The Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre's decision to present live dance performances with recorded orchestral music is the result of wrenchingly difficult choices about the future of this great organization, whose 2005-06 season opens Thursday. It would not do to be naive about their problems, and they surely did not come to this step lightly. But anyone deeply concerned about the future of the performing arts will deplore the decision personally, professionally and artistically.

		Alan Fletcher is head of the School of Music at Carnegie Mellon University.

George Balanchine famously remarked that people who didn't like his choreography could still enjoy the New York City Ballet because they would hear a wonderful concert. The qualities that make a great ballet performance unforgettable -- and irreplaceable by film, for instance -- also apply to the musical scores that are inextricably part of the ballet experience.

As great as the Pittsburgh Symphony is -- and it is very great -- it will occasionally be true that a recording of a Toscanini, or a Kleiber, or a Berlin or even a Cleveland (!) performance will have some superior aspects. But I would state unequivocally that even the best recording ever made would not persuade me to stop attending Heinz Hall for the thrill of hearing great music made live and shared in the moment of its making. The sound is different, and it is not only the sound itself -- it's something ineffable about being part of the event.

Ballet, as a marriage of music and dance, adds another element: the quality of rhythm as a responsive dynamic element of performance. Recordings always have exactly the same rhythm -- dancers are no longer responding to a vital rhythmic presence, but to a rigid scaffolding. Further, the music can never respond to the actual rhythm of the living dancers.

The Pittsburgh Ballet, like companies everywhere, no doubt uses live pianists in its classes precisely because the intuitive and practiced response to live rhythm is a skill that can't be developed with recordings. This becomes 10 times more important in the theater. One commentator on the idea of eliminating live ballet music says that audiences will eventually get used to it, just as one gets used to Spam instead of prosciutto.

All of us in the world of the performing arts are thinking every day about why we exist -- why we deserve the generous philanthropy and devoted audiences we must have in order to survive.

One of the compelling answers is that there is magic in the moment of performance -- in the great social experience of experiencing art together -- that is not replaced by electronic means, however important they are in their own way. Cinema did not eliminate theater and recordings did not eliminate orchestras. Is it possible to imagine a ballet audience that would stream into the Benedum to see a video of the Pittsburgh Ballet?

Recent years have seen financial problems for all of the traditional performing arts. The Pittsburgh Symphony negotiated a tough moment in its history thanks to a resolute promise from its board that its excellence would be maintained, a sweeping and generous commitment from the musicians and a revitalized management dedicated to innovation in presenting the orchestra to the community. The community is responding enthusiastically. Pittsburgh Opera faced difficulties of its own with a similarly uncompromising promise that the quality of its productions would never falter, and its new season plan has succeeded, as we see in the current triumphant Rigoletto.

Ballet companies across the country face an especially knotty problem. While Boston, San Francisco, Houston, the Pennsylvania Ballet and the other leading companies remain committed to live orchestras, other regional companies have already taken the drastic, self-limiting step that Pittsburgh is now embarked upon.

This step is not a healthy one for their future -- the orchestra painstakingly developed, and largely shared with Pittsburgh Opera, will not be easy to retrieve once lost. The repercussions for Pittsburgh's cultural life of essentially stepping down a level in importance and quality will be powerful and negative.

We urgently need a better plan -- one that doesn't hobble the artistic product itself.