The Boston Symphony and the Hierarchy of Goods

What a Great Cultural Institution Exists to Serve

Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1917.

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.