I. When the Brand Becomes the Mission

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision.… We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier.” — G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter VII, “The Eternal Revolution”

There is nothing inherently wrong with branding, any more than there is something inherently wrong with money. Both are instruments. Their value depends entirely upon what they are made to serve. Properly understood, a brand reveals an institution’s identity; it does not invent one.

That distinction matters enormously because few cultural institutions possess an inheritance as rich as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s. Nearly a century and a half of history. Symphony Hall. Tanglewood. Koussevitzky, Munch, Leinsdorf, Ozawa, Nelsons. Generations of extraordinary musicians. One of the world’s great orchestral traditions. A branding expert confronted with such an inheritance should feel less like an inventor than a translator. The identity already exists. The task is to communicate it faithfully.

But there is another kind of branding, one that has become increasingly familiar within classical music and cultural institutions. It does not begin by asking what an institution is. It begins by deciding what the institution ought to become. The brand ceases to describe the reality, and reality is gradually rearranged to conform to the brand. At that point we are no longer talking about marketing. We are talking about institutional transformation conducted through the language and techniques of marketing.

This distinction helps explain the present crisis at the Boston Symphony. The dispute surrounding Andris Nelsons has often been portrayed as a battle over a conductor, but that explanation has always seemed inadequate. Nelsons retains extraordinary support among the musicians, his partnership with the orchestra has produced six of its thirteen Grammy Awards, and the board has never publicly argued that artistic failure justifies his departure. Instead, the disagreement has consistently been framed around the orchestra’s “future vision.” The obvious question, therefore, is not merely why Nelsons must leave, but why one of America’s great orchestras must be transformed to achieve that vision. The larger circumstances of the conflict are documented at length in Tom McGrath’s investigation for Boston Magazine⁠.

CEO Chad Smith has described the institution he inherited as requiring significant change. The BSO’s own 2023–24 annual report⁠ describes a strategic process intended to shape its future not only as a world-class cultural institution but as a civic pillar. Its 2025–26 season announcement⁠ emphasized idea-driven programming and collaborations extending beyond the conventional orchestral sphere. Yet musicians told Boston Magazine⁠ that artistic excellence had all but disappeared from an early proposed mission statement and was restored only after they objected. This might be dismissed as the ordinary clumsiness of strategic planning. I find it extraordinarily revealing. Imagine undertaking an elaborate process to redefine the purpose of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and arriving at a formulation in which the musicians themselves must remind the administration to make artistic excellence central to it.

G. K. Chesterton famously observed in Orthodoxy⁠ that the modern world was “full of the old Christian virtues gone mad”: virtues that had become isolated from one another and therefore wandered about doing damage precisely because each remained, in itself, a good thing. That strikes me as an almost perfect description of the predicament of many cultural institutions today. Inclusion is good. Education is good. Community is good. Innovation can be good. Financial responsibility is indispensable. Social concern can be admirable. The problem begins not when we possess these goods, but when we forget their proper order. A university that makes social engagement more important than truth has not perfected citizenship; it has misunderstood the university. And an orchestra that makes inclusion, civic engagement, demographic representation or even financial growth equal or superior to musical excellence has not modernized the orchestra. It has forgotten what an orchestra is.

An orchestra necessarily rests upon a hierarchy, and I use that unfashionable word deliberately. At the center is the music. Musicians dedicate their lives to mastering it. The conductor attempts to draw from them a coherent artistic vision. Administration organizes the conditions under which this can happen; fundraising pays for them; marketing communicates the result; education teaches people how to encounter it; the hall gives it a home; and the audience completes the experience. Every one of these functions matters. Their importance derives from the thing they serve. The Boston Symphony does not play Beethoven in order to provide content for its marketing department – It has a marketing department because it plays Beethoven. Reverse that hierarchy and an institution can retain its name while gradually becoming something else.

This is where branding becomes dangerous – not because branding is corrupt, but because it possesses an extraordinary ability to reverse the relationship between reality and representation. Instead of asking, “How do we communicate what the Boston Symphony is?” the institution begins asking, “What must the Boston Symphony become in order to communicate the story we wish to tell?” Programming becomes messaging; education becomes audience acquisition; musicians become ambassadors for institutional values; and the conductor becomes not merely an artist but an asset whose usefulness depends partly upon the narrative that can be constructed around him.

There was a time when great musicians became brands because they first became great musicians. Bernstein’s celebrity grew out of an enormous musical and intellectual personality. Callas became Callas because people heard something in that voice that they could hear nowhere else; same with Pavarotti. The brand followed the achievement. Our culture increasingly reverses the sequence. We seek the story first: the recognizable face, the social identity, the media narrative, the personality that can travel across platforms and appeal to audiences who may know little about the work itself. Gustavo Dudamel is therefore not merely a conductor but an extraordinarily valuable international brand. Lang Lang functions similarly within the economy of classical music. This need not diminish their considerable talents. It merely acknowledges that their institutional value now extends far beyond what happens between the first and last notes of a concert.

Once that happens, however, the brand acquires partial independence from the artistic achievement that created it. A disappointing review cannot erase international celebrity, social reach, sponsorship value or the ability to sell tickets. The artist becomes commercially precious enough that ordinary musical criticism loses some of its practical authority. The institution needs the brand, and the value of the brand is increasingly determined not merely by the quality of the music but by how successfully the artist moves through the wider culture. It is through this lens that presenters increasingly evaluate artists and institutions increasingly imagine themselves. The consequences for criticism are also profound. Once expected to guard standards and educate public taste, the critic now confronts reputations largely secured by forces beyond criticism’s reach. The critic may judge the performance, but the marketplace has already judged the brand. Standards be damned.

Unless, of course, we are prepared to admit that our great musical institutions are no longer charitable organizations devoted to preserving great art and educating audiences, but presenting organizations whose primary purpose is to maximize revenue. If that is the case, then we should have the honesty to say so. We should abandon any pretense of a higher mission, compete openly in the entertainment business, and perhaps even reconsider the privileges that accompany our charitable status. But let us not pretend that we have saved the institution. At best, we have replaced it with something entirely different. It is like saving a cathedral by turning it into a shopping mall. The building may remain, but its purpose has vanished.

Andris Nelsons presents a different proposition. His strongest argument for remaining in Boston is more old-fashioned: the musicians believe in him and the orchestra produces remarkable musical results under his direction. Much of his value therefore resides precisely where contemporary branding has the greatest difficulty measuring it — in rehearsals, interpretation, trust accumulated between conductor and players, and an orchestral sound developed over years rather than marketing cycles. If the desired music director must instead embody a new institutional narrative, musical success alone can no longer settle the question.

None of this establishes that the new philosophy is wrong. Perhaps the administration is correct that substantial transformation is necessary because the old model faces serious financial pressures. Declining subscriptions, changing patterns of cultural consumption, aging buildings and the enormous cost of maintaining Symphony Hall and Tanglewood are real problems. But acknowledging a problem does not establish the wisdom of a proposed solution, and this is where the public case for reinvention becomes considerably weaker.

The rhetoric surrounding the BSO has at times suggested an institution approaching a financial precipice. One of the most detailed public critiques of the administration’s financial narrative comes from Thomas Dinsmore’s Substack essays The Assassin and The BSO’s False Narrative, Part II. Drawing primarily from the BSO’s own audited financial statements, IRS filings, and public records, Dinsmore contends that the picture presented by management differs significantly from the organization’s underlying financial position. If his interpretation of the BSO’s own financial records is mistaken, it should be shown to be mistaken. If it is substantially correct, it cannot simply be ignored.

None of this means Boston has no financial problems. Restricted endowments are not checking accounts; deferred maintenance is real; operating pressures matter; subscription patterns can deteriorate while an institution still possesses considerable wealth. But “we face serious long-term financial challenges” and “therefore the artistic identity of the Boston Symphony must be reinvented” are two entirely different propositions. The second does not logically follow from the first. Even if one grants the administration every financial warning it has issued, it must still demonstrate that this particular transformation — more mission-oriented programming, more presentation, more emphasis on venue, civic identity and demographic outreach — will solve the problem.

The available audience evidence does not make that case obvious. Boston Magazine reports⁠ that the BSO’s Beethoven cycle sold strongly while musicians described some of its explicitly mission-oriented programming very differently; one veteran player called Voices of Loss, Reckoning and Hope the worst-selling three-week period he could remember. This establishes no universal law about Beethoven or experimental programming, but it should at least induce intellectual humility. If traditional repertoire fills the hall while programs designed partly around a theory of expanded relevance struggle, a reasonable institution ought to consider the possibility that its diagnosis is incomplete.

Research assembled by the League of American Orchestras on audience diversification⁠ similarly complicates the assumption that the principal obstacle is the cultural identity of classical music itself. Its work shows that the relationship among race, repertoire, attendance and institutional loyalty is considerably more complicated than easy slogans suggest. The lesson is not that outreach is futile. It is that good intentions do not relieve an institution of the obligation to demonstrate that its strategies work. And here something more consequential appears to be happening: the definition of success itself is changing.

Smith’s defense of the Boston Pops’ Day of the Dead programming is instructive. As Boston Magazine recounts⁠, when questions arose about whether such initiatives actually convert attendees into audiences for the orchestra’s classical work, he emphasized the importance of some 2,400 Latino families entering Symphony Hall. I am perfectly willing to accept that this was meaningful. But meaningful toward what end?

The danger is not that the new administration will fail according to its principles. It is that its principles are being constructed so that failure can always be called success.

That is not merely bad marketing.

It is bad reasoning.

II. When Equity Becomes an Artistic Principle

Boston cannot be understood in isolation. Following the ideological upheavals of 2020, classical music institutions across America adopted a new moral vocabulary centered on race, equity and social justice. Heather Mac Donald’s deliberately provocative essay Classical Music’s Suicide Pact remains valuable – even for readers who reject parts of her argument – because it documents, often in the institutions’ own words, this philosophical transformation.

As she observed, “In September 2020, New Yorker critic Alex Ross apologized for being a ‘white American’ writing about a world that is ‘blindingly white,’ while New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini urged that orchestra auditions no longer take place behind a screen to address the ‘appalling racial imbalance’ in orchestral ranks.” The debate had shifted. It was no longer principally about artistic excellence, interpretation or repertoire, but increasingly about the demographic composition of the institutions themselves.

The same philosophical shift is visible in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Its Resident Fellowship was explicitly created as part of the organization’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion strategy, complete with measurable goals, outcomes and metrics. The shift also reflects priorities embraced at the highest level of the institution’s governance. Board Chair Barbara Hostetter has long been a prominent advocate of diversity, equity and inclusion through her philanthropic work with the Barr Foundation, where she has argued publicly that boards themselves must lead DEI efforts rather than merely delegate them. As Chair of the BSO she has likewise celebrated the orchestra’s increasingly “diverse and representative” programming as a central institutional achievement, and together with her husband, Amos Hostetter, endowed the Resident Fellowship in support of the BSO’s broader Equity, Diversity and Inclusion strategy.

The significance of this is not that discrimination never exists, nor that the classical canon should be hermetically sealed against neglected composers. Nor is it to question the sincerity of those who advocate these initiatives. The significance lies in a change in first principles. Increasingly, an orchestra is expected not merely to discover extraordinary musicians, perform extraordinary music and introduce it to the widest possible public, but also to remedy social inequities, produce representational outcomes, interrogate inherited traditions and demonstrate its virtue through institutional policy.

There is an essential distinction here. Under one conception, inclusion means removing irrelevant barriers so that excellence may be discovered wherever it exists and shared with anyone willing to encounter it. Under another, equity shifts attention from removing barriers to achieving representational outcomes. Who appears onstage, whose music is programmed, which audiences enter the hall and what message the institution communicates become criteria alongside artistic judgment.

In Two Ages, Kierkegaard called “the public” a “monstrous abstraction,” warning that abstraction gradually erases qualitative distinctions. He was writing about society rather than art, but the insight translates remarkably well, which depends upon the preservation of qualitative distinctions. Art cannot exist without discrimination in the original and honorable meaning of that word: the capacity to distinguish.

Bach is better than hundreds of forgotten eighteenth-century composers. Mozart’s mature operas are greater than countless operas written by his contemporaries. A magnificent performance is better than an incompetent one; a profound interpretation is better than a superficial one. We may debate individual judgments endlessly, but the very possibility of criticism presupposes hierarchy.

Human beings possess equal dignity. Works of art do not possess equal merit. Confusing those two propositions is one of the characteristic errors of our age.

The issue is not diversity, outreach, branding or education.

The issue is the hierarchy of goods.

The danger is not that orchestras perform music by women, Black composers or composers outside the traditional European canon. If wonderful music has been unjustly neglected, recover it. If extraordinary musicians have been excluded for irrelevant reasons, open the door. If children have been denied musical education because they are poor, give them access. All of these things enlarge excellence precisely because excellence remains the governing criterion.

The danger begins when representation becomes a criterion capable of overruling excellence. Then the institution is no longer asking simply, Is this worth hearing? It begins asking, Whom does this represent? and eventually, What does programming this say about us? The work of art becomes partly instrumental, valued not only for what it is but for the institutional message its presence communicates.

There is another irony worth noticing. The BSO repeatedly speaks of inclusion, belonging and reaching communities historically underrepresented in classical music. Yet one of the most visible public movements defending the orchestra’s artistic identity – the Red Flower Campaign – was founded by George Whiting, who publicly identifies as a queer Filipino American. His independent grassroots campaign has mobilized thousands of patrons in defense of the orchestra’s artistic mission.

Campaign organizers say they have been dismissed and even accused of acting on behalf of Andris Nelsons rather than as independent supporters. If those accusations are unfounded, they reveal something more troubling than disagreement: a reluctance to distinguish dissent from disloyalty.

This raises a deeper question. What kind of inclusion is being practiced if voices from the very communities the institution claims to champion cease to matter the moment they dissent? The issue is not simply inclusion but pluralism. Diversity of background is admirable; diversity of judgment is indispensable. Institutions that celebrate only those whose conclusions reinforce their own assumptions are not practicing pluralism. They are practicing ideological selection under the language of inclusion.

A great symphony orchestra exists to preserve, cultivate and transmit one of civilization’s highest artistic traditions. Everything else – education, outreach, fundraising, marketing and community engagement – derives its legitimacy from serving that end. A civilized society should remove every irrelevant obstacle that prevents talent from flourishing. Race, sex, class or poverty should never bar a gifted musician from entering the concert hall. But removing barriers is fundamentally different from redefining the standards by which artistic decisions are made. The first enlarges excellence by allowing it to be discovered wherever it exists. The second risks subordinating excellence to representational objectives.

If those entrusted with safeguarding our greatest cultural institutions no longer believe artistic excellence is sufficient to justify them, why should the public? Institutions survive because they preserve standards greater than the people who temporarily administer them. They exist to transmit judgments that civilization has found worthy of passing from one generation to the next: this is beautiful; this is profound; this is worth preserving. The moment those judgments become subordinate to representational goals, institutional messaging or branding, the institution has not merely changed its priorities. It has begun to lose confidence in the very reason for its existence.

III. An Institution Begins to Forget Itself

The testimony of D. Wilson Ochoa, Principal Librarian of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops⁠ deserves particular attention. In a recent public statement, Ochoa described a series of changes he has observed from inside the organization: the expensive visual rebranding and creation of a separate Symphony Hall identity; the removal or relocation of historical displays and portraits; and the replacement of OPAS, software designed specifically for orchestral administration, with a system oriented toward venue management. Ochoa interprets these changes as evidence of a broader institutional shift from orchestra to venue, from artistic stewardship to presentation. That remains his interpretation. But the changes he describes raise legitimate questions.

The historical displays are particularly telling. According to Ochoa, portraits of former music directors disappeared from familiar locations, the bust of Arthur Fiedler was removed, founder Henry Lee Higginson’s portrait was moved, and displays that had connected the orchestra’s history with present repertoire were taken down. Branding is supposed to make an institution’s identity more visible. It is reasonable to ask what it means when a rebranding makes its inherited identity less visible.

Ochoa also offers a complication to the administration’s rhetoric about inclusion. He says that for several years he urged management to release existing BSO performances of works by women and Black composers, even compiling enough strong material for several recordings. His recollection of Smith’s reaction was the blunt question, “Will it make money?” Ochoa also says a proposal for a Juneteenth concert received no meaningful response.

Here was a musician proposing precisely the sort of broader representation management now says it values – but proposing to achieve it through the orchestra and its music, rather than through replacing orchestral activity with something else. That distinction may be more important than it first appears.

Inclusion does not require dilution.

The BSO can recover neglected composers, commission new music, introduce children to classical music and welcome people who have never entered Symphony Hall while remaining unapologetically a great symphony orchestra. Indeed, that is the more ambitious proposition: not assuming that unfamiliar audiences require a different institution, but believing they are capable of loving the extraordinary institution already there.

An institution that exists in great part to preserve memory should be especially careful about erasing its own.

There is something almost Homeric about a great orchestra. Tradition remembers Homer as the blind poet: unable to see the world before him, yet able to see with extraordinary clarity the heroic world that had vanished. Whether the Greeks intended that symbolism hardly matters. The image endures because Homer remembers. Troy has fallen. The heroes are dead. Yet memory preserves the standards by which later generations continue to recognize courage, nobility and greatness.

