I find this curious. Without the audience, orchestras wouldn't exist. The people in the audience are fellow human beings, often our friends. Why aren't they more involved in orchestras' operations and planning? A year ago, Robert Spano gave an address at the American Symphony Orchestra League's annual conference. He talked about changes happening at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, where he'd just been engaged as music director. To plan these changes, he said, he'd involved what he called "the entire orchestra family," by which he meant the musicians, staff, and board, and also the chorus -- everyone except the audience, whom he didn't mention at all. Not, of course, that the people in the chorus might not also be members of the audience, who now and then (when they sing at a concert) step into a larger role. But that just underlines my point. If all these people did was listen to the music, the orchestra -- or so it seemed from Spano's remarks -- wouldn't think it had to talk to them.
Maybe that really is what we think, at least some of us. Some time ago, one of my friends in the classical music business was talking, with great excitement, about contemporary music broadcasts on the BBC. Each one featured a different composer. I asked if he thought the BBC should survey its listeners, to find out which composers they'd liked. (Interestingly, something like that happened later on, when the BBC became a major sponsor of the Masterprize, a composers' competition in which ordinary listeners decide who wins, after professionals pick a group of finalists.) But my friend was horrified at my suggestion. How could listeners be qualified to rate the composers? What was this, a popularity contest?
Some time afterward, I talked to this same friend about a project of his, a festival he'd organized for an orchestra. Panel discussions were part of the festival, and were meant to probe deep into the historical significance of all the music being played. I asked my friend if he'd thought of discussing what the music might mean to people hearing the music today -- to the audience, in other words. "We've discussed the problem of the audience," he said, and while he didn't emphasize "problem," I've italicized the word, to show how much it staggered me. Why should the audience be a problem? Because it might not care about the panel discussions as much as the organizers did? Then my friend said that the audience could, of course, ask questions -- which isn't exactly remarkable, because normally there's a question period at the end of every panel.
Nor is a chance to ask questions my idea of audience involvement. People still would sit silently during the panels, absorbing knowledge from above. The chance to ask, afterwards, for a clarification or two doesn't mean anyone truly cares what the audience thinks. If the audience had been surveyed in advance, maybe the whole structure of the panels would have been different. Or maybe not -- but how often do we stop to check?
A few years ago, the New York Philharmonic started its season with a really fine Beethoven festival; all the symphonies were played, in order, during a single week. Before and after the first concert, there were panel discussions on just one topic, a fascinating if somewhat obscure one: Beethoven's manuscripts.
I'm not going to say that the people who came didn't seem interested (or that I myself didn't learn a lot), but what else might the audience want to hear about? The people who came to these concerts love Beethoven. I'm sure there are many things they'd love to hear discussed, starting, perhaps with the experience of hearing all the symphonies at once. What could they learn about Beethoven that way that they couldn't learn otherwise? What could they learn about themselves? For that matter, what do the musicians learn, or the conductor? The Philharmonic thought the festival was a success, because all the concerts sold out. No one can blame them for that, but they missed a chance to treat their audience as something more than passive ticket-buyers, and to involve them more deeply with music.

This view of the audience -- this practice of, in many ways, taking it for granted -- has deep implications. It has consequences for commerce, for the way orchestras do business. It has consequences for art. And ultimately it has consequences for the way we treat each other as human beings.
What are the consequences for commerce? Orchestras treat the people in their audience as if they were objects. They're supposed to buy tickets. If they don't, they're treated as an obstacle -- and the fear that they'll be one is especially strong when the orchestra wants to program something interesting (new music, for instance) that it's afraid the audience won't like. But is this good business? Wouldn't it be better, especially in an age when we feel that classical music is threatened, to think of the audience as friends? Wouldn't orchestras sell more tickets if they cared more deeply about what the audience thought, knew more about it, and spoke more actively with the audience about why difficult music appears on the schedule?
Those are the consequences for business. The consequences for art are, if anything, even sadder. Orchestras tell the audience what it's supposed to think. They do that in many ways, but one of the most striking is the way they normally write program notes. The notes, first of all, usually explain why the works on the program are masterpieces. They don't leave room for debate -- or, more to the point, for personal taste. Not everyone likes every composer. Why not acknowledge that, and talk about varied responses to what the orchestra plays? Some pieces even by great composers aren't all that good. Suppose an orchestra programs the Tchaikovsky Second Piano Concerto. Why not admit in program notes that it's a failure, as a piece of music -- though an interesting one -- and ask the audience to decide for themselves why it doesn't work? They could then post their reasons on the orchestra's web site. Or members of the audience could even be asked to listen to the piece in advance, and write comments, which then could be part of the program notes.

Bur the worst thing about program notes is how technical they often are. One unfortunate example that sticks in my mind is a comment on Beethoven's Fifth that I read in a New York Philharmonic program. (I should note, by the way, that I don't mean to single out the Philharmonic. It's simply my local orchestra, the one I go to most often, and therefore know the most about.) Here's what I read. It's about the horn call and violin melody at the start of the second theme of the first movement:

An interesting detail about the horn call is that the fourth note, B-flat, is held for 13 measures so that it serves as a bass to the dolce violin melody that follows. This corresponds to the extra length of the D at the beginning of the symphony, and no doubt when Beethoven had the afterthought of lengthening that D it was to clarify this relationship. As for the violin melody, the first two measures outline the B-flat/E-flat dyad (though in reverse order), and the third and fourth outline F and B-flat. In other words, it uses the same pitch vocabulary as the opening and the horn call, and again the link in the middle is E-flat/F.

