The classical music world has problems these days, but one of the oddest and most damaging is also one of the least examined: the problem of new music. One reason it's odd is that we don't think it's odd. We take the problem more or less for granted: "Oh, yes, well, contemporary music, we ought to do something about that."
   So "doing something" then becomes a duty. Once, at a conference, I went to a panel called something like, "How To Produce New Operas Without Losing Your Shirt." The emphasis wasn't on the joy of producing new operas, or even on any interest, however mild, in getting them on stage. What everybody cared about -- given that they had to produce a new opera every now and then -- was making it as painless as possible. In dismay, I asked the panelists (two heads of opera companies and one marketing director) if there was any recent opera they really liked. The hemming and hawing in reply was remarkable.
   What we don't see, in all of this, is that if we were talking about some other art, we'd never have a problem. New work would be so much a part of our everyday lives that we'd never think to put it in a separate category.
   Suppose, for instance, that we compare classical music with serious theatre. How often do the best theatre companies present new work? They do it all the time. A few months ago, Time magazine picked the five top regional theatre companies in America -- the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, Calif. Whether these choices are right or not doesn't matter (everybody always argues over lists like that, and has a lot of fun doing it). But clearly these are five outstanding institutions, and for my purpose here, they provide a convenient list: If you look at the plays they produce, more than half are by current playwrights. Do any of the "Big Five" orchestras play that much new music?

And now look at visual art. In New York, the two leading visual art institutions would of course be the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Their names alone tell the story. Could the Metropolitan Opera be the Modern Opera Company? Could the New York Philharmonic call itself the Modern Music Orchestra? A few years ago, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted a long -- running show of Jackson Pollock's drips and drops, they had lines around the block. Would the Philharmonic sell that many tickets if it offered weeks on end of John Cage and Pierre Boulez
   How many examples do we need? When all of us go to the movies, we mostly see new stuff, whether we go to art houses, or to the multiplexes that show Hollywood films. When we read novels, they're likely to be new, and in fact it's not hard for a serious new literary work -- such as Ian McEwen's recent, probing Atonement, in no way an easy read -- to be talked about, at least among cultured people, all over America.
   And that, I'm afraid, raises an issue with devastating implications for those of us in the classical music business (among whom I count myself, as someone who composes music and writes about it). I've heard people talk about Atonement at weddings, dinner parties, and family gatherings. Have I ever heard anybody talk about new classical music? Well, once, not long ago, but that was a great exception, and in any case was something of a random accident. Some people I know had by some strange chance heard a new classical piece, and talked to me about it at a party because it had fascinated them, and they thought I'd know about it. They certainly didn't mention it to everyone.
   Which, in a way, is good news; it shows that people could care about new classical music. But who does care about it? Let me be brutal -- for the most part, only a few classical music professionals care. Among those who conspicuously don't care are the very people who have the most advanced taste, and ought to be the most open to new music -- intellectuals, and artists in other fields. In the nearly 30 years that I've been working as a music professional, there's been precisely one new piece that artists and intellectuals talked about. That was Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, which, when it was first performed in New York in 1976, was more or less a must -- see for anyone who cared about new art of any kind.
   But now, when the New York Philharmonic plays a world premiere, do playwrights, poets, novelists, and choreographers rush to Avery Fisher Hall? If I'm at a dinner party with people who've seen the latest art -- house films and can talk about the most important current painters, can any of them name the most important living classical composers (apart from Philip Glass)?

And it gets worse. Suppose we turn our attention back to our own field, and ask longtime orchestra subscribers to choose the top five orchestral works written in the past ten years. Could any of them do it? Very few, I think, because, just for a start, they aren't likely to have heard most of the pieces they might be expected to choose from. Even the most successful new works don't circulate to many orchestras; if they're recorded, hardly anyone buys the CDs.
   So I'm forced once more to be brutal. What all this suggests to me is that classical music, at least in America, is a cultural backwater. We know how to preserve the past; sometimes we can even bring it alive. But in the contemporary world, we barely exist. We create new works, but no large group of people (either inside our field or outside) knows much about them, or even cares.