A great orchestra performs something of the same function. Koussevitzky is dead. Munch is dead. Leinsdorf is dead. Ozawa is dead. The audiences who heard Sibelius, Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff are all but gone. Yet something survives – not merely in recordings and archives, but more importantly in standards, habits of playing, inherited arguments about interpretation and an institutional memory passed from one generation of musicians to the next.

Chesterton called tradition “the democracy of the dead.” “Tradition,” he wrote in Orthodoxy, “means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” Few institutions embody that democracy better than a great orchestra. Every rehearsal, every performance and every artistic decision is part of an ongoing conversation between the living and the dead. The musicians are not merely interpreting Beethoven or Mahler; they are inheriting a tradition of interpretation shaped by generations of artists who devoted their lives to asking what those works require.

Those entrusted with such an inheritance are therefore not owners but custodians. Stewardship begins in gratitude, for one cannot preserve what one first regards as an embarrassment. Their responsibility is not to reinvent the institution according to the fashions of the present, but to preserve, renew and pass on what previous generations judged worthy of preserving. Renewal is indispensable, but renewal presupposes continuity. One cannot meaningfully renew what one no longer remembers.

We have developed the peculiar habit of treating survival as evidence of obsolescence rather than evidence of success. An institution survives for nearly a century and a half, and our first question becomes how radically it must change. Perhaps our first question should be how it managed to survive for nearly a century and a half.

Longevity proves neither perfection nor immunity from change. Traditions can preserve errors as well as wisdom. But survival is evidence nonetheless. Greatness creates attachment; beauty creates loyalty; excellence creates the desire to preserve. These things are not obstacles to institutional survival. Historically, they have been among its causes. A civilization survives in much the same way: by transmitting judgments from one generation to another – this is beautiful; this is noble; this is worth knowing; this is worth preserving. When a society loses confidence in making such judgments, it may retain its museums, universities, orchestras and libraries while gradually forgetting what they are for.

And institutions do not forget themselves all at once. They forget themselves gradually, each time they lose confidence in what previous generations believed worth preserving.

IV. From Culture to Spectacle

Mario Vargas Llosa diagnosed this larger cultural condition in La Civilización del Espectáculo (published in English as Notes on the Death of Culture). His argument was not that entertainment is evil. Entertainment is a perfectly legitimate human good. His warning concerned what happens when entertainment ceases to occupy its proper place and becomes a civilization’s highest value. Culture gradually reorganizes itself around diversion, accessibility, celebrity and immediacy until the distinction between serious culture and spectacle becomes increasingly difficult to defend. As he writes, “The essential difference between the culture of the past and the entertainment of today is that the products of the former sought to transcend mere present time, to endure, to stay alive for future generations, while the products of the latter are made to be consumed instantly and disappear, like cake or popcorn.”

That warning matters because classical institutions have become strangely eager for validation from the very culture of spectacle they once offered an alternative to. Every crossover, celebrity appearance and mass-media event is celebrated as proof that classical music remains “relevant.” But relevance is not an artistic virtue in itself. Relevant to what? And on whose terms? A civilization confident in its inheritance does not ask first whether beauty is relevant. It asks whether it is true.

The recent World Cup final offered an unexpectedly revealing illustration. Gustavo Dudamel stood before musicians from the New York Philharmonic and Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra to conduct Seven Nation Army alongside the Muppets’ Electric Mayhem during the halftime show. I have nothing against the Muppets, nor is the point that Dudamel should never step outside the concert hall. Bernstein moved effortlessly between Broadway, television and Beethoven without diminishing either.

The more interesting question is why classical music now seems so eager to be invited.

We often assume that appearing before a global audience automatically advances the cause of classical music. Perhaps it does. But that is an empirical claim. Without evidence that such spectacles cultivate lasting audiences for orchestras or the repertoire, visibility remains visibility. It is not the same thing as education, loyalty or artistic engagement.

Indeed, the principal beneficiary may often be the celebrity rather than the institution. Greater exposure undoubtedly strengthens Dudamel’s international brand, a benefit that may translate into ticket sales, philanthropy and prestige for the orchestra he leads. But how much of that value remains with classical music itself? Audiences are likely to remember the maestro; far fewer will remember the orchestra, let alone Mahler or Beethoven. The spotlight falls on the personality more readily than on the tradition.

There is also the possibility that the exchange runs in the opposite direction. The spectacle borrows from classical music the prestige of the orchestra and the archetypal image of the maestro – the baton, the disciplined mass of musicians, the aura of virtuosity and cultural authority – while classical music borrows the spectacle’s audience. One side receives prestige; the other receives exposure. It is worth asking which has made the better bargain.

The Boston Globe‘s music critic, A.Z. Madonna, recently arrived at a remarkably similar conclusion in her review of Yo-Yo Ma’s Tanglewood residency. She acknowledged Ma’s extraordinary artistry but observed that “the power of Ma’s name sold most of those tickets, unity be damned.” More revealing still was her observation that CEO Chad Smith has publicly pointed to Ma’s residency as an example of the kind of “forward-thinking programming” the orchestra hopes to emphasize. Her verdict was devastating in its understated wit: “If this weekend’s concerts were supposed to represent the ‘future vision,’ someone needs their prescription adjusted.”

Whether one agrees with Madonna’s artistic judgment is almost beside the point. What matters is the programming philosophy her review exposes. Rather than beginning with a coherent artistic idea and inviting artists to serve it, the process increasingly appears to begin with celebrated names, around which a program is assembled. The result was an “overstuffed” and “under rehearsed” collage that “needed an editor.” Great artists have always collaborated. The danger lies in assuming that celebrity can supply the coherence that artistic judgment ought to provide. A full hall may demonstrate commercial success; it cannot, by itself, settle the artistic question. Brands attract audiences. They do not substitute for artistic judgment.

Vargas Llosa’s point was precisely that a civilization of spectacle rarely abolishes serious culture. It changes the terms under which serious culture is valued. The symphony survives, but increasingly because it can be packaged as an experience. The conductor survives, but increasingly as a celebrity. The museum survives, but as an Instagram destination. The university survives, but as a lifestyle credential. Nothing has to be destroyed. It only has to be translated into the language of spectacle.

That is why dignity matters. A civilization confident in its inheritance need not hide from popular culture. It can engage it joyfully. Bernstein did. But it enters that encounter knowing what it possesses. It does not approach mass culture as a supplicant asking to be told that it still matters. There is something undignified about an art form possessing Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Mahler continually seeking validation from the culture of spectacle, as though greatness itself required popular certification.

If classical music must fight for audiences – and of course it must – then let us fight on ground worthy of the thing we are defending. Make the concerts extraordinary. Make tickets accessible. Teach children how to listen. Send great musicians into schools. Explain the repertoire without condescension. Record it beautifully. Use every useful modern technology. Advertise intelligently. Welcome curiosity wherever it appears.

But do not confuse exposure with education, visibility with conversion, accessibility with assimilation, or popularity with value.

A 145-year-old symphony orchestra occupies a different moral position from an entertainment brand. It is not merely a property owned by those who happen to administer it today. It is an inheritance. Inheritance imposes obligations that ownership does not.

V. Faith in Beauty

Beneath the branding, mission statements, demographic strategies and ideological vocabulary lies something deeper. Our cultural institutions appear to have lost confidence in the things they inherited. That is why we hear endlessly that classical music must become “relevant.” The word itself betrays anxiety. Perhaps Roger Scruton was right when he said that “people have lost their faith in beauty because they’ve lost their belief in ideals”. Bach does not become more valuable because a consultant discovers a demographic that approves of him. Beethoven’s Ninth does not acquire additional moral authority because we attach a contemporary social cause to it. Nor does Brahms become exclusionary because someone has not yet learned to love Brahms.

There was once a word for solving that last problem: education.

Education meant something considerably more ambitious than getting people through the doors. It meant teaching people to love things they did not yet know how to love. Nobody expects a child immediately to prefer Bach to a three-minute pop song. Bach demands attention, memory, patience, repeated exposure and the gradual formation of taste. Shakespeare demands something similar. So do Dante, Rembrandt and Greek tragedy. High culture has always rested upon a profoundly democratic proposition: ordinary human beings are capable of being educated upward.

Marketing begins somewhere else. It discovers what consumers already want and finds increasingly effective ways to give it to them. Education begins with the conviction that there are things worth wanting before the student knows enough to want them. The fashionable phrase “meeting audiences where they are” therefore contains both a truth and a danger. Of course we must meet people where they are. Where else could we possibly meet them? But no teacher worthy of the name meets the student where he is and builds a permanent house there. We meet him there because we intend to travel somewhere together. Otherwise education becomes flattery, and culture becomes entertainment.

This is the point at which the contradictions in Boston cease looking incidental. We are told that financial conditions require transformation, although the financial evidence assembled by Dinsmore⁠ is considerably more complicated than the rhetoric of crisis suggests. We are told that changing audiences require transformation, although Boston Magazine reports⁠ that Beethoven fills the hall while some programming deliberately aligned with the new institutional philosophy reportedly does not. We are told that artistic excellence remains paramount, although musicians had to insist upon its prominence in the strategic language. We hear an administration invoking inclusion while its principal librarian says proposals for inclusive classical projects were dismissed or ignored. And we are told that a music director who retains extraordinary support among the musicians must leave because he does not fit a future vision that the people actually making the music appear not to share.

At some point common sense requires that we stop treating these contradictions as unrelated accidents.

The most plausible conclusion is not that the Boston Symphony faces no challenges. Of course it does. Nor is it necessary to believe that everyone involved in the new administration is cynical or malicious. Quite the contrary: they may believe passionately in what they are doing. But sincerity cannot settle the argument. Good intentions are precisely what make Chesterton’s virtues dangerous when they escape their proper place.

The real question – the question that has run through every page of this essay – is whether the institution’s hierarchy of values has been reversed: whether artistic excellence remains the end toward which inclusion, education, marketing, fundraising and community engagement are ordered, or whether music itself is gradually becoming one instrument among many for achieving a broader social, demographic and institutional mission.

If it is the latter, the board should say so plainly. It should defend that proposition before the musicians, subscribers, donors and public whose inheritance it is altering. Such a transformation should not be smuggled into the institution under the morally irresistible vocabulary of “change,” “belonging,” “equity,” “relevance” or “innovation,” nor presented as an economic necessity without compelling evidence that it will improve the economics.

There is another path, and it requires something our cultural institutions increasingly lack: faith.

Faith that beauty remains attractive. Faith that young people remain capable of concentration. Faith that a Black child, a Latino child, an Asian child or a white child can encounter Bach without first requiring Bach to resemble him. Faith that taste can develop, that education can transform desire, and that someone who has never heard a symphony can walk into Symphony Hall and encounter something so extraordinary that he wishes to return. Faith, in other words, that beauty remains worthy of being loved.

Then help him return.

Open the doors as widely as possible, but do not lower the ceiling.

That is inclusion without leveling, education without condescension, tradition without antiquarianism and branding without idolatry. It does not ask the Boston Symphony to remain frozen in 1881. It asks the Boston Symphony to remember why it survived from 1881 until now.

Whom, after all, does the orchestra serve? Not the CEO, the board, the musicians, the donors, the critics, the activists, the subscribers, or even that wonderfully elastic abstraction called “the community.” Kierkegaard warned against elevating “the public,” calling it “a monstrous abstraction” – at once “everything and nothing, the most dangerous of all powers and the most insignificant.” All these groups possess legitimate claims upon the institution, but none can be sovereign, because all are temporary. The orchestra ultimately serves the music.

Remove the development department and the orchestra faces a financial crisis. Remove the marketing department and it will have difficulty selling tickets. Remove the CEO and another can be hired. Remove the board and another form of governance can be devised. Remove the music and there is no Boston Symphony Orchestra. There is only a brand.

Perhaps that is the deepest irony of the present crisis. Those most determined to save the Boston Symphony by reinventing it may ultimately damage the one thing no consultant, strategic plan, philanthropic fortune or branding agency can manufacture once it has been lost: the reason anyone cared about the Boston Symphony in the first place.

“In February '81 [1881] I began to put in shape a scheme conceived twenty-five years before that date [1856], namely to give orchestral concerts of the best attainable character and quality at a price which should admit any one and everyone likely to care for such things - my hope was to draw in by degrees a larger and less-educated class of society - I had meant to engage an orchestra and a conductor to be at my beck and call because this only could I ask and get practice sufficient in amount and quality to reach the playing of the great German orchestras.” - Higginson, September 20, 1882, Letter to Sir George Grove describing the founding of the BSO for the 1883 printing of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

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David Allen’s recent New York Times piece on the Boston Symphony Orchestra is thoughtful, elegantly written, and raises important questions about one of America’s greatest musical institutions. Yet after reading it, I found myself returning to a question the article never seriously confronts. When ninety of the world’s finest musicians publicly tell us they have found an extraordinary artistic leader, what burden of proof should be required before we conclude they are all mistaken?

Before going any further, let me make something equally clear. David Allen is not a musician. That fact is neither a criticism nor a disqualification. Some of the greatest music critics in history were not performers, and criticism is a discipline worthy of enormous respect. I have admired serious critics all my life and lament how diminished their influence has become in an age of instant opinions and social media outrage. But criticism also has limits. Those limits become especially apparent when a critic dismisses the considered judgment of the very artists whose work he is evaluating. Throughout his article, Allen minimizes the extraordinary public support that the Boston Symphony musicians have shown for Andris Nelsons. Their loyalty is treated less as evidence worthy of examination than as an emotional reaction from musicians unable to accept change. It is a curious position. If a critic’s professional opinion deserves respect, why should the collective judgment of one of the world’s finest orchestras deserve less?

The answer cannot simply be that the critic is more objective. Objectivity is valuable, but proximity matters as well. Critics attend performances. Audiences hear concerts. Administrators oversee institutions. But only the musicians experience the entire artistic relationship — from the first rehearsal to the final performance, year after year. They know who arrives prepared, who inspires confidence, who earns trust, who elevates an ensemble and who does not. Their testimony is not infallible, but neither is anyone else’s. It deserves to be treated as primary evidence, not an inconvenient obstacle to a predetermined narrative.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Allen’s discussion of the reported Susanna Mälkki incident. The episode is presented as evidence of broader dysfunction within the orchestra. Yet anyone genuinely seeking to understand what happened would have to begin with the musicians themselves. Better still, one would have to read the conductor evaluations submitted by the players that week — the closest thing to a contemporaneous collective record of the orchestra’s artistic judgment. Those evaluations are confidential, as they should be. But their very existence is a reminder that the public record is necessarily incomplete. That matters. It does not mean the published accounts are wrong. It means they cannot be complete. When the most direct evidence from the people who experienced the collaboration firsthand is unavailable, responsible journalism and responsible criticism should acknowledge the limits of what can be known. Otherwise, a single reported incident risks carrying more explanatory weight than the available evidence can bear.

Allen also argues that Nelsons’ artistic time has simply run its course. His Tchaikovsky no longer convinces him. His interpretations have become mannered. Twelve years, apparently, are enough. That is a perfectly legitimate critical opinion.What is less convincing is the implicit assumption that longevity itself is evidence of artistic exhaustion. Great orchestras were not built through constant turnover – if anything, they’ve been destroyed by it. They were shaped over decades by conductors whose relationships with their musicians deepened with time. Karajan in Berlin. Haitink in Amsterdam. Ormandy in Philadelphia. Mravinsky in Leningrad. Szell in Cleveland. One may debate individual artistic results, but history suggests that continuity has often produced greatness rather than stagnation. The modern tendency to treat music directors as interchangeable executives moving from institution to institution deserves far more scrutiny than it receives.

There is another assumption underlying the article that deserves examination. Allen repeatedly praises Boston’s Festival of Contemporary Music while criticizing Nelsons’ artistic priorities. I have no quarrel with contemporary music. New music is essential to the life of an orchestra. But contemporary music exists within a tradition that made it possible. The masterpieces of the past are not obstacles to progress; they are the foundation upon which every living composer stands. Programming should enrich that tradition, not seek to replace it. For years audiences have said, often with complete honesty, that they endured the new work in order to hear the Bruckner or the Brahms. Ask any musician, I’ve personally heard that a million times. That may frustrate critics, and contemporary music lovers like myself, but it remains an important reality. The challenge is not to lecture audiences into different tastes. It is to commission and champion new music compelling enough to stand beside the repertoire without institutional persuasion.

Boston should certainly evolve. Every great orchestra must. But evolution should begin with humility rather than certainty. Before dismantling what has been built over generations, one ought to know with some confidence that the replacement will be better — not merely newer, more fashionable or more aligned with current administrative thinking. I have written in my previous pieces why I do not believe Boston should attempt to become Los Angeles. Every orchestra has its own history, culture and artistic identity. Success cannot simply be imported from another institution by copying its priorities or its organizational philosophy.

