Evaluation: Can an orchestra die? San Antonio will discover out.

Former San Antonio Philharmonic musical director Jeffrey Kahane heads the Harmonium of Texas. Credit score: Fb / Harmonium of Texas

When Harmonium of Texas provides its first orchestral live performance Friday night, its musicians will carry out a bit preoccupied with the turning of fortune’s wheel. Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana could show an exceptionally becoming selection for classical music in San Antonio.

4 years in the past, the town appeared to have misplaced its skilled orchestra. The 83-year-old San Antonio Symphony was dissolved in June 2022 after a bitter nine-month musicians’ strike. Inside weeks, nonetheless, its gamers had regrouped. That August, they introduced the formation of the San Antonio Philharmonic — not merely one other ensemble, however one carrying ahead a lot of San Antonio’s orchestral custom.

Now the household tree has branched once more.

Harmonium, based by pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane after he stepped down because the Philharmonic’s music director earlier this yr, begins its orchestral life Friday on the Lila Cockrell Theatre. Its emergence poses an uncommon query: when an orchestra disappears, who — if anybody — inherits it?

That query now has a authorized dimension. On Sept. 29, the Philharmonic filed a federal lawsuit towards Kahane and Harmonium alleging misappropriation of commerce secrets and techniques. Regardless of the courts finally determine, the dispute factors towards a a lot older cultural drawback. What really makes an orchestra the identical orchestra?

We have a tendency to think about orchestras as remarkably everlasting establishments. Musicians come and go. Conductors change. Generally the political world surrounding them disappears altogether. But the orchestra retains its biography. Think about Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. Its historical past stretches again 250 years, throughout radically completely different Russias. It existed below the empire, survived the Revolution and the Soviet Union and continues at the moment. The individuals making up the establishment have modified numerous occasions. Even the state round it has modified. But we instinctively communicate of the Bolshoi as one steady entity.

That is likely one of the peculiar powers of an orchestra or opera home: its id can outlive each particular person who constitutes it. On the similar time, an orchestra is remarkably intangible. A museum can shut and depart behind a constructing stuffed with objects. There isn’t any bodily object referred to as “the orchestra” that may be put into storage till any individual decides to reopen it. The orchestra exists when musicians assemble and play.

San Antonio found this paradox in 2022. The Symphony Society might dissolve the orchestra, but it surely couldn’t dissolve its musicians. Many moved into the Philharmonic. Acquainted gamers as soon as once more carried out orchestral repertoire for audiences in the identical metropolis. Was this a brand new orchestra, or an outdated orchestra dwelling below a brand new identify? There isn’t any easy reply. An orchestra’s id could reside in its authorized group or its identify, however it may well additionally survive in its gamers and in a group’s reminiscence. These issues don’t at all times disappear collectively.

We like orchestras to have tidy biographies: based in a selected yr, led by successive music administrators, steadily approaching the following anniversary. These dates turn into a part of the model. They reassure us that though individuals die and the world modifications, the establishment endures. Musical life is messier.

That’s what makes San Antonio so fascinating now. The town is watching orchestral id being dismantled and reconstructed in actual time. The Philharmonic embodies an apparent type of continuity as a result of it was created by musicians of the previous Symphony.

Harmonium, in the meantime, is presenting itself as a brand new chapter within the metropolis’s musical life. Friday’s debut makes that concept audible. Carmina Burana will convey skilled musicians along with singers and younger performers drawn from San Antonio’s wider musical group. And maybe that factors towards the place an orchestra’s id actually resides.

An orchestra survives as a result of musicians select to play collectively and audiences return to listen to them. Over time, a metropolis begins to really feel that the establishment by some means belongs to it. These relationships can show more durable to dissolve than the group itself. They may also be divided.

The town’s new abundance could show invigorating. However competitors for gamers, audiences and assist additionally exposes how fragile the ecosystem beneath an orchestra’s look of permanence may be. Maybe asking whether or not the San Antonio Symphony survived is due to this fact the incorrect query. The Bolshoi represents one excessive: the establishment survived revolutions and the disappearance of the state whose identify it as soon as carried.

San Antonio gives the inverse experiment. The establishment disappeared whereas a lot of the musical life surrounding it survived. When the primary notes sound on the Lila Cockrell Theatre Friday, San Antonio gained’t hear a solution to the query of which orchestra is the town’s rightful inheritor. It would hear one thing extra attention-grabbing: proof that an orchestra could also be much less like an organization than a collective reminiscence — one able to outliving the group that when gave it a reputation.

Stacy Jarvis is a British music historian, author and violinist based mostly in Manchester. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century musical tradition, orchestral establishments and the methods music intersects with politics, cultural reminiscence and public life. She writes for publications within the UK and internationally.