The Detroit Symphony Orchestra is bringing new orchestral music to Music Hall this season, with a program centered on composers with roots in the city. It fits inside a broader push by the DSO to put living voices alongside the standard canon.
The 2025-2026 season includes fifteen works by living composers, among them a world premiere and two DSO co-commissions. A program dedicated to Detroit-connected composers extends that thread directly into the community the orchestra has always claimed as its base.
The DSO makes its home at Orchestra Hall inside the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center. Music Hall carries its own DSO history. Henry Reichhold once bought the building specifically for Detroit Symphony concerts, including the nationwide Ford Sunday Evening Hour broadcasts. The two institutions share a longer story than most audiences have reason to know.
The DSO's composer-in-residence for 2025-2026 is Michael Abels, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose scores for Jordan Peele's Get Out, Us, and Nope and his opera Omar — co-composed with Rhiannon Giddens — put him squarely at the intersection of concert music and contemporary film. His approach is genre-fluid and narrative-driven, which is exactly the posture a concert of Detroit composers tends to demand. The city's musical DNA runs from Motown to techno to jazz to gospel. Composers trained here tend to carry all of it.
Classical Roots has run since 1978. The program exists to document the contributions African American composers and musicians have made to classical music, and it has grown over the decades to include school visits, community events, the African American Composer Residency, and the African American Orchestra Fellowship. The Music Hall program draws on that same institutional seriousness about whose work gets programmed and why.
The DSO's Detroit Neighborhood Initiative co-creates cultural events with community partners and residents. Detroit Harmony commits to providing an instrument and instruction to any city student who wants to learn. A concert of new works by local composers is a reasonable extension of both.
Music Hall's planned expansion will add a concert hall, music academy, recording and dance studios, and a rooftop restaurant, building a full arts campus out of a single downtown landmark. Hosting a DSO program there before the renovation changes what the room is has a certain weight to it.
Tickets and program details at dso.org and musichall.org.
