainstream classical repertoire. Yes, it has a beat, but the textural variety can be daunting, even confusing, if you seriously try to follow everything that's going on. This is pop music, maybe, but it's certainly not popular -- and yet still the people I've named sell more records, maybe far more records, than classical musicians do. Nobody gets formally educated to understand this music. Some people just like it the moment they hear it. And some people go right to their computers and learn to make it for themselves.

A third example: minimalism. Here I can speak from my own experience; I was on the scene pretty early, going to Steve Reich concerts early in the '70s. These were dazzling experiences, with people sitting on the floor at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, listening to long pieces like Drumming. Again nobody prepared us for this completely new style. We just loved it, without a word of introduction necessary.

Fourth example: Indian classical music, for which there's been at least a minor rage for in the west ever since the '60s. This is complex music, and can go on for quite a long time, but once more the people who liked it simply liked it, without needing any education in any of its complexities, and certainly without needing to hold a sitar in their arms.

The last two examples, by the way, seem to answer one objection that people might make to what I'm saying, that classical music requires sustained listening over longish spans of time. And so it does (though not all of it). But so do the minimal pieces by Steve Reich and Philip Glass that had such an eager audience starting in the '70s. And so does Indian classical music. Not to mention endless jams by the Grateful Dead (but then, someone's sure to say, drugs often were involved). Or Miles Davis fusion albums like Bitches Brew or In a Silent Way or Jack Johnson, all of which had long, unbroken spans of music, lasting an entire LP side.

Seems to me that people listen to music because it speaks to them, and that new styles catch on because they catch a wave (so to speak) in the zeitgeist. That matters much more than any special music education. And while typically the styles that spontaneously catch on are new, they don't have to be. Look at the lounge music craze that hit in the '90s, sending American kids back to stuff from the '50s, and Cuban kids back to Beny Moré.

So if classical music can't latch on to something in contemporary life, it'll very likely keep on losing listeners, no matter what kind of music education we provide.

And besides...we need more than classical music education. I've taught Juilliard graduate students who'd never heard Charlie Parker, and couldn't follow a Parker solo when I played one for them. They also couldn't make any sense of Robert Johnson's 1930s Delta blues, which over on the non-classical side of the fence is normally considered some of the most searing music ever known. But some Juilliard students have trouble even hearing it as music. Music education, in other words, is (or ought to be) a multi-edged sword, and highly educated classical musicians might need it just as much as anybody else.

Last weekend (that's October 27th and 28th), the Lousiana Philharmonic did a notable weekend of new music. I was part of it, as one of the judges of a composers' competition. But lying behind everything they did -- and making it even more important -- is (of course) the situation in New Orleans, which is really sobering to see. More on that later, though it might be the most important part of this post.

But the orchestra! They called their weekend "Festival of Living Composers," which (speaking affectionately, as a friend) I might say is just a little ghoulish. I mean, if this was a festival of living composers, what would we call all their other concerts? Though, to be fair, they're doing new music on other programs, including (in May) what I think is an inspired pairing of David Del Tredici and Carmina Burana.

The festival of living composers had two parts. First, a concert featuring three finalists in the composers' competition, conducted by the orchestra's former music director, Klauspeter Seibel. And then a concert featuring John Corigliano's Clarinet Concerto, with Stanley Drucker, principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic (for whom the work was written) as the drop-dead amazing soloist, and the orchestra's new music director, Carlos Miguel Pinero, conducting.

John was there, which made the concert especially friendly. He introduced the piece in a way that made everybody want to love it. The backstory is irresistible -- John's father was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, so John has known Drucker all his life (and even took a few clarinet lessons from him); this was the first piece the Philharmonic ever commissioned from John; his father had just died; he found a way to get every Philharmonic musician into the performance. How can anyone resist that? And then Drucker comes out, and from the very first almost whispered, rushing phrase, plays the thing with knife-edge virtuosity. The audience was on its feet at the end, just about screaming. There was no barrier here between new music and the standard repertory (the concert continued with Pictures at an Exhibition), and no barrier between new music and the audience. The people at the concert just seemed to love hearing this piece.

On to the composers' competition, which the Louisiana Philharmonic arranged wonderfully. Long before Katrina, they'd made their plans, and solicited scores worldwide. From 50-odd submissions from 12 countries, musicians from the orchestra picked 10 semifinalists. These semifinalists were then ranked by three judges, two conductors and myself; we had scores and recordings to work with, all anonymous. I'm told we all picked the same three entries, whose composers then became the finalists in the competition.

And here comes the good part. The Louisiana Philharmonic commissioned all three finalist composers to write a 10-minute piece, paying them quite good money, which I must say isn't all that common. So by the time the three pieces were unveiled at the October 28 concert, all three composers -- Frank Proto, David Remelis, and Allan Zavod -- were already winners. How often does that happen (or anything approaching it) at a composers' competition? The generosity and care for the composers was really notable. All three were present; all three had been at rehearsals. The orchestra played all three pieces, and then two decisions got made. I and the two conductors that weekend, Klauspeter and Carlos, huddled to pick a winner, who'd get another commission from the orchestra. Meanwhile the audience voted, and their pick -- David Remelis -- got a special audience prize. We picked Frank Proto.

