KINGDOM COME.(Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California)

The old American concert halls were built not just to usher in the right sort of people but to keep the wrong sort out. Upper-crust music lovers believed that they alone had the education and the cultivation to grasp the European masterpieces. The typical hall became a self-conscious cathedral of culture from which vulgar enthusiasms were expunged. The musicians were placed on a raised platform at one end of the room, and a proscenium surrounded them as a heavy frame surrounds a Rembrandt. Time stopped; music became an artifact in a collection. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, orchestras are in the unhappy position of reaping what they sowed. The audience ...