December 2008 Archives

...wonderful holiday season. I've been much distracted with family -- a good distraction. I'll return to blogging in the new year, with the conclusion of our disconnect discussion, or at least the conclusion for now; these things are ongoing. (Read the many comments to the post I've linked, and look here, too).

And also, in the new year:

   -- a post about some good news: the image of classical music is changing in the U.S., and very much for the better;

   -- a look at where we are right now, with classical ticket sales up over the past couple of years, at least for major orchestras. (As far as I know; see below.) Is this a turnaround for classical music, or just a temporary blip? The economy, of course, may provide its own unhappy answer;

   -- and a look at the deplorable state of classical music statistics. (This is the "below,"
promised above.) We know how many cars the U.S. auto industry sells, but not how many tickets people are buying to classical performances. This, not to put too fine a point on it, is just about scandalous, or at the very least a sign of great immaturity in the classical music business. Classical music institutions are publicly funded, and raise money from the public; they should tell the public how they're doing. And any discussion of classical music's long-term prospects -- or even its short-term trends -- are crippled if we don't have accurate data. I'm going to take some action on this, and I'll ask you all to help me.

But all that comes later! For now, i hope all my readers -- my friends, colleagues, sparring partners, and co-conspirators in a huge, slow process of change (though I think it picks up speed with every passing year) -- will have the best possible holidays. I'm lucky to have you all in my life, and, collectively, you've all warmed my heart and made my work in this blog and elsewhere far richer than it would have been without you.

A followup to my post about The Money Shot, a noir thriller I thought would make a fabulous -- and maybe pathbreaking -- opera.

But it would be pathbreaking only because -- in the manner of Tarantino's Kill Bill films -- it's so sexy and violent. And also, maybe, because of its implicit rock & roll ambience, which then would have to be central to its musical language. But in other respects, it's conventionally operatic. And I also take to heart Jay Langguth's remark, in a comment to my post, about noir not being the only contemporary sensibility we don't find on the opera stage.

So here's another idea. Again, I came to it very naively. I wasn't looking for a new opera idea that wouldn't be noir. Instead, I watched Cristian Mungiu's film Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days and thought immediately that it would make an almost mesmerizing opera.

Certainly it's a mesmerizing film.Its subject, more or less, is the severity and corruption of life under Romania's communist regime, though it's one of the many subtle things about the film that communism is mentioned onlyl briefly. It's story (searing) is about an illegal abortion, and you might appreciate how subtle the movie is when I tell you that it retains its subtlety even though it shows -- without hesitating, or softening the image in any way -- a late-term aborted fetus. (Hence the title.)

The word "abortion" isn't mentioned and the subject isn't even alluded to, until we see it happening. Life just unfolds, not pleasantly, and at the end, one of the women in the movie says, "We won't talk about this."



(Which could just as well be said about the communist politics that are always in the background, and even less talked about.)

There wouldn't be a single operatic moment in this opera. Nothing bigger than life, no occasion for melodies, high notes, or arias. (In any style.) The movie is unflinchingly realistic (Mungiu cites Vittorio De Sica, a founder of postwar Italian neorealism, as one of his influences), and the opera would have to be, too. This might fly against some current views of opera, but I think that if opera is going to succeed in our era, it should tackle any subject found in other media, and in every style and mood used elsewhere. This would be an opera for a small theater, using a small instrumental ensemble (I think), and unusually subtle singers. They'd have to act just as well as stage actors do.

One striking -- almost hypnotic -- aspect of the movie is how still the camera often is. Which (cf. comments to my Elliott Carter post about contemporary poetry) creates a typically modern contradiction, between the unflagging realism of what's depicted in the film, and the nonrealistic stillness with which it's shown. Entire conversations go by (even a loud and shallow dinner party), and the camera doesn't move. At one point we only see one of the people talking. The camera never leaves her, and the other woman in the conversation is present only with her hesitating voice.

I'd want the opera somehow to reflect that. Maybe the instrumental music would find a pattern or motif that it simply repeats, while the conversation takes its own shape. (I did that once in my Mahler Variations string quartet, where a longish passage from Proust is set to music that simply repeats the same chord progression, with parts of it sometimes stretched out to unusual length. But the procedure in the opera would be a lot more severe.)

I don't know if I'll ever write this opera, don't know if in the end it would turn out to be a good idea, don't know if I could ever get the rights, don't know if anyone would produce the piece. See the movie (Netflix members can watch it online), and see what you think. It's worth the time -- clearly one of the top films of the past year (with, in case this matters, a big award at Cannes).