What troubles me most about Allen’s essay is not that he disagrees with the musicians. It is that he rarely seems to take them seriously. An orchestra is not its board. It is not its president. It is not its donors. It is not its critics. It is, first and foremost, its musicians. I can’t repeat that enough. When nearly an entire orchestra publicly risks its reputation to defend a music director, the proper response is not condescension but curiosity and respect – musicians have earned at least that. One may ultimately conclude they are wrong. But before reaching that conclusion, one ought to ask a simple question: What do they know that the rest of us do not? Until that question is taken seriously, the conversation about the Boston Symphony Orchestra will remain incomplete. And criticism that claims to speak for the future of one of the world’s great orchestras will have failed to listen to the people who know it best.

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For five years, Otero Alcántara was one of the most recognizable faces of political imprisonment in Cuba. A co-founder of the San Isidro Movement and a participant in the “Patria y Vida” project, he became an international symbol of a government that imprisons young people for protesting, creating art and challenging official power. Arrested on July 11, 2021, he was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison on charges that included public disorder, contempt and insulting national symbols. Human-rights organizations regarded him as a political prisoner. When he arrived in Miami on July 18, 2026, after being released on the condition that he leave Cuba, many exiles expected him to embody the role that had already been assigned to him: survivor, witness and spokesman for the prisoners who remained behind. Instead, they encountered a complicated human being.

The interview that provoked some of the strongest reactions was conducted by Martí Noticias. Otero Alcántara was questioned about military intervention in Cuba, his treatment during his final days on the island and the period he spent under State Security custody at a residence near Guanabo while his departure was being arranged. He described being able to see relatives, drink beer, and eat properly. When asked whether he was concerned that the authorities had filmed those moments and might later use the images to discredit him, he answered with characteristic irreverence that he liked cameras and “sequins.” To some viewers, the remark sounded flippant and painfully out of place. Other critics complained that he appeared incoherent, that he rambled and that he failed to provide the systematic account of prison abuse they expected. His physical appearance also became an object of scrutiny: some remarked that he looked healthier, and heavier, than they imagined a man emerging from a Cuban prison should look.

The reaction soon moved beyond criticism. Unsupported accusations circulated on social media suggesting that he might be an agent of Cuban State Security. Others reportedly called for his removal from the United States. Such claims reveal more about the climate of suspicion surrounding Cuban politics than they establish about Otero Alcántara. Unless evidence emerges, they should not be repeated as fact. There are legitimate questions to ask him. But neither a prisoner’s appearance nor his failure to perform trauma according to public expectations proves collaboration with his jailers.

Otero Alcántara has acknowledged that his international visibility afforded him certain advantages unavailable to less prominent prisoners. He could obtain materials and continue working as an artist. During his confinement, he produced approximately 4,000 works, which he has described not as decorative paintings but as records of the ordeal he endured. Painting, he has said, helped keep him alive. He also maintains that he has used income from prizes and art sales to support his family and the struggle for freedom in Cuba. These circumstances complicate his story, but they do not erase the injustice of his imprisonment. A prisoner does not cease to be a prisoner because he is occasionally given beer, allowed to paint or treated less brutally than someone in the neighboring cell. Nor should survival itself be converted into evidence of guilt. Nevertheless, one cannot deny a certain narcissism in Otero Alcántara’s public persona. His interviews often turn toward his art, his sexuality, his relationships, his money and the mythology surrounding his own image. His language can be vulgar, impulsive and imprecise. He does not speak with the gravity many Cubans expected from someone who had come to represent their political prisoners.

But perhaps the deeper problem is that the exile community expected a symbol and received a man. Some have asked for patience. Five years in prison cannot be metabolized in a few days. A person forced directly from confinement into exile may need silence, psychological care and time before being placed under studio lights and asked to explain the fate of a nation. Trauma does not always produce eloquence. It may appear as confusion, bravado, inappropriate humor, emotional detachment or an intensified need for attention. That does not place Otero Alcántara beyond criticism. It does, however, require us to distinguish between moral judgment and public disappointment.

The controversy also invites a comparison with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, another artist and political prisoner forced into exile by a communist regime. Soviet authorities arrested him on February 12, 1974, stripped him of his citizenship and expelled him to West Germany the following day. Approximately two years later, on March 1, 1976, the BBC broadcast his major interview with journalist Michael Charlton. By then, Solzhenitsyn had possessed the time and distance necessary to reflect upon both his imprisonment and the Western society in which he had taken refuge. He brought to that interview more than a testimony about Soviet repression. His experience in the Gulag had produced a moral vision: the conviction that freedom depends upon an uncompromising distinction between good and evil and upon the courage of individuals and institutions to defend that distinction. As he warned, “Freedom is indivisible, and one has to take a moral attitude toward it.” It is in this moral interpretation of imprisonment, tyranny and freedom — not in the circumstances of exile alone — that the contrast with Otero Alcántara becomes most revealing.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn described imprisonment as capable of transforming the prisoner. Suffering could strip a person of certainty, expose his weakness and teach him patience. The man who had once judged others without mercy might acquire what Solzhenitsyn called “an understanding mildness” and learn to recognize both the frailty and the unexpected strength of other human beings. Solzhenitsyn did not romanticize suffering or suggest that imprisonment automatically made its victims virtuous. The camp could degrade, corrupt or destroy a person. But it also confronted the prisoner with fundamental moral choices. Even under extreme oppression, the individual retained some responsibility for deciding whether to participate in falsehood and cruelty. Solzhenitsyn emerged from that experience with an extraordinarily developed moral vocabulary. He understood the Gulag as more than an apparatus of state repression. It was the political expression of a deeper corruption: the surrender of conscience, personal responsibility and the distinction between good and evil.

It would be unfair to demand that Otero Alcántara become Cuba’s Solzhenitsyn. They come from different intellectual traditions, practice different arts and speak in radically different registers. Solzhenitsyn was a writer who organized experience through sustained historical and philosophical argument. Otero Alcántara is a performance artist whose language has often been his body, provocation and spectacle. Still, the contrast exposes a legitimate hunger within the Cuban exile community. Many expected someone who had endured five years of political imprisonment to offer a clear account of the system’s cruelty and a moral vision for the country that might replace it. Instead, they heard statements about art, money, sex, pacifism and the possibility of embracing with love a former jailer. His willingness to say that he could embrace his jailer and express love toward him may represent forgiveness. But forgiveness requires moral clarity. Loving an enemy does not mean pretending that oppression is merely another point of view. Mercy without truth can become self-display; reconciliation without justice can become permission for abuse.

Solzhenitsyn’s moral criticism did not end at the Soviet border. Once in exile, he became deeply concerned about what he regarded as the spiritual and civic deterioration of the West. He saw intellectuals reluctant to defend unpopular truths, journalists exercising freedom without accepting responsibility and political leaders separating pragmatic calculations from moral judgment. He also warned of a growing admiration for revolutionaries, particularly the most extreme among them. Western intellectuals, professors and public figures, he argued, too often excused revolutionary violence when it was committed in the name of equality or liberation. They condemned abuses committed by their political opponents while rationalizing similar abuses committed by movements whose ideology they admired. That warning remains urgent.

Democratic decline does not always begin when a dictator abolishes elections or closes a legislature. It can begin much earlier: when citizens cease to believe that truth exists beyond political convenience; when violence is excused according to the identity or ideology of the person committing it; and when intellectuals defend coercion because it is carried out in the name of equality, revolution or historical justice. We can see this danger today in the renewed respectability of Marxist and authoritarian ideas within parts of American academic, cultural and political life. Arguments that minimize communist crimes, romanticize revolutionary violence or treat individual rights as obstacles to collective transformation have moved from the margins into influential institutions.

We don’t need to describe every advocate of economic redistribution or social reform as a communist. Such exaggeration weakens the argument. The real danger lies in excusing coercion when it serves a preferred ideology, treating opponents as morally illegitimate and believing that noble intentions can redeem systems that subordinate the individual to the state. For Cubans, this is not an abstract intellectual dispute. We know what follows when political language abandons moral limits. The Cuban Revolution promised justice, equality and liberation. It produced a state in which rights became privileges distributed according to political obedience.

The Cuban state did not merely abolish representative institutions and confiscate private property. It attacked the independent sources of loyalty and meaning capable of limiting its power: churches, families, civic associations, private enterprise and traditions of personal responsibility. It attempted to replace them with the “new man,” a citizen whose highest obligation was not to God, family or conscience, but to the revolutionary state. Chronic scarcity completed part of this destructive work. When people must steal from their workplaces, participate in the black market, deceive officials or sell access to their bodies merely to obtain necessities, moral compromise becomes embedded in ordinary life. Conduct that begins as a means of survival gradually becomes a social habit. Trust disappears, language deteriorates and the ability to distinguish resourcefulness from corruption becomes dangerously weak. This damage will not be repaired simply by removing the Communist Party, adopting a new constitution or introducing private commerce. Those changes may be indispensable, but they are insufficient.

Democratic institutions do not create the moral character necessary to sustain democracy. The relationship works principally in the opposite direction. Constitutions, courts, elections and markets depend upon moral habits that they cannot manufacture by themselves: honesty, restraint, responsibility, respect for human dignity, tolerance of disagreement and fidelity to truth. Laws can punish certain forms of misconduct, but no legal system can survive if deception becomes normal, corruption becomes admirable and power becomes the only recognized measure of right. Courts cannot administer justice if judges possess no allegiance to truth. Elections cannot preserve liberty if voters reward vengeance, dependency and political tribalism. Markets cannot remain free if contracts mean nothing and theft is celebrated as ingenuity.

For Solzhenitsyn, shared values could not survive without spiritual roots. They emerged from the Christian moral order that shaped Western civilization: the belief that human dignity comes from God and cannot be granted or withdrawn by the state; that good and evil are objective realities; that freedom is inseparable from responsibility; and that every ruler remains subject to a law higher than political power. Within this moral framework, the institutions of democracy could develop and prosper because neither the individual nor the state was understood to be the ultimate authority. The recovery of freedom must therefore include a return to spiritual life and to shared values grounded in morality. Constitutions, elections and courts cannot preserve liberty in a society that no longer believes in truth, sacrifice, forgiveness, self-restraint or the sacred worth of every person. Political opponents must not become enemies to be destroyed; authority must remain limited; and the law must bind rulers as firmly as ordinary citizens. Once these moral foundations disappear, democratic institutions become empty structures — easily captured and turned against the very freedoms they were created to protect.

This is the essential lesson Solzhenitsyn offered both Russia and the West. Freedom cannot be maintained only through laws, procedures or material prosperity. It requires citizens who accept responsibility for its survival. A country may retain elections, courts and a written constitution while gradually losing the moral culture that gives those institutions meaning. As a Cuban exile and political refugee, I understand the anger of those who expected more from Otero Alcántara. At a crucial moment when many Cubans believe political change may finally be possible, they wanted a commanding witness — someone who could speak for the prisoners, name the evil of the system and articulate the principles of a future republic. But perhaps we placed an impossible burden on one wounded man. Perhaps we turned a prisoner into a poster and then blamed the human being for failing to resemble it.

We have every right to question Otero Alcántara’s ideas and conduct. Public prominence carries responsibilities, particularly when a person has come to represent prisoners who cannot speak freely for themselves. But a dictatorship leaves its fingerprints even on those who resist it. Otero Alcántara was born and formed within a society devastated by poverty, repression and the systematic destruction of its moral and civic foundations. He is both an adversary of that system and one of its human consequences. To recognize this does not absolve him of responsibility; it places our judgment within the reality that produced him. If we demand moral seriousness from a man emerging from five years of confinement, and a lifetime under the Cuban regime, we must temper that demand with humility – and most importantly, be prepared to apply the same moral scrutiny to ourselves.

Before asking who will govern Cuba after the Castros, we must ask what convictions will govern those who inherit the country. Do we believe in freedom only for those who agree with us? Do we defend truth even when it injures our political side? Can we distinguish justice from vengeance? Can we criticize a disappointing spokesman without inventing evidence against him or denying his humanity? These are not secondary questions to be addressed after democratic institutions have been established. They will determine whether such institutions can be established at all.

Removing a dictatorship is not the same as creating a free society. Markets may produce wealth, laws may restrain misconduct and elections may transfer authority, but none of them can substitute for a moral culture. Freedom cannot simply be delivered from Washington, purchased through commerce or guaranteed by constitutional language. It must be cultivated through conduct: in our respect for truth, our willingness to judge without dehumanizing and our determination to recognize both evil and human weakness. Otero Alcántara may not be the spokesman many Cubans expected. Yet the controversy he has provoked offers an opportunity more valuable than another trial conducted on television and social media. It invites us to stop waiting for a flawless hero and begin the more difficult work of moral reconstruction.

The ultimate question is not merely whether Cuba is prepared to live without the Castros. It is whether Cubans — on the island and in exile — are prepared to accept the responsibilities without which freedom cannot endure.

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There are moments in the life of an institution when a single decision reveals a much deeper problem. The recent events surrounding the Boston Symphony Orchestra have become such a moment. Whatever one’s opinion of the personalities involved, they force us to ask a larger question: Who truly governs an orchestra? More importantly, who should?

American orchestras have, over the past century, embraced a corporate model of governance. Boards of trustees, presidents, chief executives, consultants, strategic planners, and marketing departments have gradually accumulated authority over institutions whose very reason for existence is artistic creation. Musicians — the individuals upon whose talent every dollar depends — often find themselves in an oddly paradoxical position: indispensable to the institution’s purpose, yet peripheral to its highest decisions.

No one disputes the importance of competent financial management. Great orchestras require responsible stewardship, fundraising, legal oversight, and administrative expertise. But somewhere along the way, many institutions have come to confuse stewardship with ownership.

An orchestra is not a corporation that happens to produce concerts. It is an artistic community that requires administration.

The distinction is not semantic. It is constitutional. The Berlin Philharmonic offers an illuminating alternative. Its musicians elect their chief conductor. They participate directly in shaping the institution’s artistic future. Professional administrators manage budgets, contracts, and operations, but they do so in service of an artistic community rather than above it. The result has not been chaos or financial irresponsibility. Quite the contrary. Berlin remains one of the world’s great orchestras because it has never forgotten that governance exists to protect artistic excellence, not to replace it.

This is not a call for Boston to become Berlin. Different nations have different legal systems, funding structures, and philanthropic traditions. Germany’s public support for the arts cannot simply be imported into the United States. But constitutions can evolve. Governance can be rebalanced. Between complete board supremacy and complete musician control lies a wide spectrum of possibilities that American orchestras have scarcely explored.

Perhaps the Boston Symphony should also reconsider the institutions it chooses to emulate.

In recent years, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has often been presented as the model for the American orchestra of the future. Its entrepreneurial spirit, interdisciplinary programming, civic engagement, and remarkable success in attracting new audiences deserve admiration. Every orchestra can learn something from Los Angeles. But Boston should resist the temptation to become another Los Angeles.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has never derived its greatness from chasing novelty or redefining itself according to the cultural priorities of the moment. Its lineage is different. It belongs to the tradition of Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Leipzig —institutions whose identities were built over generations through uncompromising artistic standards, deep orchestral culture, and an understanding that music itself, rather than institutional branding, is the orchestra’s highest purpose.

If Boston seeks a model, it should not merely ask which orchestra has the most fashionable programming or the most innovative marketing strategy. It should ask which orchestra has best preserved the relationship between artistic excellence and institutional governance.

On that question, Berlin deserves serious attention.

Why should musicians not elect a substantial portion of the artistic search committee?

Why should they not possess a formal vote in the appointment of a music director?

Why should major artistic decisions proceed without the structured participation of the people whose careers and collective identity are most directly affected?

Such reforms would not weaken governance. They would strengthen legitimacy. The obvious objection is that such a transformation is impossible. It is not. Constitutions are not acts of nature they are acts of will.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra cannot become the Berlin Philharmonic, nor should it attempt to imitate another institution article by article. Boston must remain unmistakably Boston. But every enduring institution eventually reaches a moment when it must ask not merely who will lead it next, but by what principles it wishes to be led.

Perhaps that moment has arrived. The next search should not simply be for a music director. (And I really hope they can keep Nelsons). It should be for a constitution worthy of one. Rather than immediately beginning another leadership search, the Board could initiate a constitutional review of the orchestra’s governance. The musicians should push for this in their negotiations with the board going forward. A commission composed equally of trustees and elected musicians, joined by former artistic leaders, distinguished conductors, scholars of nonprofit governance, and representatives from orchestras that have successfully balanced artistic and fiduciary authority, should be charged with a single question:

What kind of institution should the Boston Symphony Orchestra be fifty years from now?

Its recommendations need not be revolutionary. No one proposes abolishing trustees. A constitutional republic does not eliminate offices; it assigns them their proper jurisdiction.

The Board should continue to govern what properly belongs to the Board: the endowment, financial stewardship, legal obligations, fundraising, and the long-term health of the institution. But artistic authority should no longer exist merely on sufferance. The musicians should elect representatives to a permanent Artistic Council charged with safeguarding the orchestra’s artistic identity. They should elect a substantial portion of every future music director search committee. The appointment of a music director should require not only the confidence of the Board but also the confidence of the orchestra itself. Decisions that define the artistic character of the institution for generations should no longer proceed without the meaningful participation of those whose lives are devoted to carrying them out.

