Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Agenda 2/1-2/6

I may as well pitch a tent at the corner of 57th and 7th, because I'll be more or less living at Carnegie Hall this week. Tonight, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, the hall is given over to the glorious Cleveland Orchestra, about which an English music presenter once legendarily asked, "Where is the Cleveland Orchestra from?" (An anecdote told in Charles Michener's in-depth profile of the orchestra, running in the New Yorker this week.) The regal Radu Lupu plays the five Beethoven piano concertos, and Franz Welser-Möst piles on some brawny twentieth-century repertory — Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony, Roy Harris' Third, Birtwistle's Night's Black Bird, Dutilleux's Second Symphony, and the Berg Three Pieces, plus Schubert's Unfinished. On Saturday afternoon, I'll see Pelléas et Mélisande at the Met. That's enough for one week, surely.

I have a handsome old score of the Beethoven concertos. It once belonged to the superb horn-player Alan Civil, who was in the Royal Philharmonic under Beecham and later in the Philharmonia and the BBC Symphony. He also played the solo on the Beatles' "For No One." His Daily Telegraph obiturary read in part: "Once on a train bound for Leeds he sat opposite a young girl who was wearing headphones from which hissed a sound unacceptable for a long journey. When asked to turn the volume down she refused, adding that it was a free country. Alan proceeded to take his horn from its case and to play Mozart loudly. The girl then left the carriage to the applause of the other occupants." The obituary also said, "It would be unrealistic to gloss over the fact that Alan Civil enjoyed a drink."

More on sex, drugs, and oboes

The other day I had a bit of fun at the expense of Blair Tindall's forthcoming book Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music. I received various responses, ranging from "That sounds completely silly" to "Darling, you have no idea." No doubt the truth lies somewhere in between, and, fortunately, Tindall's book promises something other than a sensationalistic tale of oboe crack whores (entertaining though that might be). The author writes me: "Mozart in the Jungle is really meant to illustrate how the Cold War-era 'culture boom' established an unrealistic blueprint for arts economics and attitudes in America. The resulting system, with which we're now stuck because of full-time orchestra contracts and an explosion in the number of performing-arts centers built in the 1960s, can cost communities more than it returns in public service. One orchestra manager told me his job revolves around providing full-time employment for musicians rather than serving the audience." This, of course, is important stuff, and I'll be very happy if Tindall casts a cold eye over the entire question of musicians, management, contracts, unions, and the like. Everyone in classical music knows that the big ensembles need to take bold measures to adapt and evolve. Yet the network of contracts that envelops them means that even the tiniest, most timid notions require protracted negotiations, usually ending in stalemate and stasis. If Tindall uses a bit of gossip to draw attention to the bigger issues, more power to her. I'm thinking of changing the title of my book to The Rest Is Noise: How Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Other Radical Extremists Brought the World to the Brink of Harmonic Armageddon, and Why the Critics at the Times Don't Want You to Know About It.

Norrington's Mendelssohn's Bach

[The grousing Roger Norrington post that originally appeared here didn't make much sense, so I've taken it off the air. I'm paying for this microphone, as the late President said.]

In other news, Marion Rosenberg has written a lovely tribute to the late great Giuseppe Verdi. A high-school blogger named the word whisperer does the same for Barber's Adagio for Strings. (Via Robert Gable.) I urge New Yorkers to give their business to either of the major events happening tonight — Reinbert de Leeuw at Juilliard or Boulez at Carnegie. I'm on a secret mission to Providence to see something that might be of infinitely lesser or infinitely greater importance than Boulez conducting the Rite of Spring, depending on how you look at it. Stay tuned.

Behind the Musik

The music world is sure to be talking about Blair Tindall's book Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, which Grove / Atlantic will publish in July. A well-placed source at one of New York's leading broadsheet newspapers has sent me a summary of its contents, to which I've added editorial emphasis:

From her debut recital at Carnegie Hall to performing with the orchestras of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon, oboist Blair Tindall has been playing classical music professionally for twenty-five years. She's also lived the secret life of musicians who survive hand to mouth, trading sex and drugs for low-paying gigs and the promise of winning a rare symphony position or a lucrative solo recording contract. In Mozart in the Jungle, Tindall describes her graduation from the North Carolina School of the Arts to the backbiting New York classical music scene, a world where Tindall and her fellow classical musicians often play drunk, high, or hopelessly hung-over, live in decrepit apartments, and perform in hazardous conditions. (In the cramped confines of a Broadway pit, the decibel level of one instrument is equal to the sound of a chain saw.) Mozart in the Jungle offers a stark contrast between the rarefied experiences of overpaid classical musician superstars and those of the working-class musicians. For lovers of classical music, Mozart in the Jungle is the first true, behind-the-scenes look at what goes on backstage and in the Broadway pit.

