Opinion: How to Define Classical Music in Our Rapidly Evolving World? – symphony.org

Matthew Aucoin. Photo courtesy of John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
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In the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic, Matthew Aucoin writes, “I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, a term that’s routinely applied to radically different idioms across more than 1,000 years of musical history. Within this huge array, you’ll find the engulfing sonorities of William Byrd’s choral music; the intimate revelations, too private for words, in chamber works by Franz Schubert and Anton Webern; the majestic topography of Jean Sibelius’s orchestral landscapes; and, more recently, a multitude of works by composers as different from one another as Chaya Czernowin, Tyshawn Sorey, and Thomas Adès. The unruly and elusive entity known as classical music does not sound like any one thing, and the sheer abundance of the tradition might invite the conclusion that trying to define it at all is a hopeless exercise. But that would be a mistake, especially at this moment. Like every other sector of cultural life, classical music has been roiled over the past decade by intense debates … The stakes of these discussions … have at times felt existential … What is classical music, whom is it for, and what about it is worth defending?”
, the award-winning publication of the League of American Orchestras, discusses issues critical to the orchestra community and communicates to the American public the value and importance of orchestras and the music they perform.

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