There is an ongoing discussion in the classical music world about the dwindling audience. Much of the debate is about whether the audience is actually dwindling at all, or rather simply “relocating.” Audience size for symphony orchestra concerts does indeed seem to be decreasing from year to year, causing enough concern that some British orchestras are about to begin providing a “Co-Co” (for Concert Companion) to concert goers, a small hand-held device that will allow the user to view close-ups of various musicians in the orchestra as they play, and read textual information about the work they’re hearing. As the music critic Norman Lebrecht says in his web log entry of February 10, entitled Who's afraid of classical concerts?, “It has novelty value but that will soon wear off once the menu options are exhausted.” Let’s hope so. Do you want to go hear Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and end up next to a twenty-something who’s watching TV?

Lebrecht goes on to say that he sees “people of all ages who sit gripped through four hours of King Lear, Lord of the Rings or a grand-slam tennis final but who, ten minutes into a classical concert, are squirming in their seats and wondering what crime they had committed.” All right, we’ll take at face value his implicit claim that he sees all the same people at these events — although I don’t know of many people who go to classical music concerts these days without knowing what they’re in for. (Perhaps he’s just projecting?) Lebrecht then offers an explanation for the problem: “So what, precisely, scares them off? In a word, the atmosphere. The symphony concert has stultified [sic] for half a century. It starts in mid-evening and last [sic] two hours. The ritual cannot be altered without inconveniencing the musicians and alarming the subscription audience; so nothing changes.”

He's spot on about the atmosphere problem, there can be no doubt. But blaming the musicians seems like a stretch — as if they were the Black Hats in this story. But no matter, he’s about to contradict himself, and in the process come to the heart of his proposed solution. “The only concerts that attract twenty-somethings,” Lebrecht continues, “are those which play to their rhythms. In Madrid and Barcelona, concerts begin at ten p.m. and are thronged by youngsters. In Vienna, the standing room at the rear of the opera house and the Musikverein is a singles-scene enclosure, walled off from the stuffy interior and giving the standees a sense of ownership and empowerment.”

Ownership and empowerment. Is that what they're calling it these days? Well, all right, if the point is simply to fill a concert hall with warm, pheromone-emitting bodies holding paid tickets, I guess Madrid and Vienna have succeeded. But do we really want to replace the “stultified” concert hall atmosphere with that of a pickup bar? Mr. Lebrecht has gone completely off the rails here. The concert hall needs young people who are interested in the music they’re hearing, not those lured in by gimmicks and promises of — I can hardly get myself to say it — ownership and empowerment.

Do such young people exist? Yes, but who knows for how long. As I say in my essay The Best Revenge: Create Anyway, arts budgets in our schools are being slashed and eliminated at a breakneck pace, in spite of being declared a Core Subject by the “No Child Left Behind” Act. The arts are vanishing from our children’s lives. Musicians in general are going to have to start taking an active role in local schools to keep this from becoming permanent. But in the meantime, there are also many things we can do to rekindle the classical music concert as an exciting and uplifting event.

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In 1992 I became the first composer-in-residence of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble in New York City. One of the first things I set out to do was convince the administration and musicians that St. Luke’s should have its own new music series, but that it needed to be something truly different. The concerts should take place in an “alternative space” of some kind, I argued, such as an art gallery. The presentation should be intimate, bright and light-hearted. In looking for a venue we started right at the top and asked the Guggenheim Museum if they would be interested. They immediately responded in the affirmative, we received a generous startup grant from the AT&T Foundation, and St. Luke’s “Second Helpings” series started the following year in the Guggenheim’s SoHo branch. The concerts took place after the museum’s regular business hours, and the admission fee included a “private” viewing of the museum just for concert goers. The audience size was intentionally kept small to start, so that we could get our bearings. But before long the concerts were sellouts, and the same young faces kept appearing. Imagine how pleased I was when the New York Times came to review one of our concerts that first season, and described it as “something truly different.”

