Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra has announced six new fanfare commissions conceived and supported by Seth MacFarlane, who personally selected the composers. John Williams, Ludwig Göransson, Joel McNeely, Thomas Newman, James Newton Howard and John Powell will each write a work. The premieres are planned across LACO’s 2027-28 season as concert openers, with performances also announced at The Wallis.
Williams’s fanfare is scheduled to premiere first, in fall 2027 at the new Terri and Jerry Kohl Hall at Colburn. LACO will announce the full season in spring 2027. The official release does not yet provide detailed instrumentation or descriptions of the six scores.
The roster is the obvious headline. The more revealing choice is the assignment itself. These are new fanfares asked to begin live programmes, rather than an announced cycle of existing film-score suites.
An opening form has to teach its rules quickly
Screen music can inherit context from character, dialogue, location and editing. A concert fanfare begins without those supports. It has to establish a world through sound and make the audience feel that an event has started.
Brevity does not make that job simple. It reduces the time available to establish hierarchy. Which gesture must register immediately? Which material can develop? How much energy belongs in the opening, and what needs to remain available for the final turn?
The same discipline matters in screen work. A studio logo, title sequence or compact transition may not have room for full thematic development. It still needs a legible function. In a short form, decorative material that does not advance the trajectory becomes very visible.
Opening a concert is not synonymous with maximum volume
The word fanfare suggests brass, projection and brilliance. The announcement does not support predictions about the actual scores. Their function does create a clear relationship with the room.
The music meets an audience moving from arrival into shared attention. A forceful attack can make that transition. A restrained opening can do it too, if the direction is strong enough to focus the hall.
A film composer could treat the assignment like an action scene with the picture removed. That would overlook the concert’s existing drama: the orchestra’s presence, the acoustics, the silence before the downbeat and the larger work that follows. An opener has to work on its own terms while accepting that it occupies the front edge of another programme.
One public function, six musical systems
The six works share one public function: opening a concert. The individual briefs have not been published. The series can still reveal how different musical systems answer that common frame.
Removing picture can reveal what persists beneath a composer’s screen vocabulary. Not simply recognisable colours, but a way of pacing information, controlling density and building expectation.
The comparison will still require care. The pieces will premiere across a season and in different programmes. A shared label does not turn them into a style contest. Hall acoustics, programme order and neighbouring repertoire will shape each first hearing.
LACO’s Hollywood connection begins with players
LACO’s release describes the orchestra as founded in 1968 by leading Los Angeles studio musicians. The project therefore connects film and concert practice through performers as well as composers.
That matters because a studio orchestra is not an anonymous sound source. Its players read quickly, interpret precise articulation, respond to revisions and create ensemble coherence under schedule pressure. In concert, those skills operate in a different time frame. Whatever recording may also occur, the audience hears the performance unfold in real time.
The commissions are not simply moving famous screen names into a classical setting. They are activating a shared Los Angeles culture of orchestral writing and performance.
Commissioning creates work; repetition creates repertoire
Film-music concerts often programme suites, themes and excerpts that arrive with an existing visual and popular memory. These commissions are new and are not yet attached to a published film memory.
That changes the proposition. The composers are not being asked to replay their catalogues. They receive a defined function and a specific orchestra, creating pieces that can potentially live without a film campaign.
Whether they become repertoire depends on scoring, score availability and performances beyond the 2027-28 season. A premiere creates a work. Further programming allows it to circulate.
For now, the institutional commitment is concrete: six commissions and six announced premieres across LACO’s 2027-28 season, with performances also planned at The Wallis. I will wait to hear the music before describing any of it. The announcement already makes one useful production point: a concise function does not have to narrow a composer’s identity. It can reveal how clearly the first gesture knows its job.