Deutsche Grammophon has just unveiled a new download site, where all of us can buy their classical recordings, including many that have long been out of print on CD. And all of this without DRM! (“Digital Rights Management,” which means the kind of copy-protection that up to now has beenalmost universal when we buy downloads (though the tide is starting to shift, not only at DG, but also on iTunes and at Amazon, where all downloads are DRM-free).

A good thing, obviously. But the day it was announced, I got an amazed e-mail from someone who works closely with two of DG’s big classical stars. Apparently DG didn’t tell at least these two artists in advance that this new download thing was happening. My friend was annoyed, to say the least. Where was common courtesy? Where was the thought that, just maybe, some of the artists might like to help promote their newly available downloads?

So I asked a publicist who’d e-mailed me a press release about the new site (not someone who works directly for DG). Was it true, I asked, that DG didn’t tell its artists that this was going to happen? And I got an answer. Here it is, the official — and ineffable — DG reply to my question:

Deutsche Grammophon believes its artists are pleased to learn that their label is making every effort to sell their recordings through all possible retail channels.

A mere civilian like myself couldn’t have written this. It takes someone so steeped in corporate life that they’d long since stopped expressing themselves in plain English. But certainly it confirms what I thought, and what my friend thought. DG never told its artists about its download plans. And now trusts that they’re “pleased” to learn of them!

Well, very likely they are. Though I’ll guarantee that there’s also some annoyance. But why would DG have proceeded this way? Maybe they’re just clueless. But maybe there’s some larger strategic or tactical reason for keeping the thing quiet, at least where there artists are concerned. I’ll float two theories, without any inside information that might lead me to think either of them is right. Still…maybe DG worried that some of its artists might not be pleased to see their recordings on sale without copy protection. In pop music, we’ve seen a few bands go to war against piracy, and some that for a long time wouldn’t allow downloads at all.

So maybe DG had no contractual reason not to proceed — none of their artists, or not many of them, had anything in their contracts to prohibit DRM-free downloads. But maybe DG still worried that some of the artists wouldn’t be happy, and so decided to present their stars with this as a fait accompli, to make protests more difficult. Or maybe DG’s lawyers objected. I saw this happen years ago, when the first music download was offered. This happened in the early to mid-’90s (I don’t remember the exact year); it was an Aerosmith song, if I’m remembering correctly, offered online by Geffen Records. It just about took all night to download.

I did a story on this for Entertainment Weekly, where I was working at the time, and I found out that the record company’s lawyers were all opposed to the plan. They thought it would lead to — well, more or less what it did lead to, though if record companies had taken the lead, and offered legal downloads before illegal ones spread, maybe the outcome would have been different. Maybe the lawyers helped create the outcome they’d feared.

So maybe — and again, I’m just theorizing — DG’s lawyers, or some of them, didn’t like this plan. Maybe it was controversial inside the company. So maybe, in one of those deals that people sometimes strike to keep all sides happy (even if the result doesn’t make complete sense), they all agreed to offer the downloads, but not to publicize it very much in advance. Create the download site, but don’t make much fuss over it. In this scenario, maybe the artists weren’t told, because if they had been, information might have leaked.

This is only speculation. But DG’s blunt discourtesy — in not telling the artists what was going on — does make me wonder if there might not have been some reason for it.

Some comic relief.

Pinchas Zuckerman, uneasy about the future of classical music, and squirming helplessly as he moans about it in the Denver Post, let fly with this:

If [classical music isn't] synonymous with our existence, or [isn't so to] at least 5 to 6 percent of the population, then society will become a jungle. And we don’t want to see riots as we saw them in the ’60s, because that was chaos.

Classical music as a civilizing force — that’s a gratifying myth (idealistic at best, self-congratulatory at worst) that we’ve all met before. And it’s silly. Take a deep breath, Maestro Z, and repeat after me: The Nazis loved classical music…the Nazis loved classical music…

Besides, his logic is suspect. When there were riots in the ’60s, classical music was far more central in our culture than it is now. Hey, and not only that — big orchestras had just expanded to their 52-week contracts. Didn’t stop the riots, did it? And who from the music world helped calm the riots? Isaac Stern? It was James Brown.

