Today’s online “Arts Fuse” carries a piece of mine commenting yet again on the Boston Symphony firestorm, which pits enraged musicians against the management and board – and turns Andris Nelsons, the outgoing music director, in a martyr. Excerpts follow. The read the whole thing, click here.
A 14-page “State of the Boston Symphony Orchestra” manifesto, dated April 17, 2026 (but first circulated earlier), sketches a new strategic plan. . . . This document has now been widely shared and castigated. It claims a financial emergency that may or may not endure scrutiny. Lost in the shuffle is the credibility of the programmatic prescriptions at hand.
It equally bears mentioning that the orchestra – at least during the Carnegie Hall visits I have attended – sounds impaired. I was startled to read a glowing account of the recent Carnegie performance of Dvorak’s New World Symphony led by Nelsons. It was written by Nathan Cole, the orchestra’s concertmaster. What had he gleaned from his seat at the front? To my ears, the orchestra did not play that well. I could share many examples. . . .
The board documents a series of challenges that in fact afflict the symphonic field generally in the United States. . . . The proposed template lists “symphonic cycles,” “festivals,” and “programmatic themes that build connections across several weeks of BSO concerts.” Such programing is “easier to market to targeted audiences.” BSO concerts “will be accompanied by more humanities-based collateral presentations, including lectures, panel discussions, demonstrations workshops.” “There will be some affinity programming, intended to appeal to segments of our communities who have not traditionally felt welcomed.” These changes, the document adds, “are neither radical nor even especially novel.” . . .
Having myself been engaged in a comparable initiative, with a variety of orchestras, for more than three decades, I would like to contribute to the debate my impression that these strategies, as stated, sound plausible and timely. And if they prove “especially novel,” so much the better. I also feel competent to furnish some advice.
I left my job as a New York Times music critic in 1980 partly because I discovered classical music in crisis. Its institutions seemed moribund to me, with worse to come. I next discovered myself working for New York’s 92nd Street Y. When the Y undertook a multi-year Schubert festival in collaboration with the baritone Hermann Prey, I volunteered to create an annual, all-day “symposium” tackling such themes as “Schubert the Man,” “Perspectives on Erlkonig,” and Schubert and the Piano.” Prominent scholars took part alongside prominent performers. An avid audience instantly materialized.
Not long after, I wound up running an orchestra: the Brooklyn Philharmonic at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Harvey Lichtenstein, an impresario of genius (the last of his kind), had created a state-of-the-art performance venue by presenting what could not be seen or heard at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center. He had also entrusted his resident orchestra to Dennis Russell Davies and implemented a draconian shift in repertoire. As a result, the BPO was deserted by more than two-thirds of its subscribers over two agonizing seasons. It was playing to audiences of 350 in a 2,000-seat hall. I had written a notorious book, Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music, in which I situated BAM as an antidote to Lincoln Center. Harvey invited me to lunch. I proposed that the BPO be re-modelled with the Schubert symposiums in mind. Harvey was a gambler and had nothing left to lose.
And so BPO seasons were structured as a series of thematic festivals, many with multiple events. . . . During my tenure, attendance increased four-fold and grant income exploded – Mellon, Knight, Hearst, Rockefeller all stepped up. We also became the first orchestra to land NEH support (heading a national consortium). We sustained an educational partnership with Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, which was looking to supplement its humanities offerings. Our “educational” concerts, in middle and high schools, were also thematic, linked to our 1994 celebration of the centenary of Dvorak’s New World Symphony . . . Nothing ever invalidated this experiment. It ended when an audit disclosed BAM deeply in debt. Harvey fired his CFO and terminated the symbiotic relationship linking BAM with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. From that moment, the orchestra died a lingering death.
I initiated a second incarnation of “festival programing” shortly after, when Larry Tamburri – an exceptional CEO – invited me to curate an annual three-week “winter festival” for the New Jersey Symphony. Larry had trouble selling tickets during the month of January. The winter festivals cured that. . . . They generated ongoing partnerships with the Newark Museum, Montclair State University, the History department of a superb suburban high school, and the Music department of an embattled Newark high school . . .
I [subsequently] renewed the NEH consortium I had created at BAM. I called it “Music Unwound.” Funded four times, it endured from 2010 until last April, when it was terminated – along with 1,476 other NEH initiatives — by a couple of knuckleheads working for Elon Musk’s DOGE task force.
Music Unwound implemented more than three dozen humanities-infused, cross-disciplinary festivals via orchestras, universities, and conservatories in all parts of the United States. . . . In El Paso, Texas, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, especially, Music Unwound demonstrated the full promise of festival programing — for audience development; for focusing and expanding institutional mission.
