When Harmonium of Texas gives its first orchestral concert Friday evening, its musicians will perform a piece preoccupied with the turning of fortune’s wheel. Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana may prove an exceptionally fitting choice for classical music in San Antonio.
Four years ago, the city appeared to have lost its professional orchestra. The 83-year-old San Antonio Symphony was dissolved in June 2022 after a bitter nine-month musicians’ strike. Within weeks, however, its players had regrouped. That August, they announced the formation of the San Antonio Philharmonic — not merely another ensemble, but one carrying forward much of San Antonio’s orchestral tradition.
Now the family tree has branched again.
Harmonium, founded by pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane after he stepped down as the Philharmonic’s music director earlier this year, begins its orchestral life Friday at the Lila Cockrell Theatre. Its emergence poses an unusual question: when an orchestra disappears, who — if anyone — inherits it?
That question now has a legal dimension. On Sept. 29, the Philharmonic filed a federal lawsuit against Kahane and Harmonium alleging misappropriation of trade secrets. Whatever the courts ultimately decide, the dispute points toward a much older cultural problem. What actually makes an orchestra the same orchestra?
We tend to think of orchestras as remarkably permanent institutions. Musicians come and go. Conductors change. Sometimes the political world surrounding them disappears altogether. Yet the orchestra retains its biography. Consider Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. Its history stretches back 250 years, across radically different Russias. It existed under the empire, survived the Revolution and the Soviet Union and continues today. The people making up the institution have changed countless times. Even the state around it has changed. Yet we instinctively speak of the Bolshoi as one continuous entity.
That is one of the peculiar powers of an orchestra or opera house: its identity can outlive every individual who constitutes it. At the same time, an orchestra is remarkably intangible. A museum can close and leave behind a building filled with objects. There is no physical object called “the orchestra” that can be put into storage until somebody decides to reopen it. The orchestra exists when musicians assemble and play.
San Antonio discovered this paradox in 2022. The Symphony Society could dissolve the orchestra, but it could not dissolve its musicians. Many moved into the Philharmonic. Familiar players once again performed orchestral repertoire for audiences in the same city. Was this a new orchestra, or an old orchestra living under a new name? There is no simple answer. An orchestra’s identity may reside in its legal organization or its name, but it can also survive in its players and in a community’s memory. Those things do not always disappear together.
We like orchestras to have tidy biographies: founded in a particular year, led by successive music directors, steadily approaching the next anniversary. Those dates become part of the brand. They reassure us that although people die and the world changes, the institution endures. Musical life is messier.
That is what makes San Antonio so fascinating now. The city is watching orchestral identity being dismantled and reconstructed in real time. The Philharmonic embodies an obvious form of continuity because it was created by musicians of the former Symphony.
Harmonium, meanwhile, is presenting itself as a new chapter in the city’s musical life. Friday’s debut makes that idea audible. Carmina Burana will bring professional musicians together with singers and young performers drawn from San Antonio’s wider musical community. And perhaps that points toward where an orchestra’s identity really resides.
An orchestra survives because musicians choose to play together and audiences return to hear them. Over time, a city begins to feel that the institution somehow belongs to it. Those relationships can prove harder to dissolve than the organization itself. They can also be divided.
The city’s new abundance may prove invigorating. But competition for players, audiences and support also exposes how fragile the ecosystem beneath an orchestra’s appearance of permanence can be. Perhaps asking whether the San Antonio Symphony survived is therefore the wrong question. The Bolshoi represents one extreme: the institution survived revolutions and the disappearance of the state whose name it once carried.
San Antonio offers the inverse experiment. The institution disappeared while much of the musical life surrounding it survived. When the first notes sound at the Lila Cockrell Theatre Friday, San Antonio won’t hear an answer to the question of which orchestra is the city’s rightful heir. It will hear something more interesting: evidence that an orchestra may be less like a company than a collective memory — one capable of outliving the organization that once gave it a name.
Stacy Jarvis is a British music historian, writer and violinist based in Manchester. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century musical culture, orchestral institutions and the ways music intersects with politics, cultural memory and public life. She writes for publications in the UK and internationally.
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