December 2006 Archives

I'm about to go off for the holidays, which means no blog for a while. Or more specifically, no blog till the second week in January. I'm going to be visiting family, and then taking a long, leisurely drive home. Maybe I won't even pick up e-mail during the drive. The very thought is liberating.

So this also means I won't approve comments until I'm back. It sounds so geeky, so controlling -- I have to approve every comment everybody posts, before they show up on the site. And why? So we won't have to look at the spam comments that arrive in profusion every day. The comments I've been getting have been numerous, and very welcome (even when I disagree with them). So please, keep them coming, after January 8. I promise posts that ought to provoke some commentary.

Finally, there's a new episode of my book online. This book, of course, is about the future of classical music, and I've been improvising it in installments. Lately the installments have been about modernism, and how I think it distorted classical music. Not because I don't like modernist music; I like a lot of it, and I'd hate to have any ideology about how music should sound. No, it's the old modernist orthodoxy that bothers me. We don't feel much of it any more, except maybe in college music history classes, where serious teachers still seem to spend a lot of time with the likes of Pierre Boulez, maybe making modernist music more important than it really was.

Me, I wish there had been a composer equivalent of James Joyce, someone who could turn the language of music upside down, and still stay in touch with everyday life. (Wait -- there was a composer like that! His name was Ives.) And I wish there had been a composer in Paris in the '50s and '60s who was as sharp and influential as Boulez, but whose music was like Godard's films. Which means it would have been surprising, even shocking; turning the world inside out; and directly addressing the world he or she lived in, with all its changes and uncertainties. Oh, and fun, too. I get more exhilarated over 10 minutes of Masculin Féminin or Bande à parte (the last two Godard films I've watched) than I've been in all the hours I've spent listening to Boulez.

Enough. If you're interested in the book, you might want to subscribe. I'm not writing episodes at two-week intervals, as I used to. The pace was too intense. I'm going to take my time, and add something new only when I'm ready. If you subscribe, you'll be notified by e-mail whenever something new goes up. Just click here, and type "subscribe to the book" in the subject line of the e-mail form that'll appear. Add a few lines, if you like, about who you are and why you're interested. My subscribers are an interesting bunch, and I enjoy getting to know them.

And to all of my readers -- I hope you all have a fine, peaceful holiday. We all need a break, and I know I'm looking forward to mine.

Reviews and other accounts of classical music events from the past -- I mean written in the past -- don't talk much about the audience. And why should they? Everybody reading them would know what the audience was like, so there wouldn't be much need to comment on it.

That's why a famous Virgil Thomson piece from 1950 is so interesting to read now. He's describing one part of the classical music audience back then, and -- at least if you ask me -- he might as well be talking about 19th century Shanghai. Now I don't see anything like what he describes, which is another sign (or so I think) that times have rather dramatically changed. The classical music audience we see now isn't the classical music audience that used to exist. From which it follows that the audience of the future doesn't have to be like the audience we have now.

But back to Thomson. Here's some of what he writes, in a piece called "The Intellectual Audience," published in The New York Herald-Tribune on January 15, 1950.

Anyone who attends musical and other artistic events eclectically must notice that certain of these bring out an audience thickly sprinkled with what are called "intellectuals" and the others do not. It is managements and box offices that call these people intellectuals; persons belong­ing to that group rarely use the term. They are a numerous body in New York, however, and can be counted on to patronize certain entertainments [by which, in this piece, he largely means classical music performances]. Their word-of-mouth communication has an influence, moreover, on public opinion. Their favor does not necessarily provoke mass patronage, but it does bring to the box office a considerable number of their own kind, and it does give to any show or artist receiving it some free advertising. The intellectual audience in any large city is fairly numerous, well organized, and vocal.

This group, that grants or withholds its favor without respect to paid advertising and that launches its ukases with no apparent motivation, consists of people from many social conditions. Its binding force is the book. It is a reading audience. Its members may have a musical ear or an eye for visual art, and they may have neither. What they all have is some acquaintance with ideas. The intellectual world does not judge a work of art from the talent and skill embodied in it; only professionals judge that way. It seeks in art a clear connection with contemporary esthetic and philosophic trends, as these are known through books and magazines. The intellectual audience is not a professional body; it is not a professors' club either, nor a publishers' conspiracy. Neither is it quite a readers' anarchy. Though it has no visible organization, it forms its own opinions and awards its own prizes in the form of free publicity. It is a very difficult group to maneuver or to push around.

