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Distractions: Snapping a photograph with an iPad after a performance at Carnegie Hall.Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times

For all the wonders of the web, it “threatens habits of deeper inquiry,” Ian Leslie argues in “Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It.” This book is among a growing number exploring what might be lost as we “lean on search engines and offload our memories to cloud storage,” to quote a review of four contributions to the topic last year by Jacob Silverman in The New York Times.

Among them, the one that seems most pertinent to my field, classical music, is Michael Harris’s “The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.” The book considers whether the Internet is eroding our attention spans. And you can’t listen to a 20-minute Haydn string quartet, let alone an 80-minute Mahler symphony, without having a pretty good attention span.

That live classical music requires concertgoers to listen and focus, often for lengthy stretches, has long seemed off-putting to many potential aficionados. I’m talking especially about orchestra and chamber ensemble programs. Though it’s interesting to watch performers in action, visual stimulation is not the point of a symphonic program. Opera, on the other hand, is theater. As with plays and musicals, operas have stories, characters, costumes and spectacle. Still, being confined midrow for a long one, even a classic like Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” demands considerable focus.

In the current era of constant connectivity, however, could this supposed downside of classical music become a selling point? Could the idea of the concert hall as a web-free zone, a chance to disconnect, catch on? I think so.

Though it’s a revolutionary means of finding information, the web consumes and distracts us. A shrinking number of people remember what the world was like before we had these devices. When I go to the Columbia University campus and see two students walking together, there’s about a 50 percent chance that rather than talking to each other they will be crossing the quad, each absorbed in a mobile phone.

Increasingly at concerts and operas, even older audience members check emails and send texts right until the house darkens or the conductor appears. Most then put their devices away — though not everyone, I’ve found to my amazement. (Cellphone interruptions are another matter, an annoying instance of simply forgetting to turn them off.)

Classical music asks you to pay attention to a piano sonata lasting 25 minutes, a symphony that could be twice as long or, at the opera house, an uninterrupted two-and-a-half hour work like Wagner’s “Das Rheingold.” As many cultural observers have noted, one enviable factor enables museums to entice people more easily these days than classical music institutions can: At an art exhibition you pace yourself; you can look at a painting for 10 seconds or 10 minutes; you can pass by one work entirely, while circling back to see another several times.

A painting, like a symphony, has design and composition. But the structure of a painting hits you at once; the structure of a symphony unfolds over time: You must give yourself over to it.

A willingness to do so may be the characteristic that will determine whether someone today is likely to become a fan of classical music, especially young people who have grown up in the digital age. If you welcome the chance to drop out of the web for a spell and place yourself in a time frame determined by a composer, then you are much more likely to “get” classical music. Otherwise, this art form may not be for you.

But another hurdle arises even after you surrender yourself to following a musical structure over time. Structure can be hard for listeners to grasp because we all tend to be swept up in the musical moment. And even if those passing moments are pretty exciting, after a while you can grow bored if you don’t sense how they fit into an overall narrative.

In Aaron Copland’s 1939 music-appreciation book, “What to Listen for in Music,” he notes that some listeners have an instinctive ability to recognize a melody they have heard when it returns later in a piece. That knack comes in handy when listening to a symphony or string quartet. You perk up and think, “Ah, there’s that tune again.” Returning melodies are pivotal demarcations of a work’s structure. But even those who do not consciously recognize a recurring theme usually hear it subliminally.

The challenge of discerning the layout of a piece becomes much easier in the opera house, because an opera is a show: The plot provides narrative structure: You can’t miss it. Yes, tunes and leitmotifs repeatedly return, often transformed. The more you get to know a particular opera, the more these compositional nuances resonate. Still, on first hearings, it’s easier to follow Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress” than his Symphony in C.

Major musical institutions have been under pressure for decades to make the concertgoing experience less stiff, more conducive to relaxed listening. Some important changes have taken place. I think dress codes are gone. People can attend the Metropolitan Opera in formal attire or in shorts and T-shirts. No one cares.

Still, classical music must loosen up more. Why should every orchestra concert take place in the early evening and last two hours or so? Institutions have learned that audiences love smaller settings for performances. Look at the enormous success of A Little Night Music, Lincoln Center’s refreshing series of 10 p.m., hourlong concerts in the Kaplan Penthouse, where patrons sit at small round tables and enjoy free wine. Audiences for these intimate programs listen with a collective concentration so strong you can almost feel it throughout the room. The New York Philharmonic and other big operators have to find ways to present symphonic music with comparable informality and intimacy.

I maintain, though, that opportunity awaits to promote classical music as a haven for device-free absorption in live musical performances. The message should be: Here is a chance to turn off your mobile phones, detach from the Internet and let your texts accumulate, so that you can cede control of a sensory experience to composers and performers.

Where else in society, right now, are the web-free spaces? At religious services? Not really. (Have you ever texted during a sermon? Admit it.) College seminars? No way. (Students typically sit around a table with laptops open; professors have given up trying to stop them.) Surely, when the door closes for one’s private psychotherapy session, the office becomes a web-free preserve. Yet, these days, even during treatment, many patients will excuse themselves to take what they deem an important call.

We’re down to the concert hall and the opera house. Now, that’s a selling point.