The warning signs have been looming on the horizon for years: empty seats, aged audiences, rising deficits, plummeting record sales.

But only now, as America's symphony orchestras continue to bleed cash and lose subscribers, are these institutions starting to try to save themselves. Belatedly realizing that American culture has changed faster than they have, the country's major orchestras are contemplating in what form they might endure.

The more pressing question: Are they changing quickly enough and intelligently enough to attract the new audiences and fresh sources of funding they need?

The answer, according to those who work on the front lines of classical music, will depend on whether these profoundly conservative institutions can reinvent themselves for a radically changing world. But judging by their performance over the past several decades, they do not respond adroitly to change and may be in more dire straits than they realize.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is facing staff layoffs, the cancellation of its long running national radio broadcasts, the expiration of music director Daniel Barenboim's recording contract with Teldec and the first deficit in nearly a decade. This scenario has been repeated — to varying degrees — across North America, with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra facing the real possibility of going out of business, while the orchestras of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, St. Louis and beyond are confronting six- and seven-figure deficits.

"We're fossils, and if we don't change, we'll remain fossils," says Paul Freeman, an esteemed American conductor and music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra in Prague.

"I hope (the symphony orchestra) survives, but it may not be able to in its current form," says Don Casey, dean of DePaul University's School of Music. "That's what we're testing here."

"Indeed," warns one lifelong classical music professional, "I hope we don't go down as the generation that killed artistic civilization," says Mary Lou Falcone, a veteran classical music publicist based in New York. "We get judged historically by our wars and by our arts, and I would be very unhappy if we are the generation judged only by war."

Yet the bad news keeps coming. Earlier this month, the San Jose Symphony board shut down the orchestra's business operations, citing a deficit of $2.5 million on a budget of $7.8 million. Tower Records — one of the nation's most important retail chains — has stopped ordering recordings of Allegro, Qualiton and Harmonia Mundi USA, according to a spokesman in the firm's Sacramento, Calif., headquarters. In addition, Tower has asked other labels to provide CDs on consignment (rather than expect cash upfront). Despite this litany of woes, however, many orchestra managers do not believe that a serious problem exists. They scoff at the downturn in symphonic music, attributing it to a softening of the economy and the terrorist attacks of 11 September, although classical music progressively has been disappearing from America's cultural radar for the past three decades.

"I'm cautiously optimistic," says CSO president Henry Fogel, who expects the orchestra's current deficit of $1.3 million to reach $2 million in the next fiscal year. This has forced Fogel to lay off staff, close the ECHO educational center and consider cutting back the CSO Presents series that features various classical and pop attractions.

"I think we're going to have to do some trimming around the edges of some of the extra programs we do," adds Fogel, "but I am more than optimistic."

Adds Jack McAuliffe, vice president of the non-profit American Symphony Orchestra League, "Both the economy and the orchestras are slowing down. I think it's a regrouping that's going on here. I don't think it's the beginning of a break into a downhill slide."

Others, however, are less confident.

"Some people think it's still business as usual, but life in classical music isn't what it used to be," says Zarin Mehta, executive director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and former president of the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Ill. "We have to be realistic."

"We're at a crisis point now," says DePaul's Casey. "But this field is so conservative that the musicians and the music directors are among the last willing to experiment with new ideas and approaches.

"We must step away from old models, we have to acknowledge the multiple perspectives of many vernacular musics like rock and world music, which have not been present at orchestra concerts.

"It has to do with bringing live music to younger and younger people."

Certainly almost every assumption upon which American symphony orchestras have operated for the past century no longer applies. Though generations of symphony subscribers once were introduced to the basics of classical music in the public schools, cutbacks in music education during the past three decades have rendered Bach, Beethoven and Brahms irrelevant to most kids' lives.

"We've lost three generations of listeners, kids who aren't getting classical music in the classroom," says Bruce Duffie, a former classical disc jockey on WNIB-FM 97.1, which was sold last year to Bonneville International Corp. for $165 million and now broadcasts rock and pop — to increased ratings — as WDRV-FM.

"Those are lost generations that you never can get back."

Equally important, the demographic makeup of the United States has changed significantly since the heyday of the American symphony orchestra, in the 1950s through the '70s, with the stream of European immigrants who poured into the country after World War II eventually supplanted by emigres from such places as Indonesia, Africa, South Asia, the Middle East. This population shift has inspired a wholesale change in America's cultural perspectives, with the music, traditions and values of European symphonic art gradually losing its hold on American life.