And now read this part very carefully:

In New York it is a white-collar audience containing stenographers, saleswomen, union employees of all kinds, many persons from the comfortable city middle-aged middle class, and others from the suburban young parents. There are snappy dressers too, men and women of thirty who follow the mode, and artists' wives from downtown who wear peasant blouses and do their own hair. Some are lawyers, doctors, novelists, painters, musicians, professors. Even the carriage trade is represented, and all the age levels above twenty-five. A great variety of costume is always present, of faces and figures with character in them. Many persons of known professional distinction give it seasoning and tone.

Try to imagine these people. How old are they? Probably not all that old. If Thomson says "all age levels above twenty-five," I'll take him at his word, which means that plenty of people in their 30s and 40s made up this audience. Especially when he talks about "snappy dressers...men and women of thirty who follow the mode." If they're worth mentioning, there must have been a lot of them. And how about those "artists' wives from downtown who wear peasant blouses"? No way they're in their sixties, or probably even in their fifties. I was out and about in New York City not too many years after Thomson wrote this, and the women I'd see in peasant blouses -- an immediate sign that a woman was smart and artistic, or thought she was -- weren't old.

So Thomson was describing a slice of the classical music audience that simply doesn't exist today. People looking for "a clear connection with contemporary esthetic and philosophic trends"? Nobody's going to classical music events for that, or certainly not mainstream ones. Thomson's intellectual audience wasn't mainstream, either, and he notes that they didn't normally go to the Met or the New York Philharmonic. But they did (he says) go to hear Pierre Monteux and Ernest Ansermet conduct; they came out for recitals by Schnabel, Clifford Curzon, and Wanda Landowska; they even went to the Philharmonic when Dmitri Mitropoulos, then the music director, led a concert performance of Elektra, which at that time wasn't a repertory piece. I'm sure they were there a couple of years after Thomson wrote all this, when Mitropoulos did Wozzeck in concert with the Philharmonic.

And so look at the change. The audience we have is primarily what Thomson called a "musical audience," by which he means merely musical, interested in music but not in any ideas that music might represent. It's older than Thomson's audience (as we know from all kinds of information, including, I'd think, his comments I've quoted here). And most crucially it doesn't have this outer mass of critical, thoughtful people, who show up only if a concert has some larger cultural interest. Or, rather, we do have those people, but they're not, generally speaking, going to mainstream classical concerts at all. They go to Steve Reich events, and the Next Wave festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

We also have a sophisticated musical audience, made up of people who go to hear sophisticated concerts--something with unusual programming, or with an artist who's thought to be exceptionally serious. I've heard their number in New York estimated at 2000, and also (but I think the programmer who said this was in a bad mood that day) at 150. But this isn't Thomson's intellectual audience. They're not interested in any connection classical music might have with wider culture. They're only looking for more sophisticated musical things (the sophistication being measured exclusively on musical grounds).

I've actually heard of one orchestra that does have an audience at least a little bit like Thomson's intellectuals -- a loose group of up to 300 younger people, who immediately stand out because of their age, dress, and hair, and who are attracted, I'm told, by John Adams and Carmina Burana. I wonder if other classical music institutions have seen anything like this.

And, you know, we could go further with this. The purely musical performances used to be quite a bit looser -- more fun, more personal, more (there's no other word for it) entertaining. Just watch a few YouTube videos:

Kirsten Flagstad, the great Wagnerian soprano whose career came to an end in the 1950s, singing Die Walküre

Lauritz Melchior, the great heldentenor of the prewar era, singing another Walküre excerpt (well, lipsynching it, but still his enjoyment is unmistakable)

Gino Bechi, a star Italian baritone (and force of nature), singing the Toreador Song (in Italian, evidently from a movie)

Lawrence Tibbett, the lively American star of the 1920s and 1930s, singing the same piece (in French, more properly, though I don't care what language anyone with Bechi's or Tibbett's power sings in; at the start of the video, you'll have to wait out an introduction by Thomas Hampson)

Some people (but do they really enjoy life?) might find Tibbett and Bechi a little hokey (times and styles have changed). But you can't deny that they -- and Flagstad and Melchior -- sang with more joy and pure gusto than anyone in opera has today.

