AJ blogger Greg Sandow wades into Drew McManus’s Take A Friend To The Orchestra project, and isn’t entirely sure why anyone should be so enthusiastic about the form. “There’s a dead zone between orchestras and their audience. The audience doesn’t know what’s going on. They don’t know what really happens at the concerts they hear—what chances are taken, what musical problems are solved, what anyone is trying to express. And of course any smart person who comes in from the outside can sense this. It’s engraved, somehow, on the whole orchestra experience: the blank rituals, the empty formality, the distant, scholarly program notes, all the rules about when to applaud, the very look of the people in the audience, who for the most part, and through no fault of their own, are only passively engaged. Who can blame anyone for staying away?”