When It’s Time to Rename Your Orchestra

When the orchestra Symphoria looked to connect with the rising fortunes of its hometown of Syracuse, NY, the management changed its name to the Syracuse Orchestra. The Symphony Silicon Valley promoted its local pride by becoming Symphony San Jose. And the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra put more emphasis on the Garden State by dropping “Orchestra” from its name.

Since the start of this decade, the orchestra field has seen a spurt of renaming and rebranding projects, often undertaken to emphasize hometown or home-state pride. But an opposite impulse has also played out, with the embrace of names that focus on an emotional or evocative meaning more than geography.

The Stamford Symphony became Orchestra Lumos, deemphasizing its home base as it expanded across Connecticut’s Fairfield County. The Montclair Orchestra in New Jersey followed a similar impulse to become the APEX Ensemble. And the Portland Columbia Symphony Orchestra became Orchestra Nova Northwest to highlight its broad programming ideals and regional identity.

“A name change makes sense if who you are and who you’re becoming is out of sync with your name,” says Roger Sametz, the CEO of Sametz Blackstone Associates, a Boston-based branding and strategic communications agency that advised the orchestras of New Jersey and Stamford on their recent rebranding. “It could be out of sync with audience expectations. Or it could be that your market is just changing.

But, Sametz cautions, “If there isn’t one of those motivating factors, then it generally becomes a vanity project.”

And change is hard, as the maxim goes. When Lincoln Center dropped the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra brand after half a century in 2022, as part of a revamp of its summer programming, some critics worried that the center was abandoning its historic mission and repertoire. Writing in Vulture in May 2023, Justin Davidson lamented that the shift projected “a fustiness that Mozart presumably embodies and now needs to be cleansed. The rebranding is not just about new possibilities—it’s a deliberate de-emphasizing of a history that many people treasure.”

With the rollout of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center this summer, a promotional campaign stressed its continuity with the prior ensemble, touting a “New Name, Same Iconic Orchestra” tagline and displaying photos of familiar musicians alongside their energetic new music director, Jonathon Heyward.

Heyward sees the change in nomenclature as a way of rooting the orchestra’s traditions in present-day New York. “Whilst I can sympathize that potential change can look scary—particularly when you don’t know what the [new] name or the artistic output is going to be—I hope that it becomes very clear that, even within my first season, you see the likes of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart scattered throughout the entire programming,” he tells Symphony.

The new name was suggested by a musician in the orchestra. “There were quite a few wonderful recommendations,” Heyward notes. “But the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center puts the musicians first—literally. To be able to illustrate ourselves as being part of the community was a huge importance.”

There is also a truth-in-advertising argument: the namesake composer had not dominated Mostly Mozart’s orchestral programs for many years. Even so, its advocates noted that the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra typically offered  its own classical programming for around four weeks each summer. In its debut season as the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, the ensemble gave 13 concerts over three weeks as part of the far more eclectic Summer for the City festival.

Changing Hometown Fortunes

When Symphoria was founded in the ashes of the bankrupt Syracuse Symphony Orchestra in 2011, its name was a play on “euphoria,” and according to Executive Director Pamela Murchison, was meant to signify “that we weren’t going to do things the way they’ve always been done and that we are really committed to innovation.” But a few years after the name was changed to Symphoria, strategic planning meetings and discussions with marketing and public relations consultants indicated that the orchestra suffered from low visibility in the region.

That low recognition factor was not a favorable position at a time when Syracuse’s fortunes were on a potentially dramatic upswing, with a $100 billion Micron Technology computer chip plant slated for the city’s northern suburbs. “The time felt right for us,” says Murchison. “And [the new name] is just clear: This is what we are. We are the orchestra for Syracuse. People loved Symphoria, but it required explanation for what it was.”

After deciding on The Syracuse Orchestra, Murchison’s team informed partners and key donors while seeking to avoid leaking the change to the public. The new name was unveiled at a concert last February, timed with a feature article in the Syracuse Post-Standard. “We kept people in the know as much as we could and then made it a really big reveal,” says Murchison. “That made it a good news story for us.”

On the other side of the country, a changing business climate similarly influenced Symphony Silicon Valley’s decision to change its name to Symphony San Jose in 2021. Silicon Valley had been losing its sheen, as big tech’s business practices have come under scrutiny and the locale had been linked to everything from “tech bro” culture to a satirical HBO series.