As regular readers of this blog know, I've been posting a lot about the age of the classical music audience. The current myth is that this audience has always been as old as it is now, but all the data I've found says the opposite -- the classical audience has been getting older at least since 1937, when the earliest data I've found was collected. See my post on audience age for more details.

And now -- thanks to a tip from a marketing director I know -- I've found more data, giving even more support from my view. It's in a very good book on audience development, Waiting in the Wings: A Larger Audience for the Arts and How to Develop It, published in 1992 by Bradley G. Morison, Julie Gordon Dalgleish:

In 1955, in one of the earliest such projects on record, the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (now the Minnesota Orchestra) retained a market research firm to conduct a survey of audiences.

Among other findings, the research showed that the median age of the audience was about 33 years. A comparable study was done in 1985, and the median age had increased to about 48 years. Four years later, a 1989 survey showed the median age at nearly 51 years.

In 34 years, the median age of the audience had increased by nearly 18 years while the median age of the total population inn the United States rose only about 3 years. It appears very likely that many in the current audience are the same people, grown up.

Note that last sentence. I'm saying the same thing now. Morison and Dalgleish said it in 1992.

And note their tentative conclusion:

If [everything I've just quoted is true], those "retiring" from the audience are not being replaced by an equivalent number from the younger generations, and it would appear that the proportion of Yeses [people ready to say "yes" when an orchestra asks them to buy concert tickets] among the young is substantially smaller than it was several decades back.

Could it be that the Yeses are a vanishing breed?

Again, they said that in 1992! But their book also has data, from the American Symphony Orchestra League, showing attendance at orchestra concerts peaking in the mid-1980s, and declining after that. The League's current data shows a decline that began in the mid-'90s. And I've seen private figures showing a decline -- for the largest orchestras -- beginning in 1990. But did it start even earlier?

And about the proportion of Yeses among the young: The National Endowment for the Arts found that the percentage of people under 30 at classical concerts dropped in half between 1982 and 1997. So Morison and Dalgleish seem to be on track with this data, too.

We all know (or we ought to know) that classical music used to be more popular in the United States than it is now.

But how can we measure that? Well, in the 1950s the big TV networks showed spectacular classical telecast. That's one piece of evidence. Clearly, classical music must have been more popular then, or else the networks wouldn't have bothered with it. But this isn't statistical data. It doesn't measure the popularity of classical music, and give us a number that we can compare with anything now.

With this in mind, I was fascinated to find a statistic on record sales, in a 1960 book by Richard Schickel, The World of Carnegie Hall. Schickel says (and I don't know his source) that $425 million was spent annually on recordings (LPs, in those days), and that "[o]nly 85 million of it is spent on recordings of unquestionably good music," by which I assume he means classical.

Only $85 million -- only 20 percent! By our standards today, that's miraculous. Off the top of my head, I think that maybe 3% of all recordings sold today are classical. (Though to be absolutely accurate, I don't know what, exactly, that figure measures, which means I don't know how comparable it is to the dollar figures Schickel gives. Still, I think it's clear that there's no way to measure classical recording sales today that would make them 20% of any kind of record industry total, whether we'd talk about number of CDs sold, number of downloads, or dollar revenue.)

Schickel, by the way, goes on to write the most marvelously dismissive description of pop music I've seen in a long time. Subtract the classical sales from that $425 million total, he says, and "[t]he rest is spent on show tunes, the perversions of Mantovani and his imitators, popular music which seems to get worse and worse each year, and [here comes the best part] imitation folk songs put out by the hacks of Tin Pan Alley and Nashville, Tennessee." Take that, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline!

But wait -- Schickel doesn't mention jazz, which was unquestionably riding high in 1960, with the likes of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane at or near their peaks. Does he include jazz in the $85 million sales of good music? Then, of course, the classical percentage would be smaller. But still it's got to have been higher than it is today. There's no way that classical and jazz together would add up to 20% of current sales.

