The concert orchestra is an American specialty. Theodore Thomas, whose touring Thomas Orchestra, founded in 1862, was the first world-class New World symphonic ensemble, preached, “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community, not opera.” Thomas performed Beethoven in cities large and small, coast to coast, north to south. In 1891 he became the first music director of the Chicago Orchestra, today the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

A second colossal figure in the early history of American classical music was Henry Higginson, the banker who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony beginning in 1881. He built Boston’s Symphony Hall two decades later. Musically schooled in Vienna, Higginson hired the players, chose the conductors, and shouldered the deficits. Already in its early years his orchestra was giving more than one hundred concerts per season. No less than Chicago’s, it was a civic fixture—as was Higginson himself.

By 1907 Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Louis also had professional concert orchestras of substantial accomplishment. This remarkable proliferation was unparalleled abroad. It resumed after World War I in cities of every size. An orchestra materialized in Cleveland that, thanks to the martinet conductor George Szell, dazzled both the city and the nation. In Salt Lake City, Maurice Abravanel turned up to make a full-time Utah Symphony an arts hub. Today American orchestras no longer enjoy a primacy and popularity once taken for granted. But there remain notable exceptions. In Sioux Falls, the South Dakota Symphony’s Lakota Music Project connects with Indian reservations throughout the state; its conductor, Delta David Gier, maintains that “an orchestra should serve its unique community uniquely.” The Detroit Symphony Orchestra (after a brutal 2010–2011 labor dispute) has successfully targeted inner-city churches as part of a comprehensive strategy to serve a metropolitan population.

Classical music in New York before World War I had a different sort of history. Following the European model, it was more about the opera house than the concert hall. Between 1906 and 1910 the spectacle of dueling world-class companies—the Metropolitan Opera and the Manhattan Opera—enthralled an impassioned musical public. Though founded in 1842, the New York Philharmonic remained a part-time, self-governing cooperative until it was commandeered by wealthy “guarantors” in 1909. They hired Gustav Mahler to conduct, but he could not secure a following.

In subsequent decades the Philharmonic became a fiefdom of the musical power broker Arthur Judson, who concurrently managed most of the nation’s prominent conductors. A self-described “music businessman,” he decided the orchestra could do without a presiding music director. From 1928 to 1936 a maestro of genius, Arturo Toscanini, was the Philharmonic’s principal conductor, leading as few as seven weeks per season alongside numerous guests. Boston’s Serge Koussevitzky, by comparison, conducted as many as one hundred times a year and might engage as few as two guest leaders. It was Koussevitzky who predicted that “the next Beethoven vill from Colorado come” and single-handedly created the Tanglewood festival (better than Salzburg, he claimed) as an American music laboratory.

When Toscanini left in 1936, Judson opted for John Barbirolli, who was thirty-six and manipulable. When that didn’t work, he tried a more seasoned conductor, Artur Rodziński, who left in a rage. After that came Dimitri Mitropoulos, an erratic dynamo who once wrote to Judson “to beg you, almost on my knees,” to broadcast nationally the American premiere of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. Judson said no and substituted Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F. The Philharmonic board eventually jettisoned both Judson and Mitropoulos, setting the stage for Leonard Bernstein’s historic decade as music director beginning in 1958. Bernstein’s brash Philharmonic was not the polished instrument that Szell maintained in Cleveland or that Fritz Reiner honed in Chicago. Yet from the start Bernstein proved an intrepid cultural spokesman and pedagogue as well as an irresistible musical ambassador abroad. He popularized Mahler’s symphonies and advocated for composers neglected or abused: Charles Ives, Jean Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, Dmitri Shostakovich. He tirelessly (but fruitlessly) pursued the prospect of an American symphonic canon.

Bernstein was spent by 1969 but proved irreplaceable. First came Pierre Boulez (1971–1977), a cerebral European dissident. The Philharmonic turned coarse during the long regime of Zubin Mehta (1978–1991). Kurt Masur (1991–2002) instilled discipline and made enemies. Then in quick and ephemeral succession came Lorin Maazel (2002–2009), Alan Gilbert (2009–2017), and Jaap van Zweden (2018–2024).