“When my predecessors formed the group, they were probably keeping an eye on the coattails of the tech industry and seeing if we could get the support of the Apples and the Facebooks and the Googles,” says Executive Artistic Director Robert Massey. But support from those nearby companies largely failed to materialize, and San Jose, meanwhile, enjoyed a surge of civic pride as its population ballooned to over a million residents.

The symphony’s board wanted to emphasize community spirit, says Massey, who arrived in 2022. “They were some of the first people to say, ‘Look, we are San Jose’s orchestra. San Jose is the tenth largest city in the country. Why don’t we have that in our name?’” The same year, the Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce became the San Jose Chamber of Commerce.

At first, the orchestra’s new name was simply superimposed onto the old logo, Massey recalls, “which kind of looked like a combination of Schoolhouse Rock and the AC/DC font.” The new logo followed in 2023. “You can’t rush the process,” Massey says. “My marketing director and I could have come up with the greatest logo in the world, but if we had just slapped it out there it would have been a failure. We really had to involve the right people at the right steps of the way.”

Geographic or Evocative?

There are tradeoffs between geocentric names and those with a more conceptual bent, says Sametz, the branding strategist. “A literal or geographic name is a lot easier and cheaper to get out there. [But] it’s certainly not going to be evocative, and it’s harder to invest it with any kind of storytelling or emotional meaning.” With a non-geographic name, “you must have more of a transition strategy. But once you get it out there, it means much more, and it’s much more proprietary.”

In 2022, Sametz Blackstone advised the Stamford Symphony on its name change to Orchestra Lumos. The board and staff, led by President and CEO Russell Jones, recognized that more than half of their audience—and 90 percent of donors—originates from outside of Stamford’s city limits. As the orchestra expanded its educational and community programs across Fairfield County, it became clear that the Stamford brand wasn’t sufficiently broad.

“As we amended our mission, the Stamford Symphony brand didn’t make sense anymore, because we were now everybody’s orchestra, especially in locations such as Westport, Darien, and New Canaan,” says Jones. “We decided that we had to change.”

But the broader reach did not automatically stimulate the renaming process. “We thought the name would pop out and it would be obvious,” Jones continues. “It actually didn’t. It was painstaking and involved brainstorming. It was, ‘Everybody go away with a blank piece of paper and write down ten names.’ But we got there. We coalesced unanimously around a new name.”

After considering fabricated names such as “Accentia,” the leadership chose the Latin term for light along with a yellow-on-green logo that suggests a cross between the “CBS Sunday Morning” logo and a compass (which suggests that the organization is expanding its bearings). Sametz presented it to board members and even Stamford’s mayor, provoking some initial pushback. “You don’t want this to be a marketing-only project, because it will fail,” Sametz says of transition strategies. “Especially if the staff is small, you need to train the board, so you have ambassadors who are fluent and out there to make it work. You’re not going to buy it all in advertising.”

The Portland Columbia Symphony Orchestra split the difference—of geography versus emotional meaning—when it renamed itself Orchestra Nova Northwest this past spring. “You had two geographical signifiers and two related adjectives,” says Executive Director Kevin Irving. “Where does that leave you? Portland Columbia Symphony Orchestra didn’t really say anything, and people just did not know the name. It was seen as a real strategic obstacle to a greater fiscal health and overall longevity.”

After some fits and starts, the orchestra hired the Skylight Collective, a Portland branding agency that helped translate yet-vague ideas into a concrete moniker. Orchestra Nova Northwest is meant to communicate a freshness (the orchestra has a focus on underrepresented composers) and a wider footprint in Portland’s suburbs and nearby Beaverton. “Even though we are based in Portland, our reach is not really Portland-centric,” Irving says. “So having Portland as the focus of the name didn’t really seem to fit anymore.”

Ultimately, it is difficult to place a dollar value on a name change or a rebranding. But a cohesive brand and a simplified name can help cut through the clutter, says Geoff Anderson, the New Jersey Symphony’s vice president of marketing and external affairs. When the New Jersey Symphony dropped “Orchestra” from its name in 2021—along with use of “NJSO”—the balance naturally shifted to the words “New Jersey.”

Anderson offers a quintessential Garden State analogy: that of a driver seeing the orchestra’s billboard on the New Jersey Turnpike. “When someone is driving down the highway at 65 mph, ‘NJSO’ required context and explanation if there was no prior engagement with the brand,” he says. “‘New Jersey Symphony’ provides context, is impressionable as a unique design, and is easy to read at a quick glance.”