The future of symphony orchestras with ~100 musicians is murky. Unlike comic operas, where the librettos can constantly be updated to include fresh new jokes (the supertitles in English don’t even have to match what is being sung in Italian), it’s not clear how to update classical instrumental music to keep new generations’ interest, much less compose appealing new scores that need 100 musicians.
After all, much of the reason for the expansion of orchestras from 1700 to 1900 was to make music louder.
By 1913, Stravinsky had discovered the music of the future:
Which, it turned out, really didn’t need as much exquisite subtlety as Stravinsky brought to it.
Instead, a few musicians could pound out repetitious rhythms, so long as they were loud.
Electric amplification emerged in the 1930s, first for crooners like Bing Crosby, then for electric guitarists such as Benny Goodman’s Charlie Christian in 1939. By 1964, The Kinks discovered that power-chording a simple riff could make a hit:
In the 1970s, progressive rock made some strides toward making complex music with only a handful of amplified musicians. But then critical opinion turned against bands like Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer as being less authentic than The Ramones.
By that point, most big cities had giant well-endowed orchestras playing the greatest hits of 1650-1945.
But there was less and less new orchestral music that appealed to broad audiences. After all, do you want to compete with Beethoven? Even Brahms found that intimidating: “You have no idea of how it feels — always to hear the tramp of such a giant behind you.” Better to go off in new directions from the classics. But what if they had largely exhausted what could be done with Western orchestral music?
The main exception was film scores, where composers were well-paid to continue to write in the style of Wagner.
Last year, the local public high school near me was trying to think of whom to name their brand new auditorium after. Then they realized that a 1950 graduate of theirs, John Williams, was the most popular orchestral composer of the later 20th Century, with 54 Oscar nominations, second only all-time to Walt Disney. Not only their current students love the Star Wars score, but so did their current students’ grandparents. The grand old man showed up to the dedication and was rapturously welcomed.
Still, movies are in decline.
The new art form that might conceivably save orchestral music is also kind of embarrassing, as the conclusion of 2022’s movie Tár makes clear, in which Cate Blanchett plays the first great female conductor of the future, who gets ignominiously lesbian-#MeTooed and winds up conducting a concert in Asia for cosplaying fans of a video game franchise:
Still, it’s not inconceivable that gaming fans with three digit IQs might save orchestral music.
But that would mean that symphonic orchestras should focus on appealing to white and Asian male nerds, which would be racist and sexist.
From City Journal:
Classical Music’s Misguided Quest for “Relevance”
The firing of Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Andris Nelsons reflects the field’s obsession with identity politics.
by Heather Mac Donald
On February 2, 2026, the board of the Boston Symphony Orchestra voted to terminate its contract with conductor Andris Nelsons. Nelsons had served as the BSO’s music director since 2014, following the retirement of James Levine. The decision had nothing to do with financial matters, according to the orchestra’s president and CEO, Chad Smith; ticket sales had risen under Nelsons. Rather, the board had concluded that “Andris was not the right leader for the entirety of our institution and our community,” Smith told Nelsons’s agents.
The 47-year-old Latvian Nelsons is perhaps the most hard-work
ing/popular conductor in the world over the last decade. Europeans tend to be wildly enthusiastic about him, but Bostonians tend to complain that he’s more focused on Europe. And he’s a white male.
I’m not a classical music expert, so I can’t say if …
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