Why is new music such a problem? As I've said, we don't seem to ask. Instead, some of us make earnest pleas on new music's behalf, but these are almost useless. We beg orchestras to play more new works, but all we're really doing is wishing that the problem didn't exist. And if, as I've seen some of us do, we start blaming people for the problem -- blaming composers for writing music no one likes, blaming the audience for not liking it, blaming institutions for not giving it a chance -- then I'm afraid we're no help at all. A problem this large has large-scale causes. It's bigger than all of its parts, and everyone -- composers, audience, administrators -- gets trapped in the same mess.
   I think we have to look a little deeper. We might, for instance, look for differences between music and the other arts. And clearly some differences exist. If I'm a painter, for instance, it's easy for me to show my paintings; all I have to do is hang them on a wall. (And publicize them, of course, but that's true of new music, too.) If, however, I'm a composer, I have to find musicians to play my work. Most of the time, somebody will have to pay them -- will have to pay a lot of musicians, if I've written something new for orchestra.

Music also requires both time and patience. If you hate my painting, you can walk right by it in a gallery. You can't be forced to look at it. But if I'm a composer, you might be forced to sit through my new string quartet. Do you hate it? Too bad. You'll just have to grind your teeth until it's over.
   It makes sense, then, that new music might be harder to accept than new painting (or a new novel, which you can stop reading at any time). And it certainly seems harder for new music to find its proper audience. For one thing, it's quicker and easier to go to a gallery than to go to a concert; it's cheaper, too. If you like what you see, you can tell your friends about it, and they can check it out on their own time, without paying a cent. They can even wait three weeks, and stroll by the gallery; the painting might still be there.
   Now contrast music. To hear a new symphony, you have to go to a concert. You have to buy tickets. You have to sit there all evening. You can tell your friends about it, but can you buy them tickets? And will the symphony even be played again? If the piece is recorded (which of course it might not be), you can get a CD to your friends, but will they take the time to listen? And let's not forget that a painting can speak for itself. What you see is what the painter wanted. Music, however, has to be performed, and a bad performance can ruin a piece. Your friends might hear a performance of a piece you love and find that they hate it -- completely unaware that, if the performance had been better, they might have felt differently.

But so what? So what if new music has obstacles that new painting doesn't? Why should this make any real difference, when in the past new music had no trouble at all? In the history of the music we now call "classical," new music was in fact the norm until at least the first third of the 19th century. Before that -- in Mozart's time, for instance -- hardly anyone performed old music. Yes, a few musty connoisseurs remembered Bach and Handel, but everybody else liked newer stuff. They all played new string quartets at home, and went out to see the latest operas.
   This didn't change until the 1830s, give or take a decade, when emerging groups of high-culture sophisticates began actively to perform the music of the past. And this, I suspect, is where our problem started -- with the idea that "classical music" (a term that never existed in Bach's or Mozart's day) was something special and privileged, something far loftier than any music we'd normally hear in our everyday lives. As the 19th century progressed, more and more old music got played, until by around 1870 it found a home in the deepest heart of musical life.
   But even then new music didn't stand apart in any special way. You can see that very clearly if you read music critics of the time. Take George Bernard Shaw, who reviewed concerts in the 1890s. He wrote about the Brahms Requiem, about new works by Verdi, Dvorak, and Grieg, about an absurdly hyped new opera called Cavalleria rusticana, and about premieres by Massenet and Tchaikovsky (along, of course, with pieces by composers we don't remember anymore). But -- except in the special case of Wagner, whom he loved, but who, even a decade after his death, still sounded startling to many people -- Shaw never talked about new music as if it was any problem for him or anybody else. He liked some of it; some of it (most notoriously, anything by Brahms), he didn't like. But he wrote like someone in our age going to the movies; nothing he reviewed got treated specially simply because it was new.

