Consider: While Carnegie Hall still sticks more or less to the blockbuster basics in its main Isaac Stern auditorium, the new downstairs Zankel Hall is full of frisky novelties once foreign to sober, serious classical-music concert series, from all manner of world music to Kurtag and Ligeti and Terry Riley. This fall even the big hall is consecrated largely to the music of Leonard Bernstein, who all by himself represented the kind of stylistic diversity now commonplace.

 

Among the major midtown Manhattan presenters, however, Carnegie must cede primacy to Lincoln Center, which has been breaking the old classical formats for a couple of decades now—in its Great Performers series, at the Lincoln Center Festival, and even among the offerings of its stodgier constituents. Gerard Mortier is breathing down the terrified necks of the New York City Opera and its subscribers, threatening an onslaught of his Brussels/Salzburg/Ruhr/Paris brand of experimentation. Across the torn-up plaza, the Metropolitan Opera is about to burst out next fall with the first season wholly planned under Peter Gelb’s auspices, not that Glass’s Satyagraha last spring and Adams’s Doctor Atomic this fall didn’t represent some anticipatory mold-breaking.

 

Programmatic diversity is hardly limited to midtown, or to New York, or to this country. Less prominent New York institutions like the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts, akin to many similar series scattered across the land (and stocked by the same concert agents, mostly in Manhattan), may offer the Male Choir of St. Petersburg, but the bulk of their acts are mainstream jazz, folk, and pop. The big university performing arts centers, like those at Ohio State (the Wexner Center), Cal Berkeley (Zellerbach Hall), or the University of Illinois (Krannert Center), may be slightly higher of brow, but serve up a similar smorgasbord of diversity. Breaking molds was the talk of last summer’s National Performing Arts Convention in Denver.

 

The pattern holds true abroad, especially in Europe, where London’s South Bank Centre and Barbican Centre have led the way to opening up classical programming, as have such Parisian halls as the Théâtre du Châtelet. Even the hard-core modernists of Germany have loosened their ties (not that anyone wears ties in Europe any more) and plunged into the diversity maelstrom. Under Mortier, the Salzburg Festival shook off its Karajan doldrums, Simon Rattle is sprucing up the Berlin Philharmonic, and composers like Heiner Goebbels, with his sprawling musical-theatrical frescos, are miles (kilometers) from the grimness ordained by Theodor Adorno.

 

The Brooklyn Academy of Music, which under Harvey Lichtenstein long ago turned itself over to a ceaseless quest for the new or at least the unusual (e.g., William Christie), was once a traditional, not to say dully provincial purveyor of classical music. Lichtenstein pursued the new as a way of distinguishing his Brooklyn outpost from Manhattan. But in so doing, he anticipated current trends by decades. A bow, too, to Nonesuch Records, which pioneered innovative new music and now, symptomatically, is putting out more and more pop records.

 

Before we find ourselves adrift in a sea of programming diversity, we need to sort out the different kinds of diversity out there. The closest to the old, Germanically centered Bach-Beethoven-Brahms model (still adhered to by some of the older-fashioned classical radio stations), remains our big orchestras and longstanding classical presenters. For them, diversification has meant mostly an opening up to newer kinds of new music. The old “work ethic for the ear” paradigm, a phrase coined by the critic Leighton Kerner, has given way to a more audience-friendly set of styles, and audiences have responded in a friendly fashion. From Osvaldo Golijov to Arvo Pärt to Nico Muhly to Steve Reich to Goebbels and Glass and Adams, programs today are studded with pieces people can not only enjoy, but get excited about. There are those who hold on, who clingstaunchly to a modernist past that disdains audience approval, like James Levine in Boston, but he’s an exception. Which doesn’t make him “wrong,” just out of step with the Zeitgeist.

 

Mention of Muhly, however, leads to a more extreme extension of the old classical-music format. “Crossover” is a term rightly despised, when it comes down to mere vulgar pandering. Yet real crossover, or fusion, wherein serious composers long since immersed in idioms outside the classical norm infuse their music with that diversity, is everywhere among us.