In February 2023 it was announced that Gustavo Dudamel would become music director of the New York Philharmonic beginning in the fall of 2026. Dudamel is known to be a charismatic and glamorous leader. Even better, he is a leader not about himself. Born in Venezuela in 1981, he participated from the age of five in El Sistema, the Venezuelan music education program whose emphasis on teamwork, discipline, and social integration is credited with rescuing young people from poverty. He became music director of El Sistema’s flagship ensemble, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, when he was eighteen. His meteoric trajectory eventually took him to the West Coast, where he served as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 2009 to 2026 and propelled such initiatives as Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, inspired by El Sistema.

As music director designate last season, Dudamel led no fewer than twenty-six New York Philharmonic concerts, including one at Radio City Music Hall. His popularity with the orchestra’s subscribers is already evident the instant he takes the stage. The question of the Philharmonic’s leadership may be declared settled: they will follow him. It’s the orchestra’s destination that remains unknown.

In public statements, Dudamel has rhapsodized about the diversity and scale of New York City. He is eager to occasionally move the orchestra away from its staid Lincoln Center home. The programs he led in 2025–2026 were fresh and unpredictable. The best turned out to be a premiere co-commissioned by the Philharmonic and the Aspen Festival: David Lang’s oratorio the wealth of nations. Now sixty-nine, Lang may be the most resilient member of the renegade Bang on a Can composers’ group, founded in 1987. Seven years ago the Philharmonic premiered his opera prisoner of the state. It proved an abortive prequel to Beethoven’s Fidelio, likewise celebrating political dissent. For the wealth of nations, Lang assembled writings by Adam Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Eugene Debs, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others. In a program note, he writes of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776):

[It] is often stirring in its arguments about the morality of trade, the nobility of labor, and its almost utopian belief that individual people, pursuing their own self-interest, can become the basis of a balanced and functioning society.

At its core, the book is about how connected we are to each other.

Of the texts Lang has set, the most telling is by Frederick Douglass:

from whence in our own country comes the danger to liberty the plain answer is the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the nation here is a problem worthy of the true statesman to render government a blessing.

Lang’s stripped tonal language italicizes this timely message. The entire piece is clever and original. It palpably stirred the hall. It suited Dudamel’s mission.

A second ambitious pre-Dudamel Philharmonic commission was an orchestration of Frederic Rzewski’s solo piano marathon The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975), a call to action by a prominent expatriate American composer on the far left. Rzewski’s own performances of it were legendary. The new version, ecumenically employing eighteen composers from half a dozen countries, is a mild entertainment coasting toward an incongruous Hollywood ending. While the piece’s edge is dulled, Dudamel’s own hortatory style is not defiant. (He has faced criticism, most notably from the Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero, for not speaking out sooner and more forcefully against the abuses of the Venezuelan government.) The other new works Dudamel has featured were blithe versions of makeshift music, in which disregard for lineage and tradition is treated as a virtue: a present-day symphonic blight.

Dudamel is admired by composers for the interest he takes in their work and the care with which he prepares it. As an interpreter of the standard repertoire, he is somewhat less admired. With the Philharmonic, he fluently and energetically delivered a range of canonical works, none of which were entirely successful. In Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz, the orchestra did not attempt a Viennese lilt. In Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, the culminating ascension remained earthbound. In Beethoven’s Fifth, the fury of the beginning and the ecstasy of the close were both compromised; the fraught buildup to the finale lacked mystery. In Beethoven’s Eroica, the best movement was the ebullient scherzo, prickling with humor. The weakest was the funeral march, which sang no tragedy. Far better were selections by Gershwin and Bernstein and a terrific romp through Ives’s rambunctious Second Symphony.