In The Day the Earth Stood Still, there are two moments we might think about, for the future of classical music. (And, by the way, I think it's better than most of the critics thought, though maybe I'm just a sucker for sentiment, and it certainly has really dumb lapses in logic and common sense.)

(Spoilers follow, though if you know science fiction and watch the first 20 minutes or so of the film, I doubt you'll be surprised by anything I reveal, especially if you've seen the original.)

The first moment comes when Keanu Reeves, as the alien Klaatu, visits a Nobel prizewinning scientist with a deeply humane view of life. (And who offers an elementary historical insight that somehow escaped the venerable galactic civilization that Reeves represents.) In the background, on the scientist's stereo, we hear a recording of the Goldberg Variations. "What's that?" asks Reeves. "Bach," says Jennifer Connely. "It's beautiful," says Reeves, utterly detached, but also utterly rapt. (Here and elsewhere, he comes off as plausibly alien, and that's one of the movie's strengths.) But this is one of the film's many small turning points. Reeves, as the story progresses, develops some sympathy for us poor humans, and Bach helps him do that. Score one for classical music.

The second moment comes earlier in the film. Reeves lands on earth in a huge glowing sphere, and when he comes out, surrounded by police and the military, somebody panics and shoots him. Who? We never find out. Everything we learn, in fact, is elliptical, contained in two quick sentences, unobtrusively thrown into the film as the armed presence gathers around the sphere. "Who has jurisdiction here?" asks a New York cop. "What are the rules of engagement?" asks a miltary guy, a few minutes later.

So evidently nobody knows who's in charge, and nobody knows the rules. Not surprising, then, that somebody shoots. But note how this just gets slipped in, and left for us to figure out, which we easily do, drawing on everything we've seen in films before, and everything we've learned from real life. (Remember the command and commication problems between police and firefighters during 9/11?)

That's typical of current movies -- to move, for a moment, from the sweetly silly to something really serious, last night I watched "Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days," an intense, stark, and rigorous Romanian film that's about Communist politics, but hardly mentions anything political, and centers on a dangerous illegal abortion, without ever telling us, until we see it happening, though by then we've figured out for ourselves what's going on. A 1950s science fiction film would spell out everything that happens; now we're smarter and more experienced, and both we and filmmakers comfortably make quick, elliptical leaps.

And what does this have to do with classical music? Because much of the classical repertoire comes from the age of spelling things out -- or more generally the age when things were really obvious -- and thus can seem quaint to people coming to it for the first time. And yes, I can come up with exceptions just as well as anyone who'll post disagreeements with what I'm saying (we're never told very much, for instance, about what landed Florestan in prison in Fidelio). But still you'll see new operagoers coming out of Tosca (as someone I know once did), saying "That was dumb! I knew he was going to be shot for real."

And yes, we can say -- I hope not too smugly -- that those people failed to grasp the power of the music, but on the other hand, they reacted (and I think quite reasonably) exactly as they'd react to an old movie on TV. I rewatched Laura a couple of weeks ago, and sure, I know the strengths (starting with Otto Preminger's direction) that make it rewatchable, but I also smiled affectionately at much of it, and (spoiler alert) can't imagine that many people seeing it for the first time wouldn't quickly figure out out that Clifton Webb is the murderer.

Thus we respect old movies, but also see what makes them old. In classical music, we're in effect told not to do this. Tosca has to be a masterpiece (unless you follow Joseph Kerman and think, in his words, that it's nothing more than a "shabby little shocker"), as powerful now as it was when it was new. Life, however, has moved on, and if we keep saying such things, the audience we hope to attract will move on, too.

And now a footnote about aliens and Bach. Why is Keanu Reeves so impressed? Well, of course the Goldberg Variations are pretty wonderful, but Bach carries with him an air of greatness, and of universality. Or rather our reaction to him includes those things. As the friend I saw the movie with said (he's a composer), Bach is both emotional and profoundly structured (he said it better than that; I wish I could remember his exact words), so he communicates directly to us, but also stands above everyday life. Thus he plausibly represents everything great about humanity.

Or, rather, he represents that inside the present-day version of western culture. Music, we should have learned by now, is anything but a universal language. Someone who grew up a couple of generations ago in India, immersed in Indian music, without exposure to western music, might find Bach unintelligible. The idea that an alien would respond to Bach the way we do is sweet, but not very plausible.

