Martin is right about the narrowness of programming. I think it's narrow in part because the stakes are too high to take many chances or be flexible with programming. So if one thinks about performing "new" music, there are very specific (and narrow) criteria for how that is done.

I think the problem is structural. There's no mechanism in the orchestra industry to disseminate and promote the best new music. There's lots of good music around, but we've lost the structure by which the best of it rises to the top. If you're a playwright and your play wins a Pulitzer, the next season every regional company in the country is bidding to get the rights to stage it. If you're a visual artist and you get a gallery, then a museum show, then a better museum show, collectors are lining up to buy your work. And so on and so on it the other arts.

But in symphony orchestras, say you're a composer and you get your piece premiered at the New York Philharmonic. Everyone loves the piece, and the critics rave. You've got it made, right? Nope. How many orchestras are going to be clamoring to perform your piece the next season? It doesn't happen. And it's not a "second performance" problem. Tom brings up the Joan Tower "Made in America" project. I know it was well-intended, and I happen to like Tower's music.

But this project seems to me very wrong-headed. The problem is not encouraging the writing of new music. The problem is building a way to promote and perform the best new music. Promising the largest promotional effort (50 orchestras!, 50 states!) for a work that hasn't been written yet (even Beethoven wrote some second-rate music) doesn't solve this problem, it makes it worse. Audiences don't trust us when they see new music programmed, in part because we haven't been honest about establishing a means for promoting the best new music. Who knew whether the Tower piece would be any good or not? And yet it will be the most-performed new symphonic work in America this year?

Because we want to encourage new music, we're reluctant to admit publicly when a piece isn't good. There's little if any public debate about whether a new piece is any good or not. And so there's this aesthetic (or should it be "anasthetic") limbo in which the public has an impossible time sorting out what's good and what's not. And the public's not debating it? Why should they when orchestras themselves aren't debating it in any honest way? Where's the artistic leadership that helps make that happen?

Music critics are caught in this trap too. Most cities have one main music critic these days. Critics are well aware that classical music is having problems, and most critics love music (that's the rumor, anyway). They have become timid in their writing because they fear damaging the art form if they vigorously criticize. So their writing is bland, they almost never attack a new piece, or for that matter credibly argue for or against it. They've ceded their credibility on new music because they've failed to engage (not necessarily for bad reasons, but it doesn't matter).

 Pop music has the enormous forces of the market to sort out the popular from the unpopular (and I realize the quality versus popularity issue is different), but at least there's a mechanism and it forces constant change and innovation to flush through. In classical music, the mechanism is broken.