Orchestral Programming as Cultural Reclamation

There is a quiet politics to every concert program. The works we choose — and the works we leave out — say something about who we believe belongs in the conversation of serious music.

For most of the orchestral world, that conversation has been overwhelmingly European. The standard repertoire is built on a foundation of Germanic, French, and Russian composition. These are extraordinary works. They deserve their place. But they are not the whole story.

The Gap

When I began programming for the Mesquite Symphony Orchestra, I noticed something that had bothered me for years but that I’d never been in a position to change: Latin American orchestral music was almost entirely absent from mainstream American concert halls. Not because the music didn’t exist — it does, in abundance — but because the infrastructure to discover, license, and perform it was fragmented.

This is part of why FILARMONIKA exists. Publishing is not just about printing notes on a page. It’s about making works findable, performable, and programmable at scale.

What Reclamation Looks Like

Cultural reclamation through programming isn’t about replacing the canon. It’s about expanding it. A concert that pairs Beethoven with Revueltas, or Brahms with Ginastera, doesn’t diminish either composer. It enriches the audience’s understanding of what orchestral music is.

In practical terms, this means:

• Commissioning and premiering works by living Latin American composers
• Reviving forgotten works that fell out of circulation due to publishing gaps
• Contextualizing performances so audiences understand the traditions these works emerge from
• Building catalogs that make it as easy to program a work by Estévez as one by Dvořák

The Long Game

This is generational work. One concert program doesn’t shift a culture. But hundreds of programs, across dozens of orchestras, over a decade — that starts to change what audiences expect, what students study, and what composers aspire to write.

Every time a young musician in Texas encounters a Márquez danzón for the first time, or hears a Villa-Lobos Bachianas in a professional setting, the boundaries of “standard repertoire” stretch a little wider.

That’s the work. It’s slow, and it’s worth doing.