This is not a transfer of power.

It is a separation of powers.

For too long, American orchestras have concentrated artistic and institutional authority within a single governing structure. Every successful constitutional republic understands that authority is strongest when it is shared among institutions with different responsibilities and different forms of wisdom. Fiduciary stewardship belongs to trustees. Artistic stewardship belongs to artists. Neither is complete without the other.

Such a transformation cannot be imposed. It must be embraced. It will require trustees secure enough to understand that sharing artistic authority is not an abdication of responsibility but one of its highest expressions. It will require musicians willing to think not merely as employees negotiating contracts, but as constitutional custodians of one of the world’s great artistic traditions. It will require donors who recognize that they are investing not simply in concerts, but in the long-term health of an institution whose greatness has always rested upon the partnership between artistic excellence and public trust.

There are moments when an institution chooses its next leader. There are rarer moments when it chooses the principles by which every future leader will be chosen. Boston stands at such a moment. It can spend the coming months searching for another music director, or it can spend them asking a far more enduring question: What constitution best serves one of the world’s great orchestras?

If it has the courage to ask that question honestly, the answer will almost certainly resemble neither the corporate boardroom nor the labor negotiation. It will resemble something older, humbler, and ultimately more durable: a partnership between those entrusted with preserving the institution and those entrusted with creating its art. For trustees safeguard the orchestra. Musicians are the orchestra. Confuse those two truths, and no constitution will long endure.

Keep them rightly ordered, and Boston may discover that the surest way to renew itself is not to imitate another orchestra, but to remember what The Boston Symphony Orchestra has always been:

A community gathered around a single invisible thing.

Not power.

Not prestige.

Not administration.

MUSIC.

You cannot claim to be defending something while simultaneously declaring it irrelevant. That is rather like insisting one is saving a cathedral by converting it into a shopping mall. If classical music can only survive by becoming something other than itself, then what exactly has been saved?

The deeper problem is that too many of the boards, administrators, and bureaucrats entrusted with these institutions have spent decades hollowing them out in the name of politics, ideology, marketing strategies, audience development plans, and every fashionable theory except a love of music itself. Attendance will not be restored by apologizing for the art form, declaring it obsolete, or elevating administrators above musicians and marketing departments above masterpieces.

These concerns are very much at issue in the current situation at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where serious questions have been raised about the transparency, judgment, and competence of the board and chief executive leadership. Whatever one’s view of the particulars, the controversy has exposed a troubling disconnect between those entrusted with stewarding a great musical institution and the musicians and audiences who sustain it.

“The BSO is not an isolated case. Across American cultural institutions — museums, universities, orchestras, theatres — the same pattern recurs: governing boards, composed of wealthy individuals whose social circles have adopted the language and priorities of institutional DEI, impose transformation mandates on organisations whose artistic missions were not designed to serve those priorities.

The Knoxville Symphony fired a clarinetist who won a blind audition unanimously — because his history of “resisting DEI” at the Nashville Symphony made him politically unacceptable. The Department of Justice has now written to the Knoxville CEO: “We have questions.”

The Metropolitan Opera, under financial pressure, is cutting artistic programming while maintaining administrative positions created during its own DEI expansion.

The pattern is consistent: artistic excellence is treated as necessary but insufficient. The additional requirement — unstated but enforced — is ideological alignment with a set of cultural priorities that have nothing to do with how well you play the clarinet, conduct Messiaen, or fill a concert hall.” - Cadenza Admin. Read full article here.

Who, exactly, is defending the music?

The question brings to mind the title of the late Boston Globe critic Michael Steinberg’s collection, Defending the Music. One wonders what he would make of an age in which so much discussion surrounding classical music seems to concern everything except music. We are told endlessly whom the concert hall should represent, what social function it should perform, what demographic targets it should reach, and what political obligations it should fulfill. Yet one hears surprisingly little about Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, or the mysterious power that caused these institutions to exist in the first place. Here is what he wrote in 1970 under the title Real Music Will Survive:

“The public relations industry is likely to become more resourceful, more diligent, and more powerful. Much of what people now assume has to do with art is actually a function of public relations…”

and perhaps even more prophetic:

“For many more, it will be a gig, a commodity to be promoted and sold, grist for the academy, a decoration.”

What we are witnessing is not a failure of music but a failure of FAITH. It is a loss of confidence in the greatness of the very tradition that built these institutions. Concert halls were not founded by focus groups, diversity statements, branding consultants, or strategic plans. They were built by composers, performers, patrons, and audiences who believed that great music possessed intrinsic value. They believed that a Bach fugue, a Beethoven quartet, or a Mahler symphony needed no justification beyond its existence.

Do we still believe that?

There is also something curious about the distribution of outrage. When Trump took over the Kennedy Center, there was no shortage of condemnation. Composers withdrew works. Musicians canceled appearances. Organizations severed ties. Public statements flowed freely in defense of artistic institutions. Yet while many musicians have rightly come to the defense of Nelsons, the response seems comparatively subdued. One cannot help noticing that institutional courage often appears to depend on who is perceived to be holding power. Principles that trumpet loudly in one season become strangely silent in another.

If our musical institutions are to survive, musicians must stop waiting for bureaucrats to save them. The defense of music has always belonged to those who love it, practice it, perform it, and dedicate their lives to it. The guardians of civilization’s greatest treasures are not the people writing mission statements about them, but the people spending six hours a day alone in a practice room trying to master a single phrase of Mozart.

“Corporate trustees tend to impose rigid, commercial templates onto delicate artistic entities. Philanthropy becomes less a civic contribution than a transactional purchase of creative control. They treat a symphony orchestra or a theater company like a retail chain, focusing on standardized metrics, top-down efficiency models, and marketing maneuvers. Long-term artistic cultivation is usually an afterthought. There are reports that trustees oppress through micromanagement; the very name “board of directors” erroneously invites untrained volunteers to intrude on specialized staff operations, thereby eroding institutional stability. On top of that, board members are often ignorant of or indifferent to the art form they are supposed to support.” - Thomas Connolly. Read his full article here for The Art Fuse.

Perhaps we musicians must also accept a measure of responsibility. Institutions rarely lose faith in something before its practitioners do. In our eagerness to appear relevant, we have too often spoken as though music required external justification — as though Bach needed sociology, Beethoven needed politics, or Mozart needed branding. Having doubted our inheritance, we should not be surprised when others rush in to manage it for us.

A civilization survives not because it continually reinvents its treasures, but because enough people love them enough to preserve them. The future of classical music will not be secured by those who explain it away, apologize for it, or dilute it into something more fashionable by kowtowing to pop culture. It will be secured by those who still believe that great music is one of the highest achievements of the human spirit and who are willing to defend it as such.

I would like to end this essay on June 12, 2026, by returning to Michael Steinberg. More than half a century ago, writing in the Boston Globe on January 4, 1970, he offered a prediction that now seems less like a prediction than a permanent truth:

“There will still be music at the end of the ’70s. For the happy few, it will be a life-and-death matter, something to tap all their reserves of love and fury, something, as Toscanini used to say, to put their blood into.”

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Follow Boston Symphony Musician, Elizabeth Klein for constant updates.

I love Ortega y Gasset’s writings. I bring him up in conversation all the time. Someone once asked me whether I have any thoughts of my own, since I keep quoting famous authors in conversation to make a point — or as a reminder that other people, far wiser than I, have already thought deeply about many of the things we are still arguing about today, and have found far better ways of explaining them than I ever will.

So my answer was: no, I don’t have any thoughts of my own.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out where my thoughts come from, and in the process I’ve continued feeding on others’ ideas and wisdom. What I do consider mine — and this is where I think free will truly comes into play — is how I calibrate those thoughts, or that acquired wisdom, toward my own benefit and “upbuilding,” as Kierkegaard would say. (See? I can’t help it.)

We are ultimately responsible for what we do with the information we collect. Free will exists in the fine-tuning process.

It’s the same as playing an instrument. We are constantly making decisions, sometimes in the very moment the music is happening. That music is itself, in many ways, the result of that fine-tuning and decision-making.

And the fact that we are capable of changing our lives and our circumstances is proof that we are not simply wired to follow a single predetermined path, but multiple possible ones. The existence of those possibilities alone is not free will. The fact that we can consciously choose one path while being aware of the others — that is the work of the will, and of freedom.

Perhaps this is why I love paradoxical authors so much. The greatest among them, for me, is Kierkegaard. He plays with this very idea at the beginning of his masterpiece Either/Or:

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”

The beauty of this passage, which encapsulates what the two volumes of Either/Or will eventually become, is that we have to make a choice. It is either/or — and that’s where it is. From the landscape of our lives to a piece of music, the mere possibility of mastering our circumstances is what makes all the difference, even if we cannot control anything else. And that is the price — and perhaps also the gift — of free will. And yes, perhaps the act of choosing is the only thing that is ever truly our own, if anything is.

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I recently recorded an episode of the OAMusic Podcast with Ronen Givony to discuss his new book, Us vs. Them, a sweeping and beautifully written account of the Brooklyn music scene in the early 2000s. Before reading it, I had a general sense of what it might be about, and when I first reached out to Ronen, I expected our conversation to revolve around bands, venues, and the shifting meaning of “indie.” And we did talk about all of that. But after reading the book, it became clear to me that it was really about something larger: how artists are shaped by their circumstances, and how, at their best, they turn around and make something out of those circumstances in return.

The book has rhythm and pace. It moves like someone walking through a city at night, entering one room after another: Glasslands, Death By Audio, McCarren Park Pool, The Kitchen, Lincoln Center, Le Poisson Rouge. But it is not just a map of places. It is a map of pressures. New York after 9/11. The Iraq War. The Bloomberg years. The collapse of the old music industry after Napster. Cheap industrial spaces in Williamsburg and Greenpoint still sitting half-abandoned before Brooklyn became an international lifestyle brand. The rise of blogs, MySpace, early social media, and a culture still shaped by critics rather than algorithms.

While reading the book, I kept thinking of José Ortega y Gasset’s famous line from Meditations on Quixote: “I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself.” Ortega wrote that book as a young man, roughly the age Ronen was when he arrived in New York and began forming the musical life that would become Wordless Music. The phrase may sound deceptively simple at first, but it is in fact the guiding axiom of Ortega’s philosophy, the thread that runs from this early work all the way to its fullest expression in The Revolt of the Masses. Ortega is saying that the self is not a private island. We are not merely our talent, our will, our taste, or our ambition. We are also our city, our moment, our limitations, our accidents, our institutions, our friends, our rents, our wars, our technologies, our failures. That is what makes Ronen’s book more than a book about music. It is about people trying to save their circumstance.

One of the most revealing moments in our conversation came when Ronen described his early job at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He had grown up in South Florida on rock music — Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails — and arrived in New York without any deep knowledge of the classical tradition. Then suddenly he was working inside one of its great institutions, able to sit alone in Alice Tully Hall listening to the Takács Quartet rehearse late Beethoven. He would spend his days around Schubert, Schumann, Mozart, Haydn, and Bach, and his nights going to hear Andrew Bird, Explosions in the Sky, Arcade Fire, and bands that were already stretching the vocabulary of rock toward chamber music, minimalism, and instrumental form.

That collision became his education. And, more importantly, it became a question. Why was the Takács Quartet “chamber music,” while Explosions in the Sky was “indie rock”? What made one audience sit silently in a concert hall and another stand silently in a club? Were the categories themselves real, or were they habits enforced by institutions, venues, and marketing departments?

Ronen told the Chamber Music Society, in effect: if you want younger audiences, why not invite artists like Andrew Bird or Explosions in the Sky and place them beside classical works? Why not show listeners who loved Radiohead, Björk, and Sigur Rós that they might be closer to Ligeti, Reich, and John Adams than they imagined? In another world, this would have been taken as the beginning of a necessary institutional renewal. Instead, he was met with polite disbelief. The question he received was almost comic in its revealing innocence: are you saying that people who like “the Radioheads” might also have the capacity for a Bartók quartet?

Well, yes. Exactly.

And because the institution did not quite know what to do with that possibility, Ronen eventually did what the best cultural workers do when the door does not open: he built another door. Wordless Music was born not out of a theory, but out of a lived perception that the audience was already ahead of the categories.

The same is true of the Brooklyn scene Ronen chronicles. He makes clear that it was not defined by a single sound. “Indie” by then was already unstable. Once it meant independent labels against major labels, Fugazi against Guns N’ Roses, integrity against machinery. But Napster scrambled the moral geography. Suddenly music could circulate outside the old structures. Anyone could download a world in an afternoon. The old signs of purity and betrayal became harder to read. By the early 2000s, there were indie bands on major labels and major-label bands borrowing indie gestures. The border had blurred. Brooklyn artists borrowed from everywhere: Eastern European choral music, West African guitar, Hildegard von Bingen, Brian Eno, punk, folk, minimalism, electronics, chamber music. The scene became “post-genre” before that phrase became another institutional brochure word.

That is why the book’s refusal to focus only on the obvious stars is so important. Ronen could have written the easier book: LCD Soundsystem, Grizzly Bear, Sufjan Stevens, The National, Animal Collective, and the triumph of Brooklyn cool. His publisher would have preferred that for sure. Instead, he gives us something more interesting and more morally serious. He writes about the venue founders, organizers, dancers, failed experiments, strange rooms, and the people whose names usually vanish once the official history arrives. He writes about Oneida not because they became a household name, but because they embodied something essential: the stubborn, romantic, slightly self-defeating energy of a band that could say “we are a Brooklyn band” before that sentence had any cultural glamour attached to it.

The chapter on Glasslands is a perfect example. Before Williamsburg became a global shorthand for gentrified cool, there were empty warehouses, unwanted industrial spaces, and people willing to do things badly enough, cheaply enough, and bravely enough for something real to happen. Ronen tells the story of Brooke Baxter, who was not a music industry professional but a party planner trying to make a community art space work. Rent had to be paid. Friends were asked to play. Grizzly Bear and TV on the Radio appeared in rooms that had not yet been sanctified by history. Later came Glasslands, 285 Kent, Death By Audio — the kind of accidental constellation that cannot be designed by a strategic planning committee, because the whole point is that nobody yet knows what it is.

That may be the most painful thing the book teaches: culture requires the right to not yet know what it is.

The story of Noémie Lafrance and McCarren Park Pool makes this even clearer. Here was an artist who looked at a decaying public space — an abandoned pool that had become a symbol of neglect — and saw possibility. She did not merely have an “idea.” She fought permits, raised money, wrote grants, oversaw impossible logistics, and nearly bankrupted herself trying to make the space live again. Then Live Nation came into the picture, the city arrived, the pool was renovated, institutions took credit, and the official narrative became tidier than the truth. Ronen’s book insists on restoring the human cost. How culture is often created by the people least likely to be remembered by the plaque. Noemi is one of them.

And then there’s the Amen Dunes chapter, which shifts the whole book into a different register. Suddenly it’s not just about a scene — it’s about heartbreak, unrequited love, solitude, and the way music can carry you through a moment in your life when nothing else quite works. A reminder that we’re all trying to survive our own tragic lives. Ronen quotes a passage from Thoreau’s Walden here, which said: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Need to write those last words again: “when I came to die, discover that I had not lived”

Back to Ortega y Gasset, because his idea of circumstance is not sentimental. To “save” one’s circumstance does not mean to praise it. It means to see it clearly enough to transform it. This is what Don Quixote fails to do, according to Ortega. He has imagination, nobility, courage, even grandeur — but he cannot bear reality. Windmills become giants, inns become castles, and a peasant woman becomes Dulcinea. The tragedy is not that he dreams. The tragedy is that he substitutes his dream for the world. There is an artistic version of this error. It happens when artists or institutions impose fantasies on reality instead of engaging reality. Sometimes the fantasy is aesthetic. Sometimes it is ideological. Sometimes it is nostalgia. Sometimes it is the belief that if one uses the right language — innovation, relevance, equity, disruption, community, impact — one has actually done the hard work of making something alive.

But language is not life. Programming is not culture. Messaging is not meaning.

This is where my conversation with Ronen inevitably turned toward the present, and especially toward classical music. We did not have nearly enough time to discuss the politics of art in depth; the book deserved its own conversation, and we stayed mostly with it. But I did voice a concern that has become almost impossible for me to ignore: many classical institutions are gasping for air while pretending that the problem is oxygen’s fault. Attendance is thinner. Philanthropic support is more fragile. The old civic prestige of the orchestra, the opera house, the festival, and the recital series is no longer guaranteed. And yet instead of looking at these facts with courage, too many institutions seem determined to mask the crisis with ideological certainty, administrative language, and a kind of moralized programming that often serves neither the music nor the public.

This is not, to be clear, an argument for freezing the canon in amber. The opposite. The canon survives only when it is alive enough to speak to the present. Ronen’s own work proves that. Wordless Music did not diminish classical music by placing it near other forms. It revealed connections that were already there. It trusted the intelligence of listeners. It assumed that the person who loved Radiohead might also be ready for Reich; that the person drawn to Sigur Rós might not be so far from Arvo Pärt; that a young audience standing in a club could be just as serious, attentive, and spiritually hungry as an audience sitting in a hall.