 

World music is ubiquitous. Glass developed his “minimalist” style in part through study with Ravi Shankar and his attempts to comprehend the rhythmic structure of Indian ragas. Asia has influenced Western composers at least since Debussy encountered a Javanese gamelan at the Paris International Exposition of 1889 (one could adduce the Turkish craze in 18th-century music, as in The Abduction from the Seraglio). More recently, starting most notably with Toru Takemitsu,Asian composers have mastered Western idioms even as they reach back to their own traditional past for new inspiration. Right now, it is China that seems to dominate classical composition (if not the world). Many of their best composers (Chen Yi, Tan Dun) live in the United States, feeding their fusion ideas back into the Western mainstream.

 

Tan is especially interesting in his blithe willingness to absorb all manner of musics into his own. From Chinese folk idioms to movies (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Tan has developed an exuberantly populist style. It suits him, and us, a lot better than his more earnestly modernist works, like The First Emperor, his grimly tedious opera for the Met. That did include some Chinoiserie (how could it not have, given its subject), but it sounded grafted on, not organically fused.

 

More interesting are the various halting attempts by classical composers to come to terms with jazz and rock. Things have moved a long way beyond the clumsy Third Stream efforts championed in years past by Gunther Schuller or the inept “classical” compositions by rockcomposers, most recently Paul McCartney. Now we have real hybrids that are neither rock nor classical but are infused with the virtues of both. Glass, again, is an example: His early amplified ensemble sounded nothing like rock but functioned like a rock band and appealed, with its insistence and volume, to rock audiences. More recently Muhly is the poster boy for rock-classical hybrids, bending his Juilliard education (and apprenticeship with Glass) into an utterly original music.

 

Jazz occupies a different niche in our cultural landscape than rock. Quite apart from their varying musical attributes and virtues (some jazz musicians, like some classical musicians, still regard rock as simplistic and barbarous), the major difference between the two traditions lies in their commercial appeal. Jazz used to be popular music; now it is an art music (or “black classical music,” according to some, stepping not always delicately on racial sensitivities). Jazz today appeals, in terms of CD sales, to roughly the same small number of listeners as classical music. Those administrators (like me, when I ran the Lincoln Center Festival) who believe in the creative vitality of rock music must confront the awkwardness of including it in a classical series. Jazz, yes. Folk music, yes; that’s now another niche style. But commercially successful rockers canearn so much money in stadiums and arenas that it is difficult to lure them into smaller, sniffier halls where their core audience would feel uncomfortable, anyhow. Rock bands tour on their own agendas, to promote their own records. Their amplification often works poorly in classical halls, designed for resonance.

 

But rock is changing, too. Its more innovative practitioners (like Björk and the other Icelandic indies who have inspired Muhly) don’t hope to sell in the millions. Rock musicians of this kind are just the “small, mobile, intelligent units” that the rock guitarist Robert Fripp once cleverly posited as a corrective to bloated arena rock. That makes their inclusion in classical composers’ sensibilities, and onto once purely classical concert series, much more plausible.

 

Innovation can look backward as well as forward. Ever since Nadia Boulanger’s concerts in Paris between the world wars, modernists have dwelled not only on new music but old music; what they abhored was the mainstream middle, especially the Romantics. The Brooklyn Academy has followed that path, with its novelties and its Christie-led baroque revivals. So has George Steel atColumbia University’s Miller Theater; we shall see if that programming philosophy can translate to his new home, the Dallas Opera.

 

This all speaks to the current state of classical music, but more to the point, to the programming ideas that are transforming the classical concert experience. Arts administrators and impresarios tread a tricky line. If they follow what they perceive to be the public’s taste, and define that taste in the most retrograde manner (as Rudolf Bing used to do at the Met, after his very early years of timid experimentation), then their institutions slip into irrelevance—and, eventually, into financial decline, as happened to attendance in Joseph Volpe’s later years. But if they venture too far out in front of public taste, they risk disaster: We shall see how Mortier fares with the New York City Opera.

 

The trick is to find that golden balance, that mean point between creative leadership and a recognition of reality. In New York, Jane Moss at Lincoln Center has been particularly instructive in this regard. For all its virtues, the old Great Performers series risked becoming moribund, and the Mostly Mozart Festival seemed even more irrelevant. Moss has enlivened both. And given the fact that her own background is not in music, she has done it through a shrewd recognition of thecurrent state of public taste and public readiness to accept the audience-friendly novelties that are out there, waiting to be heard. Plus she has a clever ability, vital to any administrator, to hire the right people to work under her and, as quasi-independent curators, with her. The Brooklyn Academy may have inspired her and the Lincoln Center Festival (which she originally set outto engender in its modern form), but she in turn has inspired Carnegie Hall and a host of comparable performance series nationwide.

