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Seems like a couple of points often -- always? -- come up when I talk about changes -- aging, shrinkage -- in the classical music audience.

Any stats about aging (and there are plenty, proving the aging of the audience, over many years, beyond much doubt) elicit a familiar response, that the population as a whole has aged, and so the aging of the classical music audience is simply something one would expect.

(Some of what follows might be a little dry, for those who don't move easily in the world of numbers. Apologies for that, though of course there really isn't any other way to delve into these issues.)

But there's more to the aging of the audience than that. If the classical music audience had aged simply because the population had, then the relationship of ages -- the relationship of the classical music audience's age to the age of the population as a whole -- would remain the same. If the classical audience was, let's say, 10% older than the population at large in 1950, it'd be 10% older today.

But that's not the case. In the 1950s, when the Minnesota Orchestra found that its audience had a median age of around 35, the median age of the population was just a hair over 30. In our present decade, when one major orchestra told me privately that the median age of their single-ticket buyers was late '50s, and for subscribers over 60 -- typical figures for an orchestra that size -- the median age was only around 36. Clearly, if these figures are representative, in the 1950s orchestras had an audience about 16% older than the population as a whole, while in our time, the audience (figuring a median age of about 60) would be 67% older.

These are rough figures; many approximations went into my calculations. (For instance, I don't have age data for 1955. The earliest figures I can find were for 1958, so I compared the audience age in 1955 to the population's age in 1958.) But I don't think the approximations make my calculations suspect. The trends are too large to be thrown off by small approximations/

For another look at the same phenomenon, consider NEA data that shows the median age of the classical music audience increasing from 40 in 1982 to 49 in 2008. That's a 22% rise. The median age of the population, meanwhile, went up from 31 to 36, a 16%  rise. So the classical audience is aging faster than the general population, a point, by the way, that the NEA has been making in various public statements for many yeras.

(The NEA's age figures are lower than those reported by orchestras, for reasons I've discussed before. The NEA doesn't focus on any part of the classical audience, and in fact defines "classical audience" as people 18 and over who say they've been to classical concerts. They aren't asked which concerts they went to. The orchestra audience is a subset of that, clearly with its own characteristics, one of which is that it's older.)

Not that my saying this will put the argument to rest. I'm sure I'll get the same response next time I raise these issues. Not everyone reads all of my posts, and it's hard to think about these issues -- hard to separate speculation from fact, especially when the facts aren't terribly well known, and can be hard to find.

One more argument I've run into. When I talk about the classical music audience being much younger very far in the past -- for instance, when I cite the famous passage about teens and young adults hearing Beethoven's Fifth at a concert, in E.M. Forster's 1904 novel Howard's End -- I'll be told that life expectancy was so much lower in those distant years that the youth of the classical music audience doesn't mean what it would mean today. One person posting a comment here even said that in 1904 people 25 years old were middleaged!

This, with all respect, is just zany. Life expectancy was lower in those past years for many reasons. People died in childbirth more often than they do now, and also died more often in infancy, childhood, and young adulthood. Nor of course did people so readily live into their 80s and 90s as they currently do.

But that didn't mean that the population you'd encounter as you went about your life in the 19th century, let's say, skewed notably younger than what we see today, and certainly not that 25 was the middle of life for those who made it that far. Average life expectancy is a misleading statistic here, since it includes so many people who died very young. If you read literature from the past, you see an age distribution among the characters that doesn't seem all that far off from what we see now. I'm reading Dickens' Bleak House right now, for instance. There are young characters, middleaged characters, and old characters. Similarly with Balzac, whom I read over the past year, and for that matter Shakespeare.

And the young characters act young, while the old characters act older. If, in Balzac, you find Parisian aristocrats in their 20s going to the opera every night, that's not because they're behaving the way 55 year-olds behave today. They clearly don't, and the contrast -- in things other than opera attendance -- between them and the older people they encounter is very much the contrast we'd see today, between people in their 20s and people in their 50s.

So if the people in their 20s went to the opera  constantly, that shows a different relationship to opera and classical music than people in their 20s have today. It hardly matters -- for my purposes here -- that the people in their 20s might get married earlier than they would now, or that possibly they'd encounter fewer people in their 50s and 60s than people in their 20s encounter today. The relationships between people of all these ages remained very much the same, and so the presence of many 25 year-olds at the opera really does mean something.