Needless to say, the audience loved this, and got avidly involved in the voting (just as the audience did in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, when they were asked to pick which of three new works they liked best). One important point, here -- one point of the competition was that all works had to have some relationship to jazz, which for New Orleans makes perfect sense. It also gives the music written for the competition a special spark -- there were improvised solos, for instance (especially for trumpet), which really made the audience sit up and pay eager attention. We shouldn't forget, either, that music is a central part of New Orleans's spirit, and that the orchestra -- as it recovers from the shock of Katrina, and, not least, the dispersal of its staff and musicians, and the loss of many instruments -- is welcomed in the city as yet another sign of renewal. All the more reason why the music it commissions should have some relationship to other music in the city. And in no way were the pieces weakened by the jazz requirement. They stand up to anything I'd usually hear in the normal run of new music performances, and maybe even had an extra edge, because their jazz involvement made them especially engaging.

Besides, look at what we got at a party after the competition night. A Cajun band played, and at one point two of the composers sat in, David Remelis on fiddle, and Allan Zavod playing the piano as if he was possessed by Jerry Lee Lewis. When they really got going, two percussionists from the orchestra joined it. This was hot! When else have we seen composers playing like this after a concert?

One last point about the program. The three competition works were bracketed by American classics -- Gershwin's Cuban Overture, and Leonard Bernstein's dance episodes from On the Town. This was brilliant programming. Both these pieces demonstrate that mixing jazz and classical music is nothing new. The blend has a tradition of its own, with its own classics. Gershwin and Bernstein, if you like, legitimized the competition pieces (for anyone who might have thought they needed legitimizing). They also set a standard, as if to say, "This will show how sweet the classical/jazz blend can be."

There's one other reason the weekend was special. The Lousiana Philharmonic, as I've said, was dispersed by the hurricane and its aftermath. Among the many individuals and organizations that helped the orchestra recover were the Nashville Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, both of which gave concerts with the New Orleans musicians in their own halls. So now, for this festival of living composers, players from Nashville and the New York Philharmonic joined the Louisiana Philharmonic on its own stage (well, a temporary stage -- they play in various locations, for these events a convention center, while their concert hall remains unusable).

I should also say that the orchestra and conductors did really well. It's no easy job to put together four tricky new pieces (and the Clarinet Concerto is very, very tricky) in a single week, and everyone involved deserves a lot of credit, both for their hard work and for the high quality of the result.

And now about New Orleans. When my plane approached the New Orleans airport, I looked out the window, and saw a residential neighborhood, full of subdivisions with single-family houses. The houses, as far as I could tell from up above, looked intact. So there wasn't any problem there, I thought -- until I started noticing the trailers in many of the lots. That's where most of the families were living, and not in their homes. So the houses, most of them, were very likely uninhabitable.

I found the same thing elsewhere in the city, when I saw it from the ground. The famous Ninth Ward -- the poor, largely African-American neighborhood -- that was especially hard hit, is a ghost town, stretching on for miles. It's extraordinary to see. House after house sitting abandoned, grass and weeds overgrown in the front yards, markings on the outside walls painted by the National Guard, to show what was found at the point (how many bodies, for instance). Sometimes the houses look intact, sometimes they're in ruins. Abandoned cars are everywhere. Once in a great while you see a pristine home, newly painted, with people living in it. And then of course you wonder (especially if you've talked to people in New Orleans who themselves are facing choices like this) -- what kind of brave people want to live, maybe with young children, in the middle of a ghost town, with no neighbors, and lots of rats? Understand that I'm not criticizing anybody doing this. But many people in New Orleans -- in middle-class neighborhoods as well -- hesitate to make this choice.

The city's big downtown hospital is closed. Maybe it'll never reopen; there's an intense debate about that. Stores and restaurants curtail their hours, and city services are spotty, all because so many people left the city. People just aren't available to fill all the jobs. Many businesses are closed; you see that as you drive around. New Orleans has trolley lines on some of its streets, and one of them, on a wide, important street, isn't running. The tracks are rusty. Eventually, I guess, it'll be restored, but for the moment this stands as a reminder that things are hardly back to normal. Not that anybody in New Orleans needs that reminder, but somehow, for this outsider, the rusty trolley tracks were eloquent. As were the water stains high up on many walls, and the casual remark someone made to me, as we drove through what looked like a normal residential street: "During the flood, the water here was up to the rooftops." And then of course there are the stories everybody tells, about their own dislocation, their own losses, and/or those of friends and family. It's sobering to see and hear all this. We mustn't forget about it.