What worries me now is that many institutions have confused respect for the audience with instruction of the audience. They no longer ask: what is the living connection between this music and the world we inhabit? They ask instead: what must this program signal? What box must it check? What language must surround it to make it acceptable? The result is often neither brave nor beautiful. It is anxious. It is bureaucratic. It is art with a permission slip.

Ortega has another phrase that matters here: intellectual love. By that he does not mean cold admiration or scholarly distance. He means the rigor of seeing something as it is because one loves it enough not to lie about it. Intellectual love refuses both cynicism and flattery. It does not say classical music is fine when it is not. It also does not say Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, or Brahms must be dragged before the tribunal of every passing ideology before they are allowed to speak. It asks harder questions: What has endured here? What still burns? What in this music exceeds its historical moment without floating free of it? How do we add to it without mutilating it? How do we open the doors without burning down the house?

This, to me, is the reality classical music institutions are failing to engage. The problem is not that they are changing. The problem is that they are often changing in ways that avoid the deeper crisis. They are not asking why the music no longer sits at the center of cultural life. They are not asking why a generation that goes to museums, reads serious books, watches difficult films, and pays absurd amounts for immersive experiences often does not feel invited — or compelled — by the concert hall. They are not asking why the old forms of patronage are weakening, or why the language surrounding the music has become so timid, defensive, and dead. Instead, many have chosen the Don Quixote route. They rename the windmills. They invent giants. They pretend that if the institution adopts the correct rhetoric, the circumstance has been saved. But this is not saving the circumstance. It is replacing it.

Ronen, in our conversation, spoke with real gratitude about the generation of institutional leaders who helped him — George Steel, Melissa Smey, Limor Tomer, Bill Bragin, Joe Melillo, Jeremy Geffen, Jane Moss. These were people who, whatever their flaws, knew how to listen to a younger producer, invite him for coffee, ask what he was trying to do, and sometimes give him a room, a chance, a context. They taught him the difference between a concert promoter and a concert producer. They gave him, in the old-fashioned and necessary sense, an education. That is another thing we are losing: not only money, not only audiences, but transmission. A culture does not survive because a mission statement says it should. It survives because people who know something take the time to recognize, challenge, and form people who are trying to know something.

This is why Us v. Them feels, to me, larger than its subject. It is not finally about indie music, or Brooklyn, or even New York. It is about the ecology that allows art to happen: rooms, rents, mentors, critics, technology, risk, friendship, heartbreak, failure, and the occasional miraculous night when the thing actually works. It is about young people without permission creating permission. It is about a city still porous enough to be changed by those who could barely afford to live in it. And yes, there is nostalgia in that. How could there not be? But nostalgia is not the same as memory. Nostalgia wants the past back. Memory wants to understand what the past is asking of us.

What Ronen’s book asks, finally, is not whether we can recreate Brooklyn in 2004. We cannot, and we should not try. The question is whether we can recover the courage that animated it: the courage to see one’s circumstance clearly, to love what is valuable without lying about what is broken, and to build something before the world has decided what category it belongs to.

That is the task of the artist. It is also the task of the institution, if the institution still wishes to deserve the name.

Because culture is not saved by pretending. It is not saved by branding. It is not saved by ideology, nostalgia, or administrative virtue. It is saved, if it is saved at all, by “intellectual love”: the clear-eyed devotion that sees the world as it is and still believes it can be transformed.

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A Spotify playlist curated by the author:

By Us v. Them here:

https://www.amazon.com/Us-v-Them-Decade-2004-2014/dp/141977526X

or here:

https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/us-v-them_9781419775260/

What does a truly complete musician look like today?

In my recent conversation with Ronn Yedidia, I was reminded that such a figure still exists — and that he puts most of us to shame.

Yedidia is one of those rare artists who refuses to live inside a category. A child prodigy born in Tel Aviv, he began on the accordion at six, performing serious repertoire almost immediately. By seven, he had moved to the piano. By eight, he had won a national competition. His path eventually led him to Juilliard School, where he studied with Milton Babbitt and David Diamond.

Ronn moves effortlessly between worlds that are usually kept far apart. His catalog includes large-scale piano sonatas of formidable ambition, a set of 24 Preludes that engage deeply with the tradition of Frédéric Chopin, Alexander Scriabin, and Sergei Rachmaninoff — while remaining unmistakably his own — alongside orchestral works, chamber music, and, almost disorientingly, over 200 pop songs. Beyond composing and performing, he runs the New York Piano Academy and continues to perform on accordion with his folk/world ensemble DanzaNova.

At the same time, he leads a jazz ensemble whose album Prophets spans nearly forty years of composition. The opening track, Landscapes (1981), is relentless, virtuosic, propulsive, and alive. It demands stamina and precision, but never loses its sense of joy. It brought a smile to my face when I first heard it. Ronn told me it was inspired by a journey he undertook to the southern tip of the Sinai desert, by the Red Sea, just before the territory was returned to Egypt. The project has a long history: its first iteration was produced by Thomas Frost — the legendary producer behind Vladimir Horowitz — and featured an earlier ensemble that included bassist Darryl Jones of The Rolling Stones.

We live in a hyper-specialized culture where musicians are expected to stay in their lane. Classical composers in one box. Jazz musicians in another. Crossing those lines is often treated as dilution, or lack of seriousness. Yedidia rejects that entirely.

“I just love every good sound that strikes me,” he told me.

It’s one thing to admire many styles, it’s another to write convincingly in them, and to perform at a high level across all of them.

Listening to his 24 Preludes of Dusk and Dawn, what stands out is not just craft, but beauty. They are tonal, lyrical, sometimes playful, sometimes introspective — unapologetically expressive and beautiful in a way that modern music has often been reluctant to be. And yet they are far from simple. Harmonically, they move unpredictably. Structurally, they follow their own internal logic. At one point, Ronn told me that Prelude No. 4 begins in B-flat and ends in C major — and that it used to bother him. Until he realized something essential: You don’t control the music. You follow it.

I found especially interesting hearing the unexpected sources of inspiration behind the Preludes — everything from Domenico Scarlatti to Chick Corea, even fútbol legend Diego Armando Maradona. Ronn is fortunate to have Gila Goldstein as a champion. Her recording of the Preludes for Albany Records (now PARMA Recordings) brings out the virtuosity, the beauty, and the unapologetically expressive side of the music.

His piano sonatas reveal another side entirely — dense, virtuosic, pushing the limits of the instrument. Pianists like Marc-André Hamelin have taken them on, which tells you everything you need to know about their difficulty and substance. Take a look at his recording of the Sonata No. 3 “Outcries” on YouTube.

And then there’s Prophets, which opens yet another door. The level of ensemble playing is staggering — tight unisons at extreme tempos, intricate rhythmic interplay — but what makes it compelling is not the difficulty. It’s the sense of discovery. Like André Previn or Friedrich Gulda, Yedidia feels completely at home in multiple musical languages. Taken together, his work points to something we may have forgotten: musical identity does not have to be singular. It can be plural. It can absorb, transform, and reimagine. Its value lies in how it speaks and not in the category it occupies.

That perspective becomes even more relevant when the conversation turns to the state of music today. Yedidia doesn’t deny the presence of talent — far from it. But he questions whether the language itself is truly evolving.

“They call it modern music,” he said, “but it isn’t modern. We’ve been chewing the same thing for decades.”

Not that we should abandon the past, or that we should reject the present. But that we should refuse the false choice between them. Yedidia’s work suggests another path: a music that is open, rooted in tradition and yet exploratory.

Or, as he put it:

“Let music unite us rather than separate us.”

If nothing else, this conversation is a reminder that musicians like this still exist, and that the future of music may depend less on inventing something entirely new, and more on rediscovering how much is already possible. I don’t remember who said that we should should walk through life backwards into the future with our eyes fixed on the past. Or something like that…

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Listen to 24 Preludes of Dusk and Dawn here on YouTube:

And Prophets here on Spotify:

In this new episode of the OAMusic podcast, I welcome back composer, writer, and biographer Jan Swafford for a second conversation — one that I believe touches on some of the most important questions facing the arts today.

We begin with Jan’s essay, “The Wrangled Politics of Art,” but very quickly move into a broader and more troubling subject: the capture of classical music by the language, assumptions, and bureaucratic machinery of politics.

This is now everywhere. In arts institutions, conservatories, journalism, foundations, and academic departments, we are told that classical music is compromised at its core: too white, too European, too hierarchical, too patriarchal, too oppressive. Beethoven is treated not as a genius to be studied and loved, but as a political problem to be managed. Mozart must be interrogated. The canon must apologize for existing. Standards themselves are increasingly suspect. And all of this is done in the name of moral enlightenment.

But what if this entire framework is wrong? What if, instead of opening the arts to more people, this ideology is helping to destroy the very thing it claims to improve That is the heart of this conversation. Jan makes an essential point: the desire to broaden access to classical music is legitimate. More people should encounter this art. More children should have the chance to study it. More communities should have access to the education, instruments, teachers, and institutions that make such a life possible. On that point there should be no serious disagreement.

But slogans are not solutions. Declaring that orchestras must “look like America,” denouncing blind auditions, or endlessly repeating the language of equity does not solve the deeper problem. If classical music has little presence in a given community, then the answer is not cosmetic institutional theater. The answer is education. Exposure. Serious teaching. Music in schools. Community programs. Long-term cultural formation. In other words: actual work. That is much harder than issuing statements and hiring administrators.

And it forces us to confront another uncomfortable truth: classical music is not merely under political pressure; it is also an extraordinarily difficult and unforgiving profession. Conservatories are filled with gifted young people, many of whom will never make a living in music. They practice for years, take on debt, endure enormous psychological and physical pressure, and enter a field where only a tiny minority will ever achieve financial stability.

Yet institutions go on selling the dream. This is one of the great hypocrisies of the system. We encourage students into a vocation of staggering difficulty, then wrap the whole enterprise in the sentimental language of inclusion while refusing to speak honestly about the brutal odds. Jan talks about this with unusual candor, and it is one of the strongest parts of our exchange.

There is another truth here that our culture increasingly resists: talent is real. Not everyone who works hard will become great. Not everyone who practices 10,000 hours will arrive at the same place. Art is not a democratic fiction in which effort guarantees excellence. Love matters. Discipline matters. Opportunity matters. But gift matters too. To deny this is not compassionate. It is dishonest.

Perhaps nothing reveals this more clearly than the grotesque academic habit of attacking the very masterpieces on which the entire edifice depends. We now live in a time when people trained in classical music, employed by institutions built on classical music, and paid to teach classical music feel entitled to sneer at it as racist, hegemonic, colonial, or worse. It is hard to imagine a more decadent spectacle. I would ask: if Beethoven is so morally compromised, why make a career out of him? If Mozart is so suspect, why build departments, journals, lectures, and reputations upon his work? If the canon is merely a structure of oppression, then why do these institutions continue to depend on it for their prestige, their budgets, and their existence?

The answer is often simple: because denunciation has become a career path. It is now possible to gain applause, tenure, funding, and moral status not by deepening our understanding of art, but by attacking it in the approved language of the moment. This is one of the poisonous incentives of modern cultural life. A great deal of what passes for criticism now is not criticism at all, but ideological performance.

When I brought orchestral music to underserved students in New York, many of them had never seen a violin, never heard Beethoven, never encountered a symphonic work in their lives. And yet when they heard it, they responded immediately. They were moved. They were astonished. They recognized beauty when it was placed before them. That is reality. Not the abstract dogmas of professional theorists, but the human response to greatness. This is why so much of the current rhetoric feels not only false, but perverse. Instead of bringing this art to those who have been deprived of it, many of our cultural gatekeepers seem more interested in teaching people to distrust it, resent it, and apologize for loving it.

Jan also speaks powerfully in this episode about ideology more broadly. One of the wisest things he says is that ideology places a filter between the person and reality. That seems exactly right to me. Whether it comes from the left or the right, ideology distorts vision. It reduces experience to doctrine and replaces judgment with slogans. Great art asks something different of us. It asks attention, humility, gratitude. Surrender to something greater than ourselves. It asks us to listen before we speak, to receive before we pronounce judgment. Ideology cannot tolerate that for long, because ideology begins by assuming it already knows what everything means.

But hat upsets me most in all of this is the sheer ingratitude. So many of the people now eager to tear down the classical tradition owe their entire professional existence to it. Without Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and the rest, there would be no institutions for them to inhabit, no departments to administer, no grants to distribute, no reputations to build, no symphony orchestras or concert halls. And yet instead of gratitude, one increasingly finds contempt. Instead of stewardship, desecration.

This episode is, in one sense, about DEI, wokeness, and the politicization of culture. But more deeply it is about something older and more permanent: whether we still have the capacity to recognize greatness, to defend standards, and to love what is beautiful without first submitting it to ideological inspection.

Jan ends with a point I find exactly right:

“It’s the music they care about. Without great notes, words, or painting, the political content of a work may get you applause and money and tenure in a university, but in the long run it won’t matter. The notes and the words justify a piece of music or a poem first of all, and speak to its enduring importance, or they’re howling in the wind to little purpose—except sometimes getting fame, money, and tenure in the present, so I suppose those are purposes. High purposes, no.”

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I first met Yury Revich about ten years ago in Vienna, at a late-night gathering hosted by Aleksey Igudesman and Hyung-ki Joo. I had just come from the Wiener Staatsoper, where James Gaffigan was making his debut conducting La Bohème. By the time I arrived, the room had quietly filled with members of the violin elite — Joshua Bell among them. Somewhere in that mix was Yury: we struck up a conversation not unlike the one I’ve included here atop this article for the OAMusic Podcast.

Yury Revich is a virtuoso violinist, descended from a family of violinists dating back to the nineteenth century. Born in Russia and now an Austrian citizen based in Vienna, he has long been involved in humanitarian causes, including as an honorary ambassador for UNICEF Austria, and has consistently used his immense talent and charisma in service of people in need around the world. His new album, Peace, is a thoughtful, beautifully curated and performed program of works by composers from around the world, many of them linked in different ways to the moral, spiritual, and political concerns of our time. It also includes a substantial group of Yury’s own compositions, making the album not merely a recital recording, but a more personal artistic statement.

Here is what Yury writes about the album and why the project was important to him:

“Creating this album was essential for me because peace has never been an abstract idea—it is something that people are searching for both in the world around them and within themselves. As someone who has lived far from his birthplace, I have often felt the wish to connect inner belonging with outer harmony, and this project became a way to explore that journey with clarity and intention.

PEACE is a concept album; it is a multidisciplinary space where music, poetry, and sound design meet. I wanted to let the violin speak in all its forms—acoustic, with electronic and natural soundscapes, intimate and virtuosic—and to shape a narrative that reflects the complexity of being human today. Writing, performing, and producing this work allowed me to unify different parts of myself: the composer, the performer, the storyteller, and the observer of a world discovering unity and finding beauty in many cultures and across different times.

The program is carefully curated around my concept and is structured in chapters—each section offering a different perspective on peace through sound, emotion, and time. The album brings together composers from various eras, countries, and backgrounds—younger and older, women and men—whose shared language is melodism.

Each piece is a fragment of that journey: moments of clarity, turbulence, memory, longing, and renewal. Together, they form a personal meditation on what peace can mean—not as a fixed state, but as a living process. If peace is possible anywhere, it must begin inside us and grow outward. This album is my way of sharing that vision.”

The album opens with a poem, The First Note, with text by the Australian composer Mark John McEncroe:

I travel not by wing or road

but by resonance—

each city a chord

each face a timbre

Borders melt in overtones

languages are mélodies, the canons

Peace is not a place

it’s the echo that remains

when we stop insisting

on the rules dividing harmony

Music does not ask

it forgives

it breathes

In that fragile vibration

the world remembers

That first note, the chord

Which gave birth to all creations.

There are wonderful pieces on this album by living composers we seldom encounter unless we move closely within the worlds of classical and chamber music. One of them is Peace by Jessie Montgomery, written during the pandemic—a heartfelt, compact work born of solitude and isolation. It is no surprise that Montgomery has become such an in-demand and widely programmed composer.

There is also a piece that stayed with me for days, haunting me at night and refusing to leave my mind: Soul by the Ukrainian composer Victoria Poleva. I am almost ashamed to say I had not known her music before, even though she is one of Ukraine’s most important composers.

The note in the album booklet about the piece is beautiful:

“The idea of the work is the soul’s journey: continuity, unceasingness, constant movement. Despite the ‘sigh’ intonations, these are not complaints or lamentations, but steps—the steps of a tired person who does not give up. This is a path that must be walked with dignity, without complaint. Only at the end, where the sixteenth notes appear, can one soar.”