And, from a global earthly perspective, why Bach? Suppose the scientist had been playing Indian music, something profound but non-western. "Beautiful," Keanu Reeves might just as plausibly (or implausibly) murmur, but an American audience might say, "No, that's weird." Or they could have used shakuhachi music from Japan, which even for many people in the west now sounds meditative, peaceful, Zen-like, profound. That's even become a cliché. "Beautiful," murmurs Reeves, recognizing the same otherwordly calm that his own race has attained.

Or what if the scientist was playing some blues? Robert Johnson, most likely. "Beautiful," Reeves murmurs, now suffused with compassion for human suffering. "No!" silently scream some of the people watching the film. "The emotions in the blues aren't universal! That's music of a particular time and place, of a particular people."

But then so is Bach. Play the Goldberg Variations around 1850 in Italy, and maybe even in Paris, and one common reaction would have been, "Yuck! German music!" Or read Hanslick's review of a 19th century performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Of course he recognized that the piece is a masterwork, but he also -- acutely responding to Bach's very dour Lutheran theology -- found it gloomy and dark.

We've promoted Bach to universality, but that's only in our minds. And we're taking a very partial view of Bach, of music, and of culture.

Went to two Elliott Carter concerts in Washington this weekend, neither much good. Not Carter's fault; weak performances. Sent me running back to the old Arthur Weisberg recording of the Double Concerto. Precise, expressive, musical, informed, and above all -- in great contrast to the Carter concerts I went to -- clear. (I'm starting to think that the striking virtuosity of 1970s new music groups like Speculum Musicae and Weisberg's Contemporary Chamber Ensemble has now migrated to eighth blackbird and the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Alarm Will Sound. And that with a few exceptions, like pianist Steven Beck and the Pacifica Quartet, it just isn't found in the very serious younger musicians who now have taken up the older -- complex, atonal -- new music styles.)

After one of the Carter concerts, I was home flipping channels, and came across a Pete Seeger documentary. He says he likes nothing more than getting his audience to sing along, and after Carter's complications, that seems almost naive.

But on the other hand, Carter's just as naive. His naiveté starts with thinking that people should care about his complexities. Very few will, no matter how much fun they can be for some of us who enjoy them.

And his naiveté continues with his dismissal of minimalism, so similar to Pierre Boulez's frequent dismissal of pop and rock. Neither understands what anyone might hear in the styles they so utterly dismiss. They don't know -- or never talk about -- the strengths of those musics, as experienced by smart and musically sophisticated people who like them. That's naive, and the more Carter and Boulez insist on their rudimentary, so easily refuted arguments -- after a generation of minimalism, and two generations of rock & roll -- the more naive they seem.

And finally Carter's naive because all he really seems to know about is music. This is charming, actually. Take this excerpt from his program note about his song cycle for soprano and instrumental ensemble, A Mirror on Which to Dwell:

The poems of Elizabeth Bishop impressed me because they have a clear verbal coherence as well as an imaginative use of syllabic sounds that suggest the singing voice. I was very much in sympathy with their point of view, for there is almost always a secondary layer of meaning, sometimes ironic, sometimes passionate, that gives a special ambiance, often contradictory, to what the words say.

Which means, in simpler language, that the poems play with sound, and that they have a subtext -- or, in even simpler terms, that they're good poetry, because we'd find sound and subtext in just about any good poem. But Carter doesn't quite seem to realize that, and rhapsodizes about things that are obvious, almost as if nobody had ever talked about them before.

That's sweet, and suggests to me that all he really lives for is to write music. There's no crime in that, especially since he does it so well.

For some similar thoughts, see my wife's review of two Carter concerts, in the Washington Post. I agree with what she says, though as always I have to note that she speaks for herself, and can't be assumed to agree with everything I write here.

I've enjoyed the comments on my post about ornamentation and rubato in past centuries. And I certainly agree with a point at least one commenter made, that when musicians (in the old days or now) change what the composer wrote, they can do it well or badly. But that, at least to me, doesn't reflect badly on ornamentation as a practice. We judge all kinds of things about performances, and this just adds another element. If we flag it as especially troublesome -- as if it's worse to change the composer's written notes in a bad way than it would be to play at the wrong tempo, or in the wrong mood -- I think that's only because we're not used to changing the notes. Musicians in past centuries might not have felt that way.

I know some criticisms that were made of ornaments in past centuries. In the baroque era, singers were damned for inventing ornaments that made parallel fifths with the bass, a violation of the rules of harmony. In 18th century Germany, orchestra violinists were attacked for ornamenting their parts individually -- each violinist (if we can believe this) adding his own ornaments to the written melody, without any coordination with the ornaments added by everybody else.

