What happens when ‘Star Wars’ replaces Mozart?

“Star Wars” fans take photos with people in costumes at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh, where the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra performed a live soundtrack for “The Empire Strikes Back,” May 2, 2026. Live soundtrack performances, one conductor said, are going to “become an expected part of an orchestra‘s offerings, rather than being viewed as a special or outlying concert event.” (Nate Smallwood/The New York Times)

By SOPAN DEB

This summer, plenty of familiar scores will be heard at the biggest orchestras in the country. Of course, there will be symphonies by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Gustav Mahler. But even more famous, perhaps, will be the soundtracks for “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars.”

What used to be a novelty has now become a core staple of symphonic programming in the United States: live soundtracks, performances in which an orchestra plays while a movie screens overhead. As the classical music industry grapples with declining cultural relevance and mounting financial challenges, an evening of “How to Train Your Dragon” is no longer inconceivable.

Orchestra administrators say the programming shift attracts audiences that might not otherwise come to a typical concert. And because of technological advances, there are more films available for programming than ever. Melia Tourangeau, the president and chief executive of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, said in an interview that live soundtrack shows are the ensemble’s “fastest-growing product line.”

Still, there have been grumbles about the artistic merit of these concerts.

“Trying to get people to go to the symphony by presenting something that’s more familiar is not necessarily a bad thing,” Evan Shinners, a musician and the host of the podcast “W.T.F. Bach,” said in an interview. “It’s just not an effective thing.”

“Despite how lovely film music can be, it’s not classical music,” he added. “It just happens to be playable by the orchestra. What you do when you do present film music in an orchestra is, you reinforce people’s love for films. You don’t cause them to come back to want to hear Beethoven.”

In the early 2010s, the Philadelphia Orchestra programmed one live soundtrack concert per season. In the last decade, it has typically done three. The Pittsburgh Symphony used to do three per season; now, it is doing five.

The Minnesota Orchestra is performing seven soundtracks next season, including “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (by John Williams), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (by Bernard Herrmann) and “Home Alone” (also by Williams). That is almost double the number a decade ago. On average, 36% of film concert attendees are taking in a symphony concert for the first time, the orchestra said.

“The bottom line is that it’s an income generator, and it also brings in new audiences into the concert hall, which orchestras are always trying to accomplish,” said Sarah Hicks, the principal conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Live at Orchestra Hall, a series focused on popular music that includes film concerts. The ensemble has found that 38% of those who attend the live soundtrack performances purchase ticket packages that include at least two other programs.

Performances like this have been around for decades, though it used to be much harder to strip the music out of films. Sergei Eisenstein’s battle film “Alexander Nevsky,” scored by Sergei Prokofiev, was performed by the National Symphony Orchestra in 1989 at Wolf Trap in Virginia. The next year, the ensemble accompanied another Eisenstein-Prokofiev film, “Ivan the Terrible.” Around that time, some orchestras presented “Bugs Bunny on Broadway,” a concert musical starring the famed cartoon rabbit.

There is also a long tradition of classical composers, like Prokofiev, writing film scores: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the Viennese prodigy who penned many hit operas before fleeing Nazi rule and hitting it big in Hollywood, or Franz Waxman, the German composer who won two Oscars in the 1950s for “Sunset Boulevard” and “A Place in the Sun.” And film music has made its way into the concert hall; Prokofiev reworked “Nevsky” as a cantata, and Williams has regularly conducted suites based on his soundtracks.

In some ways, film scores can be more challenging than traditional symphonic works. Musicians typically have familiarity with the classics, having played them for many years, as opposed to the underscoring for the snowball fight in “Elf.”

During performances, orchestra musicians often wear ear pieces to monitor a click track, since the score needs to match the film exactly. (For older movies, there was an analog clock to synchronize the music.) There is “no margin for error,” said Bill Buchman, a bassoonist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which 20 years ago performed music for Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights” and some film excerpts but has programmed four full-length movies this season. And the scores can be technically difficult, too, while requiring a different sort of endurance; soundtracks aren’t recorded all at once, but in snippets.

“The vast majority of them were not intended to be performed live along with a screening of the movie,” Buchman said. “They were written to be recorded on a soundstage, and you had a chance to go back and do retakes of things that didn’t quite go right. Or they even had a chance in the editing room to slow things down, speed things up or cut things in order to make it fit with what they needed for the movie.”

Although live soundtrack performances bring in much-needed revenue for orchestras across the country, some, particularly the musicians, question whether the concerts devalue their art form.

“I’ll be perfectly honest,” said Ryan Fleur, the president and CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra. “We have some musicians that feel very strongly that this wasn’t the reason that they went to conservatory.”

Jim Nova, a trombonist with the Pittsburgh Symphony, said of film scores, “I don’t think anyone is as enthusiastic as I am. I mean, I love this music.”

“I have friends who live in Los Angeles who have played on a lot of film scores, and they say that film scoring is like 95% boredom and 5% terror,” Nova said. “You’ll be plugging along playing something, and it’s not really that hard, and then you turn the page and there’s something that’s basically almost unplayable.”

Hicks said that there used to be a “certain resistance” to performing live soundtracks because the musicians weren’t trained for them.

“There was some sort of attitude,” she said, “that soundtracks and score music was somehow lesser and orchestras still do have this curatorial responsibility to perform the great works of art.”

Some of the difference in opinion is generational. Younger musicians have grown up with these concerts and expect to perform them. “Half the brass players probably in the world would credit their desire to play trumpet, trombone and French horn to the ‘Star Wars’ soundtrack,” said Ben Dettelback, a 28-year-old trombonist in the Syracuse Orchestra. “You just listen to any John Williams. That’s real music.”

If there is any — to use “Star Wars” parlance — rebellion against film scores brewing among musicians, it may be futile. Live soundtrack concerts are reliable sellers, and there is now an industry that facilitates these shows by securing rights, creating orchestrations and printing sheet music.

Film performances, Hicks said, are going to “become an expected part of an orchestra’s offerings, rather than being viewed as a special or outlying concert event.”

In one sign of that future, excerpts from “The Imperial March” (Darth Vader’s theme in “Star Wars”) and selections from “Harry Potter” are beginning to pop up in some orchestra auditions. The reason, Nova said, is “because you’re much more likely to play those things nowadays in various concerts than you are to play some of the really heavy classical pieces.”