Orchestra as Infrastructure

Orchestra as Infrastructure

Team Members

Karen Lord
Christopher Jenkins
Mikhail V. Chester
Jesse Rosen
Sheree Renée Thomas

Illustrated by Shachi Kale 

Take Three

By Karen Lord

Pierre lifted the pot in a smooth, high arc as he poured the mint tea, timing the splash of liquid into one glass first, then another, in careful counterpoint to the susurrus of the room’s two indoor fountains, and the low chuckle of the bamboo chimes at the window.

“I hope you will enjoy your time with us,” he said, putting years of training into delivering that stock phrase with the perfect cadence and timbre.

The vibrational aesthetic involved much more than pleasing sounds. Understanding frequencies and resonance was key. Knowing the importance of clear space and white noise, and how they should be used to complement the entire arrangement, required more than just talent, and far more than long but unskilled practice. Once it might have been called genius, or a close connection with a Muse, but regardless of the reasons, it was true that there was a combination of nature and nurture that strengthened this ability. Nowadays, it was impossible to find any reputable venue that did not employ this aesthetic in their decor.

He hated it. He would rather be playing his cello, performing elegant and dignified chamber music with the other members of a string ensemble, but there were far fewer opportunities for such work as demand waned for that style of classical music. Now he was lucky if he could find a trio to play with. Or, for true nostalgia, he often wished he could return to the pure simplicity of his boy soprano days in the symphony orchestra’s supporting choir. 

This was not the career trajectory he’d planned. He’d dreamed of joining the string section, but the orchestra dissolved before he completed his studies, before his voice even broke. Its performers scattered: some to play in theatre pits and jazz bands, some to teach, some to entirely new occupations. But the world’s perception of orchestral music had shifted. Priorities were changing, and music for the sake of mere art was no longer worthy of a full salary. Not with Earth’s present status as barbarous new world, uneducated and underdeveloped. Not with the two main modern-day markers of civilization: the vibrational aesthetic, which made art and fashion into a science, and the Official Speech, whose complex and comprehensive orthography supplanted both alphabets and musical notations.

Pierre looked at his guest (no … client) as he courteously offered her one of the tea glasses, and felt the usual envy. His parents had been caught up in maintaining the centuries-long traditions of a musical family, while her grandparents had seized the chance to volunteer their offspring to be in the first cohort raised and educated off-planet. Likely she was already almost fluent. Full familiarity with the linguistic and cultural nuances of Official Speech would arrive by the third or fourth generation, but already she was miles beyond him in prospects and status. She was one of the Children of Earth, yet no longer entirely of Earth, groomed to become the world’s representatives and communicators in a universe where music was the standard for civilized interaction.

She was dressed entirely in plain black—a long open mantle, slender trousers, and a loosely fitting shirt, all in some fluid, finely woven fabric. He glanced surreptitiously, uncertainly at the gauzy curtains tinting the room with a pale green light, and lowered his gaze to his sarong’s deep greens and blues (shot through with threads of silver … he wasn’t poor, after all). Pierre couldn’t help but wonder if she was mocking him, his attire, the room’s decor, and his effortful, studied attempts to match her level … showing off that she was so privileged that she could afford to not care about such things.

He tried to shake away the negative emotions. Part of him worried that she could see right through him, sensing the sullenness in his heart’s pulse, or detecting some insubordination in the flicker and blink of his eyes. But she simply took the glass from his hand with a slow, relaxed gracefulness and said, “I see why my tutor wanted me to come here. It’s interesting.”

Her tone, like her clothing, projected perfect neutrality, but Pierre’s own insecurities added a sting of sarcasm to what he heard. “Her tutor”—that meant she already knew her musicology, and this House of Music was but one stop on her Grand Tour of Earth’s curiosities. “Interesting” was not fascinating, or beautiful, or outstanding in any way. Her visit was nothing more than tourism, and he had wanted it to be a special encounter, a meeting between professionals at a similar level.

He flinched inwardly, suddenly recognizing his own hubris. How was it possible, after all this time, that he still considered himself to be one of the elite? Too much had happened, so much had changed in a short while. 

Not many musicians of his generation had gained their experience during the last-gasp, golden age of the privately funded orchestras, but as a boy soprano, surrounded by many other musicians of similar background and ambitions, he had thought they were numerous enough that survival had seemed at least possible, if not certain. Not via government funding, unfortunately. That dwindled and dried up as past nations and present city-states vied for relevance and modernity with new technologies and curricula to prepare their residents for global citizenship … and perhaps even more.

The golden age came about as a response to that lack. For a little while, wealthy patrons had kept some orchestras afloat … but don’t call them angels. Everyone knew that a small but significant number of those men and women were less interested in the arts and more interested in the pretty boys in the choirs and the pretty men of the orchestras. Part of their fee, sometimes voluntary, often not. The arrangement brought in enough to buy and maintain the orchestras’ instruments and halls. Pride and shame preserved silence within the community. As for the authorities, with all the upheaval, no one cared that much about a dying artform and the lengths to which some people might go to preserve the traditional, revered systems and structures.

Pierre had known about those things, but distantly, always at a remove, via hearsay and rumor. He hadn’t been one of those sacrificial lambs, fortunately, though he considered himself pretty enough with symmetrical features, smooth skin, and a neat fall of shoulder-length hair. Still, he sometimes felt a gaze from his clients that was assessing, judging, drawing a direct line from his past circumstances to his present work in this House of Music. 

“I’ve heard about you,” a client once told him, her eyes sparkling with unkind amusement. “You were with that all-male orchestra, the one we nicknamed the Flower Garden.”

She had said nothing more, but it had been enough. Pierre’s mind twisted, warping his pleasant memories into an unpleasant new configuration. The orchestra had never been formally all-male, but it had operated on the unspoken assumption that women weren’t really the best at maintaining a rigorous performance schedule. But what if excellence, however defined, had not been the only reason? What if they had selected performers not for the highest level of musicianship, but for those with the right “look” to appeal to sponsors and patrons? 

If that were indeed the case, was he nostalgic for a prestige that never truly existed? Was his work in this House of Music really any different? The Houses were legal, acceptable places of entertainment, but also places of desperation, of courteous and cultured pleasure traded for the chance of future hope, a cracking open of the door that led to the tier of the enlightened, the vanguard taking humanity to a higher level of civilization.

Now, at last, Pierre could admit it to himself. He was good, he knew he was good, but he was also performing to stand out, to persuade, to seduce. When mere talent might not be enough, one must also have the right aesthetic. He was waiting to be discovered, even at this late age, by a sponsor who would see in him enough ability to acquire competency, if not proficiency, in the common language of law, diplomacy, and trade. “The Music of the Spheres,” people called it at first, but the awe and wonder of the alien encounter soon wore off, and the formal, boring title of “Official Speech” became the norm. Those not of Earth—don’t call them angels; they are homo sapiens luciferensis, also known as the Shining Ones—named it something far too complicated for ordinary humans to voice. Regardless, their meaning was clear. 

Learn to speak like us, or no one will listen to you.

Pierre returned his focus to the client before him. She was humming softly, an air that he quickly recognized as Choi-Seeger’s String Quartet 2232, an obscure but not unknown work which had been a favorite from his repertoire in the old days, when he still played cello in string quartets and other chamber ensembles. Her neutral tone and monochrome garments had challenged him, but this casual, effortless sound was soothing, a wordless compliment to his abilities. The rhythm and rise and fall of the notes blended well with his carefully curated audiovisual decor, as if in gentle praise of his taste.

“How long have you been practicing this aesthetic? Eight years? Ten?”

Pierre leaned forward and nudged a plate of Turkish delight closer to her hand, using two fingers and a light, graceful touch. Then he settled back on his heels and answered her as proudly as if it had been the greatest achievement of his life.

“Eight years for this.” With a wide sweep of his hand, he indicated the harmony of the room. “Many years prior for the foundational training. I’m a musician. A cellist, to be specific. The cello—”

“I know,” she interrupted. “I saw you.”

Pierre was certain he had been born in the wrong time.

A century ago, he could have been a renowned cellist, even a conductor, proudly carrying on the family legacy in music. Fifty years ago, his surname still meant something, still opened doors and inspired respect for a history of talent and skill. Even twenty years ago, his parents had still been convinced that the old ways, the old paths, would serve him as well as they had served generations past.

The world may change overnight, but people rarely do.

The old paths had led him to this place, almost a dead end, with no recognition, little respect, and hardly more job security than an old-fashioned busker. They called it a House of Music, but there was no proper auditorium, only an open courtyard in the Spanish style, with dodgy acoustics from the rough-hewn stone and vining greenery. Private entertainment rooms made up the upper story, bars and buffets and dancing filled the lower halls. The House operated like a hotel with no overnight guests, and with the added promise that the music would never end.

Often he found himself forced to perform with amateurs … no, that was a bit harsh. Not quite amateurs, but talented enthusiasts who had come up without the rigorous training that had molded Pierre and his work. He had to harden himself to every off-beat cadence and thick-fingered trill. He learned to close his eyes when they danced about in their passion, unable to sit still for even a moment in front of the score scrolling past on their tablet. When the music deviated from the score, he tried to stay calm and unmoved, but a part of him yearned for the polished professionalism of the old orchestras.

The notes on his tablet scrolled to their end, and they finished with a flourish. As he rose with his colleagues to accept the scattered applause of their scattered audience, he set his face into a pleasant, smiling mask and looked warmly to each one during their solo bows—a warmth that was sometimes sincere, but more often feigned. 

On his left stood Fabian—not particularly handsome, but with a tall, relaxed frame and a genuinely friendly smile that endeared him to audiences. Fabian was a violist that even Pierre could respect, but he spent too much time covering up the mistakes of the very young, very nervous violinist. What was her name? Clara. Slight figure, flyaway hair. He would not be playing with her again. Jeanne, the other violinist, was competent at least. She was a retired teacher, playing for her own amusement, unbothered by the vicissitudes of life. She had already done her striving and made her mark, and played only for pleasure.

Pierre examined their audience. Most were in the courtyard, sitting in a half-oval arrangement of chairs and cushions. Some stood in the arches at the edge, politely clapping, yet distracted by other happenings in the depths of the House. Finally, he looked up to the gallery and saw, much to his shock, one of the Shining Ones, standing head and shoulders above the rest amid a crowd of black-clad figures. 

Shining indeed. Their otherworldly presence clashed with Earth’s dimensions, causing a sparkle and glow along the boundaries of the figure that the eye could see. They stood in ordinary space like a panel of stained glass, but instead of lead to seal the joins and edges, the puzzle pieces were bound with light. Pierre’s mind went utterly blank. In that moment, he felt neither fear nor envy, desire nor shame. He was caught up in the color and shimmer. None of it was at a frequency he could hear, and yet everything around the Shining One was singing, and Pierre felt all his blood sing in response, from his skin to the marrow of his bones. A warm, bright buzz surrounded him, as if he was also being transformed into a Shining One.

Now that he thought about it, now that he had time to strip the memory of emotion and revisit the snapshot of that moment in cold blood, he guessed that one of the black-clad students that shadowed the Shining One must have been her.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said. “At this very House of Music, back when they held performances for larger audiences. It’s small-scale now. More intimate and varied in offerings. More expensive. And you’re still here.” 

His own sense of inferiority might play tricks on his brain when it came to detecting disdain, and yet he was certain that she had complete control over the mild but obvious surprise that tinged her words. She wanted to show him that she had … perhaps not exactly sympathy, but an oddly detached pity for the situation, if not for his goals and his person.