Yesterday I was running errands in my car, and listening to Soundcheck, the really fine afternoon music talk show on WNYC (the public radio station in New York). They were marking a milestone in music video -- the cancellation of the only remaining show on MTV that still showed music videos.

So what was the state of music videos now? Here's what I learned. Music videos have largely migrated to YouTube. They aren't pushed to music fans by any central provider. Fans seek them out on their own.

And often the best and best-known videos aren't made by top-hit bands. They're made by far less popular indie bands. Often fans make videos on their own. Often bands make videos designed to be remixed, so to speak -- to have ttheir visuals altered -- by fans.

Just another day, in other words, in the ongoing life of Web 2.0, the current version of the Internet, which encourages participation by people who use it. As opposed to Web 1.0, the old way we did things, where information was pushed down to users from organizations with things to sell, or things they wanted us to know.

So where does classical music stand in all of this? Sorry to say, we're for the most part rooted back in Web 1.0. How do we ever think we'll attract younger people? And why, exactly, should they be interested in us? In a world that increasingly highlights individual creativity, what chance to be creative do we offer anyone?

Tomorrow -- Saturday, October 18 -- I'll have a review in the Wall Street Journal, about CDs I like a lot, Lukas Ligeti's "Afrikan Machinery," and a self-titled debut from Gabriel Kahane.

What ties these CDs together is an intriguing back story, about the emergence of a new generation of classical musicians, with new ideas. Both the artists I reviewed have famous fathers, Ligeti's being the Ligeti we all know, and Kahane's being Jeffrey Kahane, the pianist and conductor who's music director of the Colorado Symphony. And both artists combine classical music with non-classical styles, in Kahane's case a healthy dose of pop. In fact, I don't know any music that sits on the knife-edge between classical and pop as much as Kahane's does. Which contributes to its artistic strength.

If the Journal puts my review on its free website (as opposed to the one you have to pay for), I'll link to it.

A year ago I gushed about the annual Bang on a Can marathon, the crucial new music event in New York that had moved to a new space and attracted a new, excited -- and exciting -- audience.

This year (the performance was two weekends ago) the space was the same, the Winter Garden, an extravagant, comfortable public space downtown, with ceilings high enough to accommodate full-sized palm trees. It's right on the Hudson River, in the miles-long stretch that's been developed as a walkway (and skate- and bikeway) and a park. So you'll always have people walking there, and maybe popping into the World Financial Center (the building that the Winter Garden is part of), to eat or have a snack or do some shopping.

Which gives Bang on a Can a readymade audience, especially since their marathon was part of an established downtown arts series. But that didn't mean that the audience would be as large as it was, or would stay as long as it did. Because this marathon was long. Last year's was longer -- 26 hours -- but this year's, at 12 hours, was long enough to run all night.

I got there at 8 PM or so, two hours after things had started, and the first thing I noticed was that the audience was larger than it was the year before. I'm not good with estimating numbers, but the figure thrown around last year was 1000 people, when things were at their height. This year there were more than that, quite a few more, I'd say.

And who were these people? Last year, the organizers didn't know, which is to say that this wasn't a new-music insider audience, but instead what I'll call (in whatever tone of view you choose) a real one, an audience of people who either came or wandered in and stayed becuase they liked the music, not because they had a professional connection to what was going on. They were mostly young. So here again -- as I mentioned in my post about the Wordless Music orchestra concert -- was the new, young audience the classical music world says it's looking for, alive, in the flesh, larger than life, but maybe striking out in directions of its own, toward new music and away from standard classical repertoire and concerts.

I didn't mention that the event was free, which of course helped to draw people. I stayed for seven hours. Among much else, I loved the music. Well, not all of it, of course. I must have heard a dozen pieces, maybe 20. How could I love them all? But overall I did love it, and could cite many highlights, though the highest one for me was Julia Wolfe's Strong Hold, for the astonishing ensemble of eight double basses (played by The Bass Band, students from the Hartt School in Hartford, CT). Julia, of course, is one of the three Bang on a Can composers, and her music often digs into edgy, weighty, thick, and complex textures, so a piece for eight basses might be natural for her. Except, of course, that it's hardly natural for anyone, and that the sound gets quickly muddy in the lower register, where the basses are at home.

Julia, I thought, aced that problem triumphantly, and the piece was pretty much mesmerizing, throbbing through time absorbingly, always keeping me wondering what would be next, until it ended on a major chord so richly scored that it felt like it came from the bottom of the earth. This, with any mainstream audience, would hardly have been a hit, but alternative rock has changed the rules here, and the audience at the Marathon whooped and yelled.

