The panel, held in a small theater in the Rock Hall, was a great success. The two co-sponsors had assembled a distinguished group of panelists, including Rouse, John Adams, Bob Santelli, the education director of the Rock Hall, and John Rockwell, the only other writer besides me with a national reputation for writing about rock as well as classical music. One measure of our success -- some of the older members of the Cleveland Orchestra's audience attended, and came up afterward to say they were now excited about hearing some rock!
To start things off, I listed a few reasons why classical music needs rock. (You can read my essay on this right here on this site.) Here's what I suggested:

• Classical music wants a new, younger audience. This audience already listens to rock; the classical music world needs to understand the music its possible new listeners already love. (For what happens when the classical music business doesn't do its homework, see my essay on classical music marketing.)
• Once, classical singers freely ornamented the music they sang. Today's singers don't know how to do that. But R&B singers do -- R&B can provide a living example of something classical music has forgotten.
• What year is it? In our era, rock is the lingua franca of American music (and, for that matter, music all over the world). Once, classical music could easily incorporate the folk and popular music of its time. Why not now?

At the end of the panel, I suggested one more reason, but I'll let you read that in a review of the event that appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I've got to congratulate the writer; her quotes are dead accurate, and she zeroed right in on the most important things that everybody said.
One last note, though, before we get to the review. John Adams, a really sweet guy, emerged as the most conservative member of the panel. And he was appalled! With a kind of wry dismay, he said afterwards that he'd never been the most conservative person anywhere else he'd ever been. And it's true -- in classical music, he's been treated as a member of the avant-garde. But in Cleveland, his views on rock put him far on the right.

The review:

Classical, Pop Experts Embrace Differences

by Wilma Salisbury

What is the relationship between popular and classical music?
The question was explored in a stimulating symposium last night at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.
Five experts who discussed similarities and differences between high and low musical forms did not reach definitive conclusions. But they delved into controversial issues, and they dared to disagree.
Contemporary classical music was represented by John Adams and Christopher Rouse, leading composers who were commissioned to write concertos for the Cleveland Orchestra this season. Robert Santelli, the rock hall's director of education, defended rock. Music critics John Rockwell of the New York Times and Greg Sandow of the Wall Street Journal straddled the pop and classical genres.
Adams, one of America's most popular serious composers, was surprised to be cast as the highbrow on the panel. But he was outspoken in his opinions about rock. He said he listened to it only passively, did not aspire to "go platinum" and saw no necessity for classical music and rock to "shake hands like Arafat and Rabin."
Bristling at the idea of "kneeling at the altar of pop culture," Adams stressed the importance of music education in America and spoke eloquently of the richness, depth and resonance of the classical tradition in music, literature and poetry.
Rouse was friendlier to rock. He said he grew up listening to Little Richard, Elvis and Chuck Berry and was also introduced to Beethoven at an early age. Although he acknowledged the influence of rock in his compositions he said he appreciated the timelessness and profundity of the classics and was concerned about contemporary culture's lack of respect for great composers of the past.
Santelli admitted that he knew little about classical music. He said he felt intimidated by the classics and unwelcome in the classical field, especially when he saw sophisticated musicians "smirking and shaking their heads" at crossover works by Paul McCartney and Billy Joel. His mission, he said, is to reach out to music teachers and persuade them to knock down the barriers between the classics and rock.
Rockwell knocked down the concept of barriers and talked about the "flowing interchange" between classical and popular genres. Expressing a dislike for fences and walls, he said we lived in a multicultural universe where influences are absorbed from a variety of sources. Offering sharp critical judgments, he described rock composer Stuart Copeland's opera "Holy Blood and Crescent Moon" (which was premiered by Cleveland Opera) as "the worst opera ever written," and he dismissed McCartney's "Standing Stone" as "an English neoromantic pastiche thing."
But his evaluations were not all negative. He proclaimed Joni Mitchell "the Schubert of the 20th century."
Sandow, who served as moderator, said classical music needed to learn from pop and rock. Comparing artistic values of the two genres, he said Bruce Springsteen singing with the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar expressed something "deeply American, dark and important" that was missing from classical music. He also affirmed the importance of music education for people who grow up listening to rock.
In an informal survey, the audience indicated it was evenly divided among classical devotees, rock fans and fence straddlers. Questions to the panel ranged from simple queries about the artistic quality of "Roll Over, Beethoven" to technical discussions on harmony and orchestration.
There were no concluding comments, only Sandow's recommendation that the audience should attend the Cleveland Orchestra's premiere performance of Rouse's Percussion Concerto this week and take a look at "shrines to Rouse and Adams" currently on display at Severance Hall.

(I don't know if I quite agree with that last point. I thought my Springsteen remark served as a summary. One curious, rather sad detail, which I decided I wouldn't rub in anyone's face. John Adams doesn't think rock can stand next to classical music artistically, but he's barely listened to any since the '60s. Bob Santelli -- when I asked him to respond to Adams (the paper didn't quote this) -- said rock could indeed stand next to classical music. But he doesn't know anything about classical music! So neither party in this vivid dispute had any way to really argue his point.)