Oh, don't I know it. I played the oboe until age eighteen, and every day I thank my lucky stars I was rescued in the nick of time from that lurid, shocking, degrading lifestyle. (I spent two years in Holliger House, a wonderful shelter for recovering teenaged oboists.) If, as Ms. Tindall claims, classical musicians are routinely drunk, high, and horny when they play, they do much too good a job of hiding it. Let's bring some of this crunkosity out in the open. I want to see a couple of OD's and maybe some onstage vomiting at the NY Phil. Let's put a hidden camera backstage and see what Yo-Yo Ma is really doing before he saunters onstage with that cherubic grin. And let's talk about Pierre Boulez — the original party monster is in town this weekend, and it's going to be off the hook.

Twang of Death

Is there any sound quite as beautifully chilling as a low note on a harp? The instrument that stereotypically evokes the flutterings of angels has its dark side, and its bass tones can mess with your head. I thought about this during Das Lied von der Erde at Carnegie on Sunday: "Der Abschied," Mahler's antepenultimate self-requiem, begins with two harps playing two octaves below middle C, augmented by contrabassoon, two horns, tam-tam (very soft), and pizzicato cellos and basses. It's a sound from underneath the floor, something between a bell and a thump. Film/TV composer Michael Giacchino makes liberal use of deep harp notes: they're the main reason you get inexplicable chills watching Lost. Perhaps the orgy-shy Helen Radice has more to say about the history and literature of the Strum of Doom.

Update: Helen comes through with a rocking post on harp construction, Mahler, and the expressivity of the telling detail.

I kid you not

David Thomson captures the appeal of Johnny Carson: "He was a master spy, an immaculate secret, someone who knew that being on television long enough might be a very good way of burying your own soul." Read also Mr. Sun (now and forever). Kenneth Tynan's 1978 Carson profile is one of the all-time tour-de-force New Yorker articles, worth the $15,000 (!) Tynan was paid. Oddly, I once wrote a long article on late-night talk shows for the New Republic. I'm no longer sure what I was trying to say, and the last several paragraphs were actually written by Andrew Sullivan, but there is some amusing talk-show history in it. The text comes courtesy of a Freshman Composition class at Ole Miss.

Farinelli, Litherland

Trrill, the site that tells you "what the f*** we think about opera" (we're a family blog here), has a great post about the legendary castrato Farinelli. Trrill's chief editrix, Mme. Grisi Pasta, also reports that le tout Seattle has gone mad for soprano Victoria Litherland, now singing Manon in Manon Lescaut. Sound files on the singer's site are worth hearing.

Absolutely final applause post

Mozart writes about the 1778 premiere of his Paris Symphony: “Just in the middle of the first Allegro there was a Passage I was sure would please. All the listeners went into raptures over it — applauded heartily. But, as when I wrote it, I was quite aware of its Effect, I introduced it once more towards the end — and it was applauded all over again.” Mozart here describes an atmosphere similar to that of modern jazz clubs: the audience demonstrates its sophistication not by remaining silent but by acknowledging the composer's best ideas with bursts of applause. What would Mozart think of our modern concert culture? I'm guessing he'd admire the precision of the performances, and he'd appreciate the relative lack of chatter and noisemaking, but he might well be disturbed by the generally passive, frigid demeanor of audiences. An artist who imagines in the throes of his creative process a give-and-take with a responsive crowd would have a hard time adjusting to the intellectual solitude of contemporary composition. He might look around for other opportunities.