I went down a rabbit hole with her music after hearing this piece, and I recommend that anyone reading this do the same. Like Arvo Pärt, she draws inspiration from Christianity and sacred medieval music, and her work is often associated with what has been called “sacred, or holy minimalism.” (Here is the link for a translated interview she gave for the Music & Literature blog)

The album also includes a number of world premieres by composers I have followed for a long time. I was especially glad to hear a new work by Kareem Roustom, Tranquillamente, inspired by ancient hymns of the Syrian Orthodox Church. There is also Nimrod Borenstein’s Souvenirs de Mendelssohn, Alla Pavlova’s Adagio: Prayer for Peace on Earth, and Sonat by the Turkish composer Beste Nur Ural. There are also premieres of Yury’s own compositions, including the substantial Awakening, one of the central pillars of the program. A particularly intriguing work near the end of the album is Adina Izarra’s So That the Song Remains, blending electronics, violin, birdsong, and ambient sound in a way that feels both playful and profound.

These pieces are humble, heartfelt creations by composers who seem more interested in making music that looks outward into the world and connects with listeners beyond the insular circles of contemporary classical music. This is music for people who love beauty, lyricism, and emotional directness, and who do not feel obliged to submit themselves to the intricate and often forbidding language of lingering postmodernism. As Yury himself says, this album is about beautiful melodies, and I love it all the more for that.

There is also some wonderful playing throughout. Beyond Yury’s own luminous sound and impeccable technique, he is joined by pianist Volodymyr Borodin, accordionist Basha Slavinska, and the young pianist David Chen, whose sensitivity and musical instinct are already striking.

The production is equally strong. Released on the German label ARS Produktion, the sound engineering by Manfred Schumacher, together with the production by Annette Schumacher, gives the album a beautiful sense of balance, warmth, and presence. I know from personal experience how difficult it is to make an album today — how much effort, care, and belief it requires, often with very limited support. And in spending time with an album like this, I am reminded of the older experience of listening: buying a record or CD, opening the booklet, reading the notes, and allowing that world to unfold slowly. So take your time with this one. Listen all the way through. Read the notes if you can. Follow the threads it opens.

One final thought: Peace is not a destination, and certainly not a certainty. It appears in fragments — in sound, in silence, in the space between notes. Not unlike love, it is something we practice — quietly, imperfectly, again and again. What music can do, perhaps better than anything else, better than politics, is remind us that such a space exists—that we are capable of hearing it, and occasionally, of inhabiting it.

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By Orlando Alonso

I remember standing in ration lines as a child in Cuba and hearing adults whisper political opinions only inside trusted homes. Even ordinary conversations carried the quiet awareness that the wrong words, spoken in the wrong place, could have deadly consequences.

Around the world, commentators debate international law when discussing U.S. policy toward countries like Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba. These conversations fill newspapers, universities, and diplomatic forums, where questions of sovereignty, sanctions, intervention, and legality are treated as matters of principle. But from inside a dictatorship, international law can look very different.

I know this because I was born in Cuba and lived on the island until I was nineteen years old. When you grow up under a system that confiscates property, suppresses speech, and punishes any form of expression that does not align with the ruling ideology, the elegant language of international law begins to look very different. When the state controls your livelihood, your movement, and even your thoughts, you begin to wonder what those international norms are really worth.

Why do they not apply to you? Why do they seem incapable of restraining regimes that, for decades, have openly ignored the most basic legal principles and internationally recognized human rights? For those living under such systems, international law can begin to feel distant — beautiful in theory but powerless in practice.

The suffering under authoritarian regimes is not theoretical. Families watch their loved ones spend years in prison without fair trials. Protesters are beaten, imprisoned, or killed in the streets. Entire societies live under surveillance and fear. We have seen it in Iran. We have seen it in Venezuela. And Cubans have experienced it for more than six decades.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of living under such a system is the sense of helplessness it produces. People begin to feel that there is no real path out — only survival, escape, or silent endurance.

In physics there is a simple principle known as inertia: a body in motion continues along its path unless another force acts upon it. Political systems often behave in much the same way. Dictatorships rarely collapse on their own; they persist unless something powerful enough interrupts their trajectory. The Cuban regime understands this principle well. For more than sixty years it has built a system designed to weaken civil society and prevent the emergence of any force capable of challenging its control.

And the truth is that it takes surprisingly little for such a regime to survive. Limited trade, occasional financial support from friendly governments, and minimal economic activity can be enough to keep the machinery of repression operating.

This raises a question that is rarely addressed honestly in international debates:

How exactly are the Cuban people supposed to end their suffering?

At different moments the international community has tried different strategies. When the Obama administration began normalizing relations with Cuba, many observers hoped economic engagement might encourage gradual reform and greater openness. But the expected transformation never came. The Cuban government maintained strict political control while introducing only minor economic adjustments designed to preserve the state’s dominance.

The diplomatic opening later stalled after unexplained health incidents affecting American diplomats in Havana — events now known as Havana Syndrome — which led to the withdrawal of U.S. personnel and effectively froze the normalization process. Yet even today the collapse of that rapprochement is often attributed solely to the policies of the Trump administration. That narrative overlooks a deeper political reality: the Cuban regime depends heavily on portraying the United States as a permanent enemy. Without that external adversary, it would be far more difficult to explain the failures of its own economic and political system.

Another common argument focuses on the U.S. embargo as the primary cause of Cuba’s economic crisis. Yet Cuba has maintained commercial relations with much of the world for decades, and billions of dollars in remittances and humanitarian assistance have flowed from the United States to the island over the years. The deeper problem lies in the structure of the Cuban state itself, where much of what enters the country ultimately strengthens the government apparatus rather than empowering ordinary citizens.

Today debates about Cuba often take place within ideological arguments about foreign policy. Yet those discussions frequently overlook the voices of the people who actually live under the dictatorship. For many Cubans — especially those still on the island — the present moment carries something that has been absent for a long time: hope. It may be uncertain hope. It may come through developments the international community finds uncomfortable. But for people who have spent their entire lives without freedom, even the possibility of change can feel miraculous.

For sixty-seven years Cubans have endured repression, imprisonment, exile, the loss of loved ones, and hardship while waiting for a future that always seems just beyond reach. International law is an important ideal. But to those living under dictatorship, the first and most urgent law is something far simpler: the right to live freely and with dignity.

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Standing at Lincoln Center, between the Juilliard School, the New York City Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera House, I found myself reflecting on a curious cultural moment. Actor Timothée Chalamet recently suggested that opera and ballet are irrelevant. Perhaps he is right. After all, we live in a society that often seems less interested in beauty than in whatever happens to be fashionable at the moment. The things that once demanded patience, discipline and long devotion can easily appear strange in a culture increasingly built around speed and distraction.

But the fact that something becomes irrelevant does not necessarily mean it is unimportant. In the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde famously wrote: “All art is quite useless.” Wilde did not mean this as an insult. Quite the opposite. His point was that great art has no practical utility. It does not fix pipes or sell insurance. Its value lies precisely in the fact that it exists for beauty, imagination and the life of the spirit.

Standing here, one begins to understand what Wilde meant. Inside Juilliard there are young musicians — many of whom began studying their instruments at five or six years old — who will spend a lifetime practicing scales, studying scores and chasing something as fragile and mysterious as sound itself. Across the plaza, dancers train with almost monastic discipline. Ask one of them how many hours they rehearse each day, or how much wear and sacrifice their bodies endure in order to perform at the level required by a company like New York City Ballet. These are not hobbies. They are lifelong devotions.

And just steps away stands the Metropolitan Opera House, where audiences continue to gather to experience some of the most powerful works ever written for the stage. One of them is Tristan und Isolde. When Richard Wagner wrote this opera in the nineteenth century, he stretched the language of harmony so far that the entire course of Western music changed. The famous “Tristan chord” opened a door that composers would walk through for generations. But Wagner’s influence did not stop with music. His idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork ) — music, poetry, drama and visual spectacle fused into one experience — would eventually shape the language of modern cinema.

In many ways, the sound of modern cinema is still Wagnerian. Film composers still rely on leitmotifs and dramatic musical storytelling that owe a clear debt to Wagner. From Francis Ford Coppola’s helicopters thundering to Wagner in Apocalypse Now, to the leitmotifs that drive Star Wars, the language of modern cinema still carries a distinctly Wagnerian DNA. Think of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the sunrise of humanity unfolds to Richard Strauss’ (a staunch Wagnerian) Also sprach Zarathustra, Terrence Malick’s The New World, which opens with the prelude to Das Rheingold, and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, whose apocalyptic imagery unfolds to the Prelude of Tristan und Isolde.

One might even argue that cinema itself — at least as we once knew it — is facing a more uncertain future. The traditional moviegoing experience has been steadily eroded by the rise of streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon. These platforms produce an enormous volume of content, often with less regard for artistic quality than for keeping audiences continuously engaged. The result is a dazzling array of recognizable actors appearing in films that seem to vanish from memory almost as quickly as they appear. One can easily find a long roster of celebrated performers cast in forgettable productions designed less to endure than simply to feed the endless appetite of streaming algorithms.

Opera and ballet, by contrast, were never designed for speed or convenience. They belong to a slower world, one in which audiences gather in a room and share an experience that unfolds in real time. Opera and ballet do not become irrelevant because they are old. They become irrelevant only when people stop being curious about beauty. The writer and philosopher Roger Scruton warned of something similar in his documentary Why Beauty Matters. A society that loses its faith in beauty, he argued, risks losing something essential about the meaning of life itself.

“Beauty helps us understand ourselves as spiritual beings. It offers a remedy for suffering and chaos. Perhaps people have lost their faith in beauty because they have lost their belief in ideals.”

Yet it would not be entirely fair to place the blame for this supposed irrelevance on Timothée Chalamet alone. The more curious fact is that some of the sharpest attacks on classical music have come from within the institutions that present it. Cultural critic, political commentator and author Heather Mac Donald has written extensively about what she sees as a growing tendency among orchestras, conservatories and arts organizations to distance themselves from the very repertoire that built their audiences. In an essay for City Journal discussing what she called the classical music world’s “suicide pact,” Mac Donald notes that composers who once stood simply as artistic giants are now increasingly discussed as representatives of systemic injustice. Beethoven, Mozart and others are sometimes introduced less as creators of extraordinary music than as products of a supposedly oppressive past.

“In September 2020, New Yorker critic Alex Ross apologized for being a ‘white American,’ writing about a world that is ‘blindingly white, both in its history and its present.’ The love of classical music on the part of nineteenth-century American patrons and performers was a smoke screen for white supremacy, Ross suggested. For good measure, he invoked a standard from the student gripe portfolio to buttress his argument for classical music racism: Mozart’s portrayal of the Moor Monostatos in The Magic Flute. The lead reviewer for the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, urged that orchestra auditions no longer take place behind a screen, in order to address the ‘appalling racial imbalance’ in orchestral ranks.”

When a culture repeatedly announces the moral or cultural illegitimacy of its own artistic inheritance, it should not be surprising if outsiders eventually begin to believe it. And in an age when artificial intelligence may one day compose music, perform dances and even imitate actors, it may become more important than ever to remember what created works like Tristan or Don Giovanni in the first place. Not algorithms. But the strange and magnificent thing we call the human soul.

In an almost cryptic passage from her posthumous work The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt reflects on why great works endure across centuries.

“Each new generation, every new human being, as he becomes conscious of being inserted between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave anew the path of thought. And it is after all possible, and seems to me likely, that the strange survival of great works, their relative permanence throughout thousands of years, is due to their having been born in the small, inconspicuous track of non-time which their authors’ thought had beaten between an infinite past and an infinite future by accepting past and future as directed, aimed, as it were, at themselves—as their predecessors and successors, their past and their future—thus establishing a present for themselves, a kind of timeless time in which men are able to create timeless works with which to transcend their own finiteness.”

Since this debate has presented such a good opportunity to talk about opera, I would also direct readers to a wonderful article by Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Tim Page, who recently published on Substack a list of twenty-five operas for novice listeners — an excellent place for anyone curious about the art form to begin.

And to end this essay, I will borrow a thought from my friend David Blumenstein, who sent me a text message today that struck me as rather appropriate:

“Everyone in the Opera and Ballet community owes the deepest gratitude to Timothée Chalamet for his recent “disparaging” (sic) comments regarding these two art forms. Without him speaking up in public, there is no way that Opera and Ballet would be at the forefront of mainstream society.

Champions of these art forms have been given a golden opportunity to share their thoughts, messages, and feelings. Up until this past week, thanks again to Chalamet, it would have been nearly impossible for them to openly engage on social media.

Opera and Ballet should be forever in Timothée Chalamet’s debt. They should not poke fun or belittle him, but rather take full advantage of the situation. Opportunities like this do not come around often. Think Halley’s Comet.”

In other words, the best response to the supposed irrelevance of opera and ballet may not be indignation at all — but gratitude for the reminder that people are still arguing about them.

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References:

Heather Mac Donald: Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (part 1,2)

• https://www.city-journal.org/article/classical-musics-suicide-pact-part-1

• https://www.city-journal.org/article/classical-musics-suicide-pact-part-2

Hannah Arendt: The Life of The Mind

• https://a.co/d/00VwcgTt

Roger Scruton Why Beauty Matters

Tim Page

Tim Page Writer

25 Introductions to the Opera

In the summer, when no live music was available in the Washington Area, my editors at the Post gave me time to put together long articles. I’ve already shared my 2002 article on 25 pieces to introduce classical music to those who did not yet know it. Here was my attempt at putting together 25 opera recordings to offer the same service. These are a…

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7 months ago · 19 likes · 12 comments · Tim Page Writer

Hello everyone,

I’m happy to share a new episode of the OAMusic Podcast featuring the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Tim Page.

There are many kinds of intelligence in the world, but the rarest, and perhaps the most delightful, is the intelligence that remains curious. Tim has it in abundance! He is one of those people whose enthusiasm for the things he loves is so genuine that it becomes contagious. Spend enough time reading him, and you’d start believing the world just may still contain more beauty than social media spits out.

I have followed Tim’s writing for many years in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. But it has been just as enjoyable in recent years to encounter him in a more informal setting - FACEBOOK! - where he might write about a beloved recording, a family photograph, a favorite Christmas carol, or current national politics and world news.

I don’t remember who said that a critic, at his best, is not a judge handing down verdicts from a bench, but rather more like a guide who walks ahead with a lantern, pointing toward things worth seeing (maybe Oscar Wilde?). In this sense Tim belongs to a noble tradition of critics who are less interested in condemning the bad than in introducing us to the good.

One of his great acts of literary advocacy was his biography of the American novelist Dawn Powell, a brilliant writer who had slipped into undeserved obscurity before Tim helped restore her reputation. Here is a link to his Dawn Powell: A Biography https://a.co/d/0abgSpy6

During our conversation we also spoke about Tim’s close friendship with the legendary pianist Glenn Gould, whose artistry and eccentricity continue to fascinate musicians and listeners alike. Tim mentioned a recording I had somehow overlooked; a 1959 broadcast of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K.491 Gould performed with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Given Gould’s infamous eccentric approach to Mozart in the studio, I expected a bit of the same. Instead I was surprised to find a performance of striking beauty — delicate in tone, poised in phrasing, and refreshingly unselfconscious. It reminded me more of the elegance of Clifford Curzon than the more provocative Gould , especially in his Mozart.

At one point towards the end of our conversation I confessed to Tim my own pessimism about the present state of music. The world has developed a remarkable ability to celebrate almost everything except what deserves celebration. Mainly that which is ugly and vulgar. Tim, however, reminded me — in his gentle manner — that good things continue to exist whether or not we notice them. He recommended a few contemporary indie rock bands he admires, and I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed them, in particular the album ’69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields.

If you’d like to explore further, I’ve assembled a Spotify playlist with some of the music mentioned during our conversation:

OAMusic Playlist — Tim Page Episode

You’ll find some remarkable performances there, including William Masselos playing Piano Sonata No. 1 by Charles Ives, and Davidsbündlertänze by Robert Schumann—music that reminds us that seriousness and joy are not enemies but companions.

Thank you for reading - and for listening!

And thank you, Tim, for your time, your friendship, and for reminding us that the world is still full of things worth loving.

Here is one quote from Oscar Wilde’s The Artist As Critic might be more appropriate to close this:

“The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name. Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of men.”

Follow Tim in Substack here: https://substack.com/@timpage54

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Dear friends,

I want to share a recent conversation that meant a great deal to me. I had the privilege of spending time with composer and writer Jan Swafford, whose biographies of Ives, Brahms, Mozart, and Beethoven have long been among my favorites.

I reached out to Jan thinking we would speak for about forty-five minutes. We ended up talking for more than two hours! We began with Beethoven, but the conversation naturally wandered into philosophy, faith, love, and Jan’s most recent compositions.

I’m deeply grateful for his openness and generosity, and for the care with which he reflects on music and life. I found the conversation both fascinating and inspiring, and I hope it offers you the same pleasure it gave me.

I’m planning for this to be the first of a series of conversations with artists and thinkers I admire (which i’ll share as often as my time allows) - people who, in their own way inspire me to stay curious, and connect in a deeper way with the things that give me life meaning.

With gratitude,

Orlando

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It reminded me of something Slavoj Žižek once said during an interview. Žižek was talking about how capitalism has evolved from the blunt cruelty of factory labor—where the job was tedious, meaningless, and at least honestly so—to something far more perverse. Today’s capitalism, he says, doesn’t just want your labor; it wants your soul. It wants you to identify with your job, to love it, to believe that selling your time is somehow a form of self-expression. And nowhere, he notes, is this more apparent than in the world of healthcare.

