One possible response is for classical performers to program attractive new music that is not yet available on record. Gilbert’s own interest in new music has been widely noted: Alex Ross, the classical-music critic of the New Yorker, has described him as “a man with an inquisitive, contemporary mind” who is capable of turning the Philharmonic into “a markedly different, more vibrant organization。” But what will be the nature of that difference? Merely tinkering with the orchestra’s repertoire will not be enough. If Gilbert and the Philharmonic are to succeed, they must first change the relationship between America’s oldest orchestra and the new audience it hopes to attract。

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　　The news stories reporting Gil-bert’s appointment all made conspicuous mention of the fact that he is forty years old. The New York Philharmonic, far from coincidentally, has the oldest-looking audience of any major arts organization whose performances I have attended in recent years. Other orchestras are grappling with the same problem, and one of them, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has responded by taking the even more drastic step of hiring as its next music director a conductor considerably younger than Gilbert, the twenty-six-year-old Gustavo Dudamel. But it is unlikely that the youthfulness of Dudamel and Gilbert will be sufficient in and of itself to persuade anyone under thirty to come to their concerts. The generation gap in classical music goes far deeper than that。

　　A half-century ago, the New York Philharmonic hired another forty-year-old music director who promptly put the orchestra at the center of postwar American culture. But Leonard Bernstein was already famous when he succeeded Dimitri Mitropoulos. By 1958, he had scored four Broadway musicals and a Hollywood movie, made the most highly publicized conducting debut in the history of American classical music, made dozens of major-label recordings, and spent countless hours talking about music on network TV。

　　Alan Gilbert, by contrast, has done none of those things, nor will he have the opportunity to do anything like them. The fault lies not in his abilities, such as they are, but in the fact that the days of the celebrity conductor are over. Even if he proves to be a conductor comparable in quality to Bernstein, there is no possibility whatsoever that he will become as famous as Bernstein。

　　Why is this so? Because our predominantly popular culture has withdrawn its attention from classical music. The means by which a classical musician could once become famous thus no longer exist. Major labels no longer record this music except sporadically, just as the national media no longer cover it with any frequency。

　　No less alarming is a parallel musical development described by Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, in a widely noted commencement address delivered at Stanford University earlier this year:

　　At fifty-six, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even an orchestra. . . . This once-visionary and democratic system has been almost entirely dismantled by well-meaning but myopic school boards, county commissioners, and state officials, with the federal government largely indifferent to the issue. Art became an expendable luxury, and 50 million students have paid the price。

　　To be sure, part of the key to Alan Gilbert’s ultimate success or failure will lie in the quality of his music-making. But it will be at least as important for him to find new ways of reaching out to a generation of Americans who know little or nothing about classical music. It is highly unlikely, for instance, that he will have any luck getting on The Late Show with David Letterman, or persuading Time and Newsweek to put him on their covers. Although there are other means than these of communicating with younger listeners, few classical musicians seem to be aware of them, much less know how to use them effectively。

　　Does Gilbert understand how the new web-based media work? Does the management of the Philharmonic understand? If they do, are they prepared to make a sustained commitment to using these new media to communicate with the public—and will they send the right message?

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　　To grasp the nature and scope of the problems faced by Gilbert and the Philharmonic, it is useful to consider the career of Beverly Sills, who died a few days before Gilbert’s appointment was announced。

　　In an age of short cultural memories, it is noteworthy how wide-spread an outpouring of regret attended the death of a seventy-eight-year-old opera singer who had retired from the stage nearly 30 years before, especially a singer who was poorly represented by her records, few of which were made when she was in her prime.1 This means that relatively few of the people who mourned Sills’s death could have had any real understanding of why she became famous in the first place—yet they mourned her all the same。

　　The reason for their sorrow was to be found in Sills’s obituaries, all of which devoted much space to describing her regular appearances on such popular TV series as Tonight, The Carol Burnett Show, and The Muppet Show. These appearances won her the affection of millions of people who would otherwise never have heard of her. Taken together, they may well have been the most consequential thing she ever did。

　　Sills was not the only American classical musician of her day to reach out to a mass audience. Leonard Bernstein did the same thing, albeit in a more sophisticated way—but his message was the same. Among the first Young People’s Concerts that I saw on TV as a child was a program about American music. At the end, Bernstein introduced an ordinary-looking man in a business suit who proceeded to conduct the finale of a work he had written. The man, Bernstein explained, was Aaron Copland, and the piece was his Third Symphony, one of the permanent masterpieces of American art. Young as I was, I understood the point Bernstein was driving at: the making of classical music is a normal human activity, something that people do for a living, the same way they paint houses or cut hair。

　　Sills sent the same message every time she appeared on TV. As she explained in an interview conducted a year before her death:

　　In general, [people] thought of [opera singers as] big fat ladies with horns coming out of their heads. They also thought that opera singers were primarily foreign. I think Johnny [Carson] felt that a lot of people thought we were hothouse plants and that I could help change that image by showing that we led ordinary lives with families and children and problems。

　　At the time Bernstein and Sills were sending this message, in their different ways, relatively few American classical musicians knew how urgently it needed to be received. Now they—and we—know better。

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