In El Paso, the crucial ingredient was Frank Candelaria, then an Associate Provost at the University of Texas/El Paso and also a proactive board member of the El Paso Symphony. (Frank now teaches at Vanderbilt University.) Hundreds of UTEP students, and their families, experienced symphonic music for the first time. They learned about Dvorak’s historic advocacy of “Negro melodies,” and about their own cultural inheritance: the Mexican Revolution of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Silvestre Revueltas. But the sleeper was the Kurt Weill story – about an exemplary immigrant who insisted on only speaking English from the moment he arrived, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, in 1935. One morning I found myself addressing hundreds of high school students in a semi-rural “colonia.” When the assembly ended, the stage was occupied by the school chorus. They were eager to sing for me. They chose” The Star-Spangled Banner.”
But it is the South Dakota Symphony, among the nation’s most innovative orchestras, that seals the potential impact of the Boston Symphony’s new blueprint. Its Music Director, Delta David Gier, . . . has come to believe that “an orchestra should serve its unique community uniquely.” In South Dakota, that has meant connecting with Native America. Gier first met with Lakota and Dakota leaders in 2005 and encountered a wall of mistrust. After twenty years of patience and persistence (Gier did not delegate this effort), the SDSO Lakota Music Project has become its signature initiative, linking to reservations throughout the state. It’s a visionary example of the “affinity programing” that the Boston Symphony foresees. In fact, many ethnic facets of Sioux Falls have been targeted, including refugees from Africa. And the relationship is mutual. When the city’s Arab community (including many doctors) asked Gier to help “show our culture to our children,” he engaged an oud master, Simone Shaheen, for a Sioux Falls residency. (The forthcoming South Dakota Symphony Lakota Music Project program, next November, would be a revelation in Boston. It juxtaposes the “New World” Symphony — plus visuals — with Arthur Farwell’s Indianist choruses and Derek Bermel’s Lakota Refrains for the Creekside Singers and orchestra — a new composition worthy of a Pulitzer. The Longfellow connection is local to Boston. And so is Farwell).
Joining the SDSO members in such adventures is an inspiration. Alex Ross has repeatedly extolled the South Dakota Symphony in The New Yorker. The New York Times pays close attention. But other orchestras do not. In fact, with the cancellation of Music Unwound by DOGE, South Dakota’s is the only member orchestra that’s opted to maintain humanities-infused festival and affinity programing sans NEH support. This is a symptom of symphonic stagnation.
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I would like to suggest a few lessons that may be extrapolated from the tale at hand.
The first, however self-evident, is that success depends on people: conductors, administrators, board members, and musicians who embrace an institutional mission rather than self-interest. For decades, the template of the “jet-set conductor,” with trans-Atlantic commitments, has crippled capacity for leadership and reform. . . .
“Education,” traditionally, has been a satellite department for American orchestras large and small. It functions as a cash-cow, enticing funding that is otherwise deployed. It produces young people’s concerts. It does not link to the music director or to the main subscription series. Any orchestra that opts for festival programing should resituate “education” as a central activity fortified by visiting scholars or, better, a scholar-in-residence. That’s what museums and theater companies have. . . .
When my Classical Music in America was published in 2005, the Boston Symphony invited me talk about it. I took the opportunity to propose that the orchestra consider a festival exploring “Stravinsky in Boston,” partnered by Harvard University. It was at Harvard that Stravinsky in 1939-40 delivered his famous Norton lectures, controversially insisting that music is only about itself. And it was Serge Koussevitzky, majestically piloting the BSO, who most championed Stravinsky in the United States. Both at Harvard and at Symphony Hall, I encountered no interest. And yet Boston, with its sophisticated audiences and stellar educational institutions, may be ideally configured to undertake the Boston Symphony transition now being proposed. (Whether the Los Angeles Philharmonic model of humanities infusion, prioritizing cutting-edge creative adventure, is a better Boston fit than cultivating cultural memory – e.g., exploring Boston’s own distinctive cultural inheritance — is another matter.)
As for the cleavage between musicians, management, and trustees – it is an old American story, played out many times over. In recent years, the Seattle Symphony and San Francisco Symphony have experienced similar upheavals that cost Seattle a transformational conductor (Thomas Dausgaard) and San Francisco a pedigreed institutional leader (Esa-Pekka Salonen). In South Dakota, the orchestra’s salaried core comprises a string quartet and wind quintet both of which are largely self-governing; these are the nine happiest, most fulfilled symphonic musicians I have ever met. In Detroit, a brutal 2010-11 labor dispute yielded a fresh template empowering the musicians as crucial participants in every phase of the Detroit Symphony’s operations. Detroit’s may also the major American orchestra that has most prioritized outreach to targeted urban communities. In the process, it has shrunk its main subscription season by one-third. (Many American orchestras give too many concerts, with supply far outstripping demand.) . . .
Another story for another time.
For more on the Boston Symphony’s challenges, click here and here.
