When I got backstage Saturday night, I didn't have to ask. Joe Clapper stood in black tie and tails with a hard hat on his head, none the worse for wear.

David Robertson was looking casual yet dapper for his PreConcert Perspectives talk. His insights into the primal nature of Meredith Monk's vocal songs without words connected with Bartók's folk gestures, which David also connected with the Beatles. As David pointed out, if you take the lyrics from "The Long and Winding Road" or "Yesterday" and just listen to the melody you discover that Lennon and McCartney knew what Bartók knew--the power of these tunes that descend in scale and briefly rise up, how the end of a line becomes the beginning of the next line ("Oh I believe in yesterday/ Suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be..."). But Bartók managed to create these effects with a live orchestra on a stage in the 1930s before there was stereo.

During the performance of Monk's Weave (the world premiere, commissioned in part by Grand Center, Inc., our neighbor's down the street), I thought of Paul Valéry's line: "seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees." The sung text of Monk's music sounds like language--Middle Eastern, at times, or some dialect found in Oceania--or a memory of first human sounds from tens of thousands of years ago, the beginnings of words that reside in reservoirs deep within us, unknown, mysterious, and strangely comforting.

I was on duty to escort Meredith and David to the makeshift KFUO studio for the live interview at intermission, which meant running a few steps behind Meredith as she navigated a couple sets of stairs and a few doorways to make it to the stage to take her bow after Weave ended. For much of the way she kept saying variations of "Fearless! A totally fearless performance!"

As was the finale, Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. In five years with David Robertson, I've come to love the music of Bartók, which I hadn't given much consideration pre-David. For a California boy, David contains some Eastern European soul. His Bartók is wholly moving, and it rocks. I remember after Miraculous Mandarin Suite last fall, which was a Bloggers' Night, and we went out into the night shouting, "Bartók rocks!" as if the Beatles has ended the show with "She Loves You."

Yet culture gained a foothold out there. Any town that boomed spent capitol on culture--usually an opera house--because it signified civilization, and because there were people with money to buy tickets to hear Jenny Lind sing or Oscar Wilde speak.

Culture moved with fiddlers and church choirs and ragtime piano players and jazz musicians and it changed the people and places it came in contact with in Sedalia and Kansas City and San Francisco and Missoula. Even though the Sunday New York Times didn't arrive until Tuesday on the morning train.

With recordings, radio, TV, you didn't have to see the Beatles at Busch Stadium to be changed by the Beatles. They were on The Ed Sullivan Show, on the radio, on the record player--and they were in our heads and changed how we wore our hair and dressed and walked and talked and changed what we thought about.

In the technological revolution we're living in now, culture is immediate, a click away. And it is infinite. Douglas Coupland, the man who came up with the moniker Generation X, recently suggested that pop culture may be near extinction because there is no one thing that can gain traction in the vast expanse of culture--no defining group such as the Beatles, or film such as The Graduate. There's always more, with no mood or sensibility or gesture that lasts long enough to define. It devours itself.

And yet, there are artists whose power is most fully realized in direct contact with an audience, who still have the allure of minstrels or Provencal poets or a group of players arriving at Elsinore, or Jenny Lind in Havana, or Oscar Wilde in St. Louis.

Meredith Monk is that sort of artist. As David Robertson has said, she "is from a vocal tradition both classical and primal." Sure she puts out CDs and you can find her on YouTube, but her power, and that of her ensemble, is best realized in direct contact with the senses, in her presence through your eyes and ears and skin and mind. It is culture moving through you with all the haunting power of a night train.

Danse concertantes is being performed in the runouts to Rolla and Columbia next week, by the way, and may be heard at Powell Hall April 11. Holst's The Planets and Ligeti's Violin Concerto are performed this weekend at Powell.

She also included this marketing idea: "'Neptune' ring tone: Who could resist answering the bewitching Siren's call?"

Anyway, it's a good excuse to catch the SLSO in their road uniforms, and to see Missouri turn to spring while you're driving in a car full of muncheez and sodeez.

There was a crush at the stage door with well-wishers afterward. I finally made it to the elevator, and found myself with Sylvia Ray, who was beaming. She praised the chorus for being "dead on" the whole night--the best way for a chorus to send off its director.