But the whole thing is just too silly for words. The riots came from racial issues that had nothing to do with classical music. And as Z acknowledges later in the interview, classical music has difficult problems, complex ones, and he wishes that the biz would take a unified approach. Which wouldn’t be a bad idea at all. Though maybe the racial problems of the ’60s did have at least a remote classical music connection. The racial record of classical music up to that time hadn’t been very good.

In 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers of course had made Jackie Robinson the first black player in the major leagues. So somebody went to Edward Johnson, who ran the Metropolitan Opera, and suggested that he follow the Dodgers’ lead, and put a black singer in a leading role. To which Johnson whined, ”Don’t I have enough trouble already?” — thus not quite showing that classical music had civilized him in any deep, important way, in a lifetime spent in the field as a singer and administrator.

It wasn’t till years later, in 1955 — after the Supreme Court had made racial matters an issue for the entire nation, by declaring school segregation unconstitutional — that the Met dared to follow the Dodgers’ lead.

*

I hope my readers will try Pandora’s new classical music offerings. What’s Pandora? A terrific Internet radio site, on which you create your own radio station, based on any songs or artists you like. Pandora then finds other music like the stuff you picked. In pop, it’s uncannily good. I have a Lucinda Williams station, just for instance, and Pandora finds endless rootsy singer-songwriters, and they’re rootsy in much the way that Williams is. (Though she’s far better. Pandora reaffirmed that.)

So now you can do it with classical music. Type in the name of a composer, or search online to find a work, and Pandora will give you more like it. I should declare an interest here, because I’ve talked with Pandora’s founder and CEO, and offered suggestions. But I was a Pandora subscriber before that contact ever happened, and my suggestions have nothing to do with what they’re offering now.

I thought I’d throw Pandora a curve, and set up Schoenberg and Webern stations. The result amazed me. Pandora found music that fit both styles precisely. It even picked a Berio piece (Points on a Curve to Find) that fit in Schoenberg’s universe, and another one that fit in Webern’s. (I’m sorry that I didn’t write down which piece it was, and unfortunately Pandora doesn’t let you go back and see what it chose.)

My biggest surprise came when Schoenberg’s String Trio came up on the Webern station. I wouldn’t have made that connection, and could easily cite parts of the piece that don’t seem Webern-like at all. But in the Webern world that Pandora made, the String Trio fit perfectly. So there’s another lesson that Pandora taught me — the Schoenberg String Trio is more like Webern than I’d have ever figured out on my own.

Try it out yourself. And if you do, give me some feedback. This could be helpful to Pandora down the line. There are some obvious problems, some based on their licensing requirements (they can’t always play all movements of a lengthy work), others maybe fixable. But try it out. See what you think.

*

And also check out Daniel Mendelsohn’s long and smart review of the Met’s Lucia, from the New York Review. I raved about it in an earlier post; it’s now online. Music criticism rarely gets this good (though I do think the second part of the piece, about the performance, is stronger than the opening, about Lucia‘s history). And if the Met is serious about presenting real theater, it should welcome scrutiny like this.

I’m withdrawing my “Indie pop footnotes” post. It had some mistakes, some due to my carelessness, some from misinformation. What follows is (I hope) more accurate. It follows up on my earlier post about Sufjan Stevens making history — maybe – at BAM.

Other indie rock people have done work with orchestras. I’ve heard, for instance, about this happening in Australia. Ben Folds has appeared with many Australian orchestras, with whom he sometimes improvises, even in songs where they might simply be backing him. The DVD of him playing with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra isn’t obscure, as I’d wrongly thought, but is  widely available. (I’ve just ordered it.)

Neil Finn (of Crowded House and Split Enz), has appeared with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, as has Tim Freedman (of the Whitlams) and Katie Noonan (of george – no capital c). Nick Cave has worked with the Sydney Dance Company. There’s a sydneysymphony.bigpondmusic.com video on the web of the Whitlams with the Sydney Symphony. And the Australian Chamber Orchestra does say, on its website, that it has “multiple identities: as a chamber group, a small symphony orchestra, and an electro-acoustic collective.” Also on the Australian tip,check out an excerpt from an orchestral piece by Matthew Hindson, Homage to Metallica. At least in this excerpt, it’s one of the most effective classical treatments of rock I’ve ever heard. Note the 1/8 size violin, amplified at the start to recreate, in orchestral terms, the scream of an electric guitar. (Thanks to Andy Rantzen, of the Australia Council, for this link, and to Georgia Rivers of the Australian Chamber Orchestra for much help.)