(Another of my occasional posts about classical music publicity and promotion. It's so often done badly, with flyers, posters, and press releases that don't say a thing. How can we do it better?)

I don't know Laura Seay. But I admire her a lot. She's a viola student at Juilliard, and gave a recital a month or so ago, joined by three other musicians, all Korean or Korean-American. (Not hard to do at Juilliard, with its heavy Asian enrollment.)

And so she put up flyers for the concert, advertising the show as "Laura and the Koreans." As if they were a band! There weren't any other words. But there were pictures. The first poster I saw had, very simply, a fork and three pairs of chopsticks. The next had a photo of Laura holding chopsticks, and the Koreans holding forks.

There were more posters, though I've forgotten what they showed. But I think this was a triumph. I know that advertising isn't really needed for a Juilliard recital. Your friends will come, your family will come, a scattering of people from the neighborhood will come (attracted by the free admission). But some students do promotion anyway, sometimes tongue in cheek, and this was the best I've seen.

Why? Because it made me want to hear the concert. Laura Seay is clearly smart, fun, and imaginative. Maybe she plays as well as she advertises! Or maybe she doesn't, but at least I know she's got some spunk. And what do I know about other Juilliard students, who have barebones flyers, or scholarly ones? Nothing at all. So Laura wins.

Boring footnote: Of course she violated classical music rule 31-B, which says: "The music is what matters, not the performers." And she also broke rule 6-J: "You have to be serious." Believe me, I'm horrified.

By chance, next to one of her posters was another one, which obeyed rule 31-B. It listed (if I remember correctly) the composers the student was going to play, with one highlight in big type: "Including the Kägelstadt Trio!!" Or words to that effect. (And maybe there were more exclamation points.) !! violates the serious rule, I guess, but at least the flyer focused on the music.

But who really cares? (With apologies to the student, who might be well worth hearing.) The Kägelstadt Trio is a Mozart piece for the dusky sound of viola, clarinet, and piano, and sure, you might not run into it every day. But were you dying to run out and hear it right now? I didn't think so. (And since the flyer didn't explain what it was, only people who already know the piece would have been likely to respond.) And not many people, surely, care enough about that piece to justify the exclamation points?

But people always care about brains, imagination, and a good sense of fun, no matter what music you play.

(Assignment for anyone who still disapproves: Design a poster that obeys the rules, and still draw people to the concert. Then send it to me. I'm serious. I'd love to see a poster like that.)

Rock of Ages

by Jeff Leeds

New York Times, November 26, 2006

The AARP is going into the music business. As this news story says, the AARP is sponsoring Tony Bennett's current tour. And not only that:

Elton John performed at the association's "Life @50+" convention in Anaheim, Calif., last month; officials said they have booked Rod Stewart and Earth, Wind & Fire for next year. James Taylor played two years ago, and the group's magazine has named him as one of the hottest people over 50...

[The group is also] bulking up its Web site with music offerings, licensing the Pandora online radio and recommendation service [see below], and negotiating for shelf space at a major retail chain, which would carry exclusive versions of certain CDs with discounts to AARP members. And of course it will advertise at Mr. Bennett's concerts and perhaps sign up new members there too.

Why all this? Because people 45 and over have been the record industry's biggest market ever since the late 1990s:

Last year fans 45 and older accounted for 25.5 percent of sales, while older teenagers (a group more prone to music piracy) represented less than 12 percent. So it's little wonder that Rod Stewart's raspy remakes of pop standards emerged as a franchise, or that Bob Dylan in September captured the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart for the first time in 30 years.

The AARP wants to take advantage of all this, using music to attract new members.

And the meaning of it all for classical music? There's a wistful belief that people, as they age, will want something musically more serious, and so will turn away from pop, and embrace the classics.

But this news story suggests otherwise. Older people still like pop. Which isn't to say that some of them won't embrace classical music, but surely not as many of them will as happened in the past. So the classical audience -- if we don't do something -- will very likely shrink.

Two footnotes: We shouldn't forget that anybody looking for serious music can already find it outside the classical world. Someone who grew up with Aerosmith can start listening to world music, jazz, or blues.