Blowing the cobwebs out of the classical concert framework involves more than just a change of venue and a free museum viewing, of course. We tried a number of different things, but what stuck ultimately was pretty simple, and could apply to concerts of standard repertoire as well as new:

1. The programs were a maximum of 70 to 80 minutes, with a “stretch break” somewhere in the middle, but no intermission. (I think for any concert that involves unfamiliar repertoire, this is a reasonable maximum to ask people to absorb.) The rest of the evening was then available to view the artwork.*

2. The chairs were positioned more or less around the musicians, and at very close range. The musicians enjoyed this tremendously, they said, because it made them feel like they were doing a parlor concert and they liked the intimacy and immediacy of it. Audience members were also thrilled at the opportunity to observe top-caliber performers from just a few feet away.

3. There were no program booklets but rather just a single sheet of paper with a listing of the works, composers and performing musicians. We didn’t provide program notes because these concerts were “hosted” — by myself at the time, usually. The host was responsible for talking to the audience, introducing the composers and the works, and doing so in a way that made the audience feel part of the process. Actually I found that getting them to laugh about something within the first couple of minutes worked wonders toward this goal.

4. The musicians were asked to dress casually and colorfully. It was at this point I realized that musicians are a class of human beings who should not be allowed to dress themselves, and I needed no longer wonder where the tradition of “concert black” came from. But ultimately the resulting orgy of colors and patterns added to the buoyant atmosphere, and often provided me with just the thing I needed to generate that laugh.

5. After a work was performed, I talked some more about the piece and usually invited the composer back up. Sometimes on the spur of the moment we’d ask the musicians to play a particular section or movement again, or take questions from the audience. Having all this take place as part of the concert program, rather than a pre-concert or post-concert event of some kind, also made the audience realize that the event was for them.

6. We usually had a “Dead Composer Segment,” when the group would perform some Webern or Schoenberg or Stravinsky, and here the audience and I would have the most fun. It had occurred to me many years earlier that we too often teach music history as if it took place on another planet, apart from the rest of human history. So I peppered my presentation with mention of other events from the same year in which the work was written: who won the World Series or what movie won Best Film at the Oscars. This always provided a visceral jolt and often even resulted in laughter, I assume because there was a sudden sense of connection that caught the audience off guard. You don't usually hear baseball statistics in a lecture on Schoenberg.

7. We encouraged people to applaud when they felt like it (that is, between movements if they wished).

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Not all of these ideas will work in the large concert hall — fitting the entire audience on the stage with the orchestra would probably have one of those diminishing-return effects we hear so much about. Besides, you want to listen to a symphony orchestra from a certain position relative to it. But talking to an audience, getting them on your side by making them laugh about something, letting them clap when it feels like the right thing to do, getting rid of the pre-concert lecture and integrating it into the program — these are all things that could be done easily in symphony orchestra concerts and would immediately generate press and plenty of positive attention. And if the subscription audience gets offended and starts to disappear... oh, but it already has.

In any case, as the major orchestras panic and grab at straws — or Co-Cos — new chamber groups and chamber orchestras seem to be popping up all over the place. In fact, the demise of some larger regional orchestras in the United States has in some cases freed up funding and audiences for these other groups, and they are thriving. (It’s kind of like the stock market, I suppose: the money never really goes away, it just changes hands.) The smaller groups are also being more creative in their approach to programming and the concert hall atmosphere (which has been under attack since long before Mr. Lebrecht got around to it).

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The small ensembles are getting it right. Take for example the newly-formed River Oaks Chamber Orchestra in Houston, Texas, whose inaugural season begins this November. They will be performing in a local church, their concerts will be interactive, they are providing affordable child-care during the concerts. But don't let the quaint, home-spun sound of all this fool you: they are attracting significant talent to appear with them as featured soloists and conductors. We wish them well. But the methods of these successful and creatively-run groups should be examined closely by the powers-that-be in this business. There are many ways the symphonic concert hall can be made vibrant again. Encouraging ignorance of the main event — the music — in favor of scoring a hot date, is not one of them.