“This is the only thing I know how to do,” he replied as calmly as he could through a stab of anger and shame that was beyond his control.

She tilted her head and continued to examine him silently, no doubt picking up the sudden, strong throb of his blood, and the tremor of defensiveness in his voice. The second generation of Earth emigrants had learned to enjoy watching people lie as uselessly and transparently as a dog pretending to ignore a chewed-up shoe. Pierre felt humiliated, like a castrato who had suffered and given up much only to have the tide of fashion change. The hopes and ambitions of his younger years had been buried in a wave of obsolescence beyond his control … beyond anyone’s control, and among his peers he had probably handled it worst.

“You performed a Choi-Seeger work,” she continued dispassionately. “Not difficult to play competently … but her music has the potential to be outstanding in the right hands. You were getting there, but one of your violinists was having a bad day, or maybe a bad year. The quartet was unbalanced, anyway. You knew the violist and the older violinist well, and it showed.

“When her fingers slipped on that transition to 5/4 time, your expression didn’t change, but I could feel your fury surging at her mistake. Even from the gallery, we could sense the rush of blood and the flood of adrenaline that made your cheeks turn red, then pale.” 

She paused, musing over the memory, smiling as if she found the remembrance sweet. “But quick as a blink, your violist—Fabian—responded to the error by adding an arpeggio of grace notes. He joyously blended her wonky phrasing into the whole, as if that had always been the intention.”

Hurt at the criticism, Pierre spoke sharply, not caring if she found him rude. “If she wanted to improvise, she should’ve joined a jazz group. We’re meant to read the music in front of us.”

“Hm,” was her only response, but after a short pause she added obliquely, “The music of the Official Speech is not a recitation. It’s a conversation.”

He tried a lighter tone, to dismiss the topic. “Fine. Anyway, Fabian doesn’t play with us anymore.”

“I know. He’s studying with us now. Individual excellence is rare enough, but a musician whose presence elevates the performances of everyone around him as well? That’s communication of the highest degree. That’s the foundation of Official Speech.”

For some reason, it only made Pierre angry to hear that Fabian had accomplished years earlier, without even meaning to, the very thing for which he was all but prostituting himself—a chance for respect and status beyond what Earth could now provide. He wanted to pretend he didn’t care, but emotion made him quarrel with her regardless.

“In other words, you poached him from us? If music is truly the universal language, why must we all speak your dialect? Why can’t you let us keep what’s ours?”

“Nothing is being taken from you. Your orchestras may or may not die, but if they survive, some will evolve. The question is whether you’re able to see this as a tragedy, or as the very nature of music, creativity, and our humanity. Must it always and only be the notes on the page, and the great works within walls? Is tradition always stagnation? Some still wear twentieth-century formal attire when playing in the symphony halls, and some even wear robes to sing. This?” She indicated her flowing black garb. “A student’s uniform, many of you suppose, and in a way it is, but it is really a message, a statement. Absorbing, receiving, flexible, fluid. An invitation to speak, to start the conversation. Not a costume, fixed in time. Not a domination of the subject.

“Your violist? Fabian? That wasn’t the first time I’d heard him play. He’d already made a name for himself in the virtual halls online, playing in massive orchestras unlimited by geography or patronage.”

Pierre couldn’t help himself. His mouth drew into a tight line, almost but not quite a sneer.

She smiled. “So, you were never interested in the digital options. A purist. Well, for Fabian it was never either/or. And listen.”

She told him of concerts held near beaches, music adapted to blend with the sound of breaking waves; performances in forests, for the participation of the wind in the trees; flash mobs in open town squares bordered by busy streets, to capture the whisper and shout of random human voices.

“This is the symphony orchestra of today. It moves, it changes, it’s not bound to any place or form or tradition. And there’s more happening beyond the orchestras. There’s so much more.”

And then she told him of modern panyards with professional steel orchestras performing, teaching, and passing on their distinctive legacies. Venues that staged ancient opera in contemporary variants of traditional costumes. New schools dedicated solely to percussion, building on centuries-old traditions of multiple cultures. Choirs of vocal and bodily instruments—tapping feet, clapping hands, hooting and trilling and clicks and whispers. Her voice lost its neutral tone and grew deep, soft, and slow with passionate intensity as she detailed the progress made in research, and the expansion of the disciplines of cognitive musicology, psychoacoustics, and biomusicology. She leaned towards him, one hand pressed against the low table beside her untouched glass of tea, the other raised to flex and curl as if she were auto-conducting the tempo of her oratory.

“Our locations are real and virtual, permanent and ephemeral. Part historical museum, part educational center. Recording, performing, teaching, learning, creating the new, reviving the old. We are working to develop our own approved vernacular, equal in dignity and complexity to the Official Speech of the Shining Ones.

“You could join us, if you wanted to.”

With that final declaration, she sagged back and fell silent at last. Her downswept gaze fell on the glass of tea; she blinked and scooped it up with both hands. She drank long enough to slake, slow enough to savor.

Pierre breathed a long, slow exhalation. He refused to let her see how much her words had stirred him. When he refilled her glass, he took care to imbue each movement with additional grace. She gave him a slight bow of acknowledgement, and a faint smile that might have meant she was pleased with herself, or might have been a smirk at his attempt to seem impassive.

“You make it sound like … heaven.” The final word was spoken with a laugh, as Pierre released a fraction of the pent-up tension within him. Curiosity, anticipation, and fear bubbled up as he tried to imagine himself being part of the world she described. Although it wasn’t quite the discovery he had hoped for, with the full privilege and perks of the new language and the new citizenship, it was enticing. She was promising hope, and opportunities, and maybe a way to extend himself beyond the stable surroundings he had created in this beautiful but limited room.

Pierre knew this much—he would not decide based on unsubstantiated information, however persuasively delivered. He needed time.

“Sounds like heaven, and you sound like quite the evangelist. Is this invitation for me specifically, or are you recruiting for your cause?” he asked her.

She could have taken offense at his words, but she replied with a return to her usual neutrality. “For you. And don’t call it a cause. If you don’t want to play music, and play with music, don’t bother.”

Not completely neutral. There was a little edge, a slight bite to what she said, though not in how she said it. Pierre felt as if she was reminding him who she was, almost, but not quite, putting him in his place. He rallied. “And you are inviting me based on … what? A decade-old memory of a somewhat botched performance?”

Much to his surprise, she grinned suddenly. “My tutor sent me. He said you’re an oppositional bastard who’ll put pride before common sense any day of the week, but if you’re given time you’ll eventually come around.”

“Who is your tutor?” Pierre finally asked, grudgingly allowing himself to show interest. He had never learned to correctly vocalize any of the names of the Shining Ones, but it would be a delight to hear her speak it in person.

Her eyes went wide in amazement. “Who have we been discussing all afternoon? Fabian studies with us, but he’s also one of the junior lecturers in biomusicology. He’s my tutor as well. He asked me to look you up, as a favor to him, the moment this ethnomusicology project got approved.”

Pierre was so shocked by this news that he didn’t trust himself to reply at all. He busied himself with the things that would comfort him: adjusting the louvres to take advantage of the new angle of the sunlight, shifting a floral arrangement a few millimeters to the left for improved symmetry, and replenishing the Turkish delight on the table before his client. She watched his corrections to the environment with approval and kept her own silence, inserting a politely professional distance between them once again until the allotted hour had passed.

At the point of farewell, she presented him with the usual token, a small, etched round of metal which would contain payment for his services, plus a lagniappe for how well he had performed them. “My information, including my given name, is included on that token. But on Earth, they call me Sara. You can use that name, if you wish.”

Offering a simple set of consonants and vowels to use in place of the full, formal, complicated name in Official Speech—although it was a common practice, it was one which Pierre found insulting. However, this time, the condescension did not burn as deeply, eased perhaps by the tangible proof of worth that was the datacoin she had pressed into his hand.

There are three paths ahead of Pierre.

The first path, which circles back to where he started, is the path of pride. Pierre joins Sara and Fabian on the Earth Ethnomusicology Project and discovers that those two, along with most of the people they work with, have absorbed the customs and behaviors of the Shining Ones. They operate with a disorienting lack of hierarchy, while comporting themselves with an effortless absence of humility. He never quite knows where he stands with them, and it wounds his sense of self-esteem. Eventually it becomes too much for him, and he leaves to continue a peaceful but solitary life in his single room at the House of Music, growing more and more eccentric as he clings to unreliable memories of the idealized past when there were no Shining Ones, when his lineage and vocation made him more than ordinary.

The second path, which leads to a dead end, is the path of control. The education and experience that Pierre is so proud of make him seem over-rehearsed and lacking in sincerity to the Shining Ones and their protegés. They send him to therapists and doctors and analysts. They try to get him to rediscover the rootedness that was excavated from his musical soul at such an early age. They fail. Maybe they lack the know-how to change him. Maybe he lacks the motivation to change. Maybe he’s just fatally flawed. He remains at the margins of the group, yearning for that transcendence which would bring him towards the center of the movement. Some days, when he remembers that he is the only one being hard on himself, he is content. But content is not enough, and he drifts away from music performance to focus completely on the Vibrational Aesthetic, a form of perfection that never reminds him of what he is missing. 

The third path, which is a never-ending journey to new places, is the path of love. Maybe Pierre never gets over himself. He will always be frustrated that there are no higher rungs to rise to, no lower rungs to look down on, and he will never become a democratic, non-hierarchical, modern specimen of homo sapiens musicalis. Maybe he won’t get past that fundamental flaw. His connection to music will always bear that taint of stiffness, of overtraining, of an artifice and embellishment that has gone out of fashion. But beyond those obstacles to a perceived perfection, maybe he can be simply fascinated by the work, the play, the sheer novelty of what he and his comrades are doing. Every discovery is a mountain peak scaled, making his blood beat faster under his cultured, crystalline shell. Maybe, when he feels that blaze and buzz from skin to marrow, he feels as if he were becoming a Shining One indeed, and that is far, far more than merely enough.

A century later, musicians still debate whether there was a real Pierre at some point in history, or whether the character is a fictional composite of two or more real musicians from that shocking transitional era between the Information Age and the Extraterrestrial Age. Candidates include Pierre Gastinel, a cellist based in Quebec; Pierre Saint-Cyr, a Swiss composer and performer of several stringed instruments; and Pierre LaValle, a conductor of classical music in the western territories of the former United States of America. 

Either way, it hardly matters, because it’s the conductor and the orchestra who get to decide Pierre’s final path when they perform Pierre Doit Choisir, the popular symphonic creation of the Wu Wei Collective. Sometimes they throw it open to an audience vote. Sometimes they stage an extended performance and play all three endings. One version, adapted with permission from the creators by the Night Crew Collective, has three orchestras playing the three concluding movements at the same time in stormy yet harmonious cooperation.

Interpretations of this deceptively simple work are many and varied, but all are well-attended by humans from sapiens sapiens, sapiens musicalis, and sapiens luciferensis. The audience participation from the latter two groups is something to behold, often unexpectedly elevating the production to something divine. Remarkably, all the Collectives involved in creating, adapting, and performing this piece agree on one thing: no permanent record of live performances should be made. An ephemeral transmission may be made accessible for a week or two, but then it vanishes, leaving in its place information about the next, nearest performance that listeners can attend in person or in avatar. 

