Earlier this month, at a series of panel discussions hosted jointly by the Juilliard School of Music and the Music Critics Association, I had the opportunity to opine in public on the future both of my profession and of the art form to which that profession is parasitically related.

The occasion was a celebration of the 75th birthdays of Harold C. Schonberg and Paul Hume, retired chief music critics, respectively, of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Schonberg and Hume participated in all three sessions. Also involved in the opening fray, titled ''How It Was,'' were former New York Times music critic Allen Hughes, former Chicago Tribune music critic Thomas Willis and veteran free-lancer Richard Freed.  Schonberg's and Hume's thoughts on ''The Scene Today'' were supplemented by those of the Detroit News' Nancy Malitz and The Nation's David Hamilton. For the session billed as ''The Road Ahead,'' the adjunct protagonists were Opera News editor Patrick J. Smith and yours truly.

I have never thought of myself as a futurist, or as a visionary whose map of ''the road ahead'' is any more accurate than the next guy's. But my colleagues have heard me gripe plenty about the current state of affairs, and perhaps they have equated my chronic malcontentedness with some sort of clairvoyant ability. In any case, I was asked to contribute my two-cents' worth. My prepared comments, especially as they concerned the immediate future, were pessimistic. In the course of the discussion, though, my statements became increasingly rose-colored. I thought so, at least, even though some of the veteran music critics in the audience seemed horror-stricken by what I had to say.

What I said in my opening remarks was that the road ahead for music journalism, as the craft has traditionally been practiced for almost 300 years, was pretty much a dead end. This is only in part because the vehicle of that journalism - the daily newspaper - is changing.

In the good old days, as Schonberg and Hume reminded the audience, big cities in this country had as many as four or five daily newspapers, each of which offered its readers a full complement of services that included commentary on as many classical music events as could possibly be covered. Today, even though populations in urban centers have grown, the number of daily newspapers has dramatically decreased, and in most cities so has the number of music reviews. The reason for this is fairly obvious. As recently as 50 years ago, and dating back almost three centuries to the time when the medium was invented, the newspaper was the prime means of delivering messages to large numbers of persons. The inexpensively printed, mass-produced pages of the newspaper included both editorial material and advertising, two very different kinds of messages that blended in a healthy symbiotic relationship. It was editorial content - news, features, sports reports, political commentary and so on - that made people want to spend time with the papers, but it was advertising that made the papers profitable. The more readers a paper had, the more advertisers it attracted; the more income a paper generated, the more it could invest on the quality and scope of its editorial content.

This logic still holds, but the mathematics of the formula have changed. Today the newspaper is by no means the only effective vehicle for advertisers. There is also radio and television, each of which is getting a substantial piece of the revenue pie that the newspaper once had almost to itself. The newspaper still exists, and it is likely to keep on existing, for there are certain messages - editorial as well as commercial - that are communicable only through its distinctive ink-on-paper format. But it exists on new levels of economic power and cultural significance. Some would say that the newspaper of today is weaker than its pre-television forebears. I prefer to think that it is simply different, and that it will become even more different as it continues to adjust to the realities of the age of electronics. I also prefer to think - not naively, I hope - that writing on music and related subjects will hold an important place in the newspaper of the future.

There can be no doubt that certain messages - the mere facts of weather, wars, the stock market, football scores and so on - are best communicated by the various electronic media. But messages that go beyond the mere facts require a different format. Television and radio can tell us immediately if war has erupted or if the market has crashed, for example, and this is good. But they cannot effectively provide us with analyses of these matters. Such analysis is indeed offered by the electronic media, and some of it is excellent. But it is, by nature, ephemeral. It exists only for so long as it is being broadcast, and then it disappears. Unless a consumer takes the trouble to record it, there is no time to study it, to find the holes in the arguments, to engage one's self in tacit dialogue with the commentator. The very same words might well appear in the newspaper. In this case, however, the commentary is not a fleeting electronic event but rather a physical thing; it can be saved, shown to one's friends, experienced repeatedly - for better or worse - before it is used to line the bird cage.

People seem to have an appetite for commentary on the subjects in which they are interested, and the newspaper seems to be the most practical way of providing them with it. Publishers, I think, realize this, and I suspect this realization will eventually have an effect on their products. Instead of trying to compete with television in areas in which they are licked, they will emphasize the goods on which they still hold something of a monopoly. Instead of being immediate and flashy, the newspaper of the future will be chock full of things over which to linger. Crossword puzzles, advice columns and the like will take up a lot of space, and so will writing that is thoughtful and reflective. Rather than give their readers material that is easy to swallow, papers will give them something to chew on.

For music critics, this is good news. The big question is: What sort of commentary will be appropriate for the newspaper of the 21st century?