When, exactly, did new music start to be a problem? In the 20th century, of course, with the rise of modernism. "Modern music" -- they even had to have a special term for it -- didn't sound like anything that came before. It typically was noisy, reflecting not passion, nor the depths of religious awe, nor the beauties of nature, but instead the sounds and scenes of modern life, like cities, machinery, and increasingly ugly wars. It opened new views of cultures distant from our own. And it criticized the music audience. "Your taste is terrible!" it seemed to say (especially when its composers spoke these thoughts out loud). "You like romantic, sentimental junk!"
   It's no surprise, then, that many people hated modern music when it was new. But why have so many of us gone on hating it? Hardly anybody still hates modern art; think of that big New York museum, and the lines around the block for Jackson Pollock. But modern music -- despite the welcome success of Bartok and a few Stravinsky works; things do sometimes change, even in classical concerts -- still seems tricky. For almost a century now, the mainstream audience has gotten just a little tense whenever new music looms. Watch out for that! Its dissonant and ugly! Its not what we come to concerts for.
   We ought to grant that there's some truth in that. Some modernist music seems really strange. Twelve-tone music, for example, inevitably (because the way it works is too technical for any simple explanation) comes off as abstract, creepy, and mechanical. What was Schoenberg doing, putting all the notes in arbitrary rows? The serial music that came after him (with rhythms and even degrees of loudness arranged in abstract patterns) inevitably, for just the same reasons, seems even worse. We also ought to understand that the good people who love classical music -- who listen to it on the radio, buy CDs, and go to concerts -- aren't, not even remotely, the right audience for truly high-art modernism. And they wouldn't be, even if new music were as easily accepted as new novels or new plays. Those regional theaters aren't doing modernist plays by Samuel Beckett; they're mostly staging plays by modern realists, like August Wilson. And if theaters -- in spaces that typically seat less than a thousand people -- don't do high-art modernism, why should orchestras, playing in much larger halls, expect a sympathetic audience for Elliott Carter? It just won't happen.
   But still there are mysteries. The people in our audience really are conservative. Music doesn't have to be high-art modernist to bother them. They're uneasy, far too often, if they don't think a piece is beautiful -- and the standards of beauty they apply are from another age. That doesn't happen much in other arts. We have gritty plays and movies; gritty novels; gritty pop songs by the thousand (including rap, metal, and techno tracks far more edgy than just about anything by any classical composer). Jackson Pollock's splatters can draw large and eager crowds, but their musical equivalent -- or at least their equivalent in classical music -- has to tiptoe in the concert hall. Classical music has become a refuge, or so it seems, for aesthetic conservatives; studies show that people like it, by and large, because it's relaxing or inspiring, not because it makes them think, takes them to new places, or offers any kind of challenge or surprise. Is that because music -- as one musicologist I know suggests -- evokes more emotion than any other art? But if that's true, why do jazz fans so deeply love Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk, all of them 1950s modernists? Why does Radiohead, a modernist band, sell so many records? Why do people dance to screeching techno tracks?