Part of the power of Pierre Doit Choisir is that a child could circumvent those restrictions with the most basic of personal recording devices, but no one does. By mutual agreement, the prohibition is observed, the magic is preserved, and the question of what Pierre will choose to do remains in a state of suspended anticipation, never to be resolved until the hour of performance.

And why not? Music contains multitudes; it belongs to no one, or to everyone, or at least to those who love it most. The old need not be discarded, the new should not be scorned. Perhaps the message of the performance is … do we need to choose at all?

Harmonic Convergence

A Symphony for San Antonio

By Christopher Jenkins

Musicians trained in the Western classical tradition are often encouraged to believe that part of our responsibility as artists is to spread the gospel of classical music. This approach is often ingrained in our mentality. In this chapter, I subvert that approach by verbalizing the colonialist aspects of its nature, and I endorse a divergent perspective.

In some ways, the story of this chapter mirrors the recent evolution of critical thinking about Western classical music. Just as discussions about curriculum, praxis, and programming have evolved radically over the past few years, so has the concept I originally envisioned for this piece. The chapter I intended to write when this project began has little in common with the finished product.

Part I: Whose Symphony?

As Western classical music evolves in the United States, several market trends have become apparent. One trend is an increase in financial challenges faced by legacy orchestras. A partial list of orchestras filing for bankruptcy since 2000 includes the Honolulu Symphony, the Syracuse Symphony, the Albuquerque Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra. These organizations successfully reorganized, but when the San Antonio Symphony formally dissolved in 2022, San Antonio was briefly left as the largest city in the United States without a Western classical symphonic orchestra.1 Later that year, the musicians reconstituted the orchestra, under new leadership, as the San Antonio Philharmonic.

Another trend is the emergence of smaller performance organizations that demonstrate the viability of new governance models and offer career opportunities distinct from those of traditional orchestras. One model is the medium-sized chamber orchestra/ensemble, usually founded by younger players with a specific artistic focus and often lacking a conductor. Proof of concept was demonstrated in the 1980s by companies like Orpheus and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Today this model is emulated by ensembles like A Far Cry, Alarm Will Sound, East Coast Chamber Orchestra, Pink Martini, Room Full Of Teeth, and The Knights.2 Those groups have mostly employed White artists, but other ensembles seek to represent American society through an explicit focus on BIPOC artists and diverse repertoire. Such ensembles include Castle of Our Skins, Harlem Chamber Players, Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, New Canon Chamber Collective, and Sphinx Virtuosi. As these organizations usually do not rely on legacy donors (at least in their early years), advantages of this model include greater flexibility and diversity in programming and democratization of decision-making.3 A significant drawback is the inability to offer full-time salaried work for musicians and support staff.

An additional performance model is typified by the locally embedded nonprofit organization with a focus on community-building through teaching and performance. These organizations employ a small team of artists who live, perform, and teach in an area where Western classical music may not already have a foothold. They prioritize community impact over pure artistic merit, although their ensembles often perform at the highest professional level. A major advantage of their community focus is access to diverse sources of civic funding and grants, often allowing them to provide full-time stipends. For some performing musicians, a drawback is the emphasis on teaching and community engagement at the expense of artistic production (although the superb artistic quality of performances by these groups deserves notice). Examples include Community MusicWorks, Music Haven, Shelter Music Boston, and the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music and the Apple Hill String Quartet.

Both models described here have artistic and managerial advantages over legacy orchestras and community music schools, including greater appetite for risk in artistic programming, flexibility in hiring, independence from the preferences of legacy donors, and a more dynamic and stimulating environment for performers and teachers.

During the San Antonio Symphony’s dormancy, I envisioned some type of scrappy, startup, Western classical music organization following these alternative models to inhabit the artistic space in San Antonio vacated by the dissolution of the symphony. This imaginary ensemble would consist of younger musicians energized by community engagement and teaching. They would make diverse hires that reflected the community and would program repertoire by Mexican, Latinx, and Southwest American composers.

In a conversation with a Hispanic colleague from Texas, I outlined this vision. Her response was clarifying: Why does San Antonio need Western classical music? If any musical organization were to inhabit this space, shouldn’t it center an ensemble performing traditional Latin American music, perhaps even mariachi?

In 2022, more than 65% of San Antonio’s population identified as Hispanic. The population identifying as White was 22.6%.4 In Texas overall, the percentage of the population identifying as Hispanic stood at 40.2%, slightly above the White non-Latino population, which was 39.8%.5 The United States may or may not become a “majority-minority” nation by 2045,6 but Texas appears to be there now. The population of San Antonio already has musical traditions for which there is a built-in market. Mariachi is a reasonable focus but need not be a limitation; while the city’s Hispanic population has a sizeable Mexican and Mexican American contingent, many residents also hail from other Spanish-speaking areas.

The size of Texas’s Mexican population might be why Texas State University, in nearby San Marcos, began offering a Bachelor of Music degree in music studies with a mariachi concentration and teacher certification. The Butler School of Music at the University of Texas-Austin has two mariachi ensembles, one for students of all majors and another more advanced ensemble, the Mariachi Paredes de Tejastitlán. They include guitarrón and vihuela, instruments not usually taught in music schools in the United States. Under its “chamber music” heading, the University of New Mexico includes their Mariachi Juvenil, as well as the “HonkyTonk” Ensemble, which focuses on country music of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s.

A group that blends the new performance models mentioned above—a smaller chamber orchestra and a teaching organization focused on building community—could be successful in San Antonio. But any musical group trying to gain a foothold there is more likely to be successful if it reflects the diversity of San Antonio by presenting the music of residents’ traditional cultures, such as mariachi, for instance. There is even an existing local venue to host its performances: the Alameda Theater, a historic landmark completed in 1949 that was a main hub for performances by Latin American ensembles. Its current mission statement is “to be a vital presenter of Latino arts and culture.”7

The symphony’s resurrection renders this specific point moot. I am not calling for the elimination, or even the eclipsing, of the San Antonio Philharmonic. Of course there is value in exposure to any kind of live music performance, and I sympathize deeply and personally with the Western classical performers around San Antonio who just want to be employed doing what they love most. The question is not whether a symphonic orchestra in San Antonio has value, but the value of any symphony relative to other musical traditions, and how symphonies in any American city might redefine their cultural legitimacy in a rapidly diversifying nation. In the San Antonio context, it may well be that the Philharmonic could coexist with a smaller, more culturally responsive ensemble, or even that the two organizations could support one another, building a larger constituency for live music in the community.

It just so happens that a chamber ensemble drawing upon the models I describe above has indeed taken root in San Antonio: the Agarita Ensemble. The Western classical designation for Agarita would be a “piano quartet,” but its online presence suggests that it is much more than that.8 Agarita provides bilingual, multidisciplinary performances for their local community in collaboration with poets, glassblowers, and visual artists, plus free educational programs for students throughout the San Antonio area. Their four core members are experienced professional performers with K-12 and university teaching experience. Their mobile concert hall, titled the “Agarita Humble Hall,” brings outdoor performances to audiences in all ten districts of San Antonio, and their local performances are held at libraries and museums. Their tagline is, “From San Antonio, Agarita provides world-class, innovative performances for San Antonio, in San Antonio, and with San Antonio” (their emphases). The Agarita Ensemble seems to understand the critical role of community embeddedness in ensuring organizational resiliency. The question of diversity and representation in their repertoire is more complex. Their repertoire reflects a high degree of diversity, but generally within the stylistic representations of Western classical music. Composers whose works appear on recent program notes include Andrea Casarrubios, Carlos Chávez, Osvaldo Golijov, Heitor Villalobos, Florence Price, Caroline Shaw, Jessica Meyer, and Jessie Montgomery, in addition to W. A. Mozart and Dmitri Shostakovich. One might note that, in this commendably diverse selection of composers, only one, Carlos Chávez, is Mexican. Casarrubios was born in Spain; Villalobos is Brazilian; Golijov is Argentinian; and Price and Montgomery are African American.9

On the one hand, the works listed on Agarita’s press materials communicate a forward-thinking, modern accessibility that is far more dynamic, engaging, and reflective of the social and geographic landscapes their audiences navigate—or at least, more so than quartets from the common practice period. On the other hand, to conflate the identities held by Price, Golijov, Montgomery, and Villalobos as a flavor of “Brownness” representing an acceptable level of specificity for BIPOC audiences is to engage in the type of identity erasure that enforces the marginalization of BIPOC identities in the first place.

I do not mean so much to accuse Agarita of doing this as to point out that this type of thinking is, in my experience, currently at the level of “best practice” such that it is absolutely dominant among the most progressive music education organizations that desire to be embedded in their communities. Most would be excited to program works by the composers named above. If the specific cultural makeup of their constituency is even a concern, it is secondary to a desire to be seen presenting “progressive” and “accessible” Western classical music by composers who are not White.

It is very possible that Agarita regularly and explicitly collaborates with experts in Latin American music who are unrelated to the classical canon, such as mariachi performers or bandoneon players. If so, this collaboration is not immediately evident from their online presence. The larger impression is that Agarita has homed in on representations of Western classical music that are maximally accessible and culturally relevant to San Antonio’s population, and I believe Agarita should be commended for doing so. A larger question still looms: if there are musical forms that are already valued by that population outside of the practice of Western classical music, why should they not be centralized, by the San Antonio Philharmonic, by Agarita, or by other groups?

The San Antonio Symphony is unlikely to be the last American symphony to experience bankruptcy. Its difficulties typify the cultural transformations that underlie these pervasive financial issues, and the culturally informed approach taken when filling vacant artistic spaces. The brief absence of an orchestra in San Antonio is a helpful object lesson for the consideration of these issues, even if the explicit question of its artistic space has been resolved for the time being. A number of major questions remain unresolved, such as the meaning of the symphonic project and the absolute value of the orchestra in twenty-first-century American life. It is also difficult to sort out the increasingly awkward symbiosis between Western classical music and popular forms, as aesthetic features of those forms seep into classical music.

Many Americans take for granted the symphony’s valence as a component of “highbrow” culture, and perceive symphonies to be essential parts of the cultural landscape in American cities. In this age of the MAGA political movement, it is also clear that many Americans fear that immigration and the empowerment of BIPOC populations is on the verge of sparking a physical and cultural invasion that will irrevocably remake American cultural traditions. But we should be clear about the fact that the United States’ symphonic tradition is relatively new, and is alien, not native, to American culture—itself a result of not just immigration but an explicit program of cultural exportation run by the German government.

