2026-27 SEASON

I have always wondered when an orchestra actually becomes an orchestra. Is it when the musicians take their seats, when the concertmaster enters, when the conductor raises a hand, or does it happen in that captivating but strange moment when they start tuning, as dozens of people begin adjusting themselves to one another? 

Musicians always come to the orchestra separately, carrying different instruments, different histories, different bodies, and private understandings of the music, but before they can “make music” together, they must find a way of hearing themselves in relation to everyone else.

They sit together, the oboe gives an A, one pitch passes through the room until winds, brass, and strings begin to gather around a shared center, and even though everyone starts playing, they aren’t really making music yet so much as making agreement possible.

Though, that agreement does not require differences to disappear. Actually, an orchestra becomes coherent because difference is organized through attention: each player acts and listens at once, possessing a line fully while remaining answerable to what happens around it. The score establishes boundaries, but no performance is merely the execution of those boundaries. Within them lie judgment, memory, risk, responsiveness, and freedom.

The more I think about it, the more the seemingly small ritual of tuning seems to contain the questions at the heart of this season. 

What does it mean to be free? Who are we? Who are we becoming? Who are we to one another?

We tend to imagine a question as an empty space waiting for knowledge to fill it, but the questions that matter most are rarely resolved in this way. What if they are structures we live inside, shaping what we notice and permit, what we remember, and what we imagine ourselves capable of changing? An answer may satisfy them for a time, but a life will test them again, and it is all too cliche that the answer to one question may only lead to more questions.

Freedom, identity, becoming, and relationship are ancient concerns, but they press upon us with particular force because our era has made the self both sovereign and strangely powerless. We are urged to invent ourselves while living inside systems whose workings few of us understand. We can speak instantly across continents and still fail to know the person beside us, let alone the person inside us. We possess forms of mobility, knowledge, and choice that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined, and yet our lives remain vulnerable to inherited histories, institutional decisions, accidents of the body, and the judgments of strangers. The old questions have not disappeared beneath modernity, and modernity has drawn their contradictions closer to the surface.

Each of the season's four themes seems at first to name something personal: my freedom, my identity, my growth, my relationships. The word my, however, becomes unstable as soon as we examine it. Freedom is enabled or obstructed by the world around us. Identity develops through languages, histories, and expectations we did not invent. Becoming takes place in a body marked by circumstance. Relationship begins when another person exceeds the role we have assigned them. None of these can be understood entirely in the singular, and music, made from distinct voices whose meanings change through contact, knows this before philosophy gives it language.

A musical theme is recognizable by its intervals and rhythm, but its identity also depends on what surrounds it and on everything that has happened by the time it returns. The same melody may sound innocent near the beginning of a work and devastated near the end, even when not one of its notes has changed. Music therefore allows us to encounter identity as something continuous without being fixed, and freedom as something enacted within form rather than outside it. Contrary truths can remain audible together; joy can pass through grief without canceling it; resolution can arrive without erasing the conflict that made it necessary.

The concert hall asks something similar of the listener. For a span of time, we relinquish the protections of speed. We cannot scroll past a difficult phrase or select only the themes that confirm us. We remain while musical ideas acquire consequences, hearing them depart, struggle, return, and become responsible for all that has occurred in between. Music cannot decide how we should live, but it can deepen the quality of attention with which such decisions are made.

The season begins in the public square with Voices of Freedom, during the 250th anniversary of the United States—a moment made for ceremony, and therefore a moment that asks us to consider what ceremony can reveal or conceal. Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man gives public grandeur to ordinary people, while William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony troubles the ease with which a nation speaks of the common good while excluding particular lives from its promise. In Lincoln Portrait, words about equality and government pass through the voice of Sean K. Ellis, who spent more than twenty-two years imprisoned for a crime of which he was later fully exonerated. Beethoven's Seventh then carries the question beyond language and into the body, where freedom becomes pulse, coordination, and collective force. Across the program, liberty ceases to be an abstract possession and becomes a measure of the relationships our laws, institutions, and shared rhythms make possible.

From there, Worlds Within and Without turns inward, though inward does not mean away. Missy Mazzoli's These Worlds In Us hears memory as a crowded simultaneity in which grief and affection, private loss and inherited history, past and present continue to sound together. Haydn's Cello Concerto places one voice before an ensemble only to show how little the word one can mean without exchange. Brahms's First Symphony confronts an inheritance so powerful that it threatens to dictate the future. None of these works uncovers a self untouched by the world; each reveals the self taking shape through the way it receives, resists, and answers what the world has placed within it.

The third program asks what happens when that self changes. Burst, Body, Becoming begins with a childhood memory transformed into orchestral motion, passes through Hindemith's radical reimagining of themes by Weber, and arrives at Tchaikovsky's encounter with what he called fate. Together, these works refuse the comforting mythology of self-invention. We receive bodies, histories, wounds, abilities, obligations, and accidents, none of which we chose; yet what has been received is not always identical with what must be repeated. Becoming lies in that fraught interval between circumstance and response, where agency is real but never absolute.

Finally, Alone Together returns the self to the presence of others. Copland's Quiet City places isolated voices in a nocturnal landscape that does not automatically answer. Elgar's Enigma Variations reveals a person through the friends who steadied, amused, provoked, and recognized him. Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade makes storytelling an act performed under mortal pressure: a voice creates a world, a listener enters it, and power is asked, night after night, to encounter an imagination other than its own. Through these encounters, relationship becomes more than proximity; it becomes the difficult attention by which another life is allowed to remain irreducibly real.

The order of these questions matters because each corrects the possible failure of the one before it. Freedom without self-knowledge may become the permission of the powerful; identity without the capacity to change may harden into enclosure; becoming without relationship can become a fantasy of self-authorship; relationship without freedom can become possession. By the end of the season, each word has been altered by the others. Freedom begins to mean the conditions under which distinct lives can act and meet without domination. Identity becomes a pattern of continuities and revisions audible only across time. Becoming is understood not as endless improvement but as the limited, embodied capacity to answer what we did not choose. Relationship asks for an attention strong enough to let another person exist beyond our need of them.

There is no easy consolation in these propositions. They deny us several cherished illusions: that freedom can be private, that the self can be pure, that every wound becomes wisdom, or that contact guarantees communion. Music does not rescue us from these limits, but it gives them form, and form is no small gift. It allows us to remain before complexity without surrendering either to chaos or simplification; to hear conflict without mistaking it for meaninglessness; to recognize that a phrase may be interrupted and still continue, that an inherited theme may be transformed, and that a solitary voice can enter a large room and alter the quality of its silence.

At the beginning of every concert, the oboe gives the A again. The gesture is practical and almost ordinary, yet it contains the season in miniature: a single voice sounds, others answer, and agreement emerges without the erasure of difference.