Concert-hall managements often insert little etiquette codes in their programs. As Richard Taruskin sardonically notes in his new history of music, the most familiar of these litanies takes the form of Biblical commandments on the order of "Thou shalt not...," accentuating the fake churchiness of the ritual. Some organizations, thankfully, are starting to send a different message. Here's what the Houston Symphony says in response to the question "Is it proper to applaud between movements?":

As music in the schools wanes and technology and popular culture become ever more engulfing, symphony orchestras are trying to attract the widest possible audiences to classical music to ensure we have music-lovers for the future. Therefore, today's audiences consist of young and old, novice and experienced listeners, first-time visitors to Jones Hall and subscribers who have been with us for decades. While we believe in presenting the best possible musical experience, we also want to encourage spontaneity and comfort. Applause between movements can be seen as an encouraging sign of new and enthusiastic additions to the classical music fold.

Notice that the Houston Symphony stops short of endorsing applause between movements. Instead, it gently implies that experienced listeners might want to think twice before going ballistic on the issue. Wouldn't it make more sense to be happy that new people are in the hall? Perhaps be friendly to them if they're sitting next to you, instead of scowling? Just a thought. Let the last word for now belong to reader Roberto Lizondo:

In your "More applause" post you say that you have "often been to orchestral concerts where the audience supplies a standing ovation that to my taste isn't warranted." While that is certainly so, I would like to make the case that warranted and unwarranted ovations (if not standing ones), as far as classical music concerts go, are really inspiring for musicians, and a great reward in a a lonely profession full of ups and downs. Here in Buenos Aires, the audience at our Teatro Colón may not be very discriminating, but they surely know how to clap at the end of a performance. I've seen the look of disbelief in the face of some eminent musicians playing here: the endless clapping, going on and on, calling the musician back into the stage over and over again. And when after the fourth or fifth curtain call the "rhythmic" clapping starts, boy, isn't it great to be in that place with all that people, just wanting to thank the lonely figure on the stage and show them how grateful we are that they flew all the way down to spend that couple of hours (extended, if we audience are going to get our wish, a further half hour) giving us their music, even on a night when inspiration deserted them a little bit. I've been lucky enough to attend concerts in some of the world's foremost venues, and nowhere have I felt such communion between artist and audience, caused simply, I guess, by the fact that the minority of us down here who still care about (and can afford) classical music are willing to show our thankfulness to the person on the stage without the restraints of propriety.

As for clapping between movements of a piece, it surely disturbs me, but it is an argument often used by those who, at least here, want to keep "serious" music as their exclusive terrain, inaccessible to those who are not "educated enough." A few years ago I attended a lieder recital by Bernarda Fink, and next to me there was a group of high school students, who were obviously coming to a concert of this type for their first time in their lives on some school assignment. She was singing some Schumann cycle, I believe, and after the first Lied some people in the audience, conspicuously among them my student friends, started to clap. The hissing from all over the theatre started immediately, but she, very graciously looked in our direction, put a finger to her mouth, as in one of those old hospital posters, and made a gesture indicating that the applause had to be deferred until later, while looking at the hissers not unkindly, but at the very least impatiently. The students acknowledged the gesture: they seem to absorb (or try to absorb) their first Schumann, waited to start clapping until they saw everyone else doing it, and I am sure at least one or two of the group went home thinking that perhaps this music was worth investigating a little further.

Agenda 1/24-1/30

Having survived the Great Millennial Arctic Snow Deluge of 2005, I'm ready for, uh, a big blizzard of concerts. January's surfeit of Nordic notation continues with the Cincinnati Symphony at Carnegie on Monday: Paavo Järvi, son of Neeme, leads a program much like one that Anu Tali, also Estonian, conducted in New Jersey two weeks ago: again the Grieg Concerto, again the Sibelius Fifth, now Sallinen's Eighth Symphony. Tuesday and Wednesday bring installments of Juilliard's Soviet Avant-Garde festival, commemorating Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Ustvolskaya, and others voices of the Communist twilight. Also on Wednesday, the Lyric Society of New York presents Shostakovich's Brezhnev-era Blok songs. On Thursday I go to the New York City Ballet: Terry Teachout will tell me when not to applaud. Friday offers a tough choice between Pierre Boulez explicating The Rite of Spring at Carnegie and Reinbert de Leeuw conducting Gubaidulina's Stimmen ... Verstummen and Shostakovich's Fifteenth at Juilliard. I've said before and I'll say again that de Leeuw is one of the best conductors working. As for Boulez, he drops it like it's hot. (De Leeuw's concert is free; Boulez's has a top price of $35.) Saturday, Boulez is back with another Rite. And Sunday, Osmo Vänskä's Lahti Symphony closes out Nordic month with a concert at Avery Fisher. Vänskä is a brilliant musician who is moving the Minnesota Orchestra into the top echelon. Here he'll be conducting the Sibelius Second, and if you think that work is a worn-out warhorse you've never heard Vänskä's take on it. His 1996 performance with the Iceland Symphony was one of the most intense experiences of my listening life.

