Some concerts were presented outdoors, among the cherry blossoms of the Tidal Basin. Illustration by Édith Carron

“I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty”: John F. Kennedy’s words, carved in the white marble cliffs of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C., have always seemed more wistful than hopeful. These days, with brutality and ugliness in the ascendant, they have a critical edge. On a recent visit to Washington, I often had the sense that the graven voices of the memorials were speaking in admonishing tones. Jefferson: “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” F.D.R.: “We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.” Kennedy, again: “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.”

I was in town for the first edition of the Shift Festival, a convocation of four American orchestras, which was presented by the Kennedy Center and Washington Performing Arts, with events unfolding at the center and at other venues around the city. No evident political agenda motivated the festival, and yet the proceedings couldn’t help colliding with the crises of the day. Whenever the National Endowment for the Arts was mentioned at one of the Kennedy Center concerts—Shift was funded partly by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which, in turn, relies on the N.E.A.—raucous cheers went up from the audience. In a speech introducing a performance by the Boulder Philharmonic, Jared Polis, a Democratic congressman from Colorado, brought up the Republican plan to eliminate the N.E.A., triggering loud boos.

Such hints of partisanship may have made some participants nervous—classical-music institutions tend to flee from politics, as from everything else current—but to my mind they only assisted in the festival’s aim, which is to encourage fresh thinking in orchestral programming and presentation. Shift takes inspiration from a defunct Carnegie Hall event, Spring for Music, which, from 2011 to 2014, attracted two dozen orchestras and much offbeat fare to New York City. One trouble with Spring for Music was that the inventiveness of the programs often got swallowed up in Carnegie’s Gilded Age grandeur. At the Kennedy Center, the emphasis on new and native music seemed more pointed, emphasizing connections between allegedly élite institutions and modern life. Thirteen of the fifteen works in the festival were by Americans, most still living. Delegations from the orchestras were able to visit elected officials and demonstrate their public-spiritedness.

I attended the first half of the six-day festival, catching a flurry of events involving the Boulder Philharmonic and the North Carolina Symphony. (The Atlanta Symphony and the Knights, the Brooklyn-based chamber orchestra, came later.) The Boulderites were particularly zealous in challenging traditional concert formats. On a brilliant spring morning, with the cherry blossoms in bloom, ensembles drawn from the orchestra’s ranks—a string quartet, a piano-and-violin duo, a woodwind quintet, and a percussion trio—stationed themselves around the Tidal Basin, within earshot, variously, of F.D.R., Jefferson, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The results were captivating, despite gusts of wind that occasionally sent music stands tumbling. The woodwinds, whose penetrating tones gave them an acoustical advantage, waylaid tourists with the quintet version of Beethoven’s Sextet Opus 71. Staffers were on hand to explain the festival to passersby—the sort of grassroots promotion that has become essential in the classical business.

The Boulder Philharmonic also offered musical nature hikes in Rock Creek Park. Dave Sutherland, a music-loving employee of the Boulder Parks Department, has been leading such walks in recent years, illustrating elements of the orchestra’s programs. (On the occasion of a Boulder performance of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s “Cantus Arcticus,” which features recordings of birdsong, he hosted a bird-watching expedition at a local marsh.) Birds were not yet out in force in Rock Creek Park, but Sutherland’s ebullient lecture, assisted by an MP3 player and portable speakers, gave a sense of how the Boulder orchestra has adapted itself to its home city, which lives much of its life outdoors.

The main Boulder concert, under the direction of Michael Butterman, continued the open-air theme, featuring three recent scores—Stephen Lias’s “All the Songs That Nature Sings,” Jeff Midkiff’s “From the Blue Ridge,” and Steve Heitzeg’s “Ghosts of the Grasslands”—alongside Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.” Of the new works, Midkiff’s has the strongest impact. It is a concerto for mandolin and orchestra, lit up by improvisatory bursts of bluegrass and mountain fiddling. Midkiff, who was once in a bluegrass band, doubled as soloist, and his mellow virtuosity elicited youthful yelps from the upper galleries of the hall: Midkiff also teaches music at Patrick Henry High School, in Roanoke, Virginia, and the previous evening his students had given a committed performance on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage.

American orchestras are increasingly enamored of the idea that concerts must be dressed up with visual and theatrical elements—that audiences can no longer be trusted simply to sit and listen. Thus, Lias’s lushly orchestrated, John Williams-tinged score was joined to a Rocky Mountains slide show, and “Appalachian Spring” accompanied a performance by the Frequent Flyers, an aerial dance troupe from Boulder. The sight of people twirling in midair far above the stage was, for me, more terrifying than entertaining, and Copland’s spare, spacious masterpiece felt incidental to the spectacle. Still, the gusto of the Boulder campaign was hard to resist. Let’s hope that a few of the politicians who will decide the fate of the N.E.A. were present.

The North Carolina Symphony, led by Grant Llewellyn, proffered a focussed tribute to its home state. Two works by the late Robert Ward, a longtime resident, framed pieces by younger composers with Carolina connections: Mason Bates’s “Rusty Air in Carolina,” Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “Hiraeth,” and Caroline Shaw’s violin concerto, “Lo.” Shaw’s score left the deepest impression. She won a Pulitzer Prize four years ago, for her capricious, beguiling “Partita for 8 Voices.” “Lo,” her first big orchestral statement, is even more substantial. Mercurial in structure, it includes semi-improvised sections for soloist and ensemble alike. (Shaw played the solo part herself, with rich tone and agile technique.) A passage in which the brass sustain glowing tones over a swarm of pizzicato felt like the sonic double of a sultry summer night.

Although Washington’s largest musical organizations—the National Symphony and Washington National Opera—fall short of the international top tier, the city has long been a paradise for chamber music. I grew up there, and learned the chamber repertory in such intimate, welcoming venues as Dumbarton Oaks, the Library of Congress, and the Phillips Collection. A newer addition to the scene is the PostClassical Ensemble, which, since 2003, has been presenting thematic programs in halls around town. Before Shift began, I went to the Harman Center for the Arts to attend a PostClassical event entitled “Music Under Stalin: The Shostakovich-Weinberg Connection.” The group’s music director is Angel Gil-Ordóñez; its executive director is the scholar-impresario Joseph Horowitz, who, in the nineties, staged meaty festival weekends with the late, lamented Brooklyn Philharmonic.

PostClassical also experiments with alternative formats. “Music Under Stalin” included a “theatrical interlude” in which the actor Edward Gero delivered monologues that evoked scenes from Shostakovich’s tormented life. I found these unpersuasive: Gero failed to capture the composer’s skittish manner, and the texts came from “Testimony,” the memoir dubiously attributed to Shostakovich. Other Shostakovich items on the program were invigorating. Alexander Toradze cavorted thunderously through the First Piano Concerto, and Gil-Ordóñez led a vital rendition of the Eighth Quartet, in the string-orchestra arrangement by Rudolf Barshai.