When I left at 3 AM, So Percussion had just finished David Lang's the so called laws of nature. By this time, there might have been 600 people there, still this new and avid audience. David, of course, is another of the Bang on a Can composers, and this ye, ar's Pulitzer Prize winner. The piece, again by mainstream standards, wouldn't exactly be a crowd-pleaser, since it's long (at least 20 minutes), rigorous, and, within each of its large sections, pretty much unchanging, with nothing in it that you'd expect to wow an audience (except maybe the pulsing rhythm, though that would start and stop). But, again, the rules have changed. This audience whooped, and as I headed toward the exit, David was greeting people who'd line up to have him sign CDs.

I wonder how many other Pulitzer Prize composers have faced a line of happy fans at 3 AM? This marathon remains a miracle, and, if you ask me, it's the most important classical music event in New York, both for the quality of its music and the excitement of its audience. Recently, in a private blog about orchestras that I was asked to take part in, some eager orchestra professionals got rhapsodic about performances their orchestras had done (which I'm willing to believe were wonderful), and offered them as wistful proof that classical music will never die. To me that's essentially a statement of faith, and while I respect the faith, I don't see how it answers questions about what might well be diminishing interest in standard orchestra performances in the future. I feel more confident in what Bang on a Can evokes, because the hope for the future I think they offer is tangibly, visibly, andn audibly supported by an excited new and growing audience.

The National Performing Arts Convention -- convening in Denver next month -- has a blog. I was asked to contribute; my entry is here. Subject: why the arts -- aka the collection of interest groups meeting in Denver -- don't really represent art in our current world.


Since I got after the classical music business for ignoring Earth Day -- and, basically, all environmental concerns -- I should be fair, and note that the Ojai Music Festival has announced a green initiative. It's the first I've ever heard of in classical music, though I hope there have been others. To quote from Ojai's press release:

With the help of Marty Fujita, an ecologist who founded a farm-to-school food program in local Ojai schools, and Green Team volunteers from the Ojai Valley Green Coalition, the Festival is reducing solid waste going to landfills, selecting merchandise and foods produced with minimal environmental impact, and supporting local farmers, merchants, and products.

Though of course they'll still have a carbon footprint -- maybe not a small one -- from flying artists to play their concerts. I wish they'd say something about that. You can read their complete press release here.

It's still scandalous -- and I really mean it  -- that other classical music institutions haven't done anything like this. If their concerts halls are green, they don't talk about it. And they don't even do Earth Day programming. In 2008, that's scandalous.

In Wong Karwai's new film, My Blueberry Nights, Rachel Weisz has a monologue that could almost be an opera aria. When I saw the film, and Weisz quiets down outside a bar where she's just thrown a fit (with Norah Jones sitting by quietly, ready to listen to anything Weisz says), I thought, "If this was an opera, now we'd get Rachel Weisz's aria."

But I couldn't have known how musical Weisz's monologue would be. For one thing, she often spoke in musical phrases, with pitches - musical  notes - I could just about have written down in musical notation. But she also made music in a higher sense, gripping my attention simply with the sound of her voice, quite beyond the meaning of her words. Up to a point, this happened as her voice was pushed and shattered by her feelings, but as I listened - maybe because I'm a musician - the sound took on a force that was completely musical (understanding here a wider definition of music, which goes beyond the notes and chords of traditional music, and enters the wider world of pure sound.)

Listen to the monologue, and see what you think.

This, I thought, posed a challenge to opera - to new operas, that is. (And don't forget, in what follows, that I've written some myself.) The simple way to put the challenge might be, "Who needs opera, when a movie monologue carries this much musical conviction?" But that's too simple. Maybe a broader way to make a richer point would be something like this: in past centuries, when opera was a truly current art form, people understood (instinctively; this hardly had to be discussed, though perhaps it sometimes was) that opera created drama by stylizing it, embedding it in well-known forms of music.

As time went on, and as musical language developed, singing in opera could become less stylized - less dependent on full-fledged melodies, with a purely musical form of their own - and more realistic, more like the ways people actually speak. (Wagner of course had a lot to do with that.) But let's not forget that stage acting (and public speaking of any sort) was much more stylized in those days than it is now. So realism of the Blueberry Nights sort - music closely imitating speech - wouldn't bring dramatic music where pure drama is today.