Crank up the Sibelius

The Finnish Consulate surely outdid itself in subsdizing this striking visual accompaniment to the New Jersey Symphony's "Northern Lights Festival." Pekka Kuusisto's performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto on Friday night, before the snow began to fall, was a wonderfully free, vital interpretation, poised between Bachian cogitation and folk fiddling. He's also a charismatic, funny guy who had the audience in stitches with his absurdist summary of the Kalevala epic: "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that trying to kill the Swan of Death is maybe not the smartest project." Any American orchestra would want to have him, for the playing and talking alike.

Feline perspectives: Brahms and Mahler

Penelope is nearly as serious as Brahms (upper right); Maulina fondly recalls her soulmate Mahler.

Noises off (revised)

I've been thinking more about the "silent audience" — the relatively newfangled classical crowd that demands dead quiet and abstains from applause between movements. Here are some possible explanations for its emergence. 1. The superb acoustics of late nineteenth-century concert halls such as the Musikverein in Vienna and Boston's Symphony Hall changed how people listen. The sheer beauty of the sound put a kind of gilt frame around the music. The cults of Beethoven and Wagner turned the performance into something like a sacred ritual, a church-like experience to be received in quiet. (See the Parsifal imbroglio described below.) 2. Near-silent effects such as the pianissimo beginning of Beethoven's Ninth and also of Wagner's Ring practically demanded silence before the music even began. 3. As a reader pointed out to me, Gustav Mahler often glared punishingly at audiences when they made excess noise at both opera and orchestral performances. He agitated to stop applause after arias and movements. The growing idolatry of Mahler after his death led other conductors to follow his example, although some, such as Pierre Monteux, protested. 4. The rise of recordings meant that listeners became accustomed to listening to music in solitary quiet. They began to expect the same atmosphere in the concert hall. The lack of applause between movements may very well be what scholar Mark Katz calls a "phonograph effect," a consequence of recording technology and its surrounding rituals. Of course, it doesn't explain why people still feel free to make noise at rock shows and other pop events. Which leads us to 5. The rise of popular culture made classical audiences anxious about their status. They wanted to be sure that they were seen to be "serious," not like those plebians and vulgarians who made noise elsewhere.

Night of the living dead

English soothsayer Norman Lebrecht predicted that the year 2004 would spell the death of classical recording. How uncanny, how eerie the feeling when I opened the door of my office only to see a large stack of envelopes containing ... oh, horror! ... new classical CDs. They were ghoulishly similar in appearance, weight, and sound to the ones that came before the great Lebrechtian devastation. O unspeakable apparition! O unaccountable event! Playing now is a recital of Gounod and Massenet arias on Virgin Classics with the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón. Unless someone has run a fiendish digital simulation in the studio, this is a major, beautiful, passionate, intelligent voice. Somehow I overlooked Villazón's Italian recital from last year; I'll have to track it down. The new disc is in stores January 25th. It is severe.

The Return of the King

The weight of history prevented me from seeing the President's Second Inaugural Address, but, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I was able to read the text online. I was surprised by the bold, sweeping power of its rhetoric: "By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well — a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world. Yes, the fire that we have set burning in the minds of men will shine even in the dimmest dankest depths of the Mines of Bagdûr, and it will glimmer brightly upon the coldest jagged peak of the dread Mountains of Kayhan Kalhor, and it will gleam forth in a great blue tongue of fire out upon the terrible blank vastness of the Swamp of Bibimbap, yes, even unto the stark steep steps of the Dark Castle of Darth Darkûr...."

Wack Messiah

Anyone needing a lift on this grim midwinter day might want to go to Tim Johnson's site and listen to the Messiah on crack.

Related: infamous trumpet bloopers.