And Pandora! I'm hardly the first to discover it, but if you haven't tried it, go to the site and see what you think. It's an Internet radio service, which offers to learn what you like, and give you more music like it. You enter the name of a song or an artist (so far this only works with pop; classical music, the Pandora people say, is something they're working on). Then, based on what they plausibly claim are 200 or more musical characteristics, they start playing songs they think are like the music you entered. If you like a song that comes up, you can tell them so, and they'll play more like it. If you don't like something, you tell them that, too, and immediately the song vanishes. Things like it won't be played in the future.

And this works! I started with a "radio station" (you can create up to 100 of them) based on Feist, a Canadian singer-songwriter I like. Later that day, someone I know said that her taste in pop was terrible: She liked things (like Abba, whom she'd loved in high school), and didn't listen to anything she thought she ought to like. So I wondered what would happen if I created a Pandora station to address that. I told them to start playing Abba and Bob Dylan. Three or four songs down the line, they started playing Led Zeppelin, and I was amazed. Some Zep songs really might be some kind of crazed mix of Abba and Dylan -- and I'd never have thought of that myself.

I kept broadening the station. (My problem, I fear, is that I kept rejecting the Abba songs.) I added the the Ronettes, and started getting other girl group songs. I added the Pet Shop Boys, and started getting more dark dance-pop. But I also found I was getting some rock songs with a vivid dance-like rhythm, things I'd never have found on my own. Pandora works. Though now I think I'm getting too much dance, so I think I'll add Neil Young and Public Enemy and P. J. Harvey...

I've often cited Stephen Johnson's book, Everything Bad is Good for You, an ironic title, since the book talks about how smart pop culture has gotten.

And there couldn't be a better example of his thesis than the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale. I won't pretend to know how its producers planned it, but I can imagine them thinking something like this: "The James Bond franchise is old and stupid. People feel affectionate toward it, but they know how silly the movies are. Times have changed; people now expect more. What can we do to bring James Bond alive again?"

They might have decided: "Let's make Bond realistic. What would someone like that really be like? Someone, that is, who carries out impossible missions mostly on his own, and is officially empowered to act as a law unto himself [which is the larger meaning of the famous "license to kill"].

Their answer might have been: "He'd be a royal pain in the butt. Insubordinate, a loose cannon, almost impossible to control. His Oxbridge veneer would be just that, a veneer, covering deep insecurity. And he'd be lonely, with emotional armor six feet thick."

So that's what they show in the movie, which turns out to be thoughtful and touching, at least up to a point. I say "up to a point," because I'm not going to make great claims for it. In the end, however dark it gets, it's largely an arousing entertainment.

But I will say this. I've been reading the new translation of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. And that book, classic as it is, doesn't have half the thought or emotional depth of Casino Royale. Talk about entertainment -- The Three Musketeers goes down as easily as popcorn, and makes very little sense. The characters have a lot of life, and maybe even a little depth, which is probably why the book survives.

But I suppose -- because it was written 160 years ago, and, God help us, in French -- we're supposed to call it high culture.

Footnote: dark entertainment is a notably current trope. I'm reminded of one of my favorite pop groups, the Pet Shop Boys, who put serious thought into songs that sound like trashy pop glitz. Of course, they don't only sound that way. Plainly, there's depth. But in their heyday (the '80s), serious rock fans would hear only the surface of their songs, and write them off as (in the words of a friend of mine from back then), "Disco trash." When I quoted that to the two guys who make up the group, they said, "But we love disco trash!"

And that was the point. Their genuine love of pop ephemera led them to make records that both subvert current life, and exist entirely in the middle of it. The songs felt, in other words, the way living in the current world can feel. And that -- again, without making great artistic claims -- is a trope that Casino Royale also goes for (and of which classical music is just about entirely innocent).

I've complained often enough about classical music publicity and press releases. So it's wonderful to see someone doing it right. Though as it happens, this isn't a press release, but instead a newspaper item about an upcoming concert, printed today in the Times-Herald Record, the really fine local paper for New York's Mid-Hudson region:

Beethoven and the yaks

There may be no greater musical treat this season than what's happening at Bard College today.