I'll skip over the rest of operatic history (and especially Janacek, who tried harder than any other composer to render speech in music precisely as it's spoken), and simply observe that new operas these days tend to emphasize full-throated operatic singing. Which leaves them largely in the dust if you compare them to Rachel Weisz, who also outflanks them musically.

Which isn't to say that new operas are impossible. I tend to feel, though, that they work best when they're deliberately stylized. And since I think that, it can't be coincidence that Philip Glass's Satyagraha (stylized from beginning to end) knocked me out more than any new opera I've ever seen on stage, and that I wrote my own favorite among my operas, Frankenstein, deliberately as an affectionate (well, loving, really) and stylized take on Italian opera in the 19th century (which itself is stylized). If I wanted to write a realistic work - which really would appeal to me - I'd listen again, and very carefully, to Rachel Weisz, and be afraid.

I've been meaning to link to Molly Sheridan's new ArtsJournal blog...there, I've done it. I've known Molly for years, always enjoyed her, always learned from her. And now she's flying. I hate to limit her, by quoting something that doesn't give you her nuance or range, or her flavor, something so merely factual...so follow the link above and read the full Molly...but still here's something she knows more about than I do, something that fits right in with the conversation we've been having here about the new audience, and the blend of new classical music and alternative rock they're so easy with. (Here and here.) It's from Molly's first post, "I'll Take One of Everything, Please":

...a funny thing happened during a panel discussion over at Peabody a few weeks ago: Someone asked me where new music was going and for the first time since I started covering the field in 2001, I realized a big change that I had personally witnessed had finally come to pass.

Picture it: The year is 1999. Where I am living in Brooklyn, many bands are rehearsing in cheap studio spaces. Many of them come from indie rock backgrounds and liberal arts educations, but they are seeking to put their own experimental twist on the genre.

Meanwhile...

Across the river and quite a few blocks uptown--or okay, fine, just as likely right next door--other musicians in other studios are finishing up pieces for their composition degrees at the city's prestigious conservatories. They've got a piece scored for Pierrot ensemble, but they are seeking to put their own experimental twist on the genre.

Sadly, except for the occasional happy anomaly, in 1999 Camp A and Camp B seemed to exist in largely separate worlds, sharing neither common dive bars nor common practices. And this always seemed a shame, because to me it felt like each side had information the other side needed and wanted. I'm not speaking in terms of music (though some wanted to travel that way, too) but more in terms of trading recording technique for orchestration technique. But that was then. These days when I look out, it's striking to see how close these two camps have come, and it looks and sounds great...

Ellipses at the end, not because I cut off in the middle of a sentence, but because I cut off in the middle of a thought. By which I mean that Molly's thoughts are worth reading (and that it's hard to fit their full flavor into any one headline). It's great to have her here.

Problem: You're involved with a classical music organization, maybe a big one. And even though you might describe your institution as "a vital community cultural resource" (to quote one orchestra's website), you know that once you get beyond the "cultural" part of that -- which basically means the contribution that you make to the community with your music -- you don't have all that much to offer. You sense that you're not a vital part of the community when other issues -- non-musical issues -- might arise.

Solution: Do something for the environment.

I'm writing this on Earth Day. The main news section of the New York Times has three full-page environmental ads, from Macy's, Starbuck's, and the BBC. Macy's website, on its home page, suggests you ride your bike or walk to work, and offers a link to a Macy's Earth Week celebration, where you can get environmental tips, and learn what Macy's is doing for the cause. The IBM home page prominently asks if you've recycled all your old computers, offering a link to an environmental page that tells you how to do so, with further links to pages like this one, which offers an entire green campaign, with the slogan "Good for business. Good for the planet."

And of course there's more. The New York Mets are building a new stadium. It's going to be green, says the team, built almost completely from recycled steel, and with a green roof over the administrative offices, plus other green initiatives. Major League Baseball has its own green initiative, the Team Greening Program. The Pittsburgh Pirates have an environmental program; the San Francisco Giants generate electricity with solar panels.

And what do classical music institutions do? Nothing I've ever heard of. Which doesn't mean that nobody is doing anything -- that would just about defy belief -- but certainly we don't hear a lot about this. Have any of the new concert halls boasted that they're green? Not that I've heard of. The Nashville Symphony's page for their new Schermerhorn Symphony Center says not a word about anything environmental. The LA Philharmonic's site says nothing green about Disney Hall.