Rothko Chapel

Tim Johnson has written a captivating appreciation of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel, part of an ongoing celebration of favorite works of the last forty years. The list is itself a fine example of ecumenical, non-polemical new-music attitude (see the post on style  wars below): it enshrines the arch-simplicity of Arvo Pärt alongside the arch-complexity of Brian Ferneyhough. (These terms "simplicity" and "complexity" are used with due irony and circumspection. Just because Pärt fails to fill up the page with lots of notes doesn't mean he's a simple composer.) Rothko Chapel is a pivotal work for me, too; when I first heard it, I was completely shattered by the entrance of the viola at the end, playing that lonely Hebraic melody which Feldman wrote when he was a teenager,  In 1972, Heinz-Klaus Metzger obstreperously asked Feldman whether his music constituted a “mourning epilogue to murdered Yiddishkeit in Europe and dying Yiddishkeit in America.” Feldman answered:

It’s not true; but at the same time I think there’s an aspect of my attitude about being a composer that is mourning—say, for example, the death of art. I mean, remember that I'm a New Yorker, and a New Yorker doesn't think about Yiddishkeit. You think about Yiddishkeit if you live with only five thousand other Jews in Frankfurt, so I haven't got that problem, I mean, I don't think of myself as Jewish in New York. But I do in a sense mourn something that has to do with, say, Schubert leaving me. Also, I really don't feel that it's all necessary any more. And so what I tried to bring into my music are just very few essential things that I need. So I at least keep it going for a little while more. I don't this explains anything, does it?

It does help explain Rothko Chapel, written the previous year.

Sigh

Carnegie Hall has announced that Lorraine Hunt Lieberson will not be singing Das Lied von der Erde this Sunday, because of a lower back injury. Anne Sofie von Otter is replacing her, so it won't be in any way a washout, but, still, I'm thoroughly downcast: there was nothing this season I was looking forward to more. Let's wish LHL a rapid, complete recovery.

Applause mailbag

Re my applause posts below, Peter Rolufs writes from Tokyo:

Considering "the direct relationship between the greatness of the audience and the unruliness of the music" I was by all means disturbed when a "young lion" of jazz at New Orleans's leading club Snug Harbor made a sarcastic remark between songs about the audience not listening.  The place was packed, and for good reason, because this cat was indeed a lion. Well, there was a bit of a din, but I for one was concentrating full-on as the music was sublime, and by golly the din fit right in.  The lion's dad would have known better, I thought.

In the notational world, I wonder if the return of the great audience could be had for the price of a bottle of wine and glasses (and glass holders) at every seat. Mahler, brought to you by Blue Nun.  Beethoven, brought to you by Budweiser!  The cymbalist could be the orchestra's token drunk.

Actually, I wrote "the unruliness of the audience and the greatness of the music," but that's just the point, ain't it? Greatness and unruliness are often interchangeable. On the too rare occasions I make it to a jazz club — as, for example, when I saw Cecil Taylor at Iridium last spring — I feel I'm in audience heaven: informality and seriousness are in perfect balance. The Budweiser Beethoven Festival is also a brilliant idea.

X-rated Hansel and Gretel

At first, I suspected that this report of a pedophile-populated production of Hansel and Gretel was an implausible hoax concocted by AC Douglas to bolster his already very convincing case against Director Opera, but the link, to the Australian paper The Age, appears to be legit. Director Giancarlo del Monaco gets off in Erfurt: "The fairytale forest is replaced by a red-light district, with high-rises, garbage dumps and begging children. The children's mother is a whore and their father an alcoholic. The 'sand-man' is a cocaine-snorting pimp, who pursues Hansel and Gretel with a video camera and hands them over to the wicked witch — the modern 'stranger' who could be the man down the road, the local pervert, the Catholic priest."

Shuffle along

Last Friday I spoke to the annual conference of Chamber Music America, a wonderful organization that binds together chamber music organizations across the country and suggests how they can function in a seemingly indifferent culture. The conference was titled "Found In The Shuffle: Authenticity in Today’s Musical Market." The organizers had read my essay "Listen To This," from last year, and were interested in hearing more along the same lines. What I said seemed to strike a chord, and I was very moved by the response. Below are the first few paragraphs of the speech. I'll add the rest once Chamber Music America has the chance to put it on their website.