The college's Conservatory Chamber Orchestra will present a free program in the Frank Gehry-designed Sosnoff Theater at 3 p.m.

Michael Gilbert will conduct Rossini's "Overture to Cinderella," C.P.E. Bach's "FluteConcerto in D Minor," featuring soloist Tara Helen O'Connor, and -- the piece de resistance -- Beethoven's glorious "Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Opus 92."

Beethoven himself conducted the premiere of his work on Dec. 8, 1813. It was a hit, but subsequent judgments haven't always (incredibly enough) been kind.

Richard Wagner, knocked out by its lively rhythms, called it "the apotheosis of dance." But composer Carl Maria von Weber, after hearing the first movement, said he thought Beethoven was "ripe for the madhouse."

More recently, conductor Thomas Beecham said "What can you do with it? It's like a lot of yaks jumping about," prompting the unanswered questions, "Do yaks ever really jump around? And if they do, do they really sound like Beethoven?"

Find out for yourself. It's first-come, first-served. Call 758-7900 or visit www.bard.edu/conservancy

Isn't this marvelous? Remember its purpose -- it appeared in a regional newspaper, and the point was to get readers interested in the concert. Obviously a press release aimed at classical music connoisseurs would be different. But for general readers, most of whom wouldn't normally plan to attend a classical concert, this is fabulous. Makes you want to hear the piece, and (this is the really great part) form your own opinion. You're not bludgeoned with empty superlatives, killing all thought as they tell you how great Beethoven is. (There was one small problem. Can you spot it, especially after you read to the end of this post?)

Kudos to whatever Record staffer wrote this. For comparison, here's Bard's own press release, not offensive, in any way, but completely bland, with eye-glazing empty bios of the conductor and soloist:

BARD COLLEGE CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC PRESENTS THE CONSERVATORY CHAMBER ORCHESTRA AT BARD'S FISHER CENTER ON DECEMBER 3

Free Program Features Flute Soloist Tara Helen O'Connor with Michael Gilbert Conducting the Orchestra

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. -- The Bard College Conservatory of Music presents a concert featuring the Conservatory Chamber Orchestra on Sunday, December 3. The program, free and open to the public, begins at 3:00 p.m. in the acoustically stunning Frank Gehry-designed Sosnoff Theater of the Fisher Center.

Michael Gilbert conducts the Conservatory Chamber Orchestra in performances of Gioacchino Rossini's Overture to La Cenerentola (Cinderella); C. P. E. Bach's Flute Concerto in D Minor, H. 425 (W22), featuring soloist and Conservatory faculty member Tara Helen O'Connor; and Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92.

Conductor Michael Gilbert served for many decades as a member of the violin section of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. He retired from that position to pursue a busy schedule of guest appearances, especially with youth and conservatory orchestras, in the United States and abroad.

Tara Helen O'Connor received a Ph.D. from SUNY Stony Brook, where she studied with Samuel Baron, Robert Dick, Keith Underwood, and Julius Levine. In 2001, she was awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant. She is a founding member of the New Millennium Ensemble, which won the Naumburg Award in 1995, and flute soloist of the renowned Bach Aria Group. O'Connor was the first wind player chosen to participate in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's "Chamber Music Society Two" program for emerging artists. She continues to perform regularly with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Orpheus, Bargemusic, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, and Music from Angel Fire. She has recorded for Arcadia, CRI, Koch International, and Bridge Records.

Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. For further information, call the box office at 845-758-7900 or visit www.bard.edu/conservatory.

Thought for today, from the New York Times business section:

Y&R, a very traditional ad agency that recently has lost major clients and also staff, has appointed a new chief executive. He's interviewed in the Times, and here's the first question he was asked, along with the start of his answer.

Q. How can an agency like Y&R, known for its traditional approach to advertising, thrive when the marketing landscape is changing so much?

A. There is an awful lot of confusion out there. No one knows what will really happen. It's all up for grabs now. Clients are crying out, "Help get us through the minefield."

The rest of the answer is relevant only to Y&R's advertising work. But the question could just as well have been asked changes in the cultural landscape, which are the reason why the marketing landscape is changing. Media culture, for instance, is getting far more participatory. So corporations (as one response to that) are asking customers to design their own ads. Two major corporations, along with the NFL, have even asked customers to make commercials to be shown on the Superbowl telecast, which of course is where many of the most important new commercials are unveiled.