And sure, some -- a lot? -- of the corporate environmental stuff is hype. A computer newsletter I get, "PC World Daily Tech News," asks "Are Big High-Tech Companies Green Hypocrites?" The baseball initiatives have been questioned, as the articles I linked to show. (They generate huge amounts of carbon playing night games.) Back in January, the New York Times reported that the FTC was asking whether corporations really did offset their carbon footprints, after saying that they'd done so.

But classical music organizations don't even take phony stands (if that's what the corporations are really doing). I've blogged about this before, and asked the American Symphony Orchestra League (as it was called back then) if any major orchestras had ever tried to offset the carbon dioxide they generate when they tour. I never got an answer.

So that's my solution to a community relations problem -- take a stand on the environment, and do something about it. It's just about expected, these days, and it's almost shocking (when you think about it for a while) that classical music organizations don't seem to know this.

Footnote: Maybe this is related to something else, the way people who aren't classical music initiates (especially if they're young) can be surprised that big classical music institutions don't do anything for charity. Pop stars do, after all. The almost indignant answer from the institutions is that, hey, they're charities!

But this doesn't wash. From the outside, big classical music institutions look like they're rolling in money. From the inside, they often enough can barely pay their bills, but still their whole presentation (I'm talking about major orchestras, big opera companies, and major concert halls) is lavish.

So they ought to do something for charity. I once privately advised an orchestra about this, suggesting that, since they wanted to raise more money from subscribers, it would help to work for charity themselves, so they'd create an atmosphere of giving. I've heard they've done this, with some success. One way, it seemed to me, would be to stress the charitable work of individual musicians, and also to join in community-wide fundraising efforts.

But each institution can figure this out individually. Just so they do something!

Today I got e-mail from a major orchestra, advertising a photo exhibit. The photos sound very interesting. But none were included in the e-mail! Dumb. They had my attention. Why not do something with it?

They gave me a link to click, if I wanted to read a full press release about the photo show. No photos in the press release, either. Come on, people -- don't you know how the Internet works? And yes, you'd have to make separate versions of the press release, one for print, the other for downloading. But how hard would that be? Though why not just include the photos in the print release -- not as separate 8 x 10s, but printed on the paper with the text --  as well?

And speaking of the press release -- why do I have to click to download it? Other orchestras (and non-orchestral institutions, too) include the entire release, complete with formatting, in their press e-mail. Why shouldn't this one do it? Why make it hard for people to read your releases?

While I'm at it, here are some other things that publicists shouldn't do. I offer these thoughts in a constructive spirit, hoping that publicists will see how they can be more effective.

• Don't put "Press Release" -- and nothing more than that -- in the subject line of your e-mail. If I'm pressed for time (no pun intended), your release is this one I won't click on. Use the subject line to tell me something that might interest me.
• Don't send CDs tightly bound in tape-sealed bubble wrap, inside a protective envelope. My wife and I might get a dozen (or even more) CDs a day. None of them arrive damaged. So why an extra layer of protection? It's annoying -- first I have to open the protective envelope, and then get through the bubble wrap.
• Don't put the urgent flag on e-mail, unless you know for sure the content of your message really will be urgent to most people getting it. Often I get e-mail from large institutions, telling me (with great excitement I don't share) that the pianist who's supposed to play a concerto Saturday night has cancelled, and that someone else will be playing instead. I'm sure this is urgent for the institution -- i know the kind of backstage flurry these cancellations cause. But for a critic who gets the e-mail? Maybe not so important. Save the urgent flag for when you're doing business with me, and something has changed that I really, really have to know about.
• Don't use messengers or overnight delivery or even UPS unless you really have to. We get packages from UPS and other carriers, sometimes four times a day. Typically they're new releases from major record lables -- CDs which, to be honest, we might not listen to for weeks, if ever. So why the rush? Why not send the CDs by regular mail? And the point isn't just to save you money. You save me some annoyance. Here I am, sitting home, trying to get my work done, and four times during the day I have to stop my work to buzz the UPS guy through the downstairs door, and then wait for him to get to my apartment so I can sign for the CDs -- which, remember, I haven't any urgent need for (though I'm not saying I'm not glad to get them).
  

Here's something I'm very happy to announce: I'll be giving the commencement address at the Eastman School of Music next month. This warms my heart, because I've had a very happy time teaching at Eastman for the past three years (I teach a quick course in the future of classical music, taught in January, February, and March). And I've bonded each year with my students.

But I'm also  honored to get such recognition from a major mainstream music school. And not just honored -- I'm thrilled to see my ideas taken so seriously.