These unsettled impressions apply equally to the orchestra. It is strikingly young, virtually new, lacking intergenerational continuity. The players are skilled technicians who respond to their new conductor with alacrity. The Philharmonic’s most individually expressive member is Carter Brey, the principal cellist, who is retiring, however, after thirty seasons. In the sublime pas de deux from Act Two of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, a downward G-major scale is introduced by the cellos, then repeated in response by the first violins. Brey’s section eloquently took ownership of Tchaikovsky’s melody. But the Philharmonic’s young first violins played the same scale mechanically. In the Blue Danube, the same group applied no honey to sweeten the tune. In Beethoven’s Fifth, they expressed no anger. In that symphony’s scherzo, when a fugato is vigorously begun in the low strings in counterpoint with the winds, the violins—added on top—were virtually inaudible.

Perhaps Dudamel can do something about this caloric deficiency, which is by no means unique to the Philharmonic. It is partly a product of conservatory training in a bubble, partly a product of “blind” auditions that prioritize accuracy over expression, but mainly a product of temporal dislocation. Beethoven, Strauss, and Stravinsky retreat ever further into the past. To hear robustly expressive string sections, sample the broadcast recordings of Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony, or the NBC Symphony of Toscanini, or the sizzling Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of the 1930s and 1940s led by Ettore Panizza and Artur Bodanzky. It’s not just that these conductors inspire and demand; the players inhabit the notes.

The big picture is one of American orchestras in crisis, coping or not.¹ The challenges—aesthetic, administrative, and financial—are obvious. The best music is mainly old and foreign. Audiences are dwindling. Revenue sources are shifting. The traditional administrative model, known as the “three-legged stool,” is often dysfunctional: a music director who is mainly absent, a board that may know little about the arts, and a CEO whose mediating or presiding role is ill defined. A fourth leg, not even attached, is the musicians themselves. Add to that the depredations of social media and cell phones. Symphonies require a considerable attention span: the ear must remember what came before. And with box office revenue diminishing, orchestras are increasingly reliant on support from ever-younger Americans of vast wealth and worried that they may want to call the tune.

In recent seasons, frictions among musicians, administrators, and board members have cost the Seattle Symphony a transformational conductor (Thomas Dausgaard) and the San Francisco Symphony a pedigreed institutional leader (Esa-Pekka Salonen). The Boston Symphony has been embroiled in a crisis pitting a CEO and board that terminated an allegedly ineffective music director (Andris Nelsons) against musicians enraged that they did not have adequate input on that decision.

In this fraught situation, the New York Philharmonic’s engagement of Dudamel is a step forward but hardly sufficient. Among the issues challenging the new regime—Matías Tarnopolsky, the Philharmonic’s current CEO, began in January 2025—will be the shifting place of education in the orchestra’s affairs and the involvement of the musicians in implementing change.

Orchestras have for decades been notoriously reluctant to reform. This became a factor in the withdrawal of support by the nation’s major charitable foundations. One undeniable obstacle is the American Federation of Musicians, which jealously guards against any erosion of concert activity even when supply outstrips demand. There was a time when orchestras mainly superintended their artistic affairs. Today, incongruously, fundraising and marketing necessarily come first. “Service exchange,” which swaps excess concerts for outreach and educational programs, is frequently not even discussed. A former orchestra CEO has commented:

It’s an existential issue. If you’re not performing in schools, if you’re not reaching out to underserved communities, you’re not part of the fabric of civic life. So musicians have to be doing that work. And they’re usually not.

Among the remarkable exceptions, the South Dakota Symphony maintains a self-governing, salaried core comprising a string quartet and a woodwind quintet, whose nine members are the happiest orchestral musicians I have ever encountered in a professional American orchestra. Like its Lakota Music Project, the SDSO’s thematic festivals partner with universities. The music director is a full participant in the education agenda, as are visiting scholars.² The orchestra maintains four youth orchestras. Two musicians are voting members of the board.

