A riff from my book

"The winner got to conduct a piece at a Proms concert, and viewers got to see -- and hear -- exactly what conductors do."

This is bigger than most people think. To the untrained eye, the conductor is just the snooty guy (always a guy) in front who waves a stick while everyone else does the work. It's actually something that needs to be explained to the ordinary person that a conductor effectively "plays" the instruments of the orchestra the way a pianist plays their instrument, only the conductor's instrument is made up of around 110 other people. It's not immediately obvious.

Hi Greg - I like the title Rebirth!

Just wanted to pass on the good news that the attendance at the 2009 Bang on a Can Marathon was 5,000 people.

How many hundred screens showed today's Met HD broadcast of "Tosca"? And how many people attended? And there's a reprise showing, as well. Is opera dead? Isn't an audience turn-out of this sort at least as significant as the rather trivial-sounding examples you give?

How many thousand people went to Hollywood Bowl for the Dudamel welcome concert? How many attended the four (count 'em, f-o-u-r) sold-out concerts that followed, which will be succeeded by another series of sold-out concerts this coming week. Is symphonic music dead? How many LA Phil programs have significant works of contemporary music? Did the concerts increases attendance by having the musicians wear jeans?

How many people attend each and every concert in the LA Phil's Green Umbrellas series of uncompromising new music? How many attend the close-to-sold-out Monday Evening Concerts series? Or the Piano Spheres series? Or the Ojai Music Festival? (Or do you need to ask Ara Guzelimian?) Do those ticket sellers need to dumb things down by shaving someone's head or having an amateur contest to select a conductor?

Bang on the Can is pleasant, and sometimes pretty good, and I'm glad you in New York have Poisson Rouge to broaden your outlook on things (gosh, playing Messiaen to a whole 275 people!), but much more is happening than seems to be accounted for in your outlook, Horatio.

"How many classical musicians these days play in clubs? Classical music, meet the real world."

I agree with this, and haven't considered it before. Almost all other genres include playing in small venues. Classical music, however, is almost always performed in large concert halls. This does not tap the true potential of audience the genre can have.

I'm not sure that cataloging the places where the music is played live is an indicator of health. Going to hear live music, especially on a weeknight, is an activity of the leisured class. I had to leave work early to see a couple things that I went to this year; what supermarket checker can do that? Plus pay for parking, plus deal with the kids for the night? I never went to live performances with my parents because they had three kids, inflexible jobs, and very, very tiny paychecks -- and yet classical music was very healthy in our house. Part of the reason why we tend to see greyhairs and a more economically settled group of people at these things is that they are the only people who either don't have kids to deal with at night, or can afford sitters. :-)

We've mentioned the relative health of the hold that popular music has on the culture at large, but that's not through clubs and live performances. For most fans of the best rock bands, they may NEVER have seen them live, or they see them once in a once-in-a-lifetime, still-talking-about-it-twenty-years-later opportunity. "Yeah, I saw Freddie sing at Live Aid, and I'll never forget it!" People who actually went to the Journey concert in 1983 at JFK Stadium still have cachet among the band's fans. (And I am still bitter for missing three opportunities to hear them. Don't ask me about Steve Perry performing at my graduate alma mater when I was working a job with crap pay and rotating shift work and couldn't go. I'll whine at you for days.)

More people passionately love any band than have ever seen them live. What these bands/forms of music do brilliantly is get their music into people's ears even when they aren't touring. If people determine that the music is worth it, they will pursue and own it far beyond live concert attendance.

I'm starting to not be able to tell the difference between "is classical music dying?" and "is live classical music/symphonic performance dying?" in some ways in these conversations. Habitually attending live music performances is an activity of a certain class of leisured people that, as I've said, can take off work early, work flexible (salaried) jobs, can afford the gas to drive, don't have kids, or can get sitters. We need to think beyond live performances. I'm sensing that people may think that committed rock fans go to rock concerts every other day, but it's just not the case. Orchestras and operas sell season-long subscriptions, but a diehard fan of a pop act may see them once or twice in a lifetime. (Obviously, the Dead are too unique and too far from the middle of the bell curve to be useful as a point of comparison.) I think there are inaccurate ideas of the importance of live performance in gauging the health of a given type of music.

Why delete the comments ? You put on here what You want to say but delete others You don't want to hear. You still have Your nasty comment on here about David Soul but You deleted the comments made by People that Love his work and the Man. That tells Me alot about Your Personality. Looks to Me like You just don't care about the People like David Soul does.

I'm coming to this comment late. Sorry -- and no, I'm not singling it out. I'm coming to all the comments late.

I never delete anything. Sometimes comments don't get through to the blog because the software flags them as spam. That's unfortunate, but I'm not able to check every day -- and sometimes not every week -- to see if this has happened, and to let the comments through.

as far as live performances in clubs and bars, note Classical Revolution in various cities by an old friend and classmate, Charith Premawardhana. http://www.classicalrevolution.org/index.php?page_id=contact

There have been quite a few national newspapers catching onto this story.

One of the few places where young people come into "full" contact with classical music is cinema. A movie theater has got powerful speakers (not to be underestimated for visceral effect), sometimes there is Wagnerian film music in the movie, maybe even original classical music in the film score, sometimes there is the communal movie-going and listening experience.

Record companies should exploit that avenue instead of blowing their meager advertising budgets on print and TV. Pumping theaters with classical music (via advertisements, etc) is more likely to produce that "click" which turns people to that music.