And Manuel Garcia, Jr., in his famous 19th century book on singing, offers two sets of ornaments for the opening tenor aria in The Barber of Seville, and says that one set is bad. Not for musical reasons, though -- he says the bad ornaments are theatrically inappropriate, because they're too languid for the character. (I assume the good ornaments are those used by Garcia's father, who created the role.)

Many of you also talked in the comments about ornamenting Brahms, which I said just wouldn't work. I guess I should clarify that I didn't mean nobody could improvise on a Brahms piece. And in fact pianists in Brahms's time routinely improvised in performances, inventing preludes to pieces they were going to play, and transitions between one piece and another. The practice survived into the 20 century, and there are recorded examples, including one from as late as 1969, played by Wilhelm Backhaus at his last recital.

What wouldn't work, I think -- or wouldn't work most of the time -- would be to play a Brahms piece, and change the melodies Brahms wrote, the way any 19th century singer would have changed the melody in a Rossini aria. Suppose, for instance, that some orchestra's principal horn player adds something of his own to the first bars of the second symphony, playing the top line below, instead of the bottom line, which is what's in the score:



That would be terrible, ecause the three-note figure in the third measure -- the one that's changed  -- is a key motif all through the first movement. Just before the passage I've quoted, it showed up inverted, in the cellos and basses. (Or, more likely, form the motif takes in the cellos and basses is the ur-version, and the horn plays the inversion.)  During the 19th century, music -- at least from classicist composers like Brahms, and avant-gardists like Wagner -- began to suffuse itself with motifs. If you change them, you audibly spoil the coherence of the piece.

But back to Rossini, which is where this discussion started. In my post, I talked about how he started to write out the ornaments -- or some of them, anyway -- that he wanted singers to sing. We should understand that this is deceptive, first because not all the ornaments are written out, and secondly because singers would change the ones that Rossini wrote (and often have to, because passages are repeated, and nobody would sing repetitions without changing them).

And Rossini's scores are deceptive thirdly because his earlier operas -- which in places look pretty bare -- have to be ornamented just as fully as the pieces that bristle with ornaments. This goes against our present grain. We've all been taught to play what's in the printed score, and now we have to learn that this passage, from L'Italiana in Algeri, an early work, with ornaments mostly not written out



would very likely be sung with as many ornaments as this one, from Semiramide, one of Rossini's later scores, where he did write out suggested ornaments:



I tried improvising ornaments myself one afternoon, walking down the street in New York and singing one of my favorite moments in L'Italiana, making up changes for it. (It comes later in the aria whose beginning I quoted earlier, "Per lui che adoro.") But I found that some of the wilder rubato variants that singers of the time might try -- like the one I quoted in my earlier post -- are hard for me to improvise, because I'm a classical musician, and I have trouble keeping the beat in my head  while I make up melodies that phrase across beats and barlines, as jazz musicians know how to do.

I came up with simpler variants, which were nice enough. But that night I got out my notation software, and started having fun. Here's what I came up with. What Rossini put in his score is in the bottom staff, and my variant is on top of it. I added the bass, so you can see how my ornaments stretch across the measured pace of the harmony:




I really like my version. The original -- which I used  to think was wonderfully elegant -- now seems bland to me.

And what I wrote is theatrically appropriate. The character singing the aria is a smart and beautiful woman who's dressing and putting on makeup, knowing full well that the silly man who loves her is watching. She's playing a trick on him, and nothing could be more appropriate than to put makeup on the aria as well, making it less innocent and more seductive, to exactly match the singer's acting.

As a footnote, here are some elegant ornaments for a passage in "Oh bella a me ritorno," the cabaletta to "Casta Diva," the great soprano aria from Bellini's Norma, as sung by Giuditta Pasta, the singer who created the role. Again they're from Manuel Garcia's book. The bottom line, as usual, is what's written in the score, and the top line is what Pasta sang. Just look at those quintuplets, a rhythm never (or, outside Chopin, virtually never) found in written music of this period. And look also at the lovely rubato in the final measure. Pasta, we should remember, was considered one of the great artists of her time, certainly the greatest of the bel canto era sopranos. This is how she made this passage her own (I left out the words because I don't have the Garcia book with me, and can't recall exactly where Pasta put them):

Well, we seem to have moved from disconnects -- classical music not connecting to the world around us -- to ornamentation, and (this would be one way to put it) classical music not connecting to its own past. I'm happy to see so many comments, and I'll have something of my own to add in not too long.

But I want to return for some last thoughts on disconnects, in this and one more post. I'll also have to  make my tentative final list of disconnects, drawing on ideas from so many of you, which I hope you'll also supply in reaction to the new list.