Following the failed German revolutions of 1848-1849, immigration by radical Germanic artists to the United States informed the preliminary inclination of the gatekeepers of America’s symphonic tradition toward works by German-speaking composers. After the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, European immigration again helped to cement the Germanic flavor of Western classical music in the United States.10 The desire of American elites to buttress their connection to Germanic music as a badge of supremacy also played a large role in establishing the “German-ness” of the American symphonic canon. But often overlooked is the encoding of these characteristics in the “Big Five” orchestras through the imperial German government’s aggressive project of cultural exportation, prior to World War I, in an effort to combat British and French political influence in America by leveraging claims of cultural supremacy.11 German musicians and politicians approached this project of cultural exportation with a “missionary zeal.”12 In January 1914, just months before the outbreak of the first World War, the German ambassador to the U.S. declared, “Our cultural efforts do not aim at doing a favor to the Americans…we wish to elevate German Kultur to its due right—a right which it claims unconditionally as the first culture of the world.”13

The Philadelphia Orchestra, founded in 1900, was initially directed by Fritz Scheel, who conducted rehearsals in German, insisted on conducting German martial music while wearing his German army regalia, and replaced half of the orchestra’s American players with European musicians after the first season.14 When the Chicago and Minneapolis orchestras were founded, in 1891 and 1903 respectively, their conductors were German. The longest-operating orchestra in the United States, the New York Philharmonic, was founded in 1842 by a musician who had studied in Germany, and it hired few non-German or non-Austrian conductors in its first 70 years of operation.15 When the Boston Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1881 by an American who had studied piano in Vienna, he insisted that the BSO’s hall be modeled on Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, and hired a Leipzig Conservatory graduate as its first conductor.16 The Cleveland Orchestra has had few music directors not of Germanic or Austrian origin since 1943 (although some who were not have been their most influential).17

The conflict between the United States and Germany in World War II, and the antipathy that necessarily developed between the two nations, was to some extent culturally offset by efforts to establish German cultural products and traditions as exalted and venerable, including German domination of the U.S. symphonic canon. As the historian Jessica Gienow-Hecht notes, “The solidification of a ‘classical’ canon in the United States (and elsewhere) coincided with the rise of the German empire and its self-appointed role as a Kulturnation (a nation based on a cultural canon).”18 American orchestras have historically touted this special connection to German-speaking lands as a mark of cultural validation, and those connections are nurtured today.19 In 2015, the Boston Symphony Orchestra excitedly announced that it would share its music director with Leipzig’s Gewandhausorchester.20 In 2022, Germany was the first destination for a post-COVID tour by a major American symphony, by the New York Philharmonic at the Usedom Music Festival.21

The success of this cultural project—to situate German aesthetics and traditions at the heart of American musical culture—has influenced generations of American musicians. One might wonder why this matters. If the actual value of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms has been demonstrated, who cares what the source was? First, this project of cultural exportation has never been wholly successful. The popular legitimacy of the American orchestra and the symphonic canon has always been in question, especially after Afrodiasporic musical forms began to achieve global prominence, starting in the early twentieth century. Second, the aesthetic conditions attendant to the practice of Western classical music are themselves an issue. I propose that in a rapidly diversifying America, the ideals communicated by the aesthetic practice of the classical symphonic canon do not encapsulate the values of diverse cultures and people. This need not be an indictment of either the canon or of the cultures that produced it, but it does indict the supposition that the symphonic canon—and perhaps Western classical music generally—must be “universally” appealing to those with “good taste,” and that “good taste” must be taught to people from cultures where it is not naturally inculcated.

The belief that Western classical music has universal appeal, and should be taught to everyone, is best construed as an assumption that social, political, and emotional ideals are ultimately universal across cultures.22 Because they are not, Western classical music will become increasingly unpopular in the United States as our population becomes more diverse—at least as long as it retains historical practices and promotes music from a canon reflecting social and political ideals that were ascendant in nineteenth-century Germany. The good news is that there is a surfeit of opportunities to transform the American practice of Western classical music. The vocabulary and perspective of antiracism can be helpful in that transformation.

Part II: Musical Antiracism

A key feature of antiracism is that no cultural product is necessarily better or worse than any other; they are simply different. Our cultural biases cause us to interpret that difference as a measure of objective value. One might note that different cultural products communicate different social and political values, through different expressive and aesthetic modes; there is no objective or culturally neutral basis for elevating one set of values over another. An antiracist reading of the relative value of Western classical music versus mariachi music, or rap music, or gamelan music, is that they are all different, and equally valuable.

At this point, I hear the conventional orchestra fan’s inner voice all too clearly, perhaps because of my own nearness to conventionality as a recovering orchestra player: “But how could a genre like mariachi impart the same cultural value as a symphony orchestra?” Because these cultural questions are often racialized, it is important to understand the historical context of racial categories.

It is common knowledge that modern racial categories are purely social constructs and lack any scientific basis.23 They were created by White persons roughly five hundred years ago to demarcate relative access to power and resources.24 The racial categories used in the United States arose primarily as a result of the transatlantic slave trade and a need to justify specific exploitative strategies that could be legally used against various non-White groups in the Americas.25 Culture is real, and because of a history of racial segregation, cultural values and practices often align with fictive racial categories. Race is thus reified through cultural implication. But the host of negative associations and stereotypes associated with supposed racial differences are then imprinted onto our perceptions of culture.

Historically, a central function of the designation and implicit segregation of musical genre is to sort music, as a cultural, racial, and class signifier, onto a scale ranging from inferior to superior. In their study of Western art music and class in the UK, Anna Bull and Christina Scharff found that the spaces, dress, and modes of listening for classical music had many similarities with middle-class culture, and that middle-class participants enforced a strict hierarchy of value in which “urban” music was labeled “illegible,” or lacking complexity and emotional depth.26 Judith Becker’s observations on the falsity of Western music’s superior complexity, and Loren Kajikawa’s observations on the racialized construction of Western classical music’s exalted cultural value, both provide helpful vocabulary to disentangle this superimposed hierarchy of value.27 Guthrie Ramsey points out that American commercial music originally relied on “strategies of categorization and containment” to increase sales by marketing “race records” to Black Americans, “hillbilly music” to rural Whites, and pop music to middle-class Whites.28 Musical segregation increases the attractiveness of musical experiences by enhancing identity markers of race and class; listeners implicitly understand what type of music is “for them,” and reinforce aspects of identity they find desirable by associating with a specific genre. Establishing a hierarchy of value, in which “superior” music just happens to be music written by Whites and reflecting White middle-class values, has historically been the point of genre distinctions. Aside from these value judgements, however, we should also consider whether the primary purpose of any cultural product, including nonverbal mediums such as music, is to represent and reproduce particular social and political values that differ by culture.

In this context, it’s worth interrogating the assumptions behind the often reflexive support for Western classical music organizations, and the coded language through which people like myself—those trained to be ambassadors of Western classical music, situated in institutions that reproduce and promulgate it—obscure our biases:

1) We say: Communities benefit from exposure to Western classical music. This is true only insofar as any musical experience has the potential to stimulate creative thinking and generate empathy. But people in any community listen to some form of music, and many engage in music-making. The unspoken assumption is that communities benefit more from exposure to Western classical music than they do from exposure to other types of music, especially “popular” musics, which are supposedly inferior. But arguments that Western classical music is superior because it exhibits greater formal complexity and emotional depth are false. Judith Becker delivers a particularly effective response to these arguments in her 1986 essay “Is Western Art Music Superior?” noting not only the subjectivity of formal complexity, but that the relative value of structural complexity is culturally informed and bound to interpretations of music’s ideal social function.29

2) We say: In underserved communities, Western classical music training teaches students rigor and discipline, which improves their academic performance and behavior in school. One unspoken assumption informing this fallacious belief is that behavioral or academic issues are the result of a lack of rigor and discipline, and that students in underserved communities have not been taught sufficient rigor and discipline in their homes and communities.

K-12 students often lack rigor and discipline, but Black and Brown populations are no more naturally prone to undisciplined behavior than White students. Surely, some Black and Brown students in low-income school districts grow up in environments characterized by chronic underinvestment, few social supports, and endemic violence, which can affect any student’s behavior. Behaviors fostered by these systemic issues often elicit the assumption that “those kids aren’t raised right,” but that these students can be “properly” educated through the imposition of cultural values from the “White middle class” (itself a mythological construct lacking substantial being outside of our own minds).

This approach has many elements in common with the deficit model of educational thinking, in which undesirable behavior by low-income and minority students is ascribed to limited cultural capital in the home.30 This is in contrast with the cultural difference model, which holds that cultural compatibility between home and school culture is a significant factor in students’ behavior and achievement.31 Rigor and discipline can be fostered through many different styles of musical training, including those which might bear more relation to students’ homes and community cultures.

We should keep in mind that plenty of well-resourced student musicians, including many who are White, lack discipline academically and personally, even those (or perhaps particularly those) who are so devoted to their instruments that they reap privileges for performing at an excellent technical level. Perhaps the link between personal discipline and musical dedication is not so strong after all. Just as in organized sports, there is no shortage of classical musicians behaving atrociously; professionals and students describe abuse as an industry norm in both sectors.32

Why, aside from our own need for self-aggrandizement, is it necessary to sell the illusion that the grueling effort required to play diatonic scales in tune builds personal character, when there is copious evidence to the contrary? Is it not enough to say that through the application of effort and focus, students will earn the privilege to express themselves precisely and intimately through their instruments? Perhaps, though, absent explicit links between Western classical training, academic accomplishment, and personal discipline, many students and parents of color would reject classical training in favor of more culturally resonant alternatives.

3) We say: Communities need and deserve a classical symphony orchestra. Who can deny the impact of experiencing hundreds of perfectly synchronized musicians come together as one, as in the finale of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? One might even argue that the large ensemble inspires by consolidating disparate energies to simulate the apex of what a society is capable of achieving through coordinated activity.

Communities experience gratification through ensemble performances that reify shared values in musical practice. But there is no reason why that ensemble must be a symphony orchestra. Robert Schumann once claimed that “no composer epitomized the socio-political meaning of music more than Ludwig van Beethoven.”33 But different cultures foster different social and political values. There is no certainty that any performance of Western classical music, even at the climax of Beethoven’s Ninth, fully represents the social and political values of every culture and community.

Nor must we insist on the elevation of Beethoven to the level of “genius” above and beyond other musicians to appreciate and be moved by his work. Its rigorous construction and emotional impact are just as undeniable as in any stupendously captivating music. As a huge fan of music by Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Nina Simone, Robert Johnson, the Cowboy Junkies, Christopher Wallace (The Notorious B.I.G.), and Megan Pete (Megan Thee Stallion), I support the integrity and courage behind Philip Ewell’s statement that “Beethoven was an above-average composer; let’s leave it at that.”34 For those who struggle with this statement, I also empathize. I definitely underwent a spiritual transformation and emerged a different person after experiencing the third movement of Beethoven’s quartet op. 132, the Heiliger Dankgesang. But the same applies to Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues,” the Cowboy Junkies’ mesmerizingly dark cover of the same tune, and Wallace’s delivery on “Ready to Die” and “Gimme the Loot” (in what must be one of the most fantastically unexpected and dynamic lyrical expressions of triplets in music history).

I am not suggesting that the only option is to toggle between the poles symbolized by Beethoven and Megan Thee Stallion. I believe that more integrative alternatives await. There are examples of popular and successful large ensembles appealing to more diverse audiences by breaking the traditional symphony orchestra mold. During the 2010s, the Soulful Symphony consisted of a full orchestra, gospel choir, and jazz band, all onstage simultaneously. Under conductor and composer Darin Atwater, this ensemble performed hip-hop symphonies with rap groups as soloists, arrangements with gospel choir, and in a variety of other ensemble combinations. In Baltimore, a majority-Black city with an existing symphony orchestra, the Soulful Symphony regularly performed for sold-out, mostly Black audiences at Strathmore, one of the Baltimore Symphony’s halls.

A similar ensemble, centering Latin American music, could possibly thrive in San Antonio, maybe even alongside the city’s Philharmonic and the Agarita Ensemble. It could perform culturally relevant repertoire as a complement to or in place of traditional symphonic repertoire. Perhaps this solution would be closest to an integration of Western classical and Latin American aesthetics.