I also know a well-known American orchestra where one of the top administrator wants to co-produce concerts with pop people, both by having them play, and by inviting them to help curate some concerts. And I’ve heard that the music director of yet another notable American orchestra is interested. All this is tricky, obviously. You need to have a pop artist with enough knowledge and imagination to think up viable and interesting things for an orchestra to do. Note that the Baltimore Symphony, too, has  has played with Ben Folds. (Though note this, from the newspaper review the link takes you to: “The setting was a bit awkward and unusual at first, but eventually the conductor and orchestra lightened up and looked like they were enjoying themselves as much as Folds and the audience were.” Some orchestras, possibly, might never relax.)

Nick Cave, wrote the music for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and it’s very effective, in a classical style, though a collaborator is credited, so Cave might have had help. There’s no shame in that. How much help would Elliott Carter need to write a rock song?

(OK, throw things at me.)

And then there was a piece by Ken Thomson, Wait Your Turn, a fabulous romp for Thomson’s band gutbucket (again no capital letter) and orchestra, which I heard and loved at an American Composers Orchestra concert in New York not long ago. gutbucket plays a wild mixture of punk, jazz, and — to my ear, and I really loved this — metal. The orchestra part doesn’t sound difficult; here’s a piece that any orchestra could program, and have lots of fun with the new young audience Thomson might attract, or at least delight.

Though I have to note one serious problem. The ACO (that’s the American Composers Orchestra, not the Australian Chamber Orchestra!) played Wait Your Turn well enough, because the orchestra parts weren’t too hard. Other pieces on the program sounded like a mess. Steve Smith of the New York Times quite rightly blasted the concert in his review. I agree with everything he said. Concerts like this do no favors for composers. It might even be better not to play their works at all, if they’re going to be done this badly.

The ACO, I should add, hasn’t sounded very good for quite a while. And what’s especially sad is that they’re playing world premieres, often – as on the concert I heard, and Steve reviewed — by composers who haven’t written for orchestra before. There isn’t nearly enough rehearsal time. That’s one reason the performances are bad. But for premieres like these, you need a lot of rehearsal time, maybe many hours.

Even experienced composers make orchestration mistakes. I’ve heard players in major orchestras excoriate — there’s a big, fancy word — big-name composers, for problems in their orchestration. So we can assume that composers writing for orchestra for the first time might have many problems. But when you commission them, don’t you know that? Shouldn’t you give them acres of time, so the problems can be worked out, and mistakes can be fixed?

Compare BAM, with Sufjan Stevens. Stevens had never written for orchestra. So BAM, I’m told, hired orchestral musicians for three solid weeks, so Stevens could try out ideas, and learn what worked. The result was a triumph. The ACO might object, not wrongly, that it doesn’t have BAM’s resources (and especially BAM’s money). But then what does it have? What can it do, given the resources it does have, to produce concerts that treat composers fairly?

***

I’m sure I’ve just scratched the surface here. Classical music is changing. There have to be pop-classical collaborations I haven’t heard of.

I’ve never seen such a crush of classical music personalities, as at the two concerts in New York this week by Dudamel and the Venezuelan youth orchestra. And then came three concerts by the Berlin Philharmonic, which of course has close ties with the Venezuelans. These five concerts together were the hottest classical music ticket in New York, and also meant a lot for the future of the field. I’m reviewing it all for the Wall Street Journal, so here I’ll skip any comments on the musical performances. But as for the future of classical music — on that I’ll have a lot to say.

First Berlin. Then, in another post, Dudamel.