In Detroit, six members of the symphony compose an artistic advisory committee that meets with the music director and the director of artistic planning. Musicians also sit on the finance committee (among others); two are voting members of the board. Contracts are negotiated by management without recourse to lawyers. Since 2011 the subscription season has been reduced by one third through the substitution of inner-city and regional neighborhood concerts, often performed by a chamber orchestra. A civic youth ensembles initiative serves six hundred students weekly; there are also two adult ensembles. An embedded learning and engagement team tracks local needs and desires. When a paucity of musical instruments was reported in challenged neighborhoods, the Detroit Symphony created Detroit Harmony, collecting more than five thousand via a network of seventy-two partner organizations.

West Coast orchestras are generally more invested in innovation than the more venerable East Coast institutions. The Oakland Symphony commands a remarkably interracial, intergenerational audience—a legacy of the late Michael Morgan, the longtime music director, whose picture is prominently displayed in the hallways of Oakland high schools. The Los Angeles Philharmonic has long embraced experimentation—a legacy of Ernest Fleischmann, who as executive director from 1969 to 1998 initiated the construction of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, itself a stimulus to rethink the concert experience.

Abroad, European orchestras are more likely to share artistic leadership. Norway’s Bergen Philharmonic, Gramophone magazine’s 2025 “orchestra of the year,” is a trailblazer. Its musicians are engaged in every area of governance. Rather than a music director, the orchestra engages a chief conductor. I was told by a member violinist:

We are not hired help. The entirety of the season program is determined by the chief conductor in close cooperation with management and musicians, which makes perfect sense because our total season activity is far more comprehensive than the weeks of the chief conductor.

This model is reinforced by Norwegian principles of employee participation. As public funding covers 80 percent of the orchestra’s expenses, it is spared the grueling fundraising and marketing responsibilities that American orchestras must take for granted. It does not even have a development department.

As for Dudamel’s New York Philharmonic, it is too soon to render even a preliminary verdict. The education footprint, for instance, is modest. “Teaching artists,” rather than Philharmonic musicians, are typically sent into New York City classrooms. There are no preconcert talks. The Philharmonic hosts no youth orchestras. Once Dudamel is fully in place, changes will occur. In April 2024 he led a pilot Philharmonic youth orchestra at LaGuardia High School. A dormant relationship with Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church is being renewed. And Dudamel seems an obvious candidate to lead some Young People’s Concerts. Meanwhile he opened the current season at Radio City on September 10. He will take the Philharmonic on a two-week European tour. He will inaugurate an annual New York Philharmonic opera project at Carnegie Hall with Puccini’s Tosca, featuring a stellar tenor, Jonas Kaufmann, who no longer appears at the Met. He will commemorate the September 11 attacks with a concert at the Perelman Performing Arts Center. He will lead four parks concerts next June. He will lead twelve weeks of New York City concerts in all.

The Philharmonic’s home remains Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall, a brightly colored traditional space whose ambience better suits cheer than sorrow. (Its improved acoustics are, as in most concert halls, best experienced upstairs.) There will be only eight Dudamel subscription weeks—a disappointing number.³ (He remains music director of the Bolívar Orchestra and became artistic and cultural laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic this fall.) But the programs are interesting. Two evoke the cutting-edge partnerships in which the Los Angeles Philharmonic specializes. The controversial performance artist Marina Abramović will reenvision Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and Falla’s El Amor Brujo. The Academy Award–winning Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla will offer a “groundbreaking collaboration integrating music, poetry, and imagery into a moving tribute to human dignity and artistic freedom.”

The season’s last four weeks, all with Dudamel, will pay tribute to Beethoven and Bernstein. They include Mitropoulos’s string orchestra arrangement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14, Op. 131, which Bernstein made his own. Beethoven’s incidental music to Goethe’s Egmont—a play about resisting tyranny—will be presented with actors and a narrator. (In LA, it was Cate Blanchett.) And Dudamel will lead Beethoven’s Ninth, with its message of universal brotherhood.