Here's a thought, though, about somethingn fairly big that might belong on the list. It's a disconnect about performance. In classical music, the point of performances -- according to orthodox thinking -- is to bring us to the music, which is defined as something more or less unchanging that lies behind all performances. So if I play a Beethoven piano sonata, Beethoven is more important than I am. My role is to realize his intentions. (Or is it His, with a capital H?)

But in other kinds of music, things are much more flexible. You go to a performance to see a show. You also go, more often than not, to see and hear a musician. The music the musician plays is music she's written. And, when the music is jazz, music she's written and also improvises on. So musicians play a much more creative role.

And no, I'm not saying that classical musicians aren't creative, or that two performances of the same masterwork can't differ from each other, or that we don't often go to concerts because we want to hear a musician we like. I'm saying that, in the larger scheme of things, the musician -- no matter how big a star she might be, no matter how much we're attracted to hear her -- is, in the last analysis, on stage to serve the composer. This gives them -- as I think is evident, if we compare classical performances with pop or jazz -- less flexibility, and a more circumscribed role.

It wasn't that way in the past. Even in the 1950s, classical musicians had more personality -- differend more from each other -- than they do now, and in the 18th century, the music that wasn't yet called classical functioned surprisingly much like the way pop functions now. You'd go to hear somebody play, and they'd play their own music. Very likely they'd play a new piece, something you hadn't heard before. They'd improvise. (I've said all this before.)

So there's the disconnect. Classical musicians have a much more limited conception of their role than pop or jazz musicians do, and it shows in their performance (and also in the relative formality of the classical concert setting). If classical music functioned more like music in other genres -- or, to put it more strongly, if it satisfied the expectations people have developed from hearing other kinds of music -- things would be looser, more expressive, and more flexible. And classical musicians would often play pieces they themselves had composed.

Which would be pretty wonderful, wouldn't it? Especially the part about musicians composing. You'd go to a concert, and have a vivid encounter with a flesh and blood human being.

Some people will hate this one. It's something the distinguished rock and blues critic Robert Palmer said in a film called Bluesland (I found the quote in a book by Dave Marsh, The Beatles' Second Album):

My feeling is that if you want to listen to something primitive, you should listen to Mozart. Because if you hear Mozart, there's almost no rhythmic variation in it, it's 1-2-3-4 forever. No cross-rhythms or polyrhythms to speak of. The way that music's interpreted, all of the tonal qualities of the instruments tend to be very clean and pristine. There's no kind of textural variety like you would get in the blues, in terms of roughening the texture out on certain words, playing around with the pitch on certain words. Nothing like that in Mozart.

So if you hate that...well, first be thankful for the chance to see ourselves as others see us, to see classical music as it might strike a highly literate -- literate musically, as well as verbally -- person from the outside world. Palmer (who died in 1997, and whom I knew when he wrote about pop music for the New York Times knows as much about music as anyone in the classical world. It's just a different kind of music.

And this is what he honestly thinks. Remember, too, that he might know blues better than we do, and hears a lot of things in it that we might not notice. Or that we might take for granted, not understanding how crucial they are to how the blues works. Or might devalue, because classical music puts a higher value on the (written) musical text, not on the variable sound of the music as it's performed.

Note also that Palmer says "the way that music's interpreted," suggesting that there might be another way to play it -- as there surely was back in Mozart's time, when at the very least the rules about changing the text, improvising changes as you played, were a lot freer than they are now.

For the fullest understanding of music, we need to integrate his view with ours. Various kinds of music have strengths all their own, and Palmer is saying that blues has strengths we don't find in Mozart (at least as we play him now).

(And if you think Palmer is harsh, read Dave Marsh -- in the Beatles book -- on the music education classes he had to take in school. I'll quote that another time.)

I've talked many times here about performance practice in the past -- how musicians used to change the music they played, and how they often improvised their changes.

We know that, of course, and the standard word for what they used to do is "ornamentation." What we don't often hear, though, is how extensive those changes used to be. So here's a striking example. It's a passage from the Almamiva-Figaro duet in the first act of The Barber of Seville, as sung by Manuel Garcia, the tenor who created the role of Count Almaviva. It was published years later in a book, The Art of Singing, by his son, Manuel Garcia, Jr., one of the most famous voice teachers in the 19th century.

Notice how free the ornamentation is, and how exuberant. And how the rhythmic notation at the end of the first measure and the start of the second can't possibly be exact. Garcia must have been really soaring at that point, singing things that notation can't really capture. Note also that Garcia Jr. cites this as an example of rubato, which in the 19th century meant that the soloist varied the written rhythm while the accompaniment stayed in tempo.