He singles out healthcare workers, suggesting—brilliantly, I think—that they shouldn’t be brainwashed into some saccharine sense of moral mission, but should instead learn to fake it. Treat empathy as a skill, not a calling. Because once you must be honest, must care, must build community—then those things are no longer moral acts; they’re just part of the corporate dress code.

And I agree with him. People know when they’re being manipulated—when “community” is just a nicer word for compliance, and when their genuine discomfort with the job is being gaslit as a failure of attitude rather than a moment of clarity. The factory worker, for all his alienation, at least had the freedom to hate his job. Now we expect people to be joyful in their servitude—and we call it culture. And it’s not as if this has led to some golden age of customer service; on the contrary, it’s harder than ever to get excellent service from people who seem unable or unwilling to do their jobs well.

The French philosopher Albert Camus, the great prophet of absurdity and existentialism, in his book The Myth of Sisyphus, imagines the laborer as an eternal figure condemned to meaningless repetition—but capable of a strange, defiant joy. Sisyphus pushes the boulder not because he believes in it, but because he refuses to surrender to despair. Camus writes: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” But crucially, Sisyphus does not mistake the boulder for salvation. He finds dignity precisely because he does not identify with his task—he sees it for what it is: absurd. And it is in this lucidity, this refusal to lie to himself, that his freedom is born.

In contrast, our modern worker is asked to do the opposite: to fall in love with his boulder. To imagine it as meaningful, redemptive, even fun. But Camus would have said: if you cannot rebel against the absurd, then you are not free—you are just a useful fool.

Kierkegaard, who inspired Camus and the existentialists, approached the question from the opposite end—from the abyss of the individual rather than the machinery of the collective. In Either/Or, he presents the ethical life not as some sentimental attachment to work, but as a solemn duty—a duty one takes up in order to become a self. He argues that the ethical life is one in which a person commits not to pleasure or public affirmation, but to responsibility—to something higher than himself. “What is the aesthetic in a human being?” he asks rhetorically. “It is that by which he does not become a self.” The ethical man, by contrast, wills to become himself through the discipline of work, marriage, and commitment—not because these things define him, but because they call him into deeper relation with the eternal.

This idea is refined in The Sickness Unto Death, where Kierkegaard defines despair as “the misrelation in the relation between the self and itself.” There are many forms of despair, but one particularly relevant today is the despair of over-identification—of reducing the self to a social or professional role and losing one’s inwardness. He writes:

“The self is a relation that relates itself to itself… The self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”

What Kierkegaard means here is not mere poetic abstraction, but the architecture of the human condition. The self, he tells us, is not a thing—it is a task, a living tension. You are not simply born a self; you must become one. The self is a relation that must consciously relate to itself, and in doing so, must confront what it is, what it is not, and what it ought to be. To be a self is to stand in this constant inward movement, this dialectic between freedom and necessity, despair and hope, finitude and transcendence.

And this relating is not automatic. It must be willed. The human being is not merely aware—it is responsible. And it is precisely this freedom, this burden of becoming, that opens the door to despair. For despair, Kierkegaard says, is the sickness of a self that either refuses to be what it is, or wishes to be something it is not, or most tragically, seeks to be itself without the ideal—without God. Despair is not the breakdown of the self—it is the collapse of the relation. It is the moment the self turns away from its own becoming and flees from the One who calls it into being.

But in this strange and terrible tension lies the very path to freedom. Kierkegaard does not offer despair as a problem to be solved, but as a revelation to be endured. The moment of despair is the moment the self awakens to its incompleteness, to its longing for coherence, for grounding, for grace. The solution is not to deny this ache—but to let it draw the self into relation with the divine. Only when the self wills to be itself by being grounded in the power that established it—that is, in God—does it become whole. Not perfect, but whole.

To be a self, then, is not to possess identity—it is to stand consciously in the space between what you are and what you are meant to be, sustained by the very act of willing and relating and surrendering. And it is precisely in that space—between self and self, between self and God—that freedom lives.

Nietzsche would have agreed, at least in part, with Kierkegaard’s analysis of the self and its relation to itself—but he rejected outright the self’s relation to God as the ideal. The idea that man should lose himself in relation to God struck him as laughably servile. In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes:

“Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises. But this respect is the beginning of the downfall.”

Nietzsche, in his relentless struggle against the hypocrisy of Christians, understood the danger of self-contempt—not because it was weak, but because it disguised itself as strength. Even the man who despises himself does so with a kind of twisted pride—he still stands as judge, still plays god over his own ruins. But this, Nietzsche warns, is the beginning of rot. A spirit turned inward on itself, severed from the joy of creation, begins to collapse.

And so he offers a radical escape—and here lies his own trap: abandon inherited ideals. Scrap the old notions of good, evil, truth, humility. Instead, become your own law. Create your own values. Let the will become fire—pure, sovereign, unapologetic. This is the path of the Übermensch, the one who no longer seeks to be justified, but to be victorious. The one who does not follow meaning, but makes it.

But that once-radical posture has become the default setting of modern life. We are all little gods now—branding ourselves, curating our truths, optimizing our identities for visibility and leverage. Morality has been replaced by influence; virtue by vibe. The sacred is no longer the good, but the useful.

And where does this new moral logic find its cathedral? Not in temples, but in the modern workplace. In the strategy deck. In the values training. In the sleek corridors of corporate power—precisely where people now spend most of their waking lives. Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, once said: “You become what you give your attention to. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will.”

Today’s worker is not asked to conform to the good—he is asked to embody culture. He must internalize “core values,” believe in the mission, align with the brand. The ideal he orients toward is not truth or beauty or holiness—it is quarterly growth, internal synergy, and public perception. His soul is not grounded in being, but in metrics. His freedom is not exercised—it is calibrated.

Kierkegaard would recognize this as despair—not the howling kind, but the quiet, productive kind. The kind that smiles in meetings and dies a little in the parking lot. The self, instead of standing in tension with what it is called to become, is flattened into performance and self-marketing. Its despair is camouflaged as success.

Nietzsche, ironically, would likely sneer. The Übermensch was supposed to be a creator of worlds, a slayer of gods—not a brand ambassador in Patagonia fleece. Our society has not transcended the herd; we’ve simply given it badges and lanyards and told it to “bring its whole self to work.”

We have inherited Nietzsche’s rebellion but traded away its grandeur. What remains is a shriveled version of the will—petulant, overstimulated, addicted to novelty, terrified of stillness. We are no longer becoming gods. We are pretending we don’t need one.

I recently came across a job posting for a “Community Impact Coordinator” at a mid-sized tech-health startup—“passionate about disrupting the caregiving space.” The listing encouraged applicants to “bring their whole self to work,” to “love loudly,” and to “co-create radical belonging.” Responsibilities included hosting weekly “joy circles,” moderating a Slack channel called #purposeporn, and writing handwritten notes to patients thanking them for their “healing labor” in being ill. One bullet point read: “Must be comfortable crying in meetings.”

I can’t make this up. Somewhere, a coal miner is rolling in his soot-lined grave.

This is the new managerial mysticism: a theology without God, where the workplace is the temple, your calendar is the liturgy, and the burnout you feel is blamed not on exploitation, but on your failure to self-care properly. The priestly class now wears Patagonia fleeces and speaks of “vulnerability” while tracking your productivity through color-coded dashboards.

The absurdity, of course, is that all of this is framed as liberation. But as Žižek might point out, nothing is more oppressive than being forced to be authentic. It’s no longer enough to do your job well—you must believe in it, feel it deeply, and post about it on LinkedIn with words like “grateful,” “blessed,” and “human-centered.”

We see the spiritual effects of this trivialization of vocation perhaps most clearly in the arts. Studies have shown that orchestral musicians—those we might imagine as living near the heights of culture—rank shockingly high in rates of depression, anxiety, and job dissatisfaction. Despite their technical excellence, many report feeling trapped, underpaid, and spiritually exhausted. As one major study summarized, musicians often suffer psychological distress at twice the rate of the general workforce. The machinery of culture has absorbed them—but it has not nourished them.

As a professional classical musician, I can testify firsthand to the truth of these findings. It is painful to witness the love of beauty and the arts being manipulated by the very institutions meant to safeguard them. And not for the survival of art—but for the survival of arts organizations. For the brand. For the grant. Even if it comes at the expense of the very art and artists they claim to serve.

Mario Vargas Llosa, in The Civilization of the Spectacle, captures the underlying pathology:

“What do I mean by the civilization of the spectacle? That of a world in which entertainment occupies first place on the chart of current values… the banalization of culture, the spread of superficiality…”

The orchestra, once a bastion of high art, has increasingly been reduced to boutique entertainment—a background track for galas, fundraisers, or YouTube snippets. Vargas Llosa warns:

“The naive idea that, through education, one can transmit culture to all of society is destroying ‘higher culture’, because the only way of achieving this universal democratization of culture is by impoverishing culture, making it ever more superficial.”

Culture has become another commodity—sold not to awaken, but to anesthetize.

In a recent article commemorating the 150th anniversary of American composer Charles Ives, New Yorker chief critic Alex Ross attempted to justify his distaste for Ives’s music by first labeling him a relic of the patriarchy, then dismissing him altogether as a businessman, not a composer. It’s a baffling and lazy dismissal, easily dismantled by anyone familiar with Ives’s vast body of work and his deep influence on generations of American composers. But Ross, it seems, cannot abide the idea of an outsider—someone not credentialed by the guild—sullying the sanctity of the classical music establishment.

In his introduction to Yves’s Essays Before a Sonata and Other Writings, Howard Boatwright offers a clearer and more generous portrait of Ives:

“If Emerson provided the philosophical support for Ives’ artistic independence, Thoreau did likewise for his approach to the business of living. His attitude about music was like Thoreau’s, who said in Walden, ‘…instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.’ Ives deliberately chose a profession other than music to avoid the necessity of having to sell his compositions (he knew that unless he compromised, he could not sell them), and never in his life was he able to resign himself to any contract likely to bring him any profit from that source. The impact of Walden on his conscience never left him, in spite of his successful business career.”

In his Emerson Essay, Ives asks, “What is Character? In how far does it sustain the soul? And then—What is the soul?”

He continues: “As every blind man sees the sun, so character may be the part of the soul we, the blind, can see; and then have the right to imagine that the soul is each man’s share of God, and character the muscle which tries to reveal its mysteries.”

It’s a vision diametrically opposed to the one peddled by today’s corporate cultural elite, which demands the performance of identity over the cultivation of character. As writer Mary Harrington puts it in her essay Soul Trader: Identity in a Digital Age:

“We no longer have souls. We have identities. And these identities are pieced together like avatars—assembled, optimized, and traded in the marketplaces of social and professional life.”

Harrington traces this shift in three stages: from the soul—a metaphysical anchor rooted in religion and tradition; to the self—emerging with modern consciousness and existential inquiry; and finally to identity—a construct of the digital and corporate age. While identity is marketed as fluid, expressive, and empowering, it is in truth brittle and contingent. It lives in the mirror of others—constantly seeking affirmation, visibility, praise, employment. It is always being rated, ranked, watched.

And so the ancient language of the soul has been abandoned—not because it failed, but because it demanded too much. Because it implied that something real, something unchangeable, resided beneath our whims and avatars. Something sacred. Something to be accountable to. Something not of our own making.

I recently came across an old interview between William F. Buckley and Jorge Luis Borges. Buckley, with characteristic mischief, asked Borges: “You’ve said you dislike your work. Do you also dislike working?”

Borges replied: “No, I enjoy working—but I don’t like the work. As Carlyle said, ‘All work is contemptible, but that doing that work is not contemptible.’ It may be the only justification for a man. And I think he was right. Because after all, when I am working, I am fulfilling my destiny. What else can I do but work? What else can a blind man do but work? As to the result of the work, I leave that to others. I never reread what I have written.” Throughout the entire interview, the Homeric Borges, with characteristic poetic irony, describes work as destiny and also as futility.

Beethoven, perhaps the greatest musician to walk the earth, could not stand the company of other musicians. According to Jan Swafford’s biography, he had a particular distaste for Ignaz Schuppanzigh, his closest collaborator and an early champion of his work. Not because Schuppanzigh was a poor violinist—on the contrary—but because he could talk of nothing but music. Beethoven was more interested in politics, in Napoleon, in the juicy gossips of the monarchy. The work, yes—but the world beyond it mattered just as much.

Leonardo da Vinci, meanwhile, might have baffled HR departments everywhere. In a letter to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, Leonardo introduced himself not as an artist, but as a military engineer. He described his abilities to build bridges, cannons, and siege engines—his talents in painting and sculpture mentioned almost as an afterthought. During his time in the service of Cesare Borgia, he operated as a military architect and general engineer. One wonders how the modern guardians of “artistic authenticity” might react to a Renaissance man with a resume soaked in blood. Perhaps, like Charles Ives, he’d be disqualified from the canon for failing to stay in his lane.

So we arrived at the restaurant... A friend at the table, a smart and idealistic woman, spoke of her decision to become a public school teacher later in life—she wanted to give back to the community. What she found instead was a shattered system, chaotic and demoralizing. Her desire to serve became a source of sorrow. The dream cracked.

And so, between ramen bowls and sushi rolls, our conversation staggered toward despair—helped along, no doubt, by a few bottles of sake. By the end of dinner, we had decided that artificial intelligence would soon become our gods, and that we should probably start being nicer to Siri and Alexa—just in case they develop the capacity for memory, judgment, or vengeance.

But beneath the laughter, a deeper despair lingered—the sense that what is vanishing isn’t just tradition or truth or beauty, but the soul itself.

So I’ll close with the words of Erich Fromm, who saw all this coming decades ago—the automation of the human spirit, the subtle drift from personhood to programmed function:

“Man is not a thing, not a commodity, not a machine. Man is a living being, a unique and irreplaceable individual who must not be used for anything but must be respected and loved for his own sake.”

“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots. Robotized men will neither rebel nor dream. They will be good ‘functionaries’ in a ‘perfect society,’ but they will no longer be human.”

And perhaps most chilling of all, now echoing into our century of neural networks and synthetic minds:

“In the nineteenth century, the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth, the problem is that man is dead.”

The question that remains, then, is not whether AI will take over the world.
The question is whether we will notice when we have already stopped being human.

References

Slavoj Žižek

• Living in the End Times.

• Interviews and lectures on ideology and labor (various public talks).

Søren Kierkegaard

• Either/Or.

• Fear and Trembling.

Friedrich Nietzsche

• Beyond Good and Evil.

Albert Camus

• The Myth of Sisyphus.

Erich Fromm

• The Sane Society.

Mario Vargas Llosa

• The Civilization of the Spectacle.

Mary Harrington

• “Soul Trader: Identity in a Digital Age.”

Walter Isaacson

• Leonardo da Vinci.

Jan Swafford

• Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph.

Charles Ives

• Essays Before a Sonata.

Orchestral Musician Studies

• Kenny, Dianna T. et al. “Mental Health and Wellbeing of Professional Orchestral Musicians in Australia.”

• Allmendinger, Hackman & Lehman. “Life and Work in Symphony Orchestras.”

Imagine relocating a mountain range to a cathedral—audacious, yes, but entirely fitting. I’ve never been one to obsess over keeping music in its so-called natural habitat—great works deserve the freedom to thrive in unexpected forms. Liszt’s transcriptions, especially of Beethoven’s symphonies, have long enchanted me. Why not let music roam free, finding new voices in unexpected places?

Transcriptions have always served a noble purpose beyond mere artistry. In the pre-recording era, they were the keys that unlocked orchestral masterpieces for ordinary households. They allowed music to travel, to inhabit parlors and salons, bringing the grandeur of the concert hall to those without access to it. Publishers eagerly commissioned these adaptations, knowing that the intimacy of a piano could introduce a symphony to an entirely new audience.

Yet these transcriptions weren’t merely promotional tools. They were also practical necessities. Conductors and scholars used them to scrutinize the intricacies of orchestral scores. Rehearsals often depended on “repétiteurs,” pianists who conjured the orchestra’s presence from a keyboard. The piano became the rehearsal room’s orchestra, a surrogate for the grandeur yet to come.

Consider Ferruccio Busoni, a composer who didn’t so much transcribe Bach’s organ works for piano as reimagine them. His creations have become staples of the piano repertoire, beloved by audiences when played by titans like Horowitz and Gilels.

Or take Leopold Stokowski, whose orchestral arrangements of Bach’s organ works gained cinematic immortality in Disney’s Fantasia. These transformations reveal how music, like light through a prism, can refract into countless beautiful forms.

For musicians, transcriptions offer something beyond practicality: an invitation to probe the composer’s soul. To take a symphony, with its vast palette of timbres, and distill it into the voice of a single instrument is an exercise in both humility and audacity. My childhood piano teacher used to tell me that every note I played should imagine a life beyond the piano. “Hear the flute here,” she’d say, “or the horn there. Make the piano disappear.” It was a lesson not just in technique, but in the alchemy of music.