So: "Help us through the minefield." The culture is changing. And we in the classical music world need just as much help as everybody else. (Or maybe even more.)

Loonacied! Marterdyed!! Madwakemiherculossed!!! Judascessed!!!! Pairaskivvymenassed!!!!! Luredogged!!!!!!

There, from Finnegans Wake, is the motto of my latest book episode, the latest improvised installment of my online book on the future of classical music. If this episode were positioned in the style of a computer folder, it might be book/how classical music is today/how classical music got that way/the effects of modernism. As faithful readers know, I'm not happy with the effects modernist music has had on classical music, even though I like the music itself. The problems are, roughly speaking, two: difficult modernist music has been forced on an audience that doesn't want to hear it; and modernist music became far more abstract and far more removed from everyday colloquial life than modernist painting, literature, or film.

But in this episode, I'm not worrying about all that. I'm celebrating the sheer exuberance and noise of early modernism, with special reference to the 1920s, when "modern music" was a fad -- even a high-society fad -- in New York.

If you want to know when future episodes of the book arrive, please subscribe. Just type "subscribe to the book" in the e-mail form that'll appear when you click the link, and, if you would, tell me a little about yourself. My subscribers are a varied and engaging group; I've made friends with several, or at least had warm and informative e-mail exchanges, simply because people told me who they are, and why the book interests them.

Subscribers also get extra stuff in e-mails from me -- anecdotes, ideas, debates, and maybe a more personal sense of who I am.

I'll end with what I think is the highlight of my latest episode. It's something William Carlos Williams wrote in 1947, after he heard one of the most dramatic, superhyped, and noisy pieces of modern music, George Antheil's Ballet méchanique -- featuring sirens and airplane propellers -- at its disorganized Carnegie Hall premiere:

Here is Carnegie Hall. You have heard something [in the past] of the great Beethoven and it has been charming, masterful in its power over the mind. We have been alleviated, strengthened against life -- the enemy -- by it. We go out of Carnegie into the subway, and we can for a moment withstand the assault of that noise, failingly! as the strength of the music dies. Such has been its strength to enclose us that we may even feel its benediction a week long.

But as we came from Antheli's "Ballet Méchanique" a woman of our party, herself a musician, made this remark: "The subway seems sweet after that." "Good, I replied and went on to consider what evidences there were in myself in explanation of her remark. And this is what I noted. I felt that noise, the unrelated noise of life such as this in the subway had not been battened out as would have been the case with Beethoven still warm in the mind but it had actually been mastered, subjugated. Antheil had taken this hated thing life and rigged himself into power over it by his music. The offense had not been held, cooled, varnished over but annihilated and life itself made thereby triumphant. This is an important difference .By hearing Antheil's music, seemingly so much noise, when I actually came up on noise in reality, I found that "I had gone up over it."

Cities Compete in Hipness Battle to Attract Young

New York Times, November 25, 2006

"Baby boomers are retiring and the number of young adults is declining. By 2012, the work force will be losing more than two workers for every one it gains."

So cities are trying to attract people 35 and under.

"They are people who, demographers say, are likely to choose a location before finding a job. They like downtown living, public transportation and plenty of entertainment options. They view diversity and tolerance as marks of sophistication."

Another way to put it (as the story indeed does) is that this are the people identified by Richard Florida in his very influential book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which ought to be required reading for anyone who wants to know what's going on in our culture, especially with the younger people who'll be classical music's future (if it has a future).

One point Florida makes, and very strongly, is that orchestras, opera houses, and ballet companies don't work any more to attract corporations, and the smart, educated, creative people that corporations want to hire. The creative class isn't interested in those things. Instead, they like street culture, and lively local music scenes.

"From Milwaukee to Tampa Bay, consultants have been hired to score such nebulous indexes as 'social capital,' 'after hours' and 'vitality.' Relocation videos have begun to feature dreadlocks and mosh pits instead of sunsets and duck ponds."