Like the world of newspapers, the classical music scene has changed much in the last 50 years. More people than ever before attend concerts and buy recordings; fewer people than ever before have an active interest in the music they hear. Classical music, once considered an art, has become a commodity. Some listeners still go to concerts in order to be challenged or to be stimulated in other ways by compositions from the present as well as the past. Most listeners, I suspect, go in order to be entertained. They do not want to have to work at it, intellectually or emotionally; they simply want to enjoy the event, in the same way they enjoy a Broadway show or a TV comedy.

In the concert hall, new repertoire usually goes over like a lead balloon; the viable fare is the tried and true, especially when it features performers who are somehow famous. Orchestras these days are supported not by philanthropy but by box-office receipts and commercial sponsors; they are not so much arts institutions as aspects of show business, and they survive by catering to the desires of paying customers.

Samuel Lipman, in one of the essays included in his provocative new book ''Arguing for Music: Arguing for Culture,'' explains the phenomenon. Among the things he sees when he examines the situation are a continuing increase in ''the scale on which classical music is done,'' an audience ''ever larger in numbers but knowing ever less about what it is hearing,'' an explosion of programs tailored to ''the demands of mass marketing,'' a generation of young talents ''beaten down by the pressure to make themselves into imitators of past successes,'' composers in the classical tradition ''increasingly unable to write music in a consistent style,'' ''an imminent collapse, fostered by the glamour of television and the desires of every supposed art form to have a piece of the action, in the present efforts to raise the level of disciplined general music education.''

I make the same observations and form the same conclusions, yet I prefer not to engage in hand-wringing of the sort that animates Lipman's essay. It is a fact that music that flows from the tradition of Beethoven and Brahms is no longer a living, breathing force in our culture. The music has not exactly died. It still resonates, loudly and clearly, but its role in society has changed; it is being put to new uses, uses that its creators could scarcely have imagined. Just as the newspaper had its heyday, so did the kind of serious concert music that we fondly describe as classical. How will the newspaper of the future deal with this?

My fear is that music journalists will be asked to participate more and more in the show-biz side of things, to play up the splash and dazzle of grandiose happenings, to offer reviews that are not so much commentaries as consumer reports on star performers, to turn their longer writings into black-and-white versions of ''Entertainment Tonight'' featurettes. But my hope is that coverage of that sort will be left to the media for which it is appropriate, that publishers will capitalize on the fact that newspapers - simply because they are durable - can traffic not just in images but in ideas.

Regarding classical music, the ideas are likely to be very different from those that have occupied critics for the past 300 years. Although the melodies and the harmonies may be the same, this is not at all the case for their function and meaning.

Since the repertoire will be built almost entirely of certified masterpieces, the music critic of the future need not concern himself with judging the quality of this or that particular item. But why, he might wonder, is one ''great'' work acceptable to audiences while another is not? Exactly what is it that listeners en masse find attractive about a certain long-dead composer or a long-obsolete instrument? What does music of the past have that music of the present does not? What does antique music symbolize?

The participants in the symposium had very different perspectives on the matter at hand, and - naturally - each of them occasionally succumbed to the temptation to grind an ax or two specific to the field in which he earns his daily bread.

By and large, though, the discussion stayed on track. This was an unusual event, a public forum on ''Music Criticism in America's Press,'' and the panelists included not just performers and reviewers but also editors, publishers, impresarios and educators. There was plenty of friction during these six hours of open debate last weekend at the capital city's Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But in the long run the basic issue did remain the center of attention, and along with a lot of heat the sparks generated at least a modicum of light.

On the platform at various stages of the game were violinist Isaac Stern; Kennedy Center artistic director Marta Istomin; Eastman School of Music director Robert Freeman; National Public Radio political commentator and former White House correspondent Daniel Schorr; Baltimore Sun publisher Reg Murphy; San Francisco Chronicle music critic Robert Commanday; Akron Beacon-Journal associate editor David B. Cooper; New York Times music critic emeritus Harold C. Schonberg; Peabody Conservatory professor Elliot Galkin; Detroit News music critic Nancy Malitz; San Jose Mercury-News managing editor Jeannie R. Buckner; Cleveland Plain Dealer music critic Robert Finn; Time magazine music critic Michael Walsh; Gannett News Service features editor J. Ford Huffman, and myself.

Most of the special pleading at the Saturday afternoon session came, not surprisingly, from Stern.

Stern decried the current state of music criticism, especially in New York City. There are simply too many concerts there, he said; the reviewers have become jaded after hearing the Brahms or the Beethoven concerto too many times, and their appetite for novelty has resulted in a situation in which they will ignore ''a great artist playing a great masterpiece in Carnegie Hall'' and instead cover ''a concert in a church on 22nd Street given by some unknown young performer who probably won't amount to anything anyway.''

''Just because they've had long careers doesn't mean their interpretations no longer matter,'' Stern said. ''Mature artists still count. They still deserve critical commentary.'' He was careful to use the third person pronoun throughout the diatribe.

