Before 2014, catch up on the best of 2013. For the next few weeks, we'll be re-posting a selection of our most thought-provoking pieces of the year.

In late June, the Nashville Symphony Orchestra came within days of foreclosure on its concert hall, an imposing neoclassical structure that opened in 2006. Designed by a national architecture firm that specializes in faux-historical buildings, and costing $123.5 million, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, with its massive columns and impressive portico, was meant to give one of this country’s finest regional orchestras cultural and civic gravitas. But in March, leaders of the institution decided that they could no longer afford the interest rates on a letter of credit, and effectively threatened to default on their mortgage. A confidential agreement, brokered by wealthy symphony supporters, saved the orchestra from homelessness, but the situation remains bleak. In recent years, the Nashville Symphony has been running deficits of $10 to $20 million a year, and a contract with the musicians is about to expire. If recent history is any guide, negotiations will be complex and rancorous.

It has been a dark few years for this country’s orchestras. In the past season, a bitter strike in San Francisco and a lockout in Minneapolis led to cascading cancellations, including of the San Francisco Symphony’s East Coast tour. Since the economic crisis of 2008, bankruptcies have afflicted orchestras around the country, leading to the closure of the Honolulu, Syracuse, and Albuquerque symphonies, and in April 2011 came the stunning news that one of the country’s “Big Five,” the Philadelphia Orchestra, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Some of those groups reorganized, or opened in new forms, and Philadelphia emerged from bankruptcy in July 2012 with a hiring freeze, ten fewer players, and a 15 percent pay cut for the remaining ones.

No surprise, then, that many of the attendees at the recent annual meeting of the League of American Orchestras seemed in the grip of a strange mania, a mix of bitter gloom and hysterical optimism. The League, made up of orchestra managers and wealthy donors and board types, does not like bad news, and members tend to blame problems on the economy or on their musicians and the union that represents them. Not all orchestras are in dire straits, but all of them face roughly the same cultural and economic challenges, made painfully clear in the years since the economic crash of 2008. So the mood in St. Louis oscillated wildly between a counterfactual conviction that orchestras are too vitally necessary to civic life to disappear and a Cassandra-like compulsion for ineffectual truth-telling.

American orchestras, said Jesse Rosen, the League’s president, in his keynote address, have had “more than our usual share of strikes, lockouts, and bankruptcies,” and “this discord takes a heavy toll on the reputation of our entire community.” But the field is beginning to reverse “the deficit trend line,” and many groups are having a real social impact in their communities: in Stockton the symphony is working with youth to quell gang violence, and in Cleveland, whose orchestra was once led by the mandarin George Szell, the musicians have started a series at the Happy Dog Bar. Orchestras, argued Rosen, are finally grappling with big issues, including “the threshold of what we mean by diversity,” and are contemplating radical new definitions of purpose: “Maybe the concert is not what it’s ultimately about.”

If all of this sounds familiar, perhaps that is because the theme of the League’s meeting—“Reimagining 2023”—coincided with the twenty-year anniversary of its controversial and much-derided report “Americanizing the American Orchestra,” a document that grappled with the same problems and offered much the same solution: a future in which the orchestra was redefined more as a social- and community-services organization than a musical one. In 1993, cultural diversity was promoted as a primary goal of orchestra activity, from hiring musicians (despite the near universal use of blind auditions) to repertory choice and boardroom and executive leadership. Orchestras were encouraged—some would say strong-armed—to think about their community’s needs, not their traditional role as custodians of a musical tradition.