When the Delaware Symphony Orchestra’s earliest incarnation began in the early 1900s, America was in the midst of profound change.

Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House, the Wright brothers were testing fragile machines in North Carolina, and the du Pont’s mills and factories along the Brandywine were humming with the sound of modern industry. In those years, optimism and invention were in the air, and in Wilmington a group of musicians gathered at Hagley’s community house and Swamp Hall to create something that would outlast them all: an orchestra.

There is something revealing about the fact that, in an age of such disruption, people still felt compelled to make music together. They weren’t simply filling their evenings with diversion. They were building a community. Music, then a

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