What does this mean? Anyone who can tell me gets a free subscription to Symphony. Well, I'm joking, of course, and I don't mean to imply that technical analysis can't teach us a lot. [Though in fact, as I say in an essay that's going to be published in a book in 2004, I think that this particular analysis, written by Michael Steinberg, come close to nonsense.] My point is that -- whatever the value of these musings might be -- most of the Philharmonic's audience can't understand them. That's especially true, I'd think, of the sentence about the "B-flat/E-flat dyad." Who's likely to know what a dyad is? Only people who've taken advanced courses in music theory, where they'd learn that "dyad" is nothing more than a fancy term for any collection of two pitches. But how many Philharmonic subscribers -- or, for that matter, orchestra administrators -- would know that? And if neither the audience nor the staff of the orchestra (nor, I'd guess, most of the musicians) knows the word, why is it in the program book?
I do think, though, that program notes like these serve a purpose -- a very unfortunate one, and not, I trust, something that anyone consciously intends. These program notes put the audience in its place. And that place, as I've said, is at the bottom of the great chain of music. If you go to the Philharmonic, read that program note, and don't know what a dyad is, what are you likely to think? That you don't know very much, of course. Here you are, a loyal Philharmonic subscriber. You love your orchestra, and you trust it. The information in the program book, you're going to conclude, is information the orchestra wants you to have. So if you don't understand it, it's clearly your own fault. You just don't know enough. Best you should sit there in silence during concerts, doing what you're told.
   And what's especially sad is what program notes don't say. But here I should start the last part of my discussion: the consequences this way of treating an audience has for simple human relationships. This point, I'd think, has been implicit in everything I've said up to now. If orchestras treat ticket-buyers as objects, they're not thinking of them as people. If they put their audience in a subordinate place, even without meaning to, they're not treating their audience decently.

How could orchestras do better? Here's my two cents. The first and most basic thing is, as I've already said, to remember that the people in the audience are just that -- people. They have thoughts and feelings. They've been around; they know about life. All of this can connect -- inevitably does connect -- to the music they hear.
So why shouldn't orchestras talk about that? Why shouldn't program notes, just for instance, talk about how the music feels when we hear it? This doesn't have to be a simple discussion; I don't mean that program notes should gush about the wonderful passion of it all. But music does have an emotional impact. It can also make us think. It can change our lives. So instead of talking about what a Beethoven symphony meant when it was first performed -- or how it advanced Beethoven's development, or how it brought something new to sonata form -- why don't program notes ask what a Beethoven symphony means today? What do we get from hearing it?
Those comments could come from poets, painters, scholars, and musicians. And they could also come from the audience. As I write, I'm picturing the many concert halls I've sat in. I'm picturing the audiences, or rather the people in those audiences. I'm imagining their faces -- composed, respectful, trained not to show much of what's going on inside. But inside, I imagine, is a whirlwind. Behind those faces lies the response to some of the greatest, most meaningful and provocative art the world has ever known. What is that response? If our art has any meaning, we need to know what it is -- and we need to honor it, in all its diversity.

Acknowledging that response in program notes would only be a beginning. Why shouldn't orchestras involve their audience in planning? I'm not talking about popularity polls, or programming only music the audience says it wants to hear. I mean something more meaningful -- organizing an audience council, let's say, that would help the orchestra accomplish all its goals.
Suppose, for instance, the orchestra wanted to commission a new work. What would the audience council think about that? I imagine they'd be interested. If they didn't know about the composer who was likely to get the commission, I imagine they'd have questions to ask. And their simplest, most natural question would be, "Why?" Not "why would you inflict this composer on us?" but "why are you interested in him or her?" Presumably the orchestra can answer that. Presumably the answer is, at bottom, very simple: "We like the music." "Why do you like it?" the council asks..
And people on the orchestra's staff -- the artistic administrator, maybe, or the music director, or some of the musicians -- have an answer for that. This all leads into a discussion of the composer's work, of other new music, of other premieres the orchestra has done. The audience council learns things it never knew about new music, which it can then share with others in the audience, in panel discussions (at last we get audience members on them!), pre-concert talks, program notes, the orchestra's web site, and doubtless in other ways. And the orchestra, I'll bet, would learn much more about what its audience thinks about new music.
Best of all, the audience would now have entered the orchestra's musical process. And who knows where that might lead? Maybe the orchestra would want to do more new music! Maybe it would even be encouraged to play difficult new works, if it engaged the audience as a partner in approaching them. Maybe it would learn about composers it had neglected. (Why not assume that some people in the audience, at least, know as much as some of the orchestra's staff knows?) Maybe it would find that people in the audience would enjoy contributing even small amounts toward an audience commission. That's already happened at the New Jersey Symphony, and is the thought behind the People's Commissioning Fund, a program of the Bang on a Can new music group in New York.
I've offered just a few examples of how the audience might be more involved. I'm sure all of us can think of others. And if orchestras start doing some of these things, I'm sure they'll find even more possibilities.
But what's important now is to start the process. Maybe this can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship -- a friendship that might help to revitalize classical music, at a time when it urgently needs some help.

Symphony, July-August 2002