The number of people in the U.S. identifying as Hispanic increased by 23% over the past decade.35 The Agarita Ensemble readily acknowledges the significance of this evolution and offers bilingual programming and program notes. More orchestras across the U.S. are connecting with Hispanic communities through bilingual programming, new artist and repertoire choices, and revamped educational programs, including El Sistema–inspired programs conducted in Spanish and English.36 All of this programming deserves support as long as the thinking behind it is antiracist—holding that all cultural products are equally valuable and that none is fundamentally superior to any other. Different cultural products may communicate different values, and then comparison becomes a question of value systems. But this comparison might not end up favoring the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms to the extent that their adherents might expect.

Conceptually, I would like to support the existence of a Western classical music organization in San Antonio because people deserve equitable opportunities to learn about and experience forms of self-expression with which they are not familiar. And I have no desire to impede the growth of the Agarita Ensemble or the San Antonio Philharmonic. Western classical musicians in the San Antonio area deserve a chance to earn a salary expressing the music for which they have trained their whole lives.

But we should be honest about the constituency for whom they are expressing that music. Most of all, communities deserve the opportunity to engage with forms of self-expression that best reflect their cultural and community values. An integrated approach, as exemplified by the Soulful Symphony in Baltimore, might be ideal in San Antonio’s cultural space. As the demographics of the United States change, don’t cultural traditions that have existed on the margins of the mainstream deserve to be valued and centralized? Orchestras could become more culturally relevant, dynamic, fulfilling, and financially soluble if they are able to effectively access and represent those traditions.

Notes

• 1 Philip Kennicott, “America’s Orchestras are in Crisis,” The New Republic, August 25, 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/114221/orchestras-crisis-outreach-ruining-them; Javier C. Hernandez, “San Antonio Symphony to Dissolve Amid Labor Dispute,” The New York Times, June 17, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/arts/music/san-antonio-symphony-bankruptcy.html.

• 2 Obviously, my focus here is on organizations that offer employment for players of orchestral instruments, and mostly winds, brass, and strings.

• 3 By “legacy donors,” I mean the class of resourced individuals who feel they have a vested interest in the promotion of canonical symphonic and operatic repertoire as the preeminent musical event in their city or town.

• 4 QuickFacts: San Antonio city, Texas, United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanantoniocitytexas/PST045222.

• 5 QuickFacts: Texas, United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/TX/POP010210

• 6 William H. Frey, “The U.S. Will Become ‘Minority White’ in 2045, Census Predicts,” Brookings, March 14, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects.

• 7 “Our Mission,” Alameda Theater Conservancy, https://www.alamedatheaterconservancy.org.

• 8 The description of the Agarita Ensemble here draws heavily on its website, particularly the page describing its mission and the organization’s “biography”: https://www.agarita.org/mission-bio.

• 9 The ethnic and racial identities of Villalobos, Golijov, Price, and Montgomery are well-established. Casarrubios’ website describes her as a “Spanish-born cellist and composer”: https://www.andreacasarrubios.com/biography.html.

• 10 Jennifer Vanasco, “American Classical Music: Exploring Roots, Reflections,” University of Chicago Chronicle 17, no. 7 (1998), https://chronicle.uchicago.edu/980108/musymp.shtml

• 11 “The Big Five” is a moniker popularized in the mid-twentieth century to describe the most prestigious symphony orchestras in the United States: the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The term has been contested and is used less frequently today, but still has purchase in the world of American classical music.

• 12 Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Trumpeting Down the Walls of Jericho: The Politics of Art, Music, and Emotion in German-American Relations, 1870 – 1920,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 3 (2003): 594, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3790732.

• 13 Gienow-Hecht, “Trumpeting Down the Walls of Jericho,” 589.

• 14 Carnegie Hall, “Five Things to Know About the Philadelphia Orchestra,” Carnegie Hall, https://www.carnegiehall.org/Explore/Articles/2022/01/20/Five-Things-About-The-Philadelphia-Orchestra.

• 15 Georg Predota, “First Concert of the Philharmonic Society of New York 7 December 1842,” Interlude, December 7, 2023, https://interlude.hk/first-concert-of-the-philharmonic-society-of-new-york-7-december-1842.

• 16 “Major Henry Lee Higginson: Practical Idealism and the Gift for Friendship,” Life Stories of Civil War Heroes, https://dragoon1st.tripod.com/cw/files/higginson1.html; Steven Ledbetter, “Higginson and Chadwick: Non-Brahmins in Boston,” American Music, 19, no. 1 (2001): 54, https://doi.org/10.2307/3052596.

• 17 “Mission & History,” The Cleveland Orchestra, https://www.clevelandorchestra.com/discover/about.

• 18 Gienow-Hecht, “Trumpeting Down the Walls of Jericho,” 586.

• 19 Betty E. Chmaj, “Fry versus Dwight: American Music’s Debate Over Nationality,” American Music, vol. 3 no. 1 (1985): 63 – 64, 68, 78, https://doi.org/10.2307/3052118.

• 20 Andrea Shea, “BSO’s Unprecedented Partnership with Leipzig Means More Than Just Sharing Andris Nelsons,” WBUR, March 1, 2017, https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/03/01/bso-leipzig-partnership.

• 21 “New York Philharmonic: Exclusive European Residency at the Usedom Festival Announced for 2022,” Dorn Music, December 1, 2021, https://dornmusic.com/nymv.

• 22 This type of claim often draws harsh denials, but just consider the case of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. To suppose that it is an “everyman” symphony with universal appeal to all is to consider its relatively narrow political idealism—social harmony through political equality and a self-actualization only achievable for the middle class in a particular stage of merchant capitalism—as universal values living in the hearts of all “reasonable” people. Regardless of how much one might want to believe these ideals are universal, they are not.

• 23 Results from the Human Genome Project revealed an incredibly low degree of genetic variability among humans, even across supposedly diverse racial groups. See Natalie Angier, “Do Races Differ? Not Really, Genes Show,” The New York Times, August 22, 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/22/science/do-races-differ-not-really-genes-show.html.

• 24 Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Bold Type Books, 2023).

• 25 “AAA Statement on Race,” American Anthropological Association, May 17, 1998, https://americananthro.org/about/policies/statement-on-race.

• 26 Anna Bull and Christina Scharff, “’McDonald’s Music’ vs. ‘Serious Music’: How Production and Consumption Practices Help to Reproduce Class Inequality in the Classical Music Profession,” Cultural Sociology, 11, no. 3 (2017): 283.

• 27 Judith Becker, “Is Western Art Music Superior?” The Musical Quarterly, 72, no. 3 (1986): 341-359, https://www.jstor.org/stable/948146; Loren Kajikawa, “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz (University of California Press, 2019).

• 28 Guthrie P. Ramsey, “African American Music,” Grove Music Online, November 26, 2013, https://musc102.blogs.wesleyan.edu/files/2021/04/Ramsey_Guthrie_2012_African_American_Music_Groves_Music_Online.pdf.

• 29 The “classical” musics of other cultures are also typically characterized as valuable, but nonetheless lacking the formal and structural complexity and depth of feeling that can only be found in Western art music. Becker also addresses these arguments in “Is Western Art Music Superior?”

• 30 There is a significant amount of writing on the “deficit model” by education researchers and learning scientists. See, for example, Richard R. Valencia, editor, The Evolution of Deficit Thinking: Educational Thought and Practice (Routledge, 1997).

• 31 Geneva Gay, At the Essence of Learning: Multicultural Education (Kappa Delta Pi, 1994).

• 32 Charges of sexual and racial abuse have been alleged against teachers and musicians employed by a diverse array of industry stalwarts, including El Sistema in Venezuela, the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, professors at the Juilliard School, and Oberlin Conservatory, my own employer at the time of this writing. See, for example, Drew McManus, “Musicians Behaving Badly,” Adaptistration, March 1, 2011, https://adaptistration.com/2011/03/01/musicians-behaving-badly; Geoff Baker and William Cheng, “The ‘Open Secret’ of Sexual Abuse In Venezuela’s Famous Youth Orchestra Program is Finally Exposed,” The Washington Post, May 27, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/27/venezuela-me-too-yo-te-creo-sexual-abuse-el-sistema-youth-orchestra; Miranda Wilson, “Musicians and Mental Health: A Toxic Culture Takes Its Toll on Players’ Well-Being,” Strings Magazine, January-February 2024, https://stringsmagazine.com/musicians-and-mental-health-a-toxic-culture-takes-its-toll-on-players-well-being; Anne Midgette and Peggy McGlone, “Assaults in Dressing Rooms. Groping During Lessons. Classical Musicians Reveal a Profession Rife with Harassment,” The Washington Post, July 26, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/assaults-in-dressing-rooms-groping-during-lessons-classical-musicians-reveal-a-profession-rife-with-harassment/2018/07/25/f47617d0-36c8-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html; Anastasia Tsioulcas, “More Than 500 Musicians Demand Accountability After Juilliard Misconduct Allegations,” NPR Classical, December 19, 2022, https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2022/12/19/1144082321/juilliard-robert-beaser-sexual-misconduct-allegation; Mark Sullivan, “Former HC Organist ‘Abused Position of Trust,’” Telegram & Gazette, February 28, 2019, https://www.telegram.com/story/news/local/worcester/2019/02/28/former-holy-cross-organist-grossly-abused-position-of-trust-at-oberlin-report-says/53226934007; Anastasia Tsioulcas, “Cleveland Orchestra Fires 2 Leading Musicians After Sexual Misconduct Investigation,” NPR Classical, October 24, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/10/24/660248392/cleveland-orchestra-fires-two-leading-musicians-after-sexual-misconduct-investig; Jason P. Frank, “Philharmonic Players Accused of Sexual Misconduct No Longer Performing,” Vulture, April 18, 2024, https://www.vulture.com/article/new-york-philharmonic-players-not-performing-sexual-misconduct.html. For research on systemic abuse in sports contexts, see Courtney Gattis and Matt Moore, “A Conceptual Analysis of Maltreatment In Sports: A Sport Social Work Perspective,” Frontiers in Sports and Active Living 4 (2022): 1017308, https://doi.org/10.3389%2Ffspor.2022.1017308; Angela J. Hattery, Earl Smith, Katelyn Foltz, and Marissa Kiss, “Ineffective Policies for Gender-Based Violence In Sports Result in a Lack of Accountability,” Brookings Institution, April 4, 2023, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ineffective-policies-for-gender-based-violence-in-sports-result-in-lack-of-accountability.

• 33 Gienow-Hecht, “Trumpeting Down the Walls of Jericho,” 590.

• 34 Philip Ewell, “Was Beethoven Truly The Greatest?” The Conversation, May 21, 2024, https://theconversation.com/was-beethoven-truly-the-greatest-229660.

• 35 Jeffrey S. Passel, Mark Hugo Lopez, and D’Vera Cohn, “U.S. Hispanic Population Continued Its Geographic Spread in the 2010s,” Pew Research Center, February 3, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/02/03/u-s-hispanic-population-continued-its-geographic-spread-in-the-2010s.

• 36 Laurence Vittes, “How Orchestras are Strategizing to Reach a Wider Audience,” Strings Magazine, January-February 2022, https://stringsmagazine.com/orchestras-reach-wider-audience.

“Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone”1

By Jesse Rosen

Arizona State University was wise to bring classical music professionals together with science fiction writers and engineers to contemplate the future of orchestras. There is a lesson in this process for freeing the imagination across all kinds of sectors. On the morning of the second day of our convening in 2023, the science fiction writer in my small group, Sheree Renée Thomas, shared this sketch of a story, sparked by the previous day’s conversation:

In the near future, cultural apartheid has been fully institutionalized and only a few state-sponsored traditional orchestras exist in a violently repressive dystopian world where other American music is forced underground. Donald Blanchard, a masterful violist, secretly navigates dual identities as a member of the renowned Cleveland Orchestra while moonlighting as a member of a guerrilla orchestra embedded in the Arcade, one of the city’s walled-off communities. Unbeknownst to his colleagues, Blanchard has been collaborating with an eclectic crew of other artists and street engineers who use new technology and old traditions of improvisation and collaboration to plan an act of resistance they hope will inspire a national movement.

All is risked when Blanchard’s identity and his dangerous secret is threatened to be revealed by an unknown fellow musician in his orchestra who has been watching him. The other musician—and possible whistleblower—is a trombone player (or percussionist, as they have more time to watch and observe their colleagues during rehearsals), who noticed Blanchard’s unusual extracurricular movements. Blanchard and his fellow guerrillas plan to sabotage an epic New Year’s Eve “celestial” performance at Severance Center, a performance that is scheduled to be broadcast not only nationally but in space as well. With exposure, Blanchard risks not only his own career, livelihood, and freedom, but also the future of a larger resistance movement that could help change the arts and society forever.

[Editors’ note: This narrative description, by Sheree Renée Thomas, was not ultimately written as a full story for this project. Nevertheless, we believe it beautifully encompasses many of the themes broached in this “Orchestra as Infrastructure” section, as Jesse describes in this essay.]

I’m not quite sure how Sheree arrived at this engrossing scenario, but I will take the credit or blame for volunteering that trombone players are sometimes the troublemakers, having been one myself.

In just two paragraphs, Sheree captures the ruptures in our nation and the fears and anxieties many of us feel about the future, and in particular the future of music and the arts. Today’s banning of books, the use of state power to punish dissenters, the suppression of voting rights, the winner-take-all politics, the erosion of belief in the public good, and the ascent of demagoguery do not bode well for a future that celebrates and supports creativity and expression—to say nothing of our democratic values of freedom, equality, and representative government. And just to be clear, American democracy remains deeply flawed, but without it, the promise of a just government, by and for the people, will die. Alas, Sheree’s vision of the future seems chillingly plausible. And what a cruel Faustian twist she offers us. A handful of orchestras have won the sustainability prize, but at the price of eliminating not only all other orchestras but all other forms of music!

My father was chief executive of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and Carnegie Hall. He regretted that from the 1960s through the 1980s, he helped build an orchestra sector that was, on the one hand, the envy of the arts community for its relative fiscal stability, living wages and benefits for artists, and sheer scale of activity, while on the other, was impervious to a changing world, forcibly rejecting calls for greater access, inclusion, relevance, and creativity. If he were alive today, I suspect that like me, he would be pleased to see that orchestras are no longer debating whether or not to change, but rather how they must change to better meet the needs and values of our diverse society. Still, as someone shot three times and captured fighting fascism in Germany at the age of 18, he’d have a heart attack contemplating Sheree’s all-too-real and not-so-distant future.

Sheree’s forecast sharpens the mind and signals urgency in how we lead our lives and do our work. It challenges me to think: If my father, and tens of thousands of others like him, put their lives on the line to defend democracy against one of the most heinous manifestations of authoritarianism and racism, then the least we can do today is to confront this question: What practices and policies can orchestras undertake that promote a healthy, just, pluralistic society—one that values diversity, tolerance, freedom of expression, and the human capacity for collectively resolving differences without killing one another or destroying the planet? In other words, small-d democracy.

Playing great music, with all its powers, is not sufficient. Many important and eloquent words have been spoken and penned about the humanizing impact of music and the arts: the stimulation of the mind, the opening of the heart, the thrill of virtuosity, the ability to touch our inner lives in ways that words alone cannot. Music brings joy, beauty, and shared remembrance and hope. Empirically, we know of the remarkable instrumental benefits of the arts for society, ranging from economic impact to improving learning and health outcomes. These cannot be discounted. But if orchestras and other arts organizations operate in a closed system that excludes many and avoids encounters with difference of all kinds, as many of them do, the values of the arts are easily and quickly subverted. It’s not enough to merely assert these values in a mission statement or on a website, if the deeper work of orchestras is to play a role in sustaining American democracy.

The Berlin Philharmonic of the 1930s vividly demonstrates this point; its similarity to Sheree’s scenario is uncanny. In the Weimar years (roughly 1918–1933), the orchestra was near collapse. Its music director, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, tried desperately to get a meeting with Hitler to seek help.2But Hitler had a spy in the orchestra who reported to him that he had overheard Furtwängler bemoaning the high taxes in Germany. That was enough to turn Hitler against him. But Furtwängler persisted and finally got his meeting with Hitler. There are varying reports about what took place in this meeting, but the upshot was Hitler, a big fan of German music, agreed to help the orchestra. He classified the musicians as civil servants, compensated them well, and placed them under the supervision of Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda. The orchestra became an official ambassador of the Third Reich. This was a horrific time for art and artists in Germany, but not for the Berlin Philharmonic; the Faustian bargain had been stuck. It’s reported that in 1938, Furtwängler was in New York and ran into the conductor Arturo Toscanini, a fervent anti-fascist, who was incredulous that Furtwängler could countenance remaining in Germany under the Nazi regime. Furtwängler’s justification to Toscanini was, “Human beings are free wherever Wagner and Beethoven are played.”3So much for the humanizing impact of the arts and the power of the orchestra experience.

In a social context, the value of the arts is not absolute; it’s contingent upon the purposes to which they are deployed. This doesn’t reduce or nullify our individual experience with any particular artist or art form. Inasmuch as we inhale and exhale, perceive light and dark, observe the movement of the sun and the stars, experience the tension and relaxation of life, art will always speak to us and have meaning. But in society, powerful people make choices about what kinds of art get to thrive, who gets to participate, the nature of art and the artist’s engagement with the public, and the economic, cultural, and political projects art is marshaled to serve.

Sheree forecasts that in authoritarian regimes, there are a few arts winners and lots of losers. From Afghanistan to Hungary, from Russia to China, and on to Florida, this has been and continues to be borne out. PEN America reports that 1,600 books have been banned in Escambia County, Florida—including five dictionaries and biographies of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Nicki Minaj, and Thurgood Marshall.4 An orchestra colleague tells me that some orchestras in Florida must now submit their in-school program material for approval by county school officials. The Chechen Ministry of Culture just issued this decree: “From now on, all musical, vocal and choreographic works must correspond to the tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute.”5The Minster added, “Borrowing musical culture from other peoples is inadmissible. We must bring to the people and to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people.” Authoritarianism destroys art, unless you’re one of the lucky few like the Berlin Philharmonic in the 1930s, or the opera or ballet in Hungary today, favorites of Viktor Orbán, the country’s authoritarian leader.6

What is our work, our role and responsibility, in this climate? First and foremost, we need to get the question on the table. It merits discussion in boardrooms, managements, and among musicians and all stakeholders in classical music. I’d like to think that orchestras today are ready for the discussion. In the summer of 2020, as much of the United States tried to grapple with racism and its impact on all walks of life, many orchestras for the first time acknowledged that they were not neutral institutions. Maintaining their status quo meant a tacit acceptance of a history of discrimination, a present remaining stubbornly white and Eurocentric, and a long-running association, even entanglement, with great concentrations of wealth. Orchestras began to ask themselves what role they played in creating this situation, and what kinds of changes could be made to align their activity with principles of equity that are central to our democracy—and arguably equally central to realizing the promise of a thriving classical music community. Just a few short years later, still grappling with these questions around racial justice, we should ask ourselves today, as we observe threats to essential freedoms that are necessary for the arts to flourish: What is our role? What should we do?

One response is programming. For example, the centerpiece of Carnegie Hall’s 2023/24 concert season is called Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, a “journey through artistic movements in classical music, jazz, cabaret, opera, art song, and more as we investigate the forces that led to the fall of the Weimar Republic—and the many lessons about the fragility of democracy that can be gleaned from its extraordinary collapse.”7In one of the events that make up the program, “cultural historians compare current conditions with those accompanying the new music and art styles of the ‘anything-goes’ society of the 1920s that, by 1933, led to the demise of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism. Is it alarmist or realistic to see our communities as being at risk today of repeating Weimar’s past?” Great question!

Programming is also about the choice of artists, repertoire, and the nature of engagement with the public. There is a stunning example from 2019 that I will never forget. Billed as the Ode To Understanding, the Tallahassee Symphony offered a program featuring Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, a setting of the last words spoken by seven Black men who were shot and killed by police or other authority figures.8The Orchestra was joined by the Florida A&M Concert Choir and the Atlanta-based Morehouse College Glee Club, two Historically Black Colleges. The second half of the concert featured Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. During the intermission, Walt McNeil, the Sheriff of Leon County, Florida, led a gripping conversation with the composer and two orchestra board members exploring the composer’s motivation and intent, issues of law enforcement and race, and the deliberation within the board about whether to program the work at all. It took two years for them to grapple with this work and what it would mean for the Tallahassee Symphony to perform it. They leaned into the question of engaging in a highly controversial issue, and thoroughly considered different perspectives about the nature of the work itself and what it did or didn’t say about law enforcement. The Symphony also partnered with Village Square, a local organization devoted to raising the quality of civic discourse. Immediately following the performance, Village Square facilitated small informal discussions in the lobby intended to prompt further reflection and dialogue about the experience the audience had just been through. This combination of artists, repertoire, and engagement, along with the transparent confrontation of divergent points of view, is democracy at work, carried out by a symphony orchestra.

Another response concerns advocacy. Orchestras have been ardent and effective advocates for policies that are essential for supporting their missions and operations, like maintaining tax incentives for charitable giving. They have also worked to fend off unintended yet harmful consequences of various legislative and executive actions, like the ban on elephant ivory imports and exports. The ban would have effectively eliminated international travel and resales for many older instruments, since trace amounts of ivory were historically used in stringed instruments and bows. Orchestras, through their association, the League of American Orchestras, successfully secured exemptions in the regulations.9But this should be the moment to consider a broader policy agenda: one that considers issues that bear on the health of democracy itself, not just the economics of the arts sector and funding for cultural endeavors. This need not be a stretch. How could any arts organization premised on the fundamental belief in the free play of creativity and expression, as well as public access and engagement, not perceive authoritarianism as a threat to its core mission and values? That said, exploring what a proactive pro-democracy stance would look like would certainly be controversial within many orchestra board rooms. Having that conversation is also democracy at work.

Protecting voting rights and actively promoting voting belong on the advocacy agenda of orchestras; they are already important causes for many performing artists and some arts organizations. Indeed, it’s time for nonprofit arts advocacy to extend its coalition platform and build on its partnership with the commercial arts sector. During the pandemic, nonprofit arts organizations were eligible for what amounted to $1.1 billion in low-interest, forgivable loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, part of the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. But when the nonprofit arts community and the National Independent Venue Association, the live entertainment association representing clubs, festivals, promoters, and commercial venues, worked in partnership, they secured an additional $16.5 billion in federal relief for commercial and nonprofit venues alike, the largest federal arts investment in U.S. history.10There is power in looking beyond the nonprofit sector for allies. In 2022, pro-democracy advocates in Brazil partnered with BTS, the Korean K-pop band with 90 million followers, to encourage voting among 16- to 18-year-olds. They aligned their messaging with the name of the BTS international tour, Speak Yourself, as part of their effort. The 2022 election saw a 47% increase in the 16- to 18-year-old voter turnout, as compared to the previous presidential election in 2018.11It is certainly true that nonprofit arts organizations have different constraints and accountabilities than individual artists acting alone, and those must be navigated. But the point is that the threat to democracy is understood across many arts genres, commercial and nonprofit alike, and it is important to find as many coalition opportunities as possible.