And now imagine an entire performance, full of changes like this. Then imagine going to hear the opera again with a different tenor, who'd make entirely different changes of his own. We don't have any experience like this today, and if I wanted to be fierce, I could say that we're falsifying the music, which Rossini wrote fully expecting all singers to make their own changes.

Here's what Garcia sang:



Footnotes: if we trust Garcia Jr.'s notation, the duet was sung transposed a tone down.

And I also should address something well known about Rossini, which is that at some point he got tired of singers making really bad changes -- which of course happened -- and started notating the exact ornaments he wanted them to sing. Yes, he did that. But it doesn't preclude changing what he wrote. For instance, he'll write the same highly ornamented passage twice in a row, knowing full well that nobody in the 19th century sang repeated passages without making changes.

So obviously he expected some changes. What he did, I think, was to limit the ballpark in which changes could be made, not forbid them entirely -- which, as he would have known, was completely impossible. And also would have weakened performances, since one point of the changes was to take music written for one singer, and make it more suitable for others.

Here's an example. Rossini's wife, Isabella Colbran, was more comfortable, at least when she was with Rossini, in the lower part of her voice. So the role of Semiramide, which he wrote for her, is written very low. Another soprano, more comfortable in her higher range, would have said, in effect, "Well, there's no point in my singing that! It wouldn't sound good at all. So I'll rewrite it to go higher" -- which (in our own time) is exactly what Joan Sutherland does in her performance of the big soprano aria from Semiramide on her recording The Art of the Prima Donna.

I hope one thing's clear -- that when I said Christa Faust's noir thriller The Money Shot would make a good opera, I wasn't just trying to be provocative, or to break any barriers. I didn't say, "OK, I'm going to go out and find an opera subject that could turn opera upside down."

Instead, I was naive, as I almost always am. I read the book, loved it to death, and thought, with no ideological spin at all, that I'd love to make an opera out of it. In the same breath, of course -- because I think about these things so much -- I stopped being naive, and understood that the opera world would probably never stand for my idea, any more than the classical world outside opera has much room for David Del Tredici's gay and explicit song cycles, like My Favorite Penis Poems.

Ideally The Money Shot (opera version) would play in repertory with a killer production of Il Trovatore, so we could feel how outrageously violent Trovatore is. (With its talk, for instance, of a baby's skeleton, smoking in a fire.)

The existing opera (at least among those I know) most like The Money Shot is Louis Andriessen's Rosa, my favorite of all the new operas I've ever encountered. ( (I wrote liner notes for the Nonesuch recording, which I see that Amazon offers as a download as well as a CD. Though if you don't have the libretto, you won't have any idea what's going on.) Like The Money Shot, it's full of sex and violence (along with the sounds of rock and jazz), and almost certainly will never be staged by any opera company in the U.S., at the very least because one of the woman characters is nude onstage for most of the piece. And gets paint thrown at her. She also has to blend jazz and classical singing in ways most singers can't manage. (It's also an obscure piece, with a hard to figure out libretto by Peter Greenaway.)

What classical music doesn't have -- at least in its dominant mainstream form -- is a hip/noir/alternative wing., such as we find in other mainstream culture. Tarantino's films are mainstream, just for instance.

And in the mainstream, the alternative is growing stronger. Just look at WNET, New York's stuffy public television station, Channel 13, which now shows cult films. One night I watched Psycho Beach Party. It also has a show called Reel 13, a weekly package that starts with a classic film (Laura, the night I watched), followed by a new indie short, chosen by people who go to WNET's website, and an indie film. The last two segments, like Psycho Beach Party, are aimed at the younger listeners who wouldn't otherwise watch WNET, but whom the station knows that at last it has to cultivate.

Meanwhile, back in classical music, the New Jersey Symphony offers a winter festival called (I'm not making this up), Paris: Fantasy and Discovery, as if it were a 1950s travelogue. No wonder younger people stay away.

In the spirit of my "Disconnected in the past" post, here's an opera I'd like to write.

It would be based on a hardboiled thriller I've just read, The Money Shot, a piece of noir perfection by Christa Faust. This is the story of a former porn star, who now works as an agent for women in the sex industry and gets caught in the ripples from a truly ghastly business, run by people who import women from Eastern Europe and turn them into sex slaves.