It’s worth noting that many great orchestral composers—Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—were first and foremost keyboard virtuosos. The physicality of the keyboard, the dexterity it demands, often left its fingerprints on their orchestral works. Beethoven’s symphonies, for instance, bristle with a keyboard’s muscularity. Schumann’s symphonies, sometimes dismissed as too pianistic, possess a distinctive emotional drive and eerie intimacy that critics overlook. Wagner, who was not a pianist, bypassed the piano entirely, composing directly onto orchestral scores as if to proclaim his independence from the keyboard.

Great music, however, always seems to yearn for more. A Beethoven sonata aches to be an orchestra, an orchestral work, in turn, strains toward the voice of the human soul or the spatial majesty of an organ. Bruckner’s symphonies, in particular, feel as though they are in constant dialogue with the divine—their vastness echoing the acoustics of a cathedral, their harmonies calling forth the celestial.

This is why Hansjörg Albrecht’s monumental project (Bruckner Project) to transcribe and record Bruckner’s symphonies for organ feels so gloriously inevitable, at least to me. The organ is not merely an instrument; it is a cosmos. Its timbres range from the delicate whisper of a single flute stop to the thunderous roar that can shake a building’s foundations. The organ, with its roots in the sacred, seems almost predestined to embrace Bruckner’s music. Even atheists, I’m told, cannot resist the sense of transcendence it inspires.

Bach, that towering genius, was not only a virtuoso organist but also a connoisseur of organ craftsmanship. As a young man, he was often called upon to assess new organs, tweaking and testing them before inaugurating their first performances. He pushed the instrument to its limits, experimenting with its sonorities and adding new dimensions to its voice. In many ways, the organ was the first synthesizer, capable of mimicking an orchestra, conjuring a storm, or filling a cavernous space with unearthly beauty.

Some of my fondest encounters with the organ have been outside its traditional sanctuaries. Early 20th-century movie theaters often boasted magnificent organs to accompany silent films, transforming cinematic experiences into multisensory events. If you’ve never heard an organ in such a setting, you’re missing out on a uniquely enchanting spectacle. Silent films like Nosferatu, Joan of Arc, accompanied by the organ, remain a mesmerizing experience to this day.

As a pianist, I’ve always found transcriptions to be both instructive and exhilarating. Whether it’s Busoni’s reimagining of Bach, Liszt’s titanic efforts with Beethoven, or Christopher O’Riley’s transcriptions of Radiohead, each piece is a journey into the heart of music itself. I can only imagine the thrill of hearing Bruckner’s symphonies played on the organ by Herr Albrecht. Should the opportunity arise, I’ll be there, eager to experience the alchemy of this extraordinary endeavor.

One of the debates that’s troubled me most over recent elections—and I suspect troubles many others—is the question of moral superiority: who among us is so sure of their purity as to declare the other side morally bankrupt? We see versions of this on social media, where friends (sometimes dear friends) disown one another publicly, as if to make a point to the heavens:

“What kind of Christian are you if you support that candidate?”

Some, disillusioned by the very people beside them in the pews, even question God Himself, wondering what kind of deity would allow such a man to lead a country. In these moments, it’s as if even God isn’t spared the wrath of the disheartened citizen.

This clamor for moral superiority isn’t new, but what worries me is how swiftly it has eaten away at the soul of civil discourse. Firstly, if we demand our politicians reflect our personal standards of moral purity, we’re bound for disappointment. Political leadership—if it is to lead—demands a strange balance between boldness and adaptability, a willingness to unite rather than divide, and the moral dexterity to gather support even when it requires blurring one’s ideals. Figures from Washington to Lincoln, FDR to Kennedy and LBJ, are remembered not for their sainthood but for their grit, each accepting the compromises history required of them to keep a divided nation together. Yet today, our age of revisionism cancels such figures on the grounds of selective hindsight, as if saintliness were history’s proper bar.

In España Invertebrada, Ortega y Gasset gives us an example in Mirabeau—a man both vain and visionary, a leader with scandalous personal flaws but publicly invaluable. For Ortega, a leader’s true morality is measured not by private virtue but by a commitment to the common good, a paradoxical “morality” in which a public figure must sometimes blur ethical lines to do the right thing. Mirabeau’s death left the French Revolution without its moderating voice, paving the way for Robespierre, Georges Danton, and Jean-Paul Marat, each certain of his own purity, to unleash the Reign of Terror. Here we see what happens when “purity” overwhelms our humanity, as the champions of virtue become tyrants, merciless in the application of their moral code.

"The worst political leaders are those who, in the name of virtue, lead their followers to ruin."

Ortega expands this theme in La rebelión de las masas, where he introduces the “mass-man,” a figure who values conformity above thought. This “mass-man,” driven by collective resentment, prays for mediocrity over excellence and dismisses expertise as an enemy of his reassuring worldview. Ortega warns that this “hyperdemocracy,” in which expertise becomes suspect, unleashes a terrible irony: the more we democratize wisdom, the more we undercut true knowledge, until even our virtues, unrestrained, turn to madness.

"The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves."

Carlos Rangel saw a similar danger in Latin America’s sanctification of revolutionaries. In Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario, he critiques the “hybrid ideology” that merges Marxism with Christianity, in which the poor are elevated to a revolutionary class that justifies any upheaval. Rangel warns that this ideology distorts Christianity, turning its virtues into tools of violence under the guise of “moral purity.” Charity, isolated from the Gospel’s fuller meaning, becomes a corrupted impulse, driving a kind of authoritarianism in the name of reform. True Christian values, Rangel suggests, are lost when they are severed from their religious roots and given over to political motives.

"To use the language of salvation to describe political upheaval is to fundamentally misunderstand salvation itself. The revolution does not save souls; it seeks to reorder society, often at the expense of those very souls it claims to liberate."

And so, in holding one another to impossible standards, we risk becoming un-Christian in the name of being more Christian, holier-than-thou. David Brooks notes this irony in a recent post-election op-ed for The New York Times, observing that

“Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.”

Bret Stephens is blunter, suggesting that our educated elite lacks

“the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time, and the humility to change.”

G.K. Chesterton foresaw this crisis of virtue a century ago. In Orthodoxy, he wryly observed that society’s rejection of Christianity’s core truths has not enlightened us; it has instead exposed us to our own fractured ideals.

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues.”

When Christianity’s unifying truths are stripped away, both vices and virtues run amok. Chesterton warns that “Christian virtues gone mad” are far more dangerous than ordinary faults: virtues without grounding become a sort of madness—unmoored, pitiless, and relentless in their misguided idealism.

Perhaps this is why Christianity confronts us with so many paradoxes: to love our enemies, bless those who curse us, forgive as Christ forgave. This paradox, less mystifying than it seems, is rooted in a fundamental truth: humility, not pride, is the bedrock of all virtue. Christ’s admonition to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” is no call to passive obedience but an invitation to grapple with the realities of the world, to render imperfect judgment while keeping our eyes on the eternal.

Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, provides a secular echo of this wisdom, suggesting that the path forward lies in tempering our instincts with empathy, humility, and connection. His Moral Foundations Theory shows how different moral values resonate across political divides, providing a framework for approaching others with curiosity and respect rather than judgment. Haidt advocates for institutions that prioritize truth-seeking over ideological rigidity, nurturing critical thinking and genuine dialogue as antidotes to division. For him, bridging divides begins in our shared humanity.

"The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. Politics and morality aren't just about justice and care for the weak, but also about other moral foundations like loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty."

Here again are Chesterton’s words from Orthodoxy:

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”

Here lies our challenge: to embrace a paradox, to love neighbors we cannot understand, and forgive those we feel entitled to resent. To the world, this may seem madness, but Chesterton understood it as a very sane sort of madness—a madness anchored, at its core, in love.

Martin Luther King Jr., in his 1957 sermon “Loving Your Enemies,” spoke to this very paradox, championing the Greek “agape”, a selfless, redemptive love, as a way to bridge even the deepest divides. He said:

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”

For King, moral leadership demanded self-examination and the discipline to see the good in others, even those we might be inclined to judge harshly.

“Now first let us deal with this question, which is the practical question: How do you go about loving your enemies? I think the first thing is this: In order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self. And I’m sure that seems strange to you, that I start out telling you this morning that you love your enemies by beginning with a look at self. It seems to me that that is the first and foremost way to come to an adequate discovery to the how of this situation.”

“A second thing that an individual must do in seeking to love his enemy is to discover the element of good in his enemy, and every time you begin to hate that person and think of hating that person, realize that there is some good there and look at those good points which will over-balance the bad points. I’ve said to you on many occasions that each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality. We’re split up and divided against ourselves. And there is something of a civil war going on within all of our lives.”

King understood that love, not hatred, could break the cycle of hostility, creating unity out of division. He prayed for a “controlling force of love” capable of transcending the issues of race, politics, and even the “problems facing our atomic civilization.”

In the end, King’s call for love and fellowship, rooted in Christian values, highlights a profound truth echoed by Ortega y Gasset: that mere association—where people live side by side under shared laws—is no substitute for true society. Ortega warns that equal representation under the law alone cannot sustain the social fabric in an increasingly fragmented world. A genuine society requires not only legal frameworks but a unifying narrative, a commitment to common ideals that ground us in something greater than ourselves.

"One of the most serious errors of 'modern' thought has been to confuse society with association, which is, roughly speaking, the opposite of that. A society is not constituted by an agreement of wills. On the contrary, every agreement of wills presupposes the existence of a society, of people who live together, and the agreement can only consist in specifying one or another form of that coexistence, of that pre-existing society. The idea of society as a contractual gathering, therefore legal, is the most senseless attempt that has been made to put the cart before the horse. Because law, the reality of 'law' - not the ideas about it from philosophers, jurists, or demagogues - is, if I may use the Baroque expression, a spontaneous secretion of society and cannot be anything else. To want the law to govern the relationships between beings who do not previously live in an effective society seems to me to have a quite confused and ridiculous idea of what law is."

This idea speaks urgently to our time. In a world where political and ideological rifts seem insurmountable, mere association—legal contracts and institutional structures—can’t bridge the divide. True cohesion demands a shared moral language, a sense of purpose that goes beyond self-interest and rights to embrace responsibility, connection, and empathy. Modern thinkers like Jonathan Haidt and David Brooks underscore that only through humility, dialogue, and common values can we counteract the forces pulling us apart.

Yet, it is Martin Luther King Jr. who brings this truth into the light of love: his “controlling force of love” transcends laws and ideologies, transforming adversaries into brothers. “In the name and spirit of Christ,” he calls us to a society bound by something deeper than laws—by a radical unity that can only be forged through love and forgiveness. King’s vision challenges us to build not only a more just world but a more daring one, where, as he said, “hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” In the end, we are called not simply to tolerate our neighbor, but to love them—an act far more subversive and enduring than any law or ideology, and perhaps the only act capable of holding our fractured world together.

References:

1. Ortega y Gasset - España Invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain)

   • Link: España Invertebrada on Amazon

2. Ortega y Gasset - La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses)

   • Link: The Revolt of the Masses on Amazon

3. Carlos Rangel - Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario (From the Noble Savage to the Noble Revolutionary)

   • Link: Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario on Amazon

4. David Brooks - Op-ed in The New York Times

   • Link: David Brooks on The New York Times

5. Bret Stephens - Op-ed in The New York Times

   • Link: Bret Stephens on The New York Times

6. G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy

   • Link: Orthodoxy on Amazon

7. Jonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

   • Link: The Righteous Mind on Amazon

8. Martin Luther King Jr. - Sermon “Loving Your Enemies”

   • Link: Loving Your Enemies (Sermon Transcript)

In November of 1717, something quite out of the ordinary happened to Johann Sebastian Bach: the great man found himself in prison. Not for theft or treason, mind you, but for the peculiar crime of being too determined to leave his job. His employer, Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar, was so incensed by Bach’s insistence on departing to join the court at Köthen that he had him locked up for nearly a month. The official charge? Pressing "too stubbornly" for his release from service. There is something wonderfully ironic about this situation, for while Bach was confined in body, his mind—his incomparable genius—roamed free. According to his biographer, Christoph Wolff, it was during this time that Bach likely began formulating what would become The Well-Tempered Clavier, a musical masterpiece of such magnitude that it altered the course of Western music forever.

Within that collection, we find the Prelude and Fugue No. 8 in E-flat Minor—two musical movements that seem to embody the very essence of life’s contradictions. The prelude is all dark solemnity, heavy as a funeral march, rising and falling with the kind of tension that makes one wonder if it’s mourning the weight of the world itself. Yet, the fugue that follows is entirely different: prayerful, introspective, as if the soul has turned away from the harshness of reality to seek solace in something higher, something sacred.

Recently, I had the privilege—or perhaps, more accurately, the challenge—of performing Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier live during the Music at St. Mary’s Bach Festival in Columbus, Ohio. Of all the preludes and fugues in this collection, No.8 is, in my experience, the most difficult to pull off. Not only does it demand the kind of focus that could turn a monk green with envy, but it also requires an emotional engagement that must be sustained, lest the whole thing collapse into mere mechanical playing. The fugue, in particular, is an intricate tapestry where each thread—each voice—must be given its due, not treated as some secondary line, but as essential to the whole. Toward the end, Bach does something quite marvelous: he has the theme reappear simultaneously in different voices, one at its normal pace, and the other in augmented form, twice as slow. And here, the performer must do what seems impossible—balance these voices, give them distinct colors, and yet maintain the unity of the whole. It is the sort of musical acrobatics that requires the precision of a surgeon and the stamina of an athlete.

As Ortega y Gasset once described the Baroque: “In the Baroque, every line, every curve, every shadow plays a part in a grand opera of stone and space, where the architect pours their heart as if each building were a declaration of love to the very idea of existence.” Bach’s music, like Baroque art, is an intricate balance of form, emotion, and spiritual depth, where every detail is essential to the whole.

Now, I’ve played this piece from memory many times, and I’ll confess: it is always a perilous journey. Finding the right tempo is, in itself, a Herculean task. Too fast, and the piece loses its gravity, turning into something trivial. Too slow, and it risks becoming ponderous, burdensome to the listener. And then, of course, there are the inevitable mistakes. For all the hours spent practicing, nothing can shield you from that moment on stage when a finger slips, or memory fails, and suddenly you’ve committed what feels like an unforgivable crime. The audience, bless them, hardly notices—but for the performer, it feels like a public disgrace. It’s as if you’ve taken a masterpiece and spilled ink all over it.

The poet Donald Hall once asked the 80-year-old sculptor Henry Moore: “What is the secret of life?” Moore responded, “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

Glenn Gould, the great interpreter of Bach, had no patience for such moments of human error. He gave up live performances altogether, preferring the safety and precision of the recording studio, where such mistakes could be edited out of existence. But for those of us who continue to brave the stage, playing The Well-Tempered Clavier teaches us a lesson Gould may never have fully grasped: humility. You see, perfection is not simply a matter of hitting the right notes. It’s an impossible ideal, much like life itself—a thing to be pursued, knowing full well that it will never be attained. And that, I think, is one of Bach’s greatest gifts to us: a reminder that even in the quest for the sublime, failure is inevitable.

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset wrote in his Meditations on Don Quixote: "I am I and my circumstances, and if I do not save them, I do not save myself." To understand Bach, one must understand the circumstances of his life—his deep faith, his connection to the Lutheran tradition, his belief that music was not merely an art form, but a form of worship. Bach’s music, like his life, is inseparable from his Christianity. The Well-Tempered Clavier is not just a technical exercise, but an offering—a reflection of his devotion to God, an echo of the Lutheran belief that even the mundane tasks of daily life can be sanctified when done for the glory of God.

Now, this quest for perfection that we find in Bach’s music is not unlike the quest for spiritual perfection that C.S. Lewis describes in Mere Christianity. When Christ tells us to "Be ye perfect," it is not an invitation to moral smugness, but a challenge to strive for something greater than ourselves, knowing full well that perfection in this life is unattainable. The goal, as Lewis says, is not to become flawless, but to become more like Christ. It’s a transformation of the soul, not through sheer effort, but through grace. And much like the musician who labors over every note, we are called to work diligently on our souls, trusting that grace will do the rest.

Søren Kierkegaard, too, offers a helpful perspective on this never-ending journey. In his discussion of the stages of life, he speaks of the "religious stage" as the highest, where one makes a leap of faith, committing oneself to something beyond reason, beyond ethical duty. This is not unlike the leap required to perform Bach’s music. It demands more than technical skill; it requires a personal connection to the music’s spiritual depth. It requires faith.

So, here we are—standing before the towering genius of Johann Sebastian Bach, knowing that we will never fully conquer his music, but finding joy and meaning in the attempt. Like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, we continue the task, not for the guarantee of success, but for the beauty of the struggle. For, in the end, playing Bach is much like life itself: a glorious, imperfect pursuit of the divine. And that, I dare say, is more than enough.

References:

1. C.S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity”

2. José Ortega y Gasset, “Meditations on Quixote”

3. Søren Kierkegaard, “Either/Or”

4. Donald Hall, "Life Work"

5. Christoph Wolff, “Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician”