Scenes from Bullfights--In Bronze

 

Eighty-Seven Birthdays

Some Paragraphs About My Favorite Subject

   My last birthday in Heidelberg, the terminus a quo, was on February 12, 1939, my twelfth.  It took place, uncelebrated, in a house denuded of the furnishings that had been stowed into so-called lifts for shipment to New York.  Number 13, in New York, was the overture to my Bar Mitzvah at a rump German-Jewish congregation that assembled every Sabbath in the Audubon Theater where, much later, Malcolm X was murdered.  I was a star performer, chanting much more than required, singing out in a way that foreshadowed my later quasi-career singing in various choruses.  My presents: altogether $13 in cash from various people plus a few fairly useless items.  While I, ignorant of relevant customs, had no expectations, my mother, with European practices in mind, was furious at what she took to be the stinginess of our relatives.  (Inflation has made today’s equivalent sound more generous, since those thirteen dollars would now come to more than two hundred.)

   Some people sensibly stay put for most of their lives, at least after college.  Not me. I hope the following overview will not be too boring.

   While I did not permanently leave New York until almost exactly twenty years after arriving, that stretch of birthdays, to 1959, was twice interrupted—for one of them in the US Navy, aboard ship in the China Sea, while the next birthday away from New York, #24, took place in Paris, a way station during  my close friend Carl Hovde’s and my travels in Europe on fellowships from Columbia College.

   Nor did I go through graduate school—also at Columbia, starting in 1951—without interruption, since I had two birthdays while I was a “fellow” at Mortimer Adler’s Institute for Philosophical Research in San Francisco.  The work we did there left no discernable mark on philosophical or any other scholarship, but living in San Francisco induced a strong desire in Fannia and me to return there if it were at all possible.  

   And possible it turned out to be. After receiving my PhD in 1959, a couple of months after I turned 32, and with the help of friends we had made at San Francisco State, I became an assistant professor there.  The trip that summer, leaving New York and Columbia for the West, was a veritable second Bar Mitzvah.  Since I was a freshman at Columbia until I got my last degree, I saw myself regarded as “good old Rudy,” never knowing what my professors really thought of my work.  “Today I am a man” is the cliché opening of the Bar Mitzvah speech.  You get the idea.

    Our happy San Francisco stint was pleasantly interrupted by a Guggenheim in Florence, the locus of my 38^th birthday; but it ended, alas, some months after my 41^st.  I will not give an account of the “time of troubles” at SF State; books have been written about those unhappy years.  Suffice it to say that I felt caught on the horns of a dilemma.  I was unable to disengage myself from the College’s stormy politics (as departmental chair, Senate member, part of an ineffectual president’s kitchen cabinet, and, at night, as haranguer of students to stay out of the way of tactical police) and stick to just teaching my classes.  But I was also gloomily pessimistic about the outcome of those ugly clashes.  Getting out from under, we left SF State and, sadly, San Francisco.

   My 42^nd through 47^th birthdays were spent in Poughkeepsie, teaching at Vassar, one year excepted, when we lived in Oxford on a sabbatical augmented by a fellowship.  But after #48 came a radical change.  In 1974 I became arts and sciences dean at Northwestern, beginning a career as administrator, thirteen years as dean and two further ones as provost at the University of Pittsburgh.  My last birthday as administrator, in 1989, was #62. 

   I stayed on in Pittsburgh, teaching and chairing the philosophy department before retiring around No. 68, finally leaving that city after I had turned 85, making the quarter of a century in Pittsburgh the longest stretch I had lived anywhere.

   The terminus ad quem was Mexico City, where I arrived in plenty of time for Number 86, to live in the home of (daughter) Ellie, her husband, Miguel and teenage children—and my grandchildren—Max and Eva.  So, the locus of Number 87 is a truly splendid haven that, emphatically, is not a retirement place for ancients.  We celebrat with a long lunch at a superb little French restaurant within walking distance of the house, serving meals we could not have afforded were that bistro located in Manhattan.  And in Mexico City I hope to remain for whatever subsequent birthdays there might yet be.

Gladiators Then and Now*

   In the waning years of the Roman Republic—that is in the period before Rome was ruled by a long succession of emperors—gladiator games “provided their sponsors with extravagantly expensive but effective opportunities for self-promotion while offering cheap, exciting entertainment to their clients.[27] Gladiators became big business for trainers and owners.”  “Enrollment in a gladiator school offered a trade, regular food, housing of sorts and a fighting chance of fame and fortune.”

   This was so, because gladiatorial performances were immensely popular and while there was some governmental supervision, the spectacles spread throughout the empire, with amphitheaters built from the north of Europe to Africa, with the Coliseum in Rome is no doubt the most famous.

   Today, football is the closest analogy.  Just as Roman politicians, from emperors on down, gained visibility and adherence by sponsoring gladiatorial events, so cities and universities attain fame and supporters by fielding teams that can draw fans from near and far.  Moreover, just as in today’s stadium, food was then made available to the spectators, music accompanied the gladiators’ clashes, with their skill more prized than brute force.  And just as in contemporary football, fights were then supervised by the equivalent of umpires.

   The fly in the gladiatorial ointment was the fact that many—not all—contests ended in a death.  Gladiators died young, even most of the successful ones.  The ethos seemed to consider it more important how someone died—honorably, bravely—than that one died, a belief accepted not only by the spectators, but, it seems, by the combatants themselves.  Such an ideology makes some sense for a nation that maintained a huge army professional enough to overcome most of the then known world and disciplined enough to extract taxes from the places they had conquered.

   One might be tempted to say, “life, then, was cheap.”  But I think that would be a mistake.  Life expectancy was about half what it is here today, even when not considering infant and early childhood mortality, making quite common an early death from natural causes.  Still, there was mumbling, if apparently not much: objection to people being killed for entertainment.  At the end of the first century CE, however, Tertullian, the early Christian theologian, vehemently condemned the entire murderous gladiatorial practice.

   Today, people live a lot longer, thanks to huge advances in medicine. For most of a person’s lifespan, the goal is not to prolong life, but to maintain a life of high quality.  And playing football is certainly a serious obstacle in the way of that goal.  The hazards of playing football have been written about almost since the beginning of the game.  But even so blunt an instrument as Dr. Richard Schneider’s 1973 book, Head and Neck Injuries in Football—arguing that injuries to the brain cause serious, permanent disability so that players who survive these injuries will never again be able to function normally—had no effect on the profitable football industry, because its consumers also cheerfully kept their heads in the sand.

   And not just the spectators of big time football.  Since 1997, more than 50 youngsters have been killed or sustained serious injury playing football, even before reaching gladiator status.  More recently the professionals took actions of their own and succeeded in getting the NFL to allocate $760 million—widely believed to be an insufficient sum—for medical help and compensation for more than 4000  retired players for brain injuries incurred while they were in harness. 

   Many of those former heroes lead sharply diminished lives.  “I went into the kitchen and could not remember why I went there,” says one.  Here is a fuller description of what happened to a star on the field: http://nyti.ms/1f57hEe. Not dead, but not alive either.
       This is not the end of the story and who knows how it will end or whether it will end at all.  The tea leaves are not encouraging.  Even after Constantine converted to Christianity early in the 4^th century and forbad gladiatorial spectacles in the Roman empire, it took still another couple of centuries before they disappeared altogether.  Not a good sign for the future of football and its victims.

* The quotes about gladiators and most of what I learned about them comes from a very scholarly Wikipedia article.  What I know about recent events in the world of football comes from The New York Times.

The People Everyone Calls “Conservative” Aren’t Conservative

A Short Discourse on Political Labels

   Everyone I read refers to Tea Party adherents as conservatives and contrasts them with liberals on the “left” and with more traditional Republicans (if any remain) who tend to be called “moderates.”  My strong beef is that the likes of Ted Cruz and fellow tea partiers and Rand Paul and friends are labeled “conservatives,” which they are not.  Let me treat this topic in the context of a brief account of the political labels in current use.

   Start with the easiest one, because least controversial.  A liberal is someone who is prepared to use governmental powers to accomplish social goals, such as helping less fortunate members of society and the elderly to attain or retain a decent standard of living.  More broadly, someone with a liberal outlook is prepared to support actions by some agency of the state that aim at the improvement of the future—e.g., by supporting research, education, the environment by means of governmental actions and will also approve of the taxes that make such moves possible.  But while a liberal does not accord a special status to what now is—to the status quo—and is open to change it, that liberal supports changes aimed at solving particular problems, but does not—and this is important—propose to change the very system within which we live: representative government and a capitalist, if regulated, economy. (Full disclosure: I am such a liberal, with a philosophy rooted in moral convictions that can remain unexplained here.)

   While liberalism as an ideology was essentially born in the Enlightenment—though with roots going back to ancient Greece—conservatism, as a political philosophy, has above all an 18^th-century father in Edmund Burke and a 20^th century descendant in Russell Kirk.  By oversimplifying somewhat, I will try to express their position by means of two principles.  The first has to do with what is:  History, in its unfathomable complexity, generates institutions, customs, habits, beliefs, and relationships, intertwined in innumerable ways that are not by any means always discernible.  What the processes of history have brought about deserves our greatest respect:  think “tradition, tradition” as celebrated in Fiddler on the Roof.

   The second principle pertains to what we can do.  Conservatism asserts not only that humans beings are quite limited in their ability to understand that complex historical tapestry, but their rationality and knowledge are sharply limited in attempts to bring about desired goals.  Erstens kommt es anders und zweitens als man denkt. The envisaged goals are in fact not brought about, while there may well be unpredicted and undesired effects of those human actions.  The odds are that broad plans will go awry; limit your ambitious to modest and incremental changes.

   If this brief account catches the essence of conservatism, they in Congress who are called that are anything but.  Shut down government, attempt to defund a law created by normal legislative procedures, undermine programs in place since the era of FDR and more—these are not the actions or proposals of conservatives.  They are the ideas of radicals (in that they go to the root); they aim at major changes of the status quo; they are measures of reactionaries, in that they want to return to previous stages of history.  In no way, I repeat, are they conservatives

   Then there are libertarians, as represented by the Paul’s, père et fils, who are also wrongly classified as conservatives.  Their position is to radically reduce governmental action in all spheres from its sway over the economy, as well as in the country’s relation to the rest of the world.  Libertarians are not anarchists, since they hold that the state is needed for defense and to maintain civil order, but they are committed only to what they regard to be minimally necessary governmental action.  Let every individual do what she or he wants and can do when left alone.  Full sway is given to individual enterprise and action, putting Emerson’s self-reliance to shame.  While this  view has 19^th century roots—in Herbert Spencer, for example, and is also wrongly attributed to Adam Smith of the century before—the ideology in its present form goes back primarily to Ayn Rand, an unreadable novelist who sanctified laissez faire in ways that has attracted fervent followers.

   How should we classify these libertarians?  Conservative writer William Buckley tried to include them in his tent, though he was fully aware of fundamental incongruities, while Russell Kirk firmly bans them from the fold.  The verdict is surely obvious.  Not cautious about initiating major change, with the status quo in no way privileged, libertarians, in short, are not conservatives.  Indeed, the magnitude of the changes they support makes them analogous to those who advocate a systemic change to socialism, say, or communism.  Accordingly, the libertarian Messrs Paul are  also radicals, since what they advocate, is in no way merely incremental but a transformation to another system.

   With the term “radical” I conclude my short and very American exercise concerning political labels—namely by adcovating calling a spade a spade.

En Saga, En Pequeña Saga

   Last summer, I bought a 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro in Los Angeles, with the idea of watching DVDs at my desk.  While I was surprised that Mac no longer sported an internal CD/DVD drive and vaguely wondered why not, I took the advice of the experts and for not much money, added an external drive.  It worked, sort of, for a while; but not well and then gave out altogether.  It turned out to be defective and Miguel, who examined it, was worried that it might actually harm the discs it was playing.

   No big deal; I’ll replace it with another one.  In a mall not very far down on the Insurgentes was a store specializing in Macs, without being an official Mac store, so Ellie and I walked there to buy an appropriate drive. I had brought along my computer and a favorite Blu-ray, so I could learn how to work the new player.  The store’s rules however required that I first  buy it before the package could be opened and its celophane wrapping torn.  I made the purchase; let the demonstration begin.  The package was openedand my disc inserted.

   Nothing happened!  I had brought my all-time favorite Le Nozze di Figaro that I had watched successfully before I gave up on the original player.  Nothing happened, thanks to the late Steven Jobs.  My Blu-ray Figaro, was using a technique that Mr. Jobs had condemned as a “bag of hurt.” Mac would have no truck with it.   I don’t know whether that harsh verdict was a technical judgment or a commercial swipe at Sony; I hadn’t followed any part of this story.  But whichever, it seems to have been misguided: Blu-ray is flourishing.  I was mighty lucky to get my money back in spite of the torn wrapping, but I was back at Point Aleph.  

   I got some advice specifically what models of external drives to look for, with the names of half a dozen models.  I checked out some of them with the help of Google and found they mostly got good reviews.  Now to get a hold of one.  Ordering from Amazon, like anything involving the Mexican mail service, takes an unpredictably long stretch of time, is unsure, and, because import duty will be charged, expensive.  So I started drudging.  But even though I’m a pretty prodigious walker, I was mighty tired on the last of several days that I visited the five different outfits that might have sold me one or another version of what I sought.  No such luck.  Just a piece of advice: try La Plaza de la Computación en la ciudad de México.  It was located downtown, emphatically not within walking distance.

  I returned home; that errand was for another day.  Not so.  Ellie, it turned out, was downtown on other errands and had also been told about about that Plaza and phoned me from there.  One external player was to be had, the LaCie d2 Blu-ray XL.  It was bigger and more expensive than any of the others and was above all intended for people who wanted to burn their own discs (of which I was not one).  But it was a bird in the hand, with, so far, no bird to be heard twittering in the bush.

   It turned out to be easy to connect up—even by me!—by following Ikea-like diagrammatic instructions.  In little time I had tried it out with that Figaro Blu-ray, with an “old fashioned” DVD, and with a CD, a species soon to become extinct.  It passed all three tests with flying colors and singing sounds.  End of that Saga.

The Profuse Use of Adjuncts Changes the Nature of Academic Institutions

   I’ve previously written—though not on this blog—about the hazards of using large numbers of low-paid adjuncts to do a significant amount of the teaching of undergraduates.  There are issues there of quality control, of fairness to instructors regarding pay and benefits, and more.  But I have not seen discussions—admittedly, I have not looked all that far—about how these changes affect the very nature of academic institutions.

   The classical organization of a college or university has the faculty determine educational policy, a big and complex topic.  In my day, there were wild and woolly discussions on that subject,  particularly when we moved to change undergraduate requirements fairly early in my stint as dean of arts and sciences at Northwestern.  Some contributions to those discussions should be called “political,” since there were faculty members who voted to support policies primarily because they would steer more students into their departments.  But, maybe surprisingly for skeptics, many of the discussions and votes were much more “high-minded,” in that participants expressed their often thoughtful beliefs as to what a good undergraduate education should be.  I was very pleased with the outcome at Northwestern and pleased that many of the reforms instituted around thirty-five years ago are still in place.

   Now, I don’t want to mislead anyone.  The discussions by the entire faculty (who had to vote on them) about requirements and similar issues were not exactly scintillating.  Educational policy couldn’t hold a candle to bread and butter issues.  However, the committees charged with formulating curricular proposals were indeed focused on those issues, articulating different points of view and coming together on thoughtful final recommendations to be voted on at meetings of the faculty of Northwestern’s College of Arts and Sciences.

    None of these discussions were hi-falutin’ debates about grand theories of what a liberal arts education should consist of.  Pace Mortimer Adler!  Some participants had thought a lot about that, many more had not.  But just about all of the faculty members who took part in these deliberations  had extensive experience teaching undergraduates.  

   What is taking the place now, when the faculty population has changed so radically?  How are the features of undergraduate education determined under the current dispensation?  There are two possibilities, neither of them very attractive.  The first has only the tenured and tenure-track faculty have a say on the undergraduate curriculum.  Makes sense?  Yes, as fulltime at their institution, they are so to speak the keepers of their college or university.  But on the other hand, it doesn’t make sense: a significant fraction of this elite doesn’t teach undergraduates at all or they teach only such advanced courses as senior seminars.  In short, many of this regular faculty lack experience with the students for whom educational policy is to be formulated.  They have the choice of staying silent, waiting for the issue to pass, or they may sound off nevertheless.  The latter is the more likely alternative, since ignorance seldom trumps a deeply ingrained habit among academics: to speak up.

   The other alternative is to have adjuncts, who actually teach those undergraduates, participate in those curricular discussions.  There are two serious problems with that course.  From the institution’s point of view, is it appropriate to have its policies determined by people who have no stake in its future?  No business would tolerate an analogous arrangement.  Looked at from the other side, why should underpaid adjuncts, rushing off to teach another class at a distant institution, stay around to expound their on educational policy pertaining to undergraduates at this place?  They are paid for teaching courses—usually not very much, usually without any of the benefits granted to “regular” faculty.  Even if an institution invites their participation, why indeed should they bother?

   My conclusion is not a happy one.  The replacement by adjuncts of tenure-track faculty does not simply change the economics of institutions of higher education, but transforms those institutions in a much more fundamental way.   When Eisenhower addressed the Columbia faculty just before assuming that university’s presidency, Nobel physicist, I. I. Rabi, responded to him by saying:  “Please, General, don’t address us as if we were the employees of the university, we are the university.” 

   That is no longer an obvious statement.  Not only has the cadre of “genuine” faculty shrunk radically, but the number of administrators of all kinds has veritably exploded.  (A couple of years ago, I tediously counted faculty members and administrators at a top-rated New England college and found there were more or the latter than of the former.)  At the same time, presidents of colleges and universities are no longer paid generously augmented professorial salaries, as used to be the case, but a great many of them now receive salaries and benefits not unlike those of CEOs of business companies. 

   In short, colleges and universities—not all of them yet; but just wait a few years—are progressively taking on the characteristics of commercial enterprises.  That is not a good thing.  However, why it is not, calls for another discussion.            

What’s in a Name If It’s the Name of a Composer?

   While a rose may smell just as sweet whatever it is called, there are plenty of contexts where names matter.  Who is named as the composer of the works announced to be on the next symphony program will affect the size of the audience, independently of the actual style and merit of the selection named.  Simply put, many potential audience members associate  style with composers’ names: Mozart, melodious classic;  Schönberg, dissonant modern.  People who devise programs know this very well and where funding and even survival depends on getting a decent audience, close attention is paid to this presumed association of name with work.

   When some years ago Lorin Maazel did all of the Tchaikovsky symphonies during a Pittsburgh Symphony season it virtually guaranteed a respectable audience, even though the seven symphonies vary considerably—let’s say in stature—while the unnumbered Manfred Symphony is a long work and, in my view, mostly on the dreary side.  (I don’t go as far as Leonard Bernstein who called it “trash.”) But it is by the popular Tchaikovsky whose name draws.  So, of course, does Beethoven’s, though, except for the overture, most of the incidental music for Goethe’s Egmont I heard not long ago left me fairly bored.  If others agree with me, then even the greatest of names is no guarantee of the highest quality and interest.

   “Who cares?” those makers of symphony programs might say, “it’s all positive if the names of composers attract audiences.  Moreover, if that gets audiences to hear music that is less than great, that’s also good and perhaps will be an unarticulated lesson in discrimination.  In any case, a proper meal will include vegetables and potatoes to accompany that great roast.”

  Everything about this envisaged response sounds right to me.  If familiar composers’ names get people to come to concerts, splendid!  The odds are good that they will enjoy the concert; there is even a chance that they will enjoy a work on the program not by a composer familiar to that listener and if she enjoys it as well, it will have been another lesson in an unplanned course in music appreciation. 

   The real problem with going by names is in the other direction, where names keep audiences away.  What prompts this entire discussion is a program played early in December of last year by the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional (OSN), here in Mexico City.   It consisted of Anton Weber’s Im Sommerwind, Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs, and Alexander Zemlinky’s Lyric Symphony.

   I doubt that anyone will disagree with me when I assert that this program would never be found in the season of an American symphony orchestra, prominent or minor, with the possible though unlikely exception of the orchestra of a major conservatory.  (That  improbable concert would have to be at a ­major music school, since the three works require large orchestras and two of them very accomplished singers.)

   What’s in a name?  That!  Weber and Berg are known, even to those only superficially acquainted with the literature of music, to be atonalists, composers who please nobody who is wedded to the traditional variations of major and minor scales, harmonized appropriately.  So, no Weber, please, and no Berg.  Zemlinsky?  That name doesn’t sound familiar.  He’s surely not of the 19^th century; no doubt he is a member of the dissonant bunch with not a recognizable melody within earshot.

   Plausible guesses, but wrong.  Im Smmerwind was  written in 1904, when Weber was indeed a student of Schönberg, but it is actually a gorgeous late-romantic piece for large orchestra, never published or performed during the composer’s lifetime.  Berg’s seven songs of 1905-08, too, were written while the composer was studying with that fountainhead of atonality, but their style derives mostly from Richard Strauss, Mahler, and even Debussy.  To be sure the orchestral version I heard was produced considerably later, probably making the harmonic origin more obvious than in the piano version, never heard by me.

   With Zemlinsky, the relationship to Schönberg is reversed.  The latter is a few years younger than the former and Zemlinsky taught Schönberg counterpoint, thus becoming the only teacher the inventor of the tone row ever had.  The seven-movement Lyric Symphony was written considerably later than the other two works, in 1922-23, and counts as a major late-romantic work that never becomes quite as engaging as most of the Mahler symphonies.  But it also never dips its toes into the atonal pond of the composer who had by then become his brother-in-law.

   In short, that OSN concert featured three major late-romantic works of the highest quality, each one of which is very infrequently performed.  For me, it was so special treat, getting me to go both to the Friday and the Sunday performances.

There Is a Coda

   I said at the outset that the people who put together programs for symphony orchestras know well the basic principles informing these thoughts: First, that the names of composers both bring people into concerts and, more poignantly, that there are names that discourage potential audience from showing up.  While I’ve said nothing about composers that are just not known to many of a  potential audience, my discussion of Zemlinsky may suggest a not uncommon phenomenon, expressed in a familiar German saying:  Was der Bauer nicht kennt das frisst er nicht: If the farmer doesn’t know it, he won’t eat it. 

   Second, what a potential audience member supposes to be the case may be quite wrong.  In short, by having potential concert goers act on ignorance or misinformation, orchestras risk reduced audiences, during an era when many non-musical factors tend to depress the number of “consumers” of live orchestral music.

   What do program makers do in response?  The (very) rare ones ignore the hazard and devise varied programs: scary composer-names be damned.  While the OSN concert I’ve discussed was quite well attended on both days—if not as well as the full house that is achieved when a famous violinist is scheduled to play a popular concerto—the OSN, like most Mexican and European orchestras, is funded by the state and can thus risk a poorly attended concert, if not poor attendance in the long run.  US orchestras are dependend on ticket income and, above all, on donations from private citizens; and those two are very much connected: donations will not come to orchestras playing to empty seats.  So, with exceedingly rare exceptions—perhaps the Boston Symphony Orchestra during the relatively brief Levine years was such a one—artistic managers eschew risks, to coin a euphemism, to the point of limiting the programming to the Top Forty, as my late friend Gideon Toeplitz referred to the most popular works in the classical repertory.

   But is that all that is possible?  The diagnosis of the problems I have been describing is ignorance; the solution is universal musical education of the highest quality.  But such a utopia is not remotely available for mathematics and reading comprehension, subjects universally acknowledged to be part of the cake, so it will surely not be granted to musical knowledge—which is regarded as icing at best or dispensable altogether.  But a knowledgeable audience is not mere icing for symphony orchestras struggling to stay in existence. 

   No doubt most orchestras mount programs—most probably on their websites--that tell potential listeners about forthcoming programs.  And granted that I am not well informed about what American orchestras do actually to educate this select population about the music to be played, the odds are that these programs or publications make much of descriptive adjective—cheerful, emotional, dramatic and plenty of others that usually spring from the heads of development staff--labels that don’t convey much that is useful to potential listeners.  My modest proposal is to have such “program notes” advise concert goers not only what to listen for, but, given the subject of these reflections, combat frontally the presumed prejudices of many in their audience and take a crack at the likely ignorance of the Zemlinsky sort.  

   The artistic managers of orchestras know about those “failings” of their potential audiences and I am suggesting that they tackle them head-on in local publications and on the internet, aided by YouTube and the ever-growing wizardry becoming available.  A quick “topic sentence,” by way of example, to be much elaborated and illustrated.  “Yes, Schönberg has written a lot of difficult pieces, but the work, Verklärte Nacht, that our strings will be playing next week, is a deeply  romantic and melodious work that was used as the score for the Antony Tudor ballet, Pillar of Fire.  Come and hear us.”

    If such “lessons” became regular pre-concert features in the orbit of an orchestra, they might become habit-forming, with a chance that they would bring more people into concerts.  Many more?  Probably not.  But aside from the fact that everyone counts, such an educational enterprise would be a more worthy effort than staying alive by programming, over and over, the Top Forty or otherwise catering—or shamefacedly pandering—to that dwindling audience.  God helps those who help themselves. 

   I can’t resist concluding with a few sentences on a much bigger topic that certainly requires a full discussion of its own.  The premise is that in the US music education in primary and secondary schools is broken—for budgetary as well as deeper reasons.  Why not have some symphony orchestras step into the breach and either take over music education in some localities or collaborate with educational establishments in others.  Logistically and diplomatically complex, but surely not impossible everywhere.  If this would require some orchestra members to fulfill a part of their contractual obligations as teachers rather than as players, it would call for symphony programming to include more of the many works that are not scored for full orchestras.  The result would be a case of win-win.  The kids of the community would be accorded a decent education—at least in music appreciation—while their parents would get to hear music, some of it quite wonderful, that is now performed only very seldom.  To conclude with another much used saying: In tough times, it’s necessary to think out of the box.