Last fall, I found myself in a South Dakota hotel lobby talking with the composer Derek Bermel. Days before, I learned that his clarinet teacher had played in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. I asked whether he knew the Met broadcasts from the 1930s and ’40s. He did not.
So I emailed him a supreme opera performance: Verdi’s “Otello,” as broadcast on Feb. 12, 1938. The conductor is Ettore Panizza. The principal singers are Giovanni Martinelli, Lawrence Tibbett and Elisabeth Rethberg. Bermel reported back that what he heard sounded fundamentally different from any other Verdi he had encountered — and more galvanizing.
While we were earnestly cogitating about why that was the case, unbeknown to us, Chris Eagle Hawk was listening from an adjoining table. (Eagle Hawk, who died late last year, was a sagacious Lakota tribal elder I was privileged to know.) He turned to us and said three words: “They felt it.” That ended the conversation.
Classical music in the United States is borrowed from Europe, and that borrowing was initially ambitious and impressive. An apex was attained around 1900. Colossal leadership was furnished in Boston, where Henry Lee Higginson invented the Boston Symphony Orchestra and built Symphony Hall. In Chicago, Theodore Thomas founded the Chicago Orchestra (now the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) after decades of barnstorming coast to coast with his world-class Thomas Orchestra. In New York, Anton Seidl, once Richard Wagner’s surrogate son, led a Wagnerism movement that dominated national intellectual discourse. He also led symphonic concerts 14 times a week during the summer at Coney Island. Seidl’s best friend in Manhattan was Antonin Dvorak, who, as director of the National Conservatory of Music in 1893 predicted that “Negro melodies” would foster a “great and noble school” of New World concert music.
Probably none of these individuals would have anticipated that 250 years after the birth of the United States, the country’s orchestras would still mainly be playing European repertoire.
The sorrow songs Dvorak esteemed inspired genres of American popular music known the world over. But an ample American concert canon never materialized. Instead, a “culture of performance” presided, privileging celebrity conductors, instrumentalists and singers over composers.
With the passing of stellar immigrant musicians over the course of the 20th century, it became harder for American performers and composers to nurture Old World traditions — or to grow commensurate New World roots. Today, that twin failure breeds an absence of binding purpose, both musically and institutionally.
The failure takes many forms. As any sampling of broadcasts from New York, Boston and Philadelphia in the 1930s and ’40s will confirm, today’s orchestras “feel it” less and less. Our orchestras, comparably, lack access to lineage. Although American music is finally being performed in quantity, too much of what we hear is makeshift and detached from the ballast of tradition. On top of that is the world we live in: short attention spans and dwindling financial resources for the arts. That the sesquicentenary for Charles Ives, the United States’ foremost concert composer, in 2024, was more celebrated in Germany than in his own country signifies a crippling erosion of cultural memory.
One positive development is a dawning awareness among American institutions that systemic change may prove an urgent priority. Here are some snapshots, from the East Coast, the West Coast and the Midwest.
Empty Seats, but a New Era Rises in the East
Symphony Hall in Boston is riddled with empty seats. The Boston Symphony once privileged distinguished local composers and later served as a national laboratory for new American works. Now, the orchestra’s programing is anonymous. Judging from its Carnegie Hall visits, it also isn’t playing very well. The musicians, the administration and the board are at odds over the dismissal of the music director, Andris Nelsons, making him a martyr when his departure is most needed.
A Boston Symphony planning document, leaked to the press and patrons with tumultuous consequences, proposes “symphonic cycles,” “festivals” and “programmatic themes that build connections across several weeks of B.S.O. concerts.” Such programing, it says, is “easier to market to targeted audiences.”
The same prospectus advocates “humanities-based collateral presentations, including lectures, panel discussions, demonstrations and workshops,” as well as “affinity programming, intended to appeal to segments of our communities who have not traditionally felt welcomed.” These changes “are neither radical nor even especially novel,” the document adds. In fact, they sound perfectly plausible. And if they prove to be novel, so much the better.
Down the coast, the New York Philharmonic has embarked upon a new era under Gustavo Dudamel, who aspires to become as identified with New York as Nelsons (who also leads the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Germany), is foreign to Boston. Everything about Dudamel’s appointment as music and artistic director, including its emphasis on finding venues outside Lincoln Center, tacitly acknowledges that the Philharmonic has long lacked effective leadership. In fact, not since Leonard Bernstein’s fabled decade as music director has it successfully pursued a consolidated purpose.
It bears stressing that Bernstein did not concurrently preside over another orchestra. During his first season (1958-59), he led 18 weeks of subscription concerts (notably incorporating a “general survey of American music from the earliest generations of American composers to the present”), plus numerous young people’s concerts and 36 concerts on tour abroad. The remainder of the subscription season was shared by only six guest conductors (a stellar list including Herbert von Karajan), each assigned multiple weeks.