The proper role of arts institutions in combating threats to democracy is not an easy question, and there are certainly no easy answers. But orchestras, along with the rest of the nonprofit arts community, are lagging behind. Illusions of neutrality and universality have fostered an aversion to “taking sides.” It’s noteworthy that a 2024 article in the Harvard Business Review, “Corporate Advocacy in a Time of Social Outrage,” offers a framework for corporations to explore if, when, and how to engage with politically controversial issues, starting with the conflict between Israel and Gaza.12The arts sector should have a framework like this; I know of at least one association currently working on one. Perhaps there are others? The HBR article also reminds me of the 150 corporate CEOs who wrote to the North Carolina legislature condemning HB2, the notorious 2016 “bathroom bill” that took aim at the LGBTQ+ community.13While maybe a few of those corporations could claim they were simply pursuing their fundamental purpose of increasing shareholder value through their public opposition, I suspect most were also putting a stake in the ground about the kind of country in which they and their employees want to live and do business. North Carolina’s legislature received pushback from many different sectors and ultimately repealed the bill.14Taking action and stepping beyond normal boundaries can work. We do not live in a normal time.

I recently asked a young colleague what it felt like growing up in this historical moment, in this country. Her answer surprised me. She said that since her early childhood, so much of what she experienced in the arts and entertainment told her that dystopia was just around the bend, if not already here. She felt as though she’d already been through the trauma of widespread and endless wars, extinction of the planet’s ecosystems and species, and the dehumanizing impact of the collapse of societal stability. Nothing about this moment, in early 2024, seemed new or unusual. I took this as a wake-up call. We are so easily numbed when we should be shocked by what our own eyes and ears perceive.

Music and art enjoy prominent platforms that convey powerful messages and arouse deep feelings about society. In the world of pop music, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have both recently leveraged their considerable cultural cachet to make deliberate political interventions. Encouraging youth voting15 and piercing the “whites only” world of country music16are overtly political and artistic stances taken by these artists. Orchestras also convey powerful messages about society and their place in it, whether they intend to or not. For decades, American orchestras projected a “whites only” message through their choices of artists and repertoire.

Classical music can be wielded strategically to give support to many kinds of political projects: Leonard Bernstein’s performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at the Berlin Wall as it fell was a political act, just as the Third Reich’s command to the Berlin Philharmonic to broadcast an all-Beethoven program in September 1939 to accompany the Nazi troops’ invasion of Poland, marking the start of the Second World War, was a political act.17Orchestras have choices; they are not neutral. Maintaining the status quo is just as much a political act as addressing the pressing political issues of the day. Orchestras are part of the larger arts and entertainment community and have a historic opportunity now—a responsibility, I would argue—to join forces across the sector to advance democracy and to protect their missions of safeguarding creativity and free expression.

Notes

• 1 Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (Metropolitan Books, 2019).

• 2 The following passage on Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic is drawn from two excellent books: Misha Aster, Reich’s Orchestra: The Berlin Philharmonic 1933-1945 (Mosaic Press, 2010), and Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil’s Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler (Oxford University Press, 1992).

• 3 Robert Craft, “The Furtwängler Enigma,” The New York Review of Books, October 7, 1993, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/10/07/the-furtwangler-enigma.

• 4 Lisa Tolin, “More than 1,600 books banned in Escambia County, FL,” PEN America, January 9, 2024, https://pen.org/escambia-county-florida-banned-books-list.

• 5 Sonja Anderson, “Chechnya Bans Music That Isn’t Between 80 and 116 Beats Per Minute,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 16, 2024, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/music-is-now-illegal-in-chechnyaif-it-doesnt-meet-authorities-tempo-restrictions-180984159.

• 6 Michael Cooper, “Hungary Turned Far Right. That’s Meant Millions for Its Opera,” The New York Times, October 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/arts/music/hungary-viktor-orban-trump-opera.html.

• 7 Carnegie Hall, “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice,” January–May 2024, https://www.carnegiehall.org/Events/Highlights/Festivals-and-Artistic-Focuses/Fall-of-the-Weimar-Republic-Dancing-on-the-Precipice.

• 8 Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, https://sevenlastwords.org.

• 9 Ivory Ban Impact on Orchestras, League of American Orchestras, updated October 24, 2016, https://americanorchestras.org/ivory-ban-impact-on-orchestras.

• 10 This relief was provided through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, established by the Economic Aid to Hard-Hit Small Businesses, Nonprofits, and Venues Act of 2020. See “About SVOG,” U.S. Small Business Administration, https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/covid-19-relief-options/shuttered-venue-operators-grant/about-svog.

• 11 Anat Shenker-Osorio, “Speak Yourself: Mobilizing Youth to Win Elections – Brazil” Words to Win By podcast, February 6, 2024, https://wordstowinby-pod.com/speak-yourself; Soo Youn, “How K-Pop Stans Are Shaping Elections around the Globe,” MIT Technology Review, February 16, 2023, https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/16/1067943/kpop-fans-shaping-elections-worldwide.

• 12 Alison Taylor, “Corporate Advocacy in a Time of Social Outrage,” Harvard Business Review, February 6, 2024, https://hbr.org/2024/02/corporate-advocacy-in-a-time-of-social-outrage.

• 13 “More Than 100 Major CEOs & Business Leaders Urge North Carolina To Repeal Anti-LGBT Law,” Human Rights Campaign, March 31, 2016, https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/more-than-100-major-ceos-business-leaders-demand-north-carolina-repeal-radi.

• 14 The portion of North Carolina’s HB2 (the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act) that dealt with bathroom use was repealed in 2017; the rest of the law was repealed in 2020, as a result of a “sunset provision” added in 2017.

• 15 See, for example, Becky Sullivan, “A Taylor Swift Instagram Post Helped Drive a Surge in Voter Registration,” NPR, September 22, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/09/22/1201183160/taylor-swift-instagram-voter-registration.

• 16 See, for example, Brian Broome, “New Beyoncé Album is a Welcome-Back-to-Country Gift to Black Americans,” The Washington Post, March 30, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/30/beyonce-country-carter-music.

• 17 Aster, The Reich’s Orchestra, 144.

The Orchestra: An Infrastructure Error of Tightness?

Mikhail V. Chester, Ph.D.

People with a diversity of tasks divided into subspecialities, working towards a common goal. Specific tools requiring expertise and significant training. A complex system whereby observing any subset of actors doesn’t reveal the emergent behavior of the larger enterprise. A system that appears increasingly decoupled from the demands that its environment places on it. The orchestra seems in many ways quite similar to infrastructure systems, which we can define as the socio-technical systems that deliver basic and critical services such as transportation, energy, and water. Whereas at first thought it may seem that the goal of an orchestra—to produce classical musical excellence—is fundamentally different than that of infrastructure, upon deeper examination there are significant overlapping challenges: remaining relevant in a rapidly changing society, fostering creativity, modeling a willingness to take risks, being responsive to the needs of a community.1 To achieve their goals, orchestras appear to use similar organizational structures to infrastructures designed for providing water, power, and transportation. Building on these similarities, we can approach orchestras through a fundamentally different perspective, understanding them not as musical ensembles or municipal arts enterprises, but as complex and adaptive infrastructure systems. Reimagining the orchestra as infrastructure opens pathways towards modernizing and adapting these institutions to better serve their communities for the future.

Orchestral Rigidity

A viable system—whether an orchestra or an infrastructure—is one that can innovate and change at pace with a changing environment.2 In doing so, the system needs to be able to produce, through innovation and creativity, a repertoire of responses commensurate to what its environment is producing. This is known as requisite complexity, and is a useful starting point for analyzing the viability of systems.3 Environments (broadly construed as comprising culture, societal norms, politics, technology, information, and demands for services) are always changing, but a mountain of evidence has now emerged of accelerating and unprecedented changes happening across the planet, driven by humans—now commonly referred to as the Anthropocene.4,5 With these rapidly changing environments come the need to modernize, to stay relevant in a present moment that is very different than even just a few decades ago, and with respect to the prospect of a remarkably different future.

Evidence suggests that orchestras are decoupling from their environments, that they are not reflective of changing preferences and technological innovation.6 Attendance rates have been dropping, few adults attend orchestras, younger generations appear uninterested in the form, and the average age of concert attendees has increased significantly.7 Whereas in the past, U.S. orchestras were funded entirely by ticket sales, today only around 40% of their costs are covered by patrons who attend concerts and musical programs; the remaining funds are provided by philanthropic organizations, but these groups are shifting their funding priorities, threatening the financial stability of orchestras.8 Counterarguments to this narrative of decline emphasize that classical music, through various mediums (including film and video game soundtracks) now reaches more people than ever before, that classical music is performed by orchestras across the world at levels of aesthetic excellence never before achieved, and that post-pandemic ticket sales are surprisingly robust.9,10 Nevertheless, many orchestras are struggling, and simultaneously experiencing pressures from their communities to adapt to changing interests. Some may contend that the orchestra should stay the course, striving for a historically inherited definition of artistic achievement and musical virtuosity, but this may not be possible. Similarly, our non-musical infrastructures show signs that they are unable to keep up with changing environments, from climate change to disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence.11 To remain viable and thrive in new environments, orchestras will need to innovate to meet new demands and conditions. Doing so will require rethinking their organizational structures and priorities.

When innovation is needed, it’s necessary to start by reflecting on the organizational structure, and considering whether that structure enables creativity or rigidity. The major formative period for orchestras was the industrial era (roughly, the mid-1700s through the mid-1800s), a period of rapid mechanization with a focus on efficiency (over innovation) and sub-specialization of labor.12,13,14,15 During the industrial era, many organizations adopted bureaucratic forms to optimize for these objectives, reflecting consolidated executive leadership, the prevalence of middle managers, and groups of front-line laborers structured as specialized teams.16,17 This tendency is evident in the structure of orchestras, featuring sections of instruments, each with a lead (middle manager) and performers (front-line workers). The conductor is responsible for orchestrating the ensemble towards an emergent behavior: the production of classical music excellence. Higher-level planning occurs through a three-legged stool—music director, executive director, and board chairman—which together comprise the institution’s strategic leadership.18 The traditional mode of orchestra performance can be described through a simple organizational structure: autocratic, with the conductor exercising sole leadership authority.

However, considering the structure of orchestras outside of the space and time of performance reveals a machine bureaucracy, wherein strategic and financial planners are influential.19 Machine bureaucracies create rigidity in the tasks performed by the operating core—in this case, the musicians—with a high degree of standardization emphasized by leadership. The machine bureaucracy became popular during the industrial era; it’s possible that organizational and cultural preferences of that time period were instantiated in orchestras and persist today. During the industrial era, most infrastructures (from road systems to electrical grids and municipal water systems) adopted bureaucratic structures popularized by railroads, which emphasized efficiency over innovation and thrive on a narrowly defined set of rigid processes.20 These bureaucratic structures and their historical goals persist today.