These people try to kill our heroine, whose (stage) name is Angel Dare, and whom we first meet left for dead in the trunk of an old car. She fights her way out, and embarks on a quest not only for justice, but for vengeance. That's in the best Mickey Spillane tradition (though to my delight I noticed that Faust is a big fan of Richard S. Prather, whose Shell Scott novels are a cult guilty pleasure from the '50s and the '60s).

The story gets darker as it goes along. Here (in my dreamed-of operatic version) is the second act finale. Angel Dare forces one of the baddies to dig his own grave, and just when he thinks she's going to bury him alive in it, she takes pity on him and shoots him in the head.

And here's the third act finale, the end of the opera. The chief bad guy, a truly vicious sort, is watching dancers in a low-rent strip club. Angel, in disguise (a big-hair wig), gets up on stage, announces that her (stage) name is Vendetta -- nobody catches on -- and dances to an AC/DC song about blood, driving the bad guy wild. He takes her to a back room. She ties him up and gags him. Then she frees some of his sex slaves, brings them to the back room, and gives them a straight razor, which, believe me, they know how to use.

Too violent for opera? Too horrible? Well, the opera world now is as genteel as it every was -- more so, really, because at least in the past some of the divas were pretty wild in their personal lives. But how about the world outside opera? How about Quentin Tarantino's two Kill Bill films? Masterpieces, in my view. (Or really a single masterpiece in two parts.) But they make The Money Shot seem tame. If Kill Bill has a place in our world, and classical reflected all of our culture, then my opera would be possible. But as things stand, I don't think anyone would produce it.

If I'm wrong, let's talk! Though I don't think I'd ever get the rights to use the book. Certainly if I were Christa Faust, I'd never give them to an opera composer. I'd hold out for a movie sale, which seems entirely likely. Tarantino, are you listening?

One challenge in an operatic adaptation would be to find the right music. I couldn't use the AC/DC song, but wouldn't it be fun to write something that could stand in its place! I'd want to make a rock band the core of my orchestra, and I think I'd work with musicial sounds that start with a range of rock styles, roughly classic rock, punk, and metal. Probably I wouldn't write rock or punk or metal songs (except for the Vendetta climax), but there's no reason I couldn't write through-composed operatic music taking off from rock and punk and metal.

And what fun that would be. I wonder what the singing would be like. Maybe there wouldn't be any, or at any rate not much. But still the music would carry the continuity, which in my view makes the piece an opera, no matter what people sing or don't sing.

...maybe I'd have spoken dialogue, and the only singing (except for the finale) would be little shards of songs that flit through the characters' minds, and which they tonelessly sometimes sing...songs I'd write, of course...which means I'd need a lyricist...and some Romanian lyrics, for the rock song in Romanian the women sing when they're cutting up the bad guy...(they'd sing it offstage, because the final conclusion shows Angel freeing still more sex slaves, and then turning herself in to the police...so maybe in the opera's absolutely final scene, we'd hear the women singing more and more wildly in Romanian, and the guy screaming, while Angel turns herself in)...

I'm grateful to everyone who joined in our recent discussion, about ways that classical music isn't connected to our present world. And that includes people who disagree with me, who are always welcome here, and who often teach me a lot.

Soon enough I'll post my own revised list of ways in which classical music doesn't connect. But first, here's a disconnect from the past! I recently read a novel by Balzac, called Ferragus, which is dedicated to Berlioz. (It's part of a trilogy, and the second installment, The Duchesse De Lange, is dedicated to Liszt.) It's a wildly romantic -- but at the same time sordid -- melodrama, featuring heightened scenes of love and death, as well as murder, conspiracies, and vivid descriptions of some of the scuzzier parts of 19th century Paris.

And among much else, it's a wildly operatic tale. The extended death scene -- tearing apart two people who (at least before the novel begins) were the happiest lovers in the world -- just cries out for music. It's so over the top, in fact, that only music can save it.

But would Berlioz have made an opera out of this book? No way. Ferragus is skeptical, even cynical, also sordid, and, like many things in Balzac, in some ways amoral. Berlioz, by contrast, wrote operas with high-minded subjects -- a Shakespeare play, the Aeneid, and the life of a Renaissance artist. Not to mention Goethe's Faust, if you count La damnation de Faust as almost an opera.

And yes, I know that Benvenuo Cellini, in the opera that bears his name, is more or less a rogue, but this is the harmless giggling roguery of the opera stage, not anything really dangerous. Cellini drinks with his friends, innocently elopes (with a woman he truly loves), and goes way over his deadline for delivering a major work of art. Wow, he's bad! At the end, the Pope himself endorses him,which proves that he's harmless. There's no way the Pope would ever endorse any of the murderers in Ferragus.

