On Monday, the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic gathered at the Jesus Christus Kirche, in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem, to pick a new chief conductor. Unlike most ensembles of its kind, the Philharmonic is a self-governing organization, and has been since its founding, in 1882. No orchestra has a more august reputation: Berlin’s immensely distinguished roster of resident maestros includes Hans von Bülow, Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado, and, since 2002, Simon Rattle, who will step aside in 2018. The musicians chose a portentous site for their meeting: Martin Niemöller preached at the Jesus Christus Kirche during the Nazi era, and the Philharmonic has long used the church as a recording venue. A gaggle of TV crews awaited the decision outside. The Berliners’ voting process is often compared to the papal conclave, with the requisite references to black and white smoke.

The classical-music world dutifully went bananas. “#Berlinerphilharmoniker” became a trending topic on German Twitter, causing the talk-show host Harald Schmidt, the “German David Letterman,” to comment that “apparently there is still hope for this country.” Tension built, rumors spread. A fake tweet, purporting to be from the Philharmonic horn player Sarah Willis, pronounced the young Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons the victor, and for a few long minutes Bostonians fell into despair. Last fall, amid much fanfare, Nelsons became the music director of the Boston Symphony; the idea that he would abscond to Berlin was traumatic, particularly since Boston is still recovering from the abbreviated regime of James Levine. Others found the Nelsons story worthy of celebration. The Twitter accounts of the pianist Lang Lang and of the cellist Alban Gerhardt issued congratulations, and the British magazine The Gramophone managed to rush a story online before the Philharmonic corrected the record. Hours passed, and the mood turned silly. One jokester announced the selection of Nigel from the Muppets. Kitty pictures filled the void. Finally, a virtual puff of black smoke went up: the orchestra had been unable to reach a decision, and would hold another election within a year. “Berliner Failharmoniker,” the composer-provocateur Johannes Kreidler quipped.

What happened in Dahlem? German critics, such as Manuel Brug and Axel Brüggemann, offer a few clues. Evidently, one bloc of players favored Christian Thielemann, the formidable Berlin-born conductor who leans musically to the center and politically to the right. Others found Thielemann unsympathetic. The quest for an alternative was hampered by the fact that several plausible candidates—Mariss Jansons, Gustavo Dudamel, and, not least, Nelsons—had seemingly removed themselves from contention by making firm commitments elsewhere.

As the frenzy mounted, I had a heretical thought: What difference does it make? The Berlin Philharmonic is unquestionably a magnificent organism—its rendition of the “St. Matthew Passion” last fall testified to its ability to generate awe—but the idea that its chief conductor is the Pope of classical music is a relic of the Karajan cult. While its bass-heavy sound remains unmistakable, the orchestra’s profile has become incrementally more interchangeable with that of other world-class ensembles. Furthermore, there are signs of creeping conservatism. If the Philharmonic were, indeed, the world’s finest orchestra, one would expect to hear fewer reports of behind-the-scenes grumbling about new music. In my mind, a great orchestra must demonstrate technical finesse and intellectual adventure in equal measure: it must expand the repertory, not simply reproduce it in high style.

Brüggemann, in a tart commentary, criticizes the selection process as a display in vanity: the Berliners expect high-level conductors to wait giddily by the phone, prepared to jettison all prior plans for the sake of the supreme honor of occupying Karajan’s throne. Whatever happened on Monday, some of the old allure has clearly dissipated. According to Brüggemann, the orchestra has been undergoing a quiet identity crisis, and a single hiring decision won’t resolve the issue: “The designation of a Messiah in the form of a superstar conductor will certainly not bring about the renewal of the Berlin Philharmonic.”

To be sure, the same could be said of many orchestras. The New York Philharmonic, whose lineage of leaders includes Mahler, Toscanini, Bernstein, and Boulez, is also going through the familiar Kabuki of a music-director search: names are bandied about, odds are taken, critics fantasize and fret. Matthew VanBesien, the orchestra’s president, told the Times that he is searching for a conductor who displays “superb and inspiring musicianship” and who also articulates a “compelling and progressive vision for a twenty-first-century orchestra.” In other words, the Philharmonic is awaiting the same Messiah who failed to descend upon Berlin.

Not the least of the challenges that classical music faces is the increasingly unworkable celebrity-maestro model—a twentieth-century mutation, stemming from a disproportionate emphasis on the music of prior eras. It is fundamentally irrational for musicians to play the same passel of pieces over and over. Conductors serve to generate the illusion of novelty: as Theodor W. Adorno wrote, in his “Introduction to the Sociology of Music,” the maestro “acts as if he were creating the work here and now.” That top-tier conductors are almost always men is less an indication of institutional misogyny—though that certainly exists—than an inevitable consequence of the play-acting ritual: because the canonical composers are entirely male, so are their stand-ins. The modern orchestra concert is not entirely unrelated to the spectacle of a Civil War reënactment.

If orchestra schedules were tilted toward living composers, there would be less of a need for podium prestidigitation. (I don’t deny that the magic can be real: Furtwängler’s recordings with Berlin are soul-shaking documents, and even as a prematurely jaded teen-ager I could feel the Bernstein spell.) No longer obligated to perform a mass séance night after night, conductors could adopt the role of organizer, instigator, mediator—a role that Alan Gilbert, in New York, has been playing expertly. Likewise, if opera houses were to embrace more contemporary work, there would be less pressure on directors to reinvent “Figaro” and “Tosca.” Classical music is singular among major art forms in its bondage to the past. Imagine the condition of Broadway if it were restricted to dead playwrights, or of the publishing business if it endlessly repackaged Dickens.

Perhaps the Berlin Philharmonic’s decision will be made easier if the orchestra realizes that whoever is chosen will almost certainly have little effect on the broader course of musical history. Big-league orchestras are not, by and large, where the news is being made, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking at the media. In coming weeks on these shores, the future is more likely to be found at the Talea Ensemble’s two-concert survey of works by the antic-minded Austrian composer Clemens Gadenstätter, in late May; or at Wasteland LA’s presentation of music by the bristling British avant-gardist Richard Barrett; or at Kate Soper’s collaboration with the Seattle Modern Orchestra, in early June; or at this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival, which will unleash pieces by the black-metal-influenced French composer Raphaël Cendo and by the hobo visionary Harry Partch. It was Partch who said, “There is, thank God, a large segment of our population that never heard of J. S. Bach.” No one has yet founded an orchestra on that principle.