The most astonishing thing about the Berlin players is that they move when they play. You can see the violinists putting their entire bodies into many bow strokes. You see them bend forward, then swing their bodies back. The basses were especially dramatic. The principal bass at Tuesday night’s concert all but spun his instrument during the Mahler Ninth. He just about danced with it. Sometimes the entire section almost danced, each player in his own way. And meanwhile, especially in the Mahler Ninth, the strings produced the biggest, deepest, most powerful and moving sound I think I’ve heard from any orchestra. I hope string players in other orchestras won’t be offended if I say they might as well cut their bows in half, because compared to the Berlin Philharmonic, they don’t seem to be using their entire bows. The Berlin sound was arresting, vivid, totally alive.

The basses could have moved the earth. And of course the strings — and the entire orchestra — could play softly, too. Together the Berlin musicians made Das Lied von der Erde(which I heard last night) sound like chamber music, so transparent, so vital, so wonderfully committed and unanimous.

Are the sound and the movement related? Of course they are. If you put your body into something, you get more power, more freedom, more control. I think everybody knows that. It’s true in sports, it’s true in dance, it’s true in walking down the street. If you hold your body stiffly, you’ll get tired. If you move freely, swinging you arms, if you fee like it, you’ll get a surge of energy. You could see the power of this, in the singers in Das Lied. Thomas Quasthoff swayed when he sang, moving the music with his entire body, not simply with his breath. His sound was supple, fluid, clear, astonishing. Ben Heppner stood there stiffly, and his voice was stiff. Of course you get more freedom when you move.

I know a bodyworker, an accomplished rolfer in New York, who works with dancers and musicians. He says he loves the Berlin Philharmonic. He had no idea that the musicians own the orchestra, that they’re the ones who’re in control. He just sees from the way they hold their instruments, he says, that they love playing more than other orchestras he sees.

So here comes the punch line, a truly brutal one. Classical musicians are taught not to move. I’ve heard that from my Juilliard students. Their teachers tell them not to move when they play. It’s undignified, they’re told, it’s not artistic. And after last night’s Berlin concert, after Das Lied, I ran into a musician I know who plays in one of America’s big orchestras. He was terrifically moved by the concert, and, like me, he’d noticed how the players move. He loved it, and understood, just as I did, how the movement helps the Berlin Philharmonic produce its sound. But at his orchestra, he said, he and his colleagues are forbidden to move.

This rigidity has got to go. We hear that in Berlin, the Philharmonic attracts a younger audience, that there’s excitement at their concerts. And no wonder. It’s not because of marketing, or gimmicks. It’s because they’re exciting to hear, and also to see. You know they care. You know they’re excited by the music. You can see it. Carnegie Hall was electric with their presence, as it was with the young Venezuelans, but never is — just never — with most other orchestras. (From my seat downstairs, I couldn’t see the winds and brass. They may have been — probably were — moving just like the strings, but I couldn’t tell.)

***

A footnote about some lovely musical details, the kind of thing I’d never have space for in a newspaper review. For Mahler’s Ninth (though not for Das Lied), the two violin sections sat opposite each other, with the violas on the inside. This is standard seating in some orchestras, and it’s always an option, especially powerful in music where the two violin sections are deliberately contrasted. You hear the contrast — or interplay — much more clearly.

But at the end of the Ninth, the seating paid another dividend. On the last page of the score, the violas play — from inside the musical texture — play an important motif, a little turn around A flat. They play it several times. It’s the last thing we hear in the piece, a close that’s anything but final, as if the music, rather than concluding, had simply faded away. And with the violas now sitting on the inside, the sound came not just from the middle of the orchestral texture, but literally from the middle of the orchestra. That made it more evocative. You couldn’t clearly see where it was coming from; it faded from the ear invisibly. And then something equally evocative was done with the solo cello line toward the end of the piece, the one that starts at measure 148 in the score. At measure 156, the line becomes prominent, though it’s marked ppp, as is everything that’s going on just then. The Berlin Philharmonic’s principal cellist, sitting at the front of the section, played it gorgeously, with clarity and quiet radiance (though above all with the inwardness the Germans call “innigkeit”. You could see him clearly.

