Trump is killing the National Symphony Orchestra

There have been countless casualties at the hands of the Trump administration, but the National  Symphony Orchestra has got to be one of the strangest. The president declared himself “acting chairman” of the Kennedy Center last February, then promptly announced that the Center would be closed for two years for renovations. This came as a shock to all the arts organizations based in the Kennedy Center, prompting the Artistic Advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra, Ben Folds, to immediately step down. Not long after, Executive Director Jean Davidson followed in the composer’s footsteps. As Folds wrote recently, “Any artist such as myself who associated with the newly politicized Kennedy Center risked being used as a political pawn, implicitly siding with the POTUS’s politics by association.”

It’s been over a year since Trump’s initial takeover—long enough for Trump to rename it the “Trump-Kennedy Center” and then, as of last week, have that name overruled in court due to not getting congressional approval—but the NSO remains in dire straits. According to an open letter posted on Instagram by Folds earlier this week, “Our National Symphony Orchestra is in real trouble – it may not survive. There is currently no plan or solution in sight to save the organization.” That’s why he wrote the letter in the first place: in the hopes of drumming up “overwhelming public support,” which he believes “can turn the tide.” 

“The NSO doesn’t even know if it has a home, given the previously announced two-year closure of the Kennedy Center,” Folds continued. “This is a very bad sign. Further, the tools for survival are entangled in the Kennedy Center’s legal and financial troubles. […] The NSO doesn’t have the luxury of time as it’s been suffocated by the financial turmoil that resulted from the presidential takeover.”

Folds then listed out actions the everyday citizen can take to help save the NSO, including following @nso_musicians on Instagram, vocally and publicly supporting the arts and musicians, donating to the NSO, and calling congresspeople to demand safeguards be put in place to prevent this kind of takeover from happening again to any other arts institution. “I’ve been saying for years that the symphony orchestra was itself a symbol of civilization,” Folds wrote. “When the symphony erodes, that’s the sounding of an alarm for the health of actual civilization.” In other words, the canary in the coal is dying. We need to save it, and fast.

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