The current issue of “The New York Review of Books” includes my essay on state of American orchestras – and of Gustavo Dudamel’s “New York Dream.” A linked podcast (above) asks: Do Orchestras Still “Feel It”? How Can We Unleash the Untapped Artistic and Creative Potential of American Orchestral Musicians?
Here’s an excerpt from my “New York Review” article, followed by excerpts from the podcast:
FROM THE ARTICLE:
[Today’s New York Philharmonic] is strikingly young, virtually a new band lacking inter-generational 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, however, is retiring after 30 seasons of service. 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, where 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 choirs, sample the broadcast recordings of Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony, or the NBC Symphony of Arturo Toscanini, or the sizzling Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of the thirties and forties 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. The challenges — aesthetic, administrative, and financial – are obvious. The best music is mainly old and foreign. Audiences are dwindling. Revenue sources are problematically shifting. The traditional administrative model, known in the field 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 cellphones. Symphonies require a considered attention span: the ear must remember what came before. And with box office revenue diminishing in importance, orchestras are increasingly reliant on ever younger Americans of vast wealth – and worried that they may want to call the tune. . . .
[A] possibly prophetic Dudamel event was his final 2025-26 subscription program. The first half, comprising Gershwin’s Cuban Overture and four Latin American compositions, was thinly programed. The second half featured the Spanish Harlem Orchestra – a hot salsa band . . . Oscar Hernandez, the group’s leader, grabbed a microphone and told the Philharmonic 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 Colon’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 produced an infectious socio-cultural 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.
FROM THE PODCAST:
The conversation begins (at 5:56) with a torrid sampling of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of 1937 – and asks what happened next and why. Is a new generation of orchestra players presenting a “blank slate”? Are conservatories and blind auditions breeding a generation of young instrumentalists who are less engaged, emotionally and physically, than their predecessors?
Jim Orleans, who played the double bass for the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1983 to 2018, remembers the excitement of Boston Symphony concerts once led by Leonard Bernstein. He ponders “the kind of passion that I’m not seeing in young players coming in” (1:18:40). Referencing the current BSO debacle, he conjectures: “I don’t expect to see anything innovative” (1:06:55).
I add that the New York Philharmonic program book always includes a couple of interviews with members of the orchestra. They are asked a generic set of questions. “And in one of these interviews, a young violinist is asked, ‘What is your favorite piece of music?’ The answer is: ‘Whatever I’m playing at the time.’ I think that’s a red flag.” (1:19:00).
Larry Tamburri, who ran the New Jersey and Pittsburgh Symphonies, prioritizes a “simple question” that must be asked by the musicians, the board, and the music director: “For whom does the orchestra exist?” (1:10:30).
Near the close of the conversation (59:50), Kenneth Woods invites me to remember my “initial call to action” (in the 1980s) and asks: is the situation today more hopeful or less? I answer: “The note of exigency is still not loud enough.” I perceive greater acknowledgement of the crisis at hand, but add: “That’s really disheartening is the lack of [constructive] response.”
SUMMING UP:
As readers of this blog know, I have turned my novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York into a play. Both the actress playing Alma and the director are new to Mahler. As a matter of course, both did some reading. Can you imagine an orchestral musician reading about a Mahler symphony as a matter of course? Most will not even bother to read the sung texts of the Second, Third, and Eighth. Ken Woods, in our previous podcast, pondered this disparity – between the prepared actor and the unprepared musician. And Jim Orleans has commented in this space: “Consider the stage actor who perhaps has had a distracting day, or doesn’t like the director’s blocking, or is not getting along with another actor on the set but who knows once it comes down to showtime that he must get into character and use everything he has learned about acting to convincingly convey his part in the play. No actor worth their reputation would dream of ‘phoning it in’ or reciting his lines just correctly. That actor would not be hired again. And yet orchestra musicians can get away with that.”
Reflecting on it all – the article; the podcast; my previous postings in this series – I am left with two thoughts.
The first is that the conservatory education of instrumentalists needs to be radically re-considered. Too many young players join American orchestras as “blank slates.” As one of them testifies (commenting on a previous blog): “At the conservatory level we are trained to have no opinion, to play the notes on the page to an extreme level of perfection. And that is expected to be maintained . . . awaiting the conductor’s magic touch to awaken musicality.” An expanded pedagogical regime would grasp a bigger picture: What’s an orchestra for and what might I contribute? It would also inquire: What do I need to know about the composer? About the pertinent cultural milieu? About the pertinent performance style? (Why must I kick the second beat when performing a Viennese waltz?)
My second thought is that the audition process must similarly be re-considered to draw a bigger picture. What best prepares an orchestral musician? Or, for that matter, a conductor?
And here’s a postscript: I’ve just completed, in manuscript, a book titled Bearing Witness: The American Odyssey of Leonard Bernstein. It explores Bernstein’s expansive vocation. Bernstein came late to classical music. Before entering the Curtis Institute, he took an undergraduate degree at Harvard. The first formidable stage of his conducting career transpired in Israel – a crucible. Late in life, he was asked to name his “greatest influences.” Off the top of his head, he listed Lau-tzu, Moses, Christ, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, Shakespeare, and Rabelais. Bernstein knew no bubbles.
P.P.S. — I happen to know of a conductor of a major American orchestra who privately confides that he prefers players who are musically unformed – “so I can mold them.” In my book, I call the Bernstein odyssey “a lesson, an inspiration, and a warning.” Thomas Hampson, in a Foreword, adds: “It is in fact an urgent wake-up call for all of us today.”
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