An orchestra is a group of musicians. A symphony is a piece of music written for one. “Philharmonic” is neither — it is a word in an orchestra’s name, and it tells you nothing about the ensemble. The Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra are the same kind of organisation, the same size, playing the same repertoire to the same standard. Only one of the three words on this page describes a real category, and it is not the one most people are asking about.
The three words at a glance
| Word | What it actually is | From | Tells you about the ensemble? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Orchestra | The ensemble itself — the group of players | Greek orkhēstra, the floor in front of a stage | Yes — it is the thing |
| Symphony | A multi-movement piece of music written for an orchestra | Greek symphōnia, “sounding together” | In a name, no |
| Philharmonic | A name, usually inherited from the society that founded the orchestra | Greek philharmonikos, “music-loving” | No |
| Chamber orchestra | A genuinely smaller orchestra, 15–40 players | Music played in a “chamber” — a room, not a hall | Yes — this one is real |
A symphony is a piece of music, not a group of people
This is the distinction that does real work. A symphony is a composition — an extended piece for orchestra, conventionally in four movements, with a brisk opening, a slow movement, something dance-derived, and a finale. Haydn wrote more than a hundred of them, Mozart forty-one, Beethoven nine. The form settled into that shape in the second half of the eighteenth century and composers have been stretching it ever since. How it differs from the other two things an orchestra plays is a matter of who is on the platform: see symphony vs. concerto vs. sonata.
So a symphony orchestra is an orchestra large enough to play symphonies. It is not a “type” of orchestra in the way a string quartet is a type of ensemble, and it spends plenty of its year on music that is not symphonies at all — concertos, overtures, opera, ballet, film scores and choral works.
The useful way to hold it: the orchestra is who, the symphony is what. An orchestra can play a symphony the way a band can play a song. Neither word is a subset of the other.
Philharmonic means music-loving, and that is the whole of it
The word comes from Greek — philos, loving, and harmonia. It was never a description of an ensemble’s size or instrumentation. It was the name that music-loving societies gave themselves, and those societies are where a lot of today’s orchestras came from.
London’s Royal Philharmonic Society was founded in 1813 to put on concerts. The Philharmonic Society of New York followed in 1842, started by a group of local musicians led by Ureli Corelli Hill, giving a handful of subscription concerts a year from a rented hall. In each case the society was the organisation — the fundraisers, the subscribers, the committee — and the orchestra was what it paid for. Over time the name slid from the society onto the players, and it stuck.
That is the entire content of the word. It records how an orchestra was founded, not how it sounds.
Why one city ends up with both
If the two words meant different things, no city could field one of each. London has five major orchestras and the names simply record the order they arrived in: the London Symphony Orchestra (1904), the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1930), the London Philharmonic (1932), the Philharmonia (1945) and the Royal Philharmonic (1946). Vienna has the Vienna Philharmonic, founded 1842 and based at the Musikverein, and the Vienna Symphony, founded 1900 and based at the Konzerthaus.
Found a new orchestra in a city where “Symphony” is taken, and you call yourself the Philharmonic. That is the whole mechanism. It is a naming problem, not a musical one.
The New York Philharmonic settles the question
The clearest evidence that the two words are interchangeable is that one orchestra carries both. The Philharmonic Society of New York spent the 1920s absorbing its rivals — the National Symphony Orchestra in 1921, the City Symphony in 1923, and in 1928 the Symphony Society of New York. The merged body has been legally named the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York ever since.
Everyone calls it the New York Philharmonic. But its actual name has both words in it, joined by a hyphen, because when a Philharmonic and a Symphony merged there was nothing to reconcile. If the terms denoted different kinds of ensemble, that merger would have had to pick one.
The chamber orchestra is the one that is really different
Here the label tracks something you can hear. A full symphony orchestra runs 60–100 players. A chamber orchestra runs 15–40, and the reduction is not uniform: the strings shrink most, the brass and percussion may be small or absent entirely, and the winds often go down to one player per part.
Fewer players means individual lines stay audible instead of blending into a section, which is why Baroque and early Classical repertoire — Bach, Handel, early Haydn and Mozart — sits better on a chamber orchestra than on a hundred-piece one. Some chamber orchestras play without a conductor, taking their lead from the first violinist, though plenty of them have a conductor like anyone else.
One thing worth separating: a chamber orchestra is not the same as chamber music. Chamber music means one player per part — a string quartet is four people playing four lines. A chamber orchestra still doubles its string parts, it just doubles them less.
Other names that are also just names
Once you know the pattern, the rest of the concert listings stop being confusing. None of these indicate a different species of ensemble:
- Philharmonia — the same Greek root, chosen because “Philharmonic” was already taken locally.
- Sinfonia — Italian for symphony. Sinfonietta is the diminutive, and usually does signal a smaller group.
- Concertgebouw — Dutch for “concert building”. The Amsterdam orchestra is named after its hall.
- Staatskapelle — a German court or state chapel ensemble, a name inherited from an aristocratic employer.
- Academy, as in the Academy of St Martin in the Fields — named for the church the group first recorded in.
Size and repertoire are the things that vary. The word on the poster is heritage.
