Dear James Levine,

I am writing this because I never go to the Symphony. Neither do any of my friends, so far as I know.

I might therefore be the last person you need to hear from, as you prepare to assume your new duties as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

However, it strikes me that my friends and I — music devotees all — might contribute to an interesting audience for the BSO, if only the BSO played music that interested us.

As you no doubt know, Boston is in many ways a place out of step with the rest of the country: our choice for president wins almost as rarely as our baseball team. And though we do not have the density of population to qualify as a top media market, we manage to keep a fair number of art-house movie theaters and independent bookstores in business.

We also enjoy a disproportionate number of excellent record stores.

If you spend time hanging out at some of these stores, you will discover something that might surprise you: many of their customers listen to 20th-century and contemporary classical music. In fact, this is a town where out-of-print Stockhausen LPs sell for outrageously high prices. It is also a town where you might have trouble finding a new CD of music by Morton Feldman . . . because it’s sold out.

Nevertheless, the BSO conducted by Seiji Ozawa has never performed music by either of these composers.

Here is a sampling of other 20th-century composers, none of whom is represented in Ozawa’s repertoire with the BSO — I don’t know that every one of them has written work suitable to an orchestra, but most certainly have, and some who haven’t but are still living might do so in response to a commission. Consider what a varied and interesting repertoire might be developed from the music of George Antheil, Louis Andreiessen, Paul Bowles, Anthony Braxton, Earle Brown, Cornelius Cardew, Gloria Coates, Henry Cowell, Alvin Curran, Luigi Dallapiccola, James Dillon, Iancu Dumitrescu, Brian Ferneyhough, Philip Glass, Henryk Górecki, Sofia Gubaidulina, Lou Harrison, Heinz Holliger, Toshio Hosokawa, Klaus Huber, Mauricio Kagel, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, Conlon Nancarrow, Luigi Nono, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Arvo Pärt, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, Silvestre Revueltas, Wolfgang Rihm, Terry Riley, William Russell, Frederic Rzewski, Erik Satie, Somei Satoh, Giacinto Scelsi, Alfred Schnittke, Virgil Thomson, Galina Ustvolskaya, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Christian Wolff, Stefan Wolpe, Iannis Xenakis, LaMonte Young, Isang Yun, and John Zorn.

Not that the repertoire must include everything, but shouldn’t we have heard some of these composers, over the last 28 years, from Ozawa with the BSO? And shouldn’t we have heard more of the following pivotal figures, who are indeed represented but only minimally in the Ozawa/BSO repertoire: Luciano Berio (one work), Pierre Boulez (one work), John Cage (see below), György Ligeti (one work), Bruno Maderna (one work), Edgar Varèse (one work)? And while I’m at it, a plea for one of the canonical masters of modernism, whose music is I think still too seldom performed: more Webern!

What strikes me looking at this list of voices absent or muted in the Ozawa repertoire is that we expect our museums of art to provide us with access to the " difficult " voices of modernism and, slowly but surely, postmodernism and beyond. Why do we not have the same in music? Aren’t we now, as listeners, ready not only for more of the music of the early part of the 20th century, but of the entire century?

I am not suggesting that there is a hidden, popular audience that would fill even the FleetCenter if only Morton Feldman’s music were offered there instead of Aerosmith. I have seen enough poorly attended concerts of adventurous music to know that’s not the case. But as I understand it, an institution like the BSO does not intend merely to satisfy existing taste — there are other institutions (Aerosmith, the Boston Pops . . . ) for that.

And I have read that there have been eras in the past when the Boston Symphony Orchestra was in fact known for its daring programming, for introducing music unfamiliar to its regular audiences — or to anyone else, for that matter. From 1924 to 1949, under Serge Koussevitzky, the BSO presented world premieres of works by Copland, Hindemith, Respighi, Roussel, Prokofiev, Sessions, Bax, Tcherepnin, Honegger, Gershwin, Roy Harris, Martinu, Stravinsky, Arthur Lourie, Lukas Foss, Barber, Schoenberg, Bartók, Villa-Lobos, Cowell, Milhaud, Bernstein, Messiaen, and a host of others to whom time has not been as kind. It seems that BSO concertgoers of the era must have had a vivid sense of their contemporary musical culture.

It is true that Ozawa and the BSO have, since 1973, presented a number of world premieres, including works by Peter Maxwell Davies, Hans Werner Henze, Ned Rorem, and Henri Dutilleux; but I think it is fair to say that if one listened only to what this director and orchestra have performed together, one would have a narrow view of the music that has been written not just in the last 28 years, but in the entire 20th century.

I am aware that the BSO under Ozawa did commission two works by John Cage. The first was in 1976, in connection with an NEA program intended to encourage new American music for the bicentennial (Cage later wrote that Ozawa asked him to " Make it easy! " ). The second was in 1989, in connection with Harvard’s invitation for Cage to deliver the prestigious Norton lectures. Neither of these scores, I notice, requires a conductor. (There are no other Cage works in the Ozawa/BSO repertoire.)

More to his credit is Ozawa’s longstanding working relationship with the great Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. Despite Takemitsu’s absence from the list of world premieres undertaken by the BSO, there is an impressive number of his works included in the orchestra’s repertoire.

But this notable exception highlights another frustration those interested in 20th-century music have faced with the BSO under Ozawa. Consider the program one must attend to hear Takemitsu this season: Takemitsu’s Dream/Window, Dutilleux’s The shadows of time, and . . . Beethoven’s Eroica. Didn’t John Cage once say that some of the only sounds he couldn’t enjoy were created by Beethoven?

So, no, I didn’t buy a ticket ($25 to $87) for the sake of the Takemitsu curtain raiser. Other programs, with Ozawa conducting, that did not tempt me this season: Mendelssohn; Brahms; Schumann (replaced by Berlioz); Bartók, Bruch, and Bach (the three B’s?) together with the lesser-known Swiss composer Frank Martin; Bartók and Beethoven (more B’s); Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>rák, the young French composer Éric Tanguy, and . . . John Williams (yes, that John Williams); Bartók (third time!) and Berlioz (again with the B’s?); and, in the finale for the season and for Ozawa’s tenure, Mahler’s Ninth.

Were I a fan, I would opt for the Mahler and the big farewell. But I’m not, so the season will likely pass, once again, without my hearing the BSO under Ozawa.

As you plan the new repertoire you will bring to the BSO, please consider what has been missing here, both in terms of the composers selected and in the logic of the programming. Please do not pair contemporary work with the Eroica unless you have a reason more compelling than rewarding your audience’s " patience. " Please do not offer Bartók as a substitute for contemporary programming.

Boston is a city filled with young people — and as a professor once explained to me, they only get younger each year. That is, even as conductors age, a significant segment of the population here remains forever young, replenished each fall by the world’s graduating high-school seniors.

And partly because we adopt so many young people each year, Boston is a city that — contrary to much common wisdom that you may hear — can support experiment. Boston’s provincialism is often remarked upon, not least by its residents. And provincialism, it is true, is a form of conservatism. But Boston is conservative primarily in the sense that it is protective of tradition. Note that progressive traditions can become entrenched here, in true provincial fashion, as easily as regressive ones: witness our politics.

I am writing this letter to ask, in the most provincial and conservative fashion (indeed, I am employing some of the rhetoric of the jeremiad that has characterized New England public discourse since Puritan times), that you return the BSO to what it once was: an institution dedicated to new music, to experimental music, to challenging its audience as well as pleasing it. Bring us music by the composers that Ozawa never did and I promise I’ll come to Symphony Hall, together with all my friends. Student rush. (What, you thought we were trustee material?)