Rigid top-down organizational structures emphasize efficiency but limit a system’s ability to adapt to changing environments. While most systems adapt eventually, what is key for success is that change happens at pace with the changing environment. Structures that are too resistant to change for their technical and strategic contexts result in errors of tightness. This means that procedures, hierarchical norms, and other bureaucratic processes tend to constrain decision-making.21 In an orchestra, this may present as business or orchestral units that are given little space to innovate or self-organize. Often, people on the front line—those closest to the change—are best able to make sense of changing environments. Providing space for innovation to front-line workers can lead to organizational creativity.22 For the orchestra, those closest to pressures for change, especially from audiences and patrons, may be the marketing department, which may also be the unit of the organization least likely to feel boxed in by a lifelong vocational commitment to a particular artistic form. Orchestra musicians may be committed to classical forms, given their extensive expertise and training—as well as their personal passion and love for traditional modes of classical music, or a particularly focused mode of intensive rehearsal and musical study—and shielded from outside signals that are pushing for change toward different aesthetic styles, or different modes of community and public engagement, for instance.

Innovation starts with leadership that makes space for self-determination. Effective leaders for infrastructures and institutions threatened or destabilized by rapid change must recognize that the system is increasingly out of pace with its environment and that innovation often most effectively starts from the bottom up. This concept is known as near-decomposability, and describes how when a system is disturbed, subunits of the system will find balance fastest as long as they are given space for self-determination; this mode of organization can be described as loose-fit design. When they are disturbed, systems that are rigidly structured, with a tight-fit design, will struggle to reach equilibrium, or fail to regain equilibrium entirely. In infrastructure systems this concept is seen during, for example, an extreme event (a power outage, a flash flood)—organizations that give people practicing in the field space to self-organize into appropriate teams and make decisions on behalf of the organization perform better than those in which rigid structures are enforced with top-down decision-making. In the case of orchestras, leadership could confer decision-making capabilities on marketing departments or empower groups of musicians willing to deviate from norms in the selection of compositions, instrumental makeup, and venues, given the signals they are receiving from communities about local preferences and needs. This, of course, is predicated on leadership actually recognizing that the orchestra is at risk of failure or decline, thereby creating motivation to innovate.

In the theory and systematic study of infrastructure, innovation should occur both continuously and in response to acute challenges. Orchestras should be constantly scanning their environments for signals that indicate disruption to normal operating conditions, including changing audience preferences, new technologies, and disruptions to financial streams. During times of relative calm, orchestras might rely on conventional forms of management while investing in resources and tools to scan and make sense of changing conditions. However, during periods of disruption, whether slow or fast, orchestras, like threatened infrastructure systems, must shift their leadership styles to create more space for innovation, towards those in the organization who are in the best position to make sense of the change. This is known as enabling leadership: the ability to pivot between stability and disruption, changing the locations where knowledge-making occurs and decisions are made within the organization.23 Orchestras will need to develop the capacities to change their structures—in organizational-studies terms, this is defined as agility—to respond to changing demands—in other words, organizational flexibility.

The Agile and Flexible Orchestra

If orchestras are indeed similar to infrastructures, built and organized through rigid structures based on legacy goals, then change will not come easy. Often, the notion of radical change is untenable, and instead small steps seem more practical. One mechanism for exploring institutional change in a more methodical way is through organizational ambidexterity. Instead of jumping into wholesale change, in this paradigm an orchestra might dedicate resources or simply create flexibility for the institution to test novel organizational structures, music, instruments, and technologies from time to time. This might include giving a subset of the orchestra performers permission to creatively explore during what would have been normal practice, or committing the entirety of the orchestra to something novel every so often—a performance of modern music, using new instruments, engaging with new technologies, or building new types of programming that involve the community in unfamiliar ways. These acts of creative exploration, using time and resources carved out of the usual flow of operations, can lead to insights into the possibilities for how the organization might change in response to its changing environment.

Expanding organizational ambidexterity requires a reflexivity that may be triggered from within the organization or outside. Reflexivity is productive insecurity about the basic assumptions of the organization, leading to self-evaluation and examination of goals, processes, metrics for success, and internal structure.24 It leads to organizations creating spaces to examine what they do and who they do it for, and whether these basic assumptions will hold into the future, especially in conditions of deep uncertainty that may stem from social and cultural change. For example, despite a successful and profitable business model focused on mailing DVDs to subscribers, Netflix recognized that a digital transformation had begun, and movie streaming and digital content production was likely to define the success of their organization into the future. Around 2010, Netflix began a wholesale shift to digital streaming, which involved organizational restructuring, investment in streaming infrastructure, a shift in the capabilities and cultures of their workforce, and the creation of new content.25 Netflix created space to rethink who their legacy model was serving and whether that model would sustain into the future. They correctly pivoted to meet a very new demand, and take advantage of a new opportunity space, which has positioned them as a leader in streaming video delivery. While Netflix transformed its organizational structure based on internal self-reflection, an example of external triggers prompting organizational innovation is that of Lockheed Martin. In the 1950s, in response to fears around nuclear warfare, Lockheed created a division, Skunk Works, which was given autonomy to test and innovate high-risk but potentially high-reward technologies. The division ultimately developed many groundbreaking defense technologies, including aircraft, propulsion, and weaponry systems, which positioned Lockheed as an innovation leader for decades to come.

The first step towards innovation is creating space for imagining disruption. Orchestras will need to embark upon exercises that encourage musicians, directors, marketing professionals, and other groups within the organization to imagine futures in which disruption has occurred and the orchestra has responded. These future-visioning activities are critical in that they begin to build a shared understanding of the potential landscape of challenges, and the tradeoffs inherent in different ways that the organization may respond. Without this future-visioning space, orchestras will be weathervanes, responding as best they can to disruption as it occurs. Instead, strategies should be developed in advance. These may simply be speculative plans, or could possibly lead to investments in the capacity to adapt. They should challenge all facets of the organization, from organizational structure to technology to talent acquisition (inside of and beyond the rehearsal space and symphony hall) and physical infrastructure. They should also explore where significant change and disruption might manifest, whether from within the organization or outside.

Strategic change to the industry writ large could come from within, with a small set of orchestras developing innovative models that then become the template for other orchestras. However, if the industry as a whole recognizes the need for shared innovation, then creating incentives through exogenous systems may be prudent. For example, if the U.S. Department of Defense, the largest employer of musicians in the U.S. through its many military bands, across the various service branches,26 reimagines bands as tools of creativity to address future challenges in security and peacekeeping, then these successful strategies could be adopted by private orchestras. On another front, if orchestras were to consider how the cities they are embedded within are growing and changing, then they may create innovative strategies in response. Instead of an orchestra institution that is locked into a single real estate asset (the symphony hall or other large, dedicated traditional performance space), there may be an opportunity for improved access to local communities through distributed real estate. In developing out new performance venues, new spaces could emerge for exploring how to engage with new technology and to share space with other kinds of organizations and groups of community members.

All systems, including orchestras and infrastructures, adapt—the question is how quickly. As the struggles of traditional orchestras mount, especially decreasing attendance and concomitant threats to financial viability, it is critical that they self-reflect on their structures and goals, and consider whether they are positioned to persist, and thrive, into the future. Infrastructures find themselves in a similar position, beholden to legacy ways of doing that appear increasingly decoupled from their environments. It’s not that these systems are at risk of disappearing entirely, but that they are marginalizing themselves, creating space for new, more nimble and contextually responsive systems to fill the spaces demanded by their environments. If orchestras don’t adapt quickly enough, what new kinds of structures could emerge to fulfill their artistic, educational, and cultural functions?

Notes

• 1 Jesse Rosen, “Visions of Orchestras,” Symphony, Summer 2017, 20–24

• 2 Mikhail V. Chester and Braden Allenby, “Infrastructure Autopoiesis: Requisite Variety To Engage Complexity,” Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability 2, no. 1 (2022): 012001, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00016-y.

• 3 Max Boisot and Bill McKelvey, “Complexity and Organization-Environment Relations: Revisiting Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety,” in The Sage Handbook of Complexity and Management, edited by Peter Allen, Steve Maguire, and Bill McKelvey (Sage, 2011), https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446201084.n17.

• 4 Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” in The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers, edited by Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, and Kerry Ward (University of California Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520964297-051.

• 5 Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Alan Haywood, and Michael Ellis, “The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369 (2011): 835–841, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2010.0339.

• 6 Rosen, “Visions of Orchestras.”

• 7 Caroline M. Clouse, “Revitalizing Classical Music Interest and Concert Attendance: Why Today’s Youth Are Deterred from Classical Music and Why Symphony Orchestras and Businesses Need to Get Involved,” Senior Honors Projects, 2010–2019, JMU Scholarly Commons, James Madison University (2016): 143, https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/honors201019/143.

• 8 Robert J. Flanagan, The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras: Artistic Triumphs and Economic Challenges (Yale University Press, 2012).

• 9 Clouse, “Revitalizing Classical Music Interest and Concert Attendance.”

• 10 Zachary Woolfe, “Audiences Are Coming Back to Orchestras After ‘Scary’ Sales Last Fall,” New York Times, May 23, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/arts/music/orchestra-classical-music-attendance.html.

• 11 Mikhail Chester, B. Shane Underwood, Braden Allenby, Margaret Garcia, Constantine Samaras, Samuel Markolf, Kelly Sanders, Benjamin Preston, and Thaddeus R. Miller, “Infrastructure Resilience to Navigate Increasingly Uncertain and Complex Conditions in the Anthropocene,” npj Urban Sustainability 1 (2021): 4, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00016-y.

• 12 Mikhail V. Chester, Thaddeus Miller, and Tischa A. Muñoz-Erickson, “Infrastructure Governance for the Anthropocene,” Elementa 8, no. 1 (2020): 078, https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2020.078.

• 13 Flanagan, The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras.

• 14 Philip Hart, Orpheus in the New World: The Symphony Orchestra as an American Cultural Institution (W. W. Norton & Company, 1973).

• 15 Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005).

• 16 Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Harvard University Press, 1977).

• 17 Henry Mintzberg, The Structuring of Organizations: A Synthesis of the Research (Prentice-Hall, 1979).

• 18 Henry Fogel, “Are Three Legs Appropriate? Or Even Sufficient?” Harmony: Forum of the Symphony Orchestra Institute 10 (2000): 11–34, https://iml.esm.rochester.edu/polyphonic-archive/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2012/03/Three_Legs_Fogel.pdf.

• 19 Mintzberg, The Structuring of Organizations.

• 20 Chester, Miller, and Muñoz-Erickson, “Infrastructure Governance for the Anthropocene.”

• 21 R. J. Butler, D. H. R. Price, P. D. Coates, and R. H. Pike, “Organizing for Innovation: Loose or Tight Control?” Long Range Planning 31, no. 5 (1998): 775–782, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0024-6301(98)00082-X.

• 22 Mary Uhl-Bien and Michael Arena, “Leadership for Organizational Adaptability: A Theoretical Synthesis and Integrative Framework,” The Leadership Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2018): 89–104, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.12.009.

• 23 Uhl-Bien and Arena, “Leadership for Organizational Adaptability.”

• 24 Aikaterini Valvi and Konstantinos C. Fragkos, “A Review of Reflexivity in Management Theory,” March 18, 2013, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3281392.

• 25 Catie Keck, “Why Netflix Never Goes Down,” The Verge, November 17, 2021, https://www.theverge.com/22787426/netflix-cdn-open-connect.

• 26 Bruce P. Gleason, “Military Music in the United States: A Historical Examination of Performance and Training,” Music Educators Journal 101, no. 3 (2015): 37–46, https://doi.org/10.1177/0027432114563718.