Then, at measure 161, the score directs the solo cellist to play two notes muted, filling out the harmony otherwise created by the second violins, the violas, and half the rest of the cello section, also muted. But now the principal cellist didn’t play. The solo migrated to a back-stand player, who barely could be seen. This, of course, helped with one technical detail. The principal cellist didn’t have to put his mute on, maybe creating a visual distraction. But the move also helped the cello notes — now far less vital than the line the principal had played — take their place (like the viola turns) in the middle of the texture.

Maybe this is standard practice. Or maybe it’s a Berlin innovation. It’s smart and sensitive, either way.

Well, maybe not the future, but one possibility. This was Sufjan Stevens’s piece BQE at BAM last weekend, part of their Next Wave festival. Here was a top indie rock guy creating a multimedia piece, 30 minutes long, with the music written for orchestra (30 pieces or so, counting his band). And he most certainly can write for orchestra. This wasn’t the embarrassment we all too often get, when pop people venture into classical music.

Jon Pareles wrote a rave review in the New York Times, both of  BQE and the show of Stevens’s songs that followed, also with the orchestra joining in. I wasn’t quite as excited as Jon was. For me there was a disconnect between the fancy stuff in the program book about the actual BQE — the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a grizzled highway in New York — which the piece claims to be about. It’s fun to read about how the highway was built, and how the man responsible (Robert Moses, a key figure, and not a very wholesome one, in the development of New York in past generations) built parks, but hated frivolous recreation, thus explaining the hula hoops in the piece, which juxtaposed a pleasure Moses surely hated with the road he built…well, sure. But did any of that come through in what I saw onstage? I’d have to say no, though the hula hoops were fun, and the verve of the BQE images on video was also fun. And the onstage orchestra was vividly part of the stage picture.

But then Einstein didn’t have all that much — visibly or audibly — to do with Einstein on the Beach, a classic of this kind of music-theater. And what mattered most to me was the orchestra. The players were said to be Stevens’s friends (or, more likely, a few of his friends and some of their friends), and that made a difference. They were completely into the show. Older, veteran orchestral players might not have been so excited. Anyone steeped in classical music could say that Stevens doesn’t write for orchestra the way a classical composer would, that the textures could have been more precise, that more could have been going on, in separate voices, at any one time. Older orchestra players might also be put off by Stevens’s blend of true and faux naiveté, not uncommon in indie rock, but not often found in high art.

That last point, though, only shows that Stevens isn’t aiming his stuff at older people, and the musical complaint I sketched above would be a misunderstanding, because most of all I thought the music was new, fresh, really original, comparable only to Stevens’s albums. You can hear an inadequate excerpt in a video of a radio broadcast, with an ensemble much smaller than the one at BAM, and playing that’s not all that good. Still, it might give you some idea of what’s going on, with one more caveat – -the excerpt sounds more like Philip Glass than the piece did as a whole. This is a serious piece of work, completely conceived for orchestra, and realized with a lot of color and skill.

And the piece sold out three performances in BAM’s opera house, capacity 2109, without any advertising. Yes, without any advertising. All BAM had to do was mention the piece in its first publicity for this year’s Next Wave, and word of mouth took care of the rest. The crowd was young, of course.

So why shouldn’t shows like this be part of the future of orchestras? So many people talk about reaching a young audience. Well, here’s one way to do it. Infallible, I’d say. Book Sufjan Stevens. But this won’t be easy, because Stevens is both shy, and serious. He worked, I’m told, for three weeks with his BAM ensemble. Orchestras might slot this show as something they could fly in, and present — profitably — with just one rehearsal, and Stevens, from everything I hear, wouldn’t stand for that. So maybe BQE wouldn’t be economical for orchestras. But as an investment in the future? Priceless.

And something else to think about.

Yes, this isn’t the kind of orchestral music normally heard on classical concerts, even when new works are on the program. But is that a problem? And who’s to say, once we open this door, that more pop musicians won’t write serious orchestral music, and — here’s the key point — get better at it, as they continue doing it? The classical music world doesn’t understand the culture outside it very well, especially the culture of younger people. Rather than look down our noses, saying, “Oh, it’s all right in its way, but it’s just not us,” we should understand that this is exactly the central point — it’s not like us — and open ourselves to what it is, taken on its own terms. Otherwise people like Stevens will move into classical territory outside the classical world, and leave us gasping alone, like beached whales.