Instead, America in the last decade has opened its ears to sounds originating well outside Europe, which helps explain why several Virgin Megastores across the country have booted classical music out of the soundproof rooms it once occupied. The coveted space has been turned over to more saleable products, such as DVDs, with the classical inventory halved at Chicago's Virgin Megastore.

"World music has proliferated to an amazing extent," says Marty Graff, the classical and world-music buyer for the Virgin on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. "Reggae, Latin, salsa, Tex-Mex, Brazilian, Cuban, Asian, Chinese, Indonesian, Pakistani — that's the music that people are coming into the store to buy.

"We're not a nation fixated on Europe anymore. We're world citizens, and the advent of international travel has enormously broadened our horizons as Americans who listen to music."

Considering all these shifts in American life, perhaps it's no surprise that sales of classical recordings dipped to 2.7 percent of all U.S. record sales in 2000 (down from 3.7 percent a decade ago and 7 percent during the CD boom of the 1980s and '90s according to the Recording Industry Association of America), while world music sales have exploded.

Meanwhile, the increasing pace of life in the U.S. has left even classical music fans less inclined to devote as much time and money to attending symphonic concerts as their counterparts of an earlier generation. So though orchestras once could count on subscribers who paid in advance for a season of, say, 24 concerts, today the average subscription series is just 6, says Boston Symphony Orchestra managing director Mark Volpe. This fact of life makes selling tickets considerably more laborious and costly.

To their credit, some of America's orchestras slowly have begun to respond to the seismic shifts occurring around them, with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the vanguard of change. Last year, for instance, the famous Philadelphians started an Access Concert Series in which the orchestra performs a single piece of music and the conductor explains its structure and context. Though orchestra management introduced this series simply as a way for listeners to learn more about music in a non-threatening setting, audience response has "taken off", according to an orchestra representative, leading Philadelphia Orchestra management to consider dramatically expanding the series in coming seasons.

In addition, the Philadelphia Orchestra has released a recording on its own label, a response to the stasis in the classical recording industry, and has started to explore its options for broadcasting concerts over the Internet.

In New York, the Philharmonic has scaled down its ambitions to a new reality, broadcasting 26 of its concerts not nationally but in New York alone, on WQXR.

"Sure, it would be nice to be heard in Chicago and Albuquerque," says executive director Mehta, "but national broadcasts are expensive, while local broadcasts are not."

Even the CSO, an institution deeply committed to musical traditions of an increasingly distant past, has dabbled in new ideas, performing community concerts in the Pilsen neighborhoods, and adding jazz and pop events to the CSO Presents offerings. Yet the decline in CSO ticket sales, and the empty seats that now routinely dot CSO concerts, may suggest that this is too little, too late.

Unfortunately, symphony orchestras by definition are structured to preserve rather than to innovate, which may make these organizations slow to respond to an American cultural landscape that is increasingly in flux.

A few years ago, a study by the National Endowment for the Arts warned that "attendance at classical music performances is highest among those born between 1936 – 45 and lowest in the oldest and youngest (age groups). ... This could signal problems for the future of live classical music if these younger adults fail to mature into attendance."

Whether symphony orchestras acted upon this warning is open to debate. Critics contend that by spending hundreds of millions of dollars building new concert halls, as Philadelphia and Los Angeles are in the process of doing, or remodeling older ones, as Chicago has done with Orchestra Hall (at a cost of $120 million), the orchestras have squandered funds that might have been better spent re-energizing repertory and developing young audiences. Defenders of the expansion plans counter that 21st century audiences will demand state-of-the-art facilities.

Either way, however, there's no question that the vast fundraising efforts required for these edifices have left many donors spent.

Meanwhile, records show salaries of both players and administrators steadily escalated during the 1990s, with the CSO in the last fiscal year paying Daniel Barenboim $670,546 in compensation, plus $120,800 in benefits and allowances; concertmaster Samuel Magad, $276,615 plus $53,700 in benefits and deferred compensation; and CSO president Fogel, $318,000 plus $37,631 in contributions and other allowances.

But the loss of the radio broadcasts, says CSO music director Barenboim, "is really a civic disaster, because this cultural institution is one of the main assets the City of Chicago has. Any one of these broadcasts can be heard by millions of people."

Yet even Barenboim appears to be yearning for a past that no longer can be retrieved. The days in which major symphony orchestras can find sponsors willing to support 52 weeks of national radio broadcasts, as the CSO had done for a quarter century, are long since passed.

It remains to be seen whether Barenboim and his orchestra can adjust to the economically and socially turbulent world that engulfs them.