And why is our modernism itself so conservative? At its birth, with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Schoenberg's first atonal works, musical modernism was dramatically new, and closely linked to other arts. The Rite of Spring was a ballet score; Schoenberg was intimate, artistically and personally, with early abstract painters. But as modernism grew, modernist music moved into a distant sphere of its own. By the 1930s, Stravinsky was writing neoclassic pieces, based on older styles. Were there neoclassic painters -- by which I mean modernists who deliberately painted in ironic versions of older painting styles? Apparently there didn't have to be; modern painters seemed to free themselves from the past more easily.
   The more I think of this, the more bizarre it seems. Even Schoenberg's twelve-tone system looked backward toward the past. Schoenberg said that he developed it because he felt lost without tonality; he wanted to restore the certainty of tonal music. In tonal pieces, notes arrange themselves in scales and keys. In twelve-tone music, Schoenberg ordered them in rows. Having done that, he could tell himself he understood how they were arranged; just as in tonality, he thought he knew the function of every note. But modern painters didn't need protective systems; they just painted.
   And musical modernists were also more removed from ordinary life than painters (or playwrights, or novelists, or art film directors) have been. It's amusing, for instance, to see what modernist composers took from James Joyce, who of course is a modernist icon in literature. Modernist composers liked the disconnected surface of his work: the way thoughts flash by, unevenly, as they do in our unconscious. They liked Joyce's new vocabulary, too, and his liberation from normal sentences and grammar. "Amtsadam, sir, to you!" Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake (in a passage I've chosen quite at random). "Eternest cittas, heil! Here we are again! I am bubub brought up under a camel act of dynasties long out of print..." But Joyce was also funny, wildly sensual, and full of references to everyday affairs -- food, streets in Dublin, advertising, popular culture in all its ragged glory, including sentimental popular songs. Most of this, quite plainly, musical modernists ignore. Can we imagine a modernist classical music mandarin like Elliott Carter, who in at least one piece claims inspiration from Joyce, quoting advertising jingles in his music? I'm sure he'd rather die.
   Musical modernism, it seems to me, is really weird. It can be more uptight than modernism in the other arts -- and that, in turn, might be another reason why it can be a problem in the concert hall.

But not all new music is modernist; modernist new music, in fact, is essentially the music of a past generation. So if we want to address the odd, huge problem of new music, we might start by putting modernism in its proper place. No longer should the fear of it, or the wish that it would go away, hover over every new piece on a concert program. New pieces can be tonal; they can be accessible; they can be funny. They can have pop references, or melodies, or dance rhythms, or subjects drawn from daily life; they can feel like the world we live in.
   One way to address the problem of new music is to program pieces, often by younger composers, that feel this way. That doesn't mean that we should never program modernist works. Some of them are trips to places that, even after all these years of modernism, we haven't been. They can open us. In the '80s, I heard the Cleveland Orchestra devote an entire concert to Coro, a collage of vibrant shards of ethnic music (among many other things) by Luciano Berio. I spent the evening on the edge of my seat.
   But any orchestra that still plays mostly modernist new music simply won't reflect the current world. Other arts have made the leap; painting, plays, and novels feel vibrantly contemporary. "Classical" music should feel that way, too.

One thing is clear to me. We shouldn't do more new music than we do right now. Or, rather, we shouldn't yet, because that might be a losing game. Orchestras might lose their mainstream audience; their fund raising might suffer; the people on their staffs and boards might feel uncomfortable. In the future, I'm not sure we can save classical music -- and make it compelling to the world outside -- if new works don't become as normal as they seemed in the 19th century. Maybe they should even be the norm. But that's for later; we're not there yet.
   To get there, though -- and even to sustain ourselves creatively right now -- we should aim to be passionately engaged with every new piece that we play. Of course passionate engagement isn't always possible; some new pieces (like new books or movies) will be duds. But we should do more for new music than simply program it, and hope for the best. Orchestras should get their audiences involved, along with their musicians, and the people on their staffs and boards. "We've played a world premiere! What does everybody think?" Let's have discussion; even arguments. Let's give our audience a chance to hear important pieces, even if our orchestra is not about to play them. We can talk about premieres in newsletters, e-mail, program books, and pre-concert lectures. Orchestras can sell CDs, if they're available. They can set up listening parties (like the reading groups so many people join). And they can work to get people interested. "Here's a Jennifer Higdon piece. It was a smash in Philadelphia. What does everybody think of it? Is it something we should play?"
   We can't change things overnight. But I think that a change is going to come; classical music may be evolving into something different, something livelier and more contemporary. If that's true, we can bring the change a little closer by taking steps against the doubts, the lack of information, and the apathy with which so many of us meet new music. We can make classical music what it was in past centuries, when new music didn't belong to a remote elite, and ordinary mortals had a lot to say about it.