It was like clockwork. Someone writing in The New York Times would refer to the Big Five American orchestras: the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. And within hours, Peter Pastreich, the respected executive director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1978 to 1999, would beard The Times’s overseer of classical music — at the time, me — by telephone or e-mail, complaining that the term Big Five had long since outlived whatever usefulness it may once have had.

The Times was by no means alone in using it. At least by the mid-1960s, soon after I had started to follow classical music, the term had become common coin in discussions of the American orchestral scene. And it proved remarkably persistent, even as the mighty handful started to suffer setbacks and other orchestras grew in budget and artistic stature, notably the St. Louis Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony.

Ernest Fleischmann, executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1969 to 1998, argued for recognition of a big six. And the San Francisco Symphony, celebrating its centennial in the 2011-12 season under Mr. Pastreich’s successor, Brent Assink, found a creative way to imply the existence of a big seven if not proclaim it, presenting each of the Big Five and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in brief residencies at its home, Davies Symphony Hall.

Plausible notions both, though neither caught on. Yet it is true that while the idea of the Big Five may still exist in the public imagination, you no longer hear talk of it in the profession except from Big Five members, when, occasionally, they find it useful.