The Dilemma: So are the musicians where you’ve been dragged part of an orchestra, a symphony, or a philharmonic? And more important, is it intermission yet?

People You Can Impress: guys named Ludwig, Wolfgang, or Dmitri

The Quick Trick: All symphonies are orchestras, but only the big orchestras are symphonies.

The Explanation:
Start with the most basic: an orchestra. While the meaning of that word has drifted somewhat over the centuries, today orchestra is used to describe a musical group that includes a wind, percussion, and string section—specifically violins, violas, cellos, and basses. If there are no strings, it’s a band (or a band with a fancy name, like wind symphony or concert band or Coldplay). If the orchestra is small—say, fewer than 40 members or even as small as four or five—it’s a chamber orchestra (because it was once small enough to fit in a chamber, or room, instead of needing a huge concert hall).

There’s a point at which an orchestra becomes a symphony orchestra, or just symphony, for short. This distinction has less to do with numbers and more to do with instrumentation. Symphony orchestras have four sections of instruments: strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion. Basically, an orchestra is a symphony if it is capable of playing symphonies. These are long pieces, usually of three or more movements, written for orchestras with full percussion sections, piano, harp, bassoons, oboes, an organ, a special guy to play the triangle, etc. For instance, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (known as the “Choral Symphony” and containing the famous “Ode to Joy”) calls for the following instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, French horn, trumpet, timpani, violin I and violin II, viola, cello, bass viol, full chorus, and solo soprano, alto, tenor, and bass vocalists. In the modern era, composers have gone farther and farther afield to bring unique sounds to their symphonies, including everything from trash cans and kazoos to typewriters and washing machines. So when does a symphony become a philharmonic? Basically, if there’s another symphony already in town. These days, the term “philharmonic” is mostly used to distinguish a symphony orchestra from another symphony orchestra in the same city. Vienna, for instance, has the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The word philharmonic means nothing more than “harmony-loving.”

Now with Authentic Intestines
A recent trend in symphonies has been to try to recreate what musical pieces sounded like when they were first performed on authentic period instruments, including violins strung with catgut (don’t worry, it’s not really cat—it’s actually sheep intestine).