Wealth & Money Quote by Graeme Murphy

Scarcity becomes an aesthetic, not a handicap. Graeme Murphy is basically admitting the budget, then refusing to let the audience feel it. The line is half practical confession, half artistic manifesto: if you cannot buy the full orchestra, you design the illusion of one. “Sound rich and symphonic” signals a particular kind of ambition - not merely making do, but making it feel expansive, lush, high-stakes. That’s a dancer’s logic applied to music: the body can suggest a whole world with limited resources, and the score can do the same.

The key move is in “the nature of the instrumentation and the people we work with.” Murphy shifts attention from money to method and relationships. Instrumentation becomes choreography by other means: selecting timbres that bloom, layering textures to imply scale, using fewer players to create a fuller sonic architecture. It’s an argument for craft over capital, but it’s also a quiet flex. The “people” are collaborators with enough virtuosity and ingenuity to thicken the sound, to play like an ensemble larger than the headcount.

The subtext is about cultural economics. “Big symphonies” function as a prestige object, a shorthand for institutional power and old-world legitimacy. Murphy’s phrasing pushes back on that hierarchy: contemporary performance can borrow the emotional payload of the symphonic tradition without purchasing the entire apparatus. It’s survival strategy in the arts framed as creativity, a reminder that constraint doesn’t just limit a production - it can define its signature.