The Philharmonic’s 2026-27 subscription series, by comparison, features no fewer than 19 conductors, with Dudamel in charge for only eight weeks. But his programs are creative. And he has already led a memorable premiere: David Lang’s oratorio “the wealth of nations,” a composition that demonstrates how new symphonic music can be clever, original and timely. Setting texts by Adam Smith, Frederick Douglass and Eugene V. Debs, it bears witness to today’s fraught American experience without preaching or prescribing.
At the Metropolitan Opera, the company’s well-documented financial challenges are compounded by issues of artistic planning. Göran Gentele, Rudolf Bing’s successor as general manager in 1972, had he not died in an automobile accident, could have made a difference. His most farsighted priority was a planned mini-Met. The company’s 3,800-seat Lincoln Center home, he realized, craved big voices that no longer existed. And he knew that a refreshed repertoire would demand a more intimate alternative space. Today’s cavernous Met struggles to fill seats with overrated midcult products that cannot possibly endure. Changing times generate changing needs and circumstances.
Eager to Innovate? Go West
West Coast institutions of classical music have long been more open to experimentation. During the directorship of Speight Jenkins, from 1983 to 2014, the Seattle Opera displaced the Met as the leading North American venue for Wagner. He would not have commissioned the vapid, high-tech “Ring” with which Robert Lepage burdened the Met in recent years. Jenkins shrank the Seattle house and enhanced its acoustics. He was omnipresent in the lobbies. He stressed world-class “Ring” lectures, four-hour “Ring” symposiums and a serious bookstore. He introduced English supertitles long before the Met began translating Wagner for its audiences.
In Los Angeles, Ernest Fleischmann rethought the Los Angeles Philharmonic and engaged Frank Gehry to build Walt Disney Concert Hall — which, in its third decade, continues to entice capacity audiences with dramatic sightlines and crystalline acoustics. The orchestra’s current leadership team evinces both continuity and an eagerness to innovate. Dudamel, as departing music and artistic director, will become artistic and cultural laureate. Esa-Pekka Salonen, who preceded Dudamel, will become creative director. The composer John Adams is the creative chair, and Herbie Hancock is the creative chair for jazz. Daniel Harding is the incoming music director. Though this profusion of titles has excited ridicule, it doubtless negates business as usual.
Up the coast, the Oakland Symphony enjoys a remarkably multiethnic, intergenerational audience — a legacy of Michael Morgan, who served as music director for three decades until his death in 2021. Morgan’s omnipresence in the community defined his tenure. That is why you will even now find his picture displayed on the walls of the city’s public high schools.
Cultivating Community in the Midwest
In the Midwest, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra (for which, full disclosure, I serve as scholar in residence) likewise fulfills the credo pronounced long ago by Theodore Thomas when he crusaded for symphonic music across the United States: “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community, not opera.”
In fact, the concert orchestra, to a remarkable degree, proved an American invention — a civic hub comparable to the opera house abroad. The South Dakota Symphony enjoys a music director, Delta David Gier, who moved to Sioux Falls 22 years ago and has raised a family there. Gier has at all times insisted that an orchestra aspire to serve a specific community in specific ways. His signature initiative is the Lakota Music Project, which binds the orchestra to Native American reservations throughout the state. Beyond that, all the proposals now controversial in Boston, including thematic festivals and “affinity programing,” have already been implemented in Sioux Falls.
Do the South Dakota Symphony musicians, in Eagle Hawk’s words, “feel it”? The orchestra maintains a nine-member, full-time core consisting of a string quartet and wind quintet, both self-governing. They perform more than 100 times per season. At the Pine Ridge or Rosebud reservations, they play with Lakota drummers and singers, and mentor young musical aspirants. The remainder of the orchestra’s members, many of whom come from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, are self-selecting: They do not trek to Sioux Falls for the income, but are enticed by the repertoire, which is brave, and the vibe, which is exhilarating.
The history of the Lakota Music Project tracks the South Dakota Symphony’s larger trajectory. It is an exercise in building trust and mutual understanding. Early on, the symphony members and the Porcupine Singers would play for each other. Personal and musical relationships evolved. Then there were fledgling attempts to make music together. The most recent Lakota Music Project tour, last October, premiered two compositions: one by Jeffrey Paul, the orchestra’s extraordinary principal oboist, and one by Bermel, with whom I conferred about those Met Opera broadcasts. The performers included symphony musicians alongside Pine Ridge’s Creekside Singers and the Dakota flutist Bryan Akipa.
In both pieces, elements of Native American and Western classical music merged triumphantly. Bermel has recast his composition to include the entire South Dakota Symphony; it premieres in November as part of a two-week festival considering “Native American inspirations” in classical music, beginning with Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony (accompanied by visuals exploring his indebtedness to Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha”). Given the intellectual heft of this exercise, tracking the “Indianist” movement Dvorak inspired and its more recent aftermath, the festival will reach beyond the concert hall not only to local high schools, but to classrooms and concerts at four universities in four South Dakota cities.
I cannot imagine a more promising musical celebration of the United States at 250.
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