I’m going to begin by quoting from Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Before I do, I want to reassure you about my use of the word "collapse." This is not going to be one of those death-of-classical-music lamentations, a woe-betide-us, the-end-is-nigh, the-sky-is falling-this-year-too kind of affair. I am going to strike a pretty optimistic note today. I tend to usually, because it’s simply more fun to be an optimist than a pessimist. Optimists are never pleasantly surprised, they say. Well, pessimists are never pleasant. In any case, while I do think that the future of classical music, so called, is, if not exactly bright, then something other than bleak, I do admit that the possibility of failure, of an eventual and complete end to everything we hold dear, is perfectly real. And, as Diamond’s book suggests, in reference to societies and civilizations that have bit the dust of history, we will fail, in essence, if we choose to fail, if we want to fail. There are literally hundreds of passages in this book that have an eerie relevance to the situation in which we find ourselves. For example: “It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one’s core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer to die than to compromise and live?”

Diamond gives the example of the Norse settlers who died out on the shores of Greenland. They refused to adapt to the way of living of the Inuit people, who had figured out the only way to survive in the Greenland climate. “In trying to carry on as Christian farmers, the Greenland Norse in effect were deciding that they were prepared to die as Christian farmers rather than live as Inuit.” He goes on: “Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change.” Among the most damaging of those values, Diamond finds, are religious ones, such as those espoused by the Norse in Greenland, which prevented them from adapting to their new climate. And there are secular equivalents of religious values, quasi-religious notions that we cling to even after the conditions that created them no longer exist. These are values dictated by “wooden-headedness, persistence in error, mental standstill or stagnation,” to quote from another book on a similar subject, Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly. These self-destructively high-minded values are often rooted in a deep fear of what the world might be like without the accustomed way of doing things — a fear of losing one’s identity. It can also come from pure, simple, close-minded pride, from a contempt for the unfamiliar and the other and the unknown.

Now, who chooses to fail, who wants to fail? No one consciously does, I suppose, but there is an attitude which amounts to the same thing, and it can be detected in some corners of the classical world. It’s the attitude of, well, things seem to be going down hill, so the best thing to do is to hold on to one’s dignity. Kind of like Mr. and Mrs. Astor on the Titanic, or Victor Garber in that movie, holding his head high as the water laps about his feet, his chest, his chin. After all, there can be a kind of excitement, even a strange elation, in bearing witness to the demise of an art, in being the last man standing. I detect an eagerness to see the end, an appetite for destruction, to take a phrase from Axl Rose. But the music refuses to die according to the schedules that doomsayers have devised for it. And, in any case, the death of a great institution or of a genre or of a style is not the same thing as the death of an art. It can feel like death, but it is only change and evolution. The Titanic was one ship that sank: human transportation went on. Consider another apocalyptic metaphor, the extinction of the dinosaurs. The death of one set of species was not the end of life on earth. It cleared room for a new host of species. When the age of the dinosaurs came to an end, the age of the mammals began.

Perhaps I don’t need to spell out for you where exactly this metaphor might be heading, and why I feel rather more comfortable using it in front of a gathering of chamber musicians, instead of, say, a gathering of symphony orchestra musicians or administrators. But I’ll go ahead and spell it out anyway. All the major symphony orchestras in America could collapse tomorrow, and life would go on, musical life would go on. The symphony orchestra in its modern form has existed for about a century and a half. We had hundreds of years of musical history before that, an endless catalogue of masterpieces and legendary musicians. We functioned without the orchestra then, and we’d be able to function without it in the future. I’m not in any way wishing for the collapse of the orchestra. I’d be deeply disheartened by such a turn of events. It might mean among other things that I’d be out of a job, as would many music critics around the country. But I’d be very interested to see what happened next. The point is, I wish that for every story in the media about troubled orchestras there was a matching story about a new composer-led ensemble, a new chamber series, a new program of professional musicians working in schools, and so on. There are more professional musicians than ever before. More people are going to live concerts of classical music than ever before. There are far more composers writing music —ten, maybe twenty times as many as a hundred years ago. But musical life lacks a center. It exists off the radar screen of the major media. It’s actually kind of exciting when you think about it. If I were in the business of marketing classical music to younger audiences, I’d make a virtue of this. Classical music is the new underground.