What is actually in an orchestra
Whatever it calls itself, a full orchestra is built from four families. Bowed strings make up more than half the players, which is why an orchestra sounds like an orchestra and a wind band does not.
| Family | Typical instruments | Roughly how many |
|---|---|---|
| Strings | Violin (first and second), viola, cello, double bass; harp when scored | 50–60 |
| Woodwind | Flute, piccolo, oboe, cor anglais, clarinet, bassoon | 8–16 |
| Brass | French horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba | 8–14 |
| Percussion | Timpani, snare, bass drum, cymbals, tuned percussion | 2–5 |
A piano, organ or celesta joins when a score calls for it rather than sitting in the orchestra permanently — our guide to keyboard instruments covers where they fit. For the wider map of how these families are classified, see types of instruments, and for how an orchestra differs from the school band most people actually encounter, orchestra vs band works through that comparison.
“Orchestra” also means where you sit
If a ticket site offers you orchestra seats, that is a different sense of the word and nobody is being careless. In ancient Greek theatres the orkhēstra was the flat semicircular floor between the audience and the stage, where the chorus sang and danced. The name migrated twice: first to the musicians who later occupied that space, and separately to the ground-floor seating that now sits there.
So “orchestra” can mean the players or the best seats in the house, and context does all the work.
Learning to listen properly
Knowing that “philharmonic” is only a name is worth about thirty seconds. Being able to follow what an orchestra is doing while it does it is worth rather more, and it is a skill rather than a fact.
Aaron Copland — What to Listen For in Music
- Paperback, around 300 pages
- Written by a composer, not a critic
- Builds from rhythm, melody, harmony and tone colour
- Around $8
Copland takes the position that most people listen to music passively and can be taught not to, then spends the book showing how. He works up from the four elements to musical form, so by the end a symphony’s four movements read as a structure you can follow rather than twenty minutes of undifferentiated orchestra. For a reader who has just sorted out what a symphony is, that is the natural next thing to know.
It first appeared in the 1930s and it reads like it — the tone is formal and the listening examples assume a record collection nobody has any more. Neither matters much, because the framework is the part that lasted and the pieces he points at are all a search away. At around $8 it is the cheapest thing on this page and the one most likely to change how you hear a concert.
- Costs less than a coffee and a pastry
- Explains musical form, which is what makes long pieces navigable
- Still in print after eighty-odd years for a reason
- Dated prose and dated examples
- Assumes you will go and listen — it is not a book to read passively
Instruments of the Orchestra poster
- 22 × 34 inches
- Published by Hal Leonard
- All four families laid out by section
- Around $8
The four families are far easier to absorb as a picture than as a list, and this puts every instrument in one view at the size it is actually seen from a seat in the hall. It is the obvious thing for a practice room, a classroom wall or a child who has started asking which one is the cor anglais.
Set expectations honestly: it is a poster. It labels instruments and groups them, and it does not explain anything. It is also a thinly reviewed listing — the ratings that exist are good, but there are not many of them, which is worth knowing before ordering at any price above this one.
A Child’s Introduction to the Orchestra
- Hardcover, revised and updated edition
- Instrument-by-instrument tour with audio to stream
- Includes a pull-out poster
- Around $13
This covers the same ground as the section above — what the four families are and who sits where — at a length and a reading level that suits roughly seven to twelve. The audio is the reason to prefer it to a plain book: hearing an oboe immediately after reading about one is what makes the family names stick.
It is genuinely a children’s book and an adult should buy the Copland instead. As a way of answering a curious eight-year-old without improvising, it does the job well and it is cheap enough not to think about.
For the composers rather than the music, Michael Steen’s The Lives and Times of the Great Composers runs to nearly a thousand pages of biography and social history, Handel through to the late nineteenth century. It is a hardcover at around $60, so it is a reference-shelf commitment rather than an impulse buy, and it answers a different question from the three above — who these people were, not how to listen to them.
Common questions
What is the difference between a symphony and a philharmonic?
As orchestra names, none. Both describe a full-size orchestra of roughly 60–100 players covering the same repertoire. The difference is only in which word the founders chose. As ordinary nouns they are not alike at all: a symphony is a piece of music, while “philharmonic” is only ever part of a name.
Is a philharmonic better than a symphony orchestra?
No. Quality varies enormously between orchestras and not at all between the two words. The Berlin Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are both world-class; a community philharmonic and a community symphony are both community orchestras.
Why is it called a philharmonic?
Because a music-loving society founded it, or founded the concert series it grew out of. The word means “music-loving” in Greek, and it belonged to the organisation before it belonged to the players.
How many musicians are in an orchestra?
A full symphony or philharmonic orchestra is 60–100 players, and the exact number changes piece by piece — a Mozart symphony needs far fewer bodies on stage than a Mahler one. A chamber orchestra is 15–40.
What is the difference between a symphony orchestra and a chamber orchestra?
Size, and it is a real difference rather than a naming one. A chamber orchestra’s 15–40 players give a clearer, lighter texture suited to Baroque and early Classical music, and it may have little or no brass and percussion.
Can an orchestra play music that is not a symphony?
Most of what it plays is not a symphony. Concertos, overtures, tone poems, opera and ballet scores, choral works and film music all take an orchestra, and the name over the door does not restrict any of it.
Does a philharmonic orchestra have a conductor?
Yes, exactly as a symphony orchestra does. Conductorless playing turns up occasionally among chamber orchestras, where a group small enough to hear itself can be led from the first violin instead.