Yet it was the apparently beleaguered Stern who, in his opening shot at the critical horde, articulated what turned out to be the symposium's unofficial watchword.

''I've performed and been reviewed in many, many cities all over the world,'' he said, ''and I think that most of what passes for music criticism both in this country and in Europe is balderdash, sophomoric nonsense that's not worth the paper it's printed on. But I also know that there are some places where criticism can, indeed, be taken seriously.

''These places have traditions of informed, sensible commentary, and in the musical world these are considered to be centers of power. The critics in these cities know something about music; they're first-class thinkers and they're first-class writers. Most important, the critics who are respected are the ones who approach their task with a sense of responsibility.''

The word surfaced again and again as each panelist in turn held forth. And it rang out like a leitmotiv during the verbal free-for-alls. Everyone agreed that the world would indeed be a better place if all critics - and all performers and all newspaper editors - always acted with the utmost responsbility. But there was little overt agreement about to whom, or to what, this responsibility is owed.

Stern said he felt critics should be responsible above all to the art of music, that the critic's essential role was that of educator.

The Baltimore Sun's Murphy saw it differently. ''The critic works for a newspaper, and the prime responsibility of the critic is to the readers of that newspaper,'' he said.

''The basic function of the critic is to report on musical events,'' Murphy said. ''But he has to do it in a special way. He has to report on not only what happened at a particular concert but also on what it meant to those who were there, and what it might have meant to those who weren't.''

The Times' Schonberg had no serious objections to what Murphy said about the critic as reporter. But he suggested there was more to it than that. ''I think critics should - as performers should - search for the truth,'' he said. ''Look, we're all critics; we all pass judgments. The main difference between the music critic and everyone else who goes to concerts is that the critic has a regular forum for his opinions. Of course, the critic is supposed to know what he's talking about. The job of the critic is to express opinions that make his readers think a bit.''

Buckner of the San Jose Mercury-News spoke both as someone with a casual but genuine interest in the arts and as an executive of a large news organization.

''I look to the critic so I can be guided, informed and somehow elevated,'' she said. ''The critic knows more about music than I do, obviously, so I want him to help me - personally - learn more about music. But I also want the critic to help me gain readers for my newspaper. I'm all for serious, considered music criticism. More than anything else, though, I'm for music criticism that's accessible.''

Schorr, who once upon a time spent a year reviewing classical music concerts for a now defunct New York newspaper, minced no words in chastising those would-be ''accessible'' critics who write flippantly and who make careers of being clever at the expense of persons who have dedicated their lives to music-making. And he said he wasn't sure music criticism, at least as it concerned only performances, had any proper function.

''Music is ephemeral,'' Schorr said. ''Once a performance is over, it's over. You can't go back and examine it again, like you can a painting or a film. So what's the point?''

''It's precisely because music is ephemeral that it needs criticism,'' Commanday retorted.

''The review is a kind of fixative, something that 'holds' a performance in place for a while,'' he said. ''And along with making an otherwise ephemeral event just a bit more permanent, the review is an attempt to discover the value in music and musical performances. Too many people these days never stop to reflect on values. The critic reminds them that values do exist, that it is possible to find them. The critic's function, I think, is to help people discover values on their own.''

It was at this point that I stopped taking notes. I knew that sooner or later the ball would bounce into my court. And it occurred to me that although I indeed intended to report on this fracas, I also wanted to be one of its combatants. In fact, I had many opportunities to speak my piece, and I took full advantage of them. But in a nutshell, what I said was this:

Yes, critics need to be responsible, to their readers, to their editors and publishers, to the musicians about whom they write, to the art of music in general. But they also need to be responsible to themselves, for criticism is worthless if its author in any way pulls his punches.

Yes, critics must be reporters. Their reportage, however, is valuable only to the extent that it relates ''what really happened'' at a musical event, and ''what really happened'' - at least in the area of interpretation - is typically a matter of personal opinion.

Yes, critics have to be accessible to any of a newspaper's readers who choose to turn to the review pages. But ''accessibility'' ought not be equated with watered-down writing. The only criticism that counts is substantive criticism, and this will be accessible as long as the prose is lucid and the language free of technical jargon.

Yes, critics ought to make their readers think. But in order to do that they first have to be able to think for themselves, and to express their thoughts - the conclusions as well as the reasons that lead up to them - clearly.

Yes, critics should be educators. But if they know their subject and if they're capable writers, they can, in the course of a review, communicate plenty of relevant information without seeming in any way pedantic.

I think I'm right about all this.

At the same time, I realize that readers of music criticism in this or any other newspaper probably have their own thoughts on the matter.

The purpose of the slugfest at the Kennedy Center was to open the issue of music criticism in America's press to public debate. Consumers of music criticism have as much right to express themselves as do criticism's practitioners and the performers who sometimes feel they are criticism's victims, and in fact some of the most impassioned statements last weekend came from members of the audience.