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Notes on MusicBen Ratliff and Alex Ross discuss the state of the art form and the experience of listening.

Posted Thursday, Nov. 8, 2007, at 5:42 PM ET

Music critics Ben Ratliff and Alex Ross were online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, Nov. 8, to chat with readers about the state of jazz, pop, and classical. An unedited transcript follows.

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Pennsylvania: Your discussion triggered some of my longstanding observations about music, music performance and popular taste: Concerts, and I'm not talking about clubs here, are events, and not strictly musical ones. This is especially true of arena rock concerts, but it has become true of classical concerts as well. It's how they're now marketed, because the perceived competition at the rising price point in other entertainment events.

The demise of arts education in schools plays a role, in that younger people no longer have the long-ago (in their lives) exposure to "high art" (I include jazz here) that prior generations enjoyed. It might not awaken in you until you're in your 30s, but it provides a baseline appreciation. The proliferation and fragmentation of media formats make it too easy to hear only "what you like." Tight formats on radio prevent the sort of cross-pollination that you could hear 30-40 years ago. Lifestyle plays a role in that much of listening today is passive, background. Challenging those listeners will cause them to switch to another nonchallenging station. I do have some hope for the guerilla mindset I see in the current download generation; whether it translates to jazz clubs and classical concert programming is another matter.

Alex Ross: Thanks so much for all these obversations. I worry about all the same things. Price, for example. It's rather difficult these for people to go casually to a classical concert, just out of curiosity. Cheap seats are available, but they're not the best ones. Fifty years ago, even the best seats cost a fraction of what they are today (in adjusted dollars). Whenever big institutions offer cheaper tickets, there's a flood of interested newcomers. The Baltimore Symphony is performing a great experiment right now with $25 subscription seats, and they're having a huge success. Of course, lowering the ticket prices also lowers income, but classical institutions lose money anyway, even if they sell out night after night. So why not get an extra grant and lower the prices? That's the most obvious way to build a new audience.

Alex Ross: Ben, are people in jazz excited about internet possibilities as they are in classical?

Ben Ratliff: Using the internet to get one's music out there is pretty much the only hope for jazz, and I think we're going to see this more and more clearly. Record companies and radio are not the paradigms that musicians are looking at anymore to help them. But live music is very, very, very important.

I think the issue, for jazz, is how to get all the internet-related musical taste-broadening to translate to actually going out to the clubs. Right now there's an age issue, because the prime jazz audience—people over 45—don't spend as much time online as younger people. But give it 15 years or so, and you'll see big changes...

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Claverack, N.Y.: Respectfully, can I ask about what you believe the aim of your Slate discussion is? It's entitled "Leave Your Musical Island" ... but with all due respect, you haven't. You're just talking about jazz and classical ... and how the audience is deserting them ... and how it's not the music's fault, it's the audience's fault. Which, to be honest, seems kinda huffy and elitist. Are you intending to actually consider some of the other "islands" at some point? Or was that more a comment to the audience, a call for us to get off our islands and come visit yours?

Alex Ross: We've talked about a lot of different kinds of music here, from Timbalada to Led Zeppelin. I don't remember saying it was the audience's fault. I definitely don't believe that to be the case. In fact, the classical audience is doing pretty well at the moment. Halls are not empty. The Metropolitan Opera is selling out night after night. But I believe that there is room for the classical (or jazz) audience to expand, and to become more diverse. And one way to do that is to encourage people to explore many different genres and think about the connections between them: Coltrane listening to Stravinsky, Steve Reich listening to Coltrane, Sufjan Stevens listening to Reich. We need to get rid of the idea that each genre is a fortress on an island with an unchanging audience. That's my idea at least.

Ben Ratliff: Well, yeah. It's well underway, this process. I think that jazz and classical music are now thought of as two parts of a much wider spectrum of music for adult audiences.

However, jazz and classical do have their own individual traditions, and since we are each tuned into one of those traditions, we were comparing notes between islands.

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Alexandria, Va.: It's not just jazz—music and radio are controlled to by too few corporations. There's a lot of great music in all genres being made, most of it is not being heard by more than a small percentage of the population.

Alex Ross: The most damaging thing that has happened since 1980 or so is the mass-media enforcement of the idea that only genres appealing to, say, 18-30 males are of real significance. Everything else has been left by the wayside, no matter how many people love it. Will the Internet lead to a breakup of that monolithic demographic concept? I hope so. What Ben just said about waiting 10-15 years holds just as true for the clasical world and for all the other "niche" genres. I believe that in 20 years the image of classical music will be transformed in the public mind; it will once gain be a "mainstream" activity (to the extent that a mainstream still exists). I've seen many signs pointing in that direction. For example, almost a thousand people, about a third of them under the age of thirty, showed up for a new-music concert in Chicago sponsored by the Chicago Symphony. No stars on the program, all new pieces. It looked like an indie-rock show from the audience standpoint. And that kind of audience has become routine in Chicago (and also at similar concerts in Los Angeles).

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Ben Ratliff is a New York Times jazz critic. His new book is Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Alex Ross is The New Yorker's music critic. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has just been published.
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