How much does it cost to take in a night of live Beethoven or Bach music? The answer seems to be “more and more.”

Henry Fogel, president of the American Symphony Orchestra League, writes in his blog On The Record, that symphony ticket prices “have escalated at rates well beyond inflation” over the past 3 decades. Ticket sales, meanwhile, have tended to decline, especially in the 1990s through 2003.

Mr. Fogel, however, also sees as a positive trend “bubbling up in the world of symphony orchestras”: a tendency for some nonprofit ensembles to re-examine their ticket-pricing policies and come up with innovative ways to make Beethoven and Bach cost less.

Mr. Fogel notes that the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra recently decided to price every single subscription ticket no higher than $25 (a financial move helped, in part, by a grant from the PNC Foundation).

The Dallas Symphony...