L'Orchestre du Nouveau Monde was still playing when the gas canisters landed in double-bass cases during last week's French student protests. That image tells you everything about what co-founder Étienne Jarrier and his colleagues have built: an orchestra that judges a performance's success not by the accuracy of its notes but by its consciousness-raising impact. Their manifesto commits them to being anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, environmentalist, and dedicated to de-growth — a set of positions deliberately provocative to both the political mainstream and to classical music's institutional culture. The ONM performs La Marseillaise alongside music from The Avengers alongside Dvořák's New World Symphony alongside protest songs, not in hermetically sealed concert halls optimized for perfect acoustics, but at Place de la République, outside television studios, at the foot of glaciers. They want audiences to sing, move, and shout. This is not a fringe curiosity: it is a coherent aesthetic and political philosophy that takes classical music's own history seriously enough to refuse its present comforts. The lineage the ONM inherits is specific and under-discussed. Two British orchestras founded in 1969 and 1970 did something structurally similar. The Scratch Orchestra, co-founded by Cornelius Cardew, Howard Skempton, and Michael Parsons, built its aesthetic around radical inclusion — music open to participants of all abilities, formalized in The Great Learning, based on Confucian texts, whose notation enacted its politics. The Scratchers played the Proms in 1972 before disbanding in 1974 as Cardew's leftwing activism pulled the project toward pure politics. The Portsmouth Sinfonia — which included Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno, and Michael Nyman — took a different angle: virtuosic incompetence as critique, playing the classical repertoire on instruments none of them could actually play. The deliberate cacophony reached number 38 in the UK charts in 1981 with Classical Muddly. The ONM is more serious than the Portsmouth Sinfonia's joyful chaos, and more directly political than the Scratch Orchestra's aesthetic radicalism ever fully became. What they share with both predecessors is the refusal to treat the concert hall as a neutral space. Today's UK ecosystem includes analogues — the Multi-Story Orchestra in Peckham, the National Open Youth Orchestra, RNS Moves, Paraorchestra, and Contemporary Music for All — all organizations where social activism meets orchestral practice, though none quite match the ONM's appetite for direct action. The ONM's manifesto contains the clue to why this matters beyond novelty: they want classical music to be reconnected to reality. The implicit argument is that classical music's self-inflicted irrelevance in recent decades comes from pretending the political conditions of its creation — the courts of Vienna, the concert halls of Soviet Russia — were incidental rather than constitutive. You cannot inherit Beethoven or Shostakovich while disavowing the power structures that produced them. The ONM's position is not a break from classical music's tradition; it is a demand that the tradition be read honestly. That demand has a cost. The ONM judges performance quality by political impact rather than execution, which is a genuinely high-risk aesthetic bet — it works when the context is charged (student protests, glacier vigils) and risks incoherence when the cause is diffuse. There is also a tension, unresolved in the article, between the orchestra's anti-capitalist politics and the institutional infrastructure any ensemble requires to survive. The Scratch Orchestra faced exactly this tension and disbanded. Whether the ONM has found a more durable structure remains to be seen. For now, the image stands: the last musicians playing as tear gas fills double-bass cases. Classical music has not often looked like that. Whether it should look like that more often is the question the ONM is forcing the form to answer.
