Creativity Quote by Skitch Henderson

Skitch Henderson’s line lands like a backstage aside delivered with a raised eyebrow: “Symphonic orchestras have almost become a glut in the market.” Coming from a working musician and conductor, it’s not an anti-art sneer so much as a blunt read of supply, attention, and prestige. He borrows the cold language of commerce to puncture the warm halo we like to wrap around “the symphony,” treating orchestras not as sacred institutions but as competing products fighting for the same shrinking shelf space.

The intent is practical: if everyone has an orchestra, an orchestra stops being special. Postwar America saw a boom in civic cultural infrastructure - new halls, new ensembles, new donors chasing cultural legitimacy. Henderson’s subtext is that this growth can outpace demand: audiences fragment, budgets thin, and the ecosystem starts to reward branding over musicianship. “Almost become” matters; he’s not declaring collapse, he’s warning about saturation and the quiet desperation it breeds.

There’s also a performer’s realism underneath. Orchestras don’t just compete with each other; they compete with television, recordings, Broadway, and the entire attention economy. Henderson, who moved fluidly between “high” and popular forms, is implicitly arguing for adaptability: programming that meets listeners where they are, and institutions that stop assuming reverence will pay the bills.

The line works because it flips the usual moral framing. Instead of lamenting “declining culture,” it diagnoses a market problem - a provocative way of saying the symphony’s biggest threat might be its own proliferation.