Atlanta seems to be the most attractive city for the people we're talking about, and in fact has drawn people from New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. "There are some 45 colleges and universities in the metro area. The Cartoon Network is based here, as are scores of companies in the technology and entertainment sectors. The music industry is another draw for the creative class. And the city has large international and gay populations, considered strong indicators for popularity with the young and restless."

Not that there's any formula. As a consultant quoted in the story said, "The real issue was, is your city open to a set of ideas from young people, and their wish to realize their dream or objective in your city. You could go out and build bike paths, but if that's not what your young people want, it's not going to work."

Why this is important:

These are the people we need to attract to classical music, either now or later in their lives. And if you believe what this news story said -- or what Richard Florida says -- we'll have trouble doing it. Classical music, as currently presented, is just too dull and too predictable, and certainly not contemporary enough.

So do we have to dumb it down, or tart it up, add all kinds of glitter to make it seem exciting. No way. This new audience will see right through that. They're looking for something authentic. We'll have to make classical music smarter -- edgier, more current, more exciting. And yes, we should change the way it looks and feels, but we have to start with the music itself, both what we feature in performances, and the way we perform it. Make it sharp, incisive, full of life, and above all, full of meaning. Kill the formality, and replace it with something real, something that jumps off the stage, and makes everyone feel from the first note that something's happening, something they won't want to miss.

(It's a fantasy, by the way -- or at least I think so -- that today's creative class will get older, and then develop a taste for classical music as we know it now. Why would they? What's in it for them? We could imagine that their lives are shallow now, so when they get older, they'll need something deeper. But the key word here is "imagine." This is a smart, solid, self-motivated group of people, and we'd be silly to think that we can predict what's going to happen to them, and especially that we've got the answer to any future problems they might have.)

800 Very Unsquare Feet

New York Times, November 30

What this story says:

In Malibu, there's a store called Free City Supershop, run by a fashion professional named Nina Garduno. "Is it a camping store?" the story asks (and it's a very vivid, focused story, I might add, written by Cathy Horyn). "Ms. Garduno sells customized teepees, with one on display near the entrance."

"Is it a bike shop? She sells vintage and new bicycles, each one refitted and custom-painted so that no two are alike.

"Is it a clothing store? Ms. Garduno sells hand-printed T-shirts and sweat pants that she produces herself, the block type reminiscent of the style, if not the spirit, of a concert handbill."

Free City Supershop is also a place where people come to hang out. There's free orange juice for everyone. "'Surfers will come in and just load their pockets with oranges.' [Ms. Garduno] grinned. 'It's totally great.'"

This is a high-end clothing (or whatever) store; some of the t-shirts sell for $200. But it's also comfortable. And that's the point. That's the key both to the store and to the article about it:

...for something to be perceived as authentic, that value has to be communicated cleanly through every detail -- from the quality of the wash, if it's a T-shirt, to the integrity of the physical environment. This is the almost visceral sense you get when you enter Free City. Not to sound crunchy, but you feel the love.

Yet if fashion executives were to look beyond the granola rhetoric of Laurel Canyon circa 1975, beyond the $140 T-shirts with mystical-sounding phrases like "Texas Tokyo," they may be forced to admit that Ms. Garduno is in fact very instinctual, that her ideas are prescient. They may even have to ask why the fashion industry has not been able to create a new shopping experience equal in its fun and sense of surprise to that of Whole Foods or Apple, but which is available in 800 square feet in a strip mall in Malibu.

Why this is important:

Has anyone in classical music created anything with the creativity and sense of surprise of Whole Foods or Apple?

Has anyone created a concert experience whose authenticity is "communicated cleanly through every detail"?

We especially haven't done the latter. The program book, for instance, at most performances, gives the game away. It tends to look like a community newspaper. Very sweet, very sincere, but not anywhere near the artistic level the music is supposed to be at.

Of course, some people will tell me that the music is what's important, not the setting, not the sizzle, not the accessories. To which I can only reply that classical music already has ambience and accessories. Concert halls are built in standard ways, and convey a sense of formal luxury (spacious at best, pretentious at worst). Musicians wear formal clothes. Etc. We all know the drill. How does all of this help the music? What kind of performance does it encourage?

And how would we want concerts to look and feel, if we designed them from the ground up, with no preconceptions, starting only from the music?