The grand finale will be a staging of Bernstein’s MASS (1971), an ambitious and provocative choice. It showcases a composer asking himself about the place of the artist in a nation’s life when times turn hard. (The FBI warned the White House that MASS might be a subversive attack on the authority of the United States government.) MASS wrestles with religious faith and national well-being. Its structural spine is the Catholic liturgy, subjected to scrutiny and resistance. The central character, a baritone with a guitar, is a robed Celebrant. The musical idiom, ranging from Broadway to rock and the blues, is didactically eclectic. Bernstein’s librettist, Stephen Schwartz, had just created the off-Broadway smash Godspell, in which a rebellious Woodstock sensibility invaded the Gospel of Matthew. According to Bernstein’s program note:

At the climax of Communion, all ceremony breaks down and the Mass is shattered. It then remains for each individual on the stage to find a new seed of faith within himself through painful meditation, enabling each individual to pass on the embrace of peace (Pax) to his neighbor. The chain of embrace grows and threads through the entire stage, ultimately into the audience and hopefully into the world outside.

Though MASS inaugurated the Kennedy Center, President Richard Nixon did not attend. (On the White House tapes, he can be overheard reacting to H.R. Haldeman’s description of Bernstein kissing the male members of the cast: “Absolutely sickening.”)

MASS achieved extraordinary popularity: Sol Hurok presented it for a full month at the Metropolitan Opera House; the recording topped Billboard’s classical chart. It was also faulted by some as anodyne and derivative. In retrospect, it bears witness to a national psychodrama whose participants included paranoid FBI agents, posturing Black Panthers, and a gamut of young revolutionaries including nihilistic yippies, zonked flower children, and SDS terrorists. It will be informative to discover how MASS plays in Donald Trump’s America.

Theodore Thomas’s Gilded Age credo that “a symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community” was both prophetic and of its time. The idea of the arts projecting and shaping civic identity was entirely credible in late-nineteenth-century America. The country’s new museums—including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and New York’s Metropolitan—did that. And its new orchestras did it even more. Today the creative exhaustion of Western classical music risks making the orchestra an anachronism.

Dudamel, too, has a credo. You can read it on the back cover of the Philharmonic’s 2026–2027 subscription brochure:

For me, music is not merely entertainment. It helps us to understand who we are and how we fit into the wider world. Now more than ever it is vital that we work with one another, across cultures, borders, and beliefs, to create something beautiful.

What will become of his New York dream to “show the culture of the community”? Of Dudamel’s Philharmonic programs this past season, two in particular may yield the beginnings of an answer. He took the orchestra to Radio City last January when the Philharmonic discovered it had never performed there. The logic of programming excerpts from Bernstein’s three New York musicals—On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953), and West Side Story (1957)—seemed obvious. The musical highlight of the evening was Bernadette Peters singing “Conga!”—a showstopper from Wonderful Town. Though invited, the audience failed to join in the “conga!” cries. No one knows the conga anymore. And the lyrics, by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, are a witty cultural inventory of names likewise forgotten. The unintended lessons of this incongruous event were that Bernstein’s Broadway no longer exists and neither does Bernstein’s New York.

The second possibly prophetic Dudamel event was his final 2025–2026 subscription program. The first half, comprising Gershwin’s Cuban Overture and four Latin American compositions, was thin. The second half featured thirteen members of the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, a hot salsa band. Oscar Hernández, the group’s leader, grabbed a microphone and told the audience that he was born in the South Bronx “and music saved my life.” Then Dudamel took over. “I grew up in a home where music was part of life,” he began. “My dream was to be a salsa player. Sadly, I became…” and he gestured to his baton. “But it’s a good job because they have to follow me.” He brought his father onstage to play the trombone. He called the Spanish Harlem Orchestra “part of the identity of this wonderful city.” He referred to the Philharmonic as “my new family.” Even though Johnny Pacheco’s Mi Gente and Willie Colón’s La Banda blew the roof off the hall, this shotgun marriage of two orchestras, with the Philharmonic strings noodling along, did not produce a memorable musical evening. Rather, it was an infectious sociocultural experiment. Three nights later, the concert was repeated at the United Palace—the Philharmonic’s first visit to Washington Heights.

Surely it is only a matter of time until Gustavo Dudamel and Zohran Mamdani occupy the same stage. They share a happy vision. Is it a wishful mirage? We will find out.