The American Symphony Orchestra League, the Washington-based national service organization for the field of symphonic music, has just issued another report on the fate of our orchestras. Its earlier report, “The Financial Condition of Symphony Orchestras,”¹ concerned itself with the economic outlook for the field and was distinctly pessimistic. The new report, “Americanizing the American Orchestra,”² provides, not remedies, exactly, but the optimistic suggestions of a group of experts for carrying our orchestras into the multicultural twenty-first century.

To understand this report, it is necessary to recount some of the recent history of our symphony orchestras. There is little doubt that the long-expected terminal crisis of American orchestras is upon us. For many years the crisis seemed to be artistic: there was no new music being written which could command the love, and therefore the attendance, of music lovers. But whatever problems there were in the past, musicians and administrators could nevertheless rely for audience enthusiasm on the performance of the great classics, from Bach in the early eighteenth century to Bartók, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich in the middle of the twentieth century. The lack of new music was handled—simply and directly, it was thought—by commissioning and performing contemporary works, both to educate and to accustom paying customers to new music.

Side by side with these profound artistic problems was (and remains) the explosion of costs, chiefly in the area of artistic and administrative personnel. Driven both by a desire to provide more remunerative employment for