 

It’s not just composers and administrators and audiences that determine what comprises a (formerly) classical series. Private donors and public funders, to the extent that that dying breed is not yet extinct in the United States, play a role. So do inflation and rising union wages,driving up costs and placing an ever-greater emphasis on box-office success. Since a lot of board members attend meetings and galas and give money for social cachet, it takes a shift in the taste of America’s financial elite to propel the process of opening up the old to the new.

 

In Europe, where public funding still dominates, there is a tension between the populism of, say, Tony Blair and his Millennium Wheel and the more earnest politicians of the past, still clinging to their modernist criteria. (It is an irony of present-day conservatism, epitomized in the United States by Hilton Kramer and his New Criterion magazine that cultural conservatives cling to modernism, which came to life decrying the conservatism of yore.) Jane Moss and Peter Gelb don’t just have to win over the musicians and the public; they have to win over their boards, too, which Mortier is reportedly having trouble doing at the City Opera. Fortunately, Americans value the bottom line, and success at the box office will help most any administrator win over his or her board, unless the popular pandering is too egregious.

 

I have deliberately, thus far, begged the question of whether all this diversity, this miscegenation, represents progress or an appalling decline of standards. I believe the former; cultural conservatives cling to the latter. The American historian Lawrence Levine’s instructive book Highbrow, Lowbrow is helpful in this regard. He portrays a late-18th and 19th-century America in which Shakespeare and the circus, Beethoven, Bellini and patriotic ditties, co-habited happily in single mega-concerts. In 1806 Franz Clement interspersed the movements of his world-premiere performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto by playing a fantasia with the violin held upside down. It took Wagner to have the house lights lowered for opera and to reduce the steady social chatter that had heretofore accompanied the music.

 

Levine sees all the earlier populism as aesthetic democracy in action, and regrets the   separation—aesthetically and socially—of high-brow from low-brow starting in the late 19th century, a separation that became canonical and universal in the minds of conservatives soon thereafter. Others regard the potpourri nature of earlier American concert formats as a degradation of the classics, and welcome the new-found seriousness of attention afforded by their high-brow status. In either case, what we see now is something of a reversion to earlierconcert-going and concert-programming practice.

 

Clearly, on balance, with due recognition to the pandering and vulgarities that inevitably accompany the process, I regard the diversification of our classical musical life as healthy in nearly every respect. Others will lament the intrusion of rock-concert mores and standards intothe sacred precincts of the concert hall, with its busts of famous composers and their names embossed in gold above the proscenium arch.

 

But never fear: Divisions will remain in the house of music. However diverse classical concert series may become, there will always be a place for traditional classical music (however enlivened by new composers), for jazz (Jazz at Lincoln Center has struggled mightily to maintainthe separateness of jazz from all forms of dreaded fusion), and for the varying forms of pop. Halls are different, audiences are different, concert behavior is different, and, at the root of it all, the music is different.

 

Still, for me, a little healthy miscegenation reinvigorates the stock; ruddy mongrels beat snooty purebreds in a fair fight every time. But these matters move in cycles, like most everything else. Far be it for any observer, or administrator, to assume that what’s happening now will happen forevermore. Soon enough we will shift back to some new plateau of staid respectability, and conservatives will hail the situation then as the reaffirmation of universal standards.

 

In the meantime, as a prospective attendee today of any such newly diverse series, you still need to exercise your taste and discretion. Some old-style classical performances will be great and others terrible, and the same for the friskier novelties. However much they may shape or seem to shape audience taste, critics and administrators must ultimately follow the spirit of the times and the dictates of their audiences. So as an audience member, you need to exercise your own taste. What you do will determine the future more than anything else.

 

A longtime New York Times music, dance, and arts critic and editor and the founding director of the Lincoln Center Festival, John Rockwell is now a freelance writer based in New York. He has published four books—the paperback edition of his latest, a compilation called Outsider: John Rockwell on the Arts 1967-2006, has just been released—and has a blog called Rockwell Matters on the artsjournal.com Web site.