And there's more. No opera composer of Berlioz's time -- let alone Berlioz -- would have written with an opera with a gritty urban setting, or, in fact, one that didn't take place in the safely distant past. Verdi caused at least a minor a scandal when he set La traviata in his own time, but note that, though he got away with that, he never did it again. And, yes, I know the Italian censors sometimes thought his far-in-the-past operas cut too close to the bone for the Italian politics of his time, but we don't see him adapting Balzac, putting semi-literate Parisian grisettes on stage (depicted without any reference to morals or propriety, as Balzac depicted a grisette in Ferragus), or, for that matter, adapting Dickens and putting searing scenes of poverty on stage.

Music, in other words, was a genteel art even in the 19th century, and also in the 18th, where we don't (just for instance) see composers writing oratorios with texts from free-thinkers like Voltaire. When Beethoven wrote a large religious work, it was a Catholic mass, even though Beethoven wasn't any kind of strict Christian, and in fact had a religion that (to judge from his writing about his religious ideas) was -- in the terms we'd use now -- very much New Age.

Why was this? Because music cost a lot of money, at a guess. Voltaire could publish books for relatively little, but nobody could find support for an opera that would strongly violate the genteel norms of the time. And again (see my remark about Verdi's censors, above) I don't mean to say that opera didn't sometimes ruffle feathers (Mozart even adapted Beaumarchais), but overall, it was safe. Just compare 19th century opera with 19th century novels. Where's the operatic version of Madame Bovary, with its unflinching picture of adultery, and (maybe even more) its detailed portrait of bourgeois life?

So classical music was disconnected from contemporary culture even in the past. Not as disconnected as it is right now, because the conservative cultural ideas we find in most of it had support from many people. But taken as a whole, the repertoire is disonnected because the left wing of culture almost never figures in it, not until the last part of the 19th century.

"Whether through discussion circles, on-line forums, or post-event coffee hours, the larger idea for arts organizations is that their job is to build community around content, rather than just generating content."

-- from my fellow-blogger Andrew Taylor's post, "Enabling and rewarding your critics."

I'm sure we've all read about this -- the YouTube initiative, which big-time orchestras have joined, to allow musicians anywhere to audition for orchestra projects online. ArtsJournal linked to the New York Times story, though you'll forgive me if I think my wife's piece in the Washington Post was more incisive.

Now, I think this is a good thing, maybe a wonderful thing. But someone highly placed in the biz gave me a critique this morning -- the project didn't do anything to help orchestras or other classical music institutions develop an online community, meaning a community of people interested in their concerts.

And my friend is right. This project doesn't address that at all. But I think, paradoxically, that this is one of the project's great virtues. My friend thinks, as he has every right to, that building an online community is the highest online priority for classical music institutions. And as my friend points out, I've also said this matters a lot.

But the project doesn't address any priorities at all. Here's how it happened, as Anne says in her piece. Two guys at Google came up with the idea (Google owns YouTube), and pitched it to the rest of the company. The rest of the company liked it, so Google went ahead, and found classical music partners to join in the fun.

In other words, the sole reason for the project was that people at Google loved the idea. And that, if you ask me, is how change is coming to classical music. Not because anyone (least of all me) figures out what classical music needs, and then goes out and does exactly that. No, we're making progress because people all over the map are getting ideas of their own, and putting them in action. That's what's transforming classical music world (slowly at first, but I'm sure we'll see it pick up speed). It's also how we find out what works.

So this YouTube thing, big as it is, is at bottom just another one of those ideas. And the ideas succeed because somebody loves them. Contrast this with a foundation project I was part of, where classical music institutions were enlisted -- with funding as the carrot -- in a long-term program designed to get them to innovate. Some of the innovations weren't bad, but many were dutiful, cooked up in response to someone else's urgency. From this I learned that "innovation" is a suspicious word. Truly innovative people don't innovate, or at least not as any kind of conscious project. Instead, they embrace new ideas -- either because the ideas solve a problem, or else just because the people involved love them -- and make those ideas happen.

And online communities? The models for creating those are already out there -- check out, for instance, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which has the least grandiose, least hype-filled, and most appealing website of any orchestra I know, and does the most with social networking. Not to mention all kinds of things outside classical music. Anyone who wants to start a large-scale initiative to foster this inside the classical music world only has to fall in love with the idea.

Footnote: my wife raised what I think is the most important question about the YouTube project: "It remains to be seen, though, whether the spontaneous combustion of the most viral YouTube videos can be replicated or steered through means that are essentially artificial." But I'm optimistic about that.