By BRUCE BRUBAKER

Trumpeter and Juilliard faculty member Mark Gould is part of Pink Baby Monster, a band that will launch Juilliard's performance season with Afterlife, a multidisciplinary presentation in Paul Hall on September 19 at 8 p.m. The band's debut CD Rich Boys will be released later this year.

Pretty much everyone alive loves music. But now, as lots of symphony orchestras face financial hard times and sales of "classical" recordings decline to almost nil, many in the concert music establishment are wondering just what this word "music" means—or can mean.

"The music we are doing here would really have no categorization. It sounds like rock, it sounds like jazz, it sounds like electronica--it's informed by all of that. I hear some very organic amalgamations of different kinds of music...combinations of different musical languages that seem to work very, very well."

Gould's September 19 performance at Juilliard—with Brian McWhorter, Wayne DuMaine, Kyle Sanna, Warren Wernick, and video artists Michael Zansky and Jonathan Bell—is titled Afterlife. Gould describes the material as "political" and "quite funny." The performance will make use of two computers with samples (and live sampling), guitar, trumpet, piano, and vocals. Gould said, "I'm also going to use Juilliard students, probably three or four sopranos, and four or five trumpeters—extra trumpet players. I'm not sure how that's going to be; it may grow. The structure is very well planned out, but there will be a great deal of improvisation. There will be video footage from public-domain silent movies. One of them is called The Rapture of Christ from 1905. And then some low-tech horror movies, like Mothra." Mark agreed with me that this could be termed "performance art." Of course, it's sometimes hard to know what words to use: "performance art," "live art," "interdisciplinary work"â€|. In recent decades, these phenomena have energized the artistic world, particularly the visual arts. Classical musicians have gotten involved too. Lincoln Center's New Visions series is conspicuous. Juilliard's InterArts class is another example of boundary-crossing curiosity; every year, class members collaborate in an interdisciplinary piece performed in May. (See the photos of Richard Didn't Play Hindemith in the Recent Events section of this issue.)

Mark Gould's work with Pink Baby Monster involves the crossing of boundaries within music too. He told me, "The music we are doing here would really have no categorization. It sounds like rock, it sounds like jazz, it sounds like electronica—it's informed by all that. I hear some very organic amalgamations of different kinds of music—no longer a "symphony orchestra" with a "rock band" in front of the orchestra, which never really worked. Now, there are organic combinations of different musical languages that seem to work very, very well." Passages of the band's music, Gould acknowledged, have a regular, rock beat. Divergent elements are brought together: One of the band's songs, "I Live For Art," combines the tenor aria "E lucevan le stele," from Giacomo Puccini's Tosca, with Karlheinz Stockhausen's controversial remarks about terrorism and art, uttered in September 2001.

The Juilliard School is that bastion of the performing arts where Leontyne Price and Van Cliburn were trained. It's also where the works of P. D. Q. Bach were first heard, where Philip Glass was nurturedâ€|and even Neil Sedaka. You might say those were artists seeking a voice—or work looking for its audience. I asked Mark Gould about the audience for Pink Baby Monster. He said, "It's a problem for record companies. The companies ask: 'Well, who's gonna buy this? Who is this for?' Maybe the lyrics are a bit more sophisticated than usual teenage lyrics and maybe the music is too experimentalâ€|. Right now, it’s in a stage of development and Juilliard's a very good place to do such things."

Pink Baby Monster: Afterlife Paul Hall Friday, Sept. 19, 8 p.m. For ticket information, please see the calendar.

We talked about young composers and the isolation of the "classical music composer." "The model of the solitary composer needs to be revamped," Gould said. "In an educational setting, what I would like to see is composers being part of 'bands.' "As he was saying this, I thought of the English composer Steve Martland and his band, and even Philip Glass and Steve Reich—who, in their own ways, formed ensembles that were intrinsically linked to the genesis of new compositions. Mark described a setup where a student composer would collaborate very directly with a small group of players, testing ideas in rehearsals and through controlled improvisations. "They would be part of a process," he said. "It would help them; it would help the players. Everybody would start to think like creators, and that would be good."

I asked Gould how he—an esteemed classical trumpet player—got involved with all this. "I came to New York as a budding, mediocre, bebop trumpet player," he explained. "So I was always interested in improvisation. And then, being at the opera, I was very interested in theater. And somehow all this came together for me—to do something like this, to make a band, to do video. Now that I'm no longer playing at the Metropolitan Opera, I'm going to have time to spend on such quixotic adventures."