Orchestras punctuate performances at Coachella and beyond
Orchestras punctuate performance at Coachella in 2025, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing with art Laufey, LL Cool J, and Zedd, highlighting the growing intersection of orchestral music with pop, hip-hop, and electronic genres.
Orchestras punctuate performances at Coachella and beyond
by Harry Levin via Chartmetric
When Coachella is in full swing, surprise guest performances dominate the news cycle. But this year, Laufey, LL Cool J, Zedd, and Becky G joined a set that was surprising to be at Coachella in the first place: Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra.
Coachella is a symbol of pop culture known for hosting superstar headliners. This year three of them are Lady Gaga, Post Malone, and Travis Scott. In between those massive shows, a group of musicians are performing in a musical format that first came to fruition thousands of years ago: the orchestra. They played the works of classical masters such as Beethoven and Wagner…along with orchestral pop renditions from the aforementioned roster of guests.
“My dream was always to mix the worlds of classical and orchestra and pop and fun music festivals like this,” Laufey said during the first weekend of the festival before performing the live debut of her new song, “Silver Lining.”
Well, by every indication, Laufey’s dream is closer and closer to coming true. Pop artists of all genres, including Dua Lipa, Louis Cole, Anderson .Paak, Pete Tong, Billie Eilish, Nas, Willow, deadmau5, and Florence + The Machine have all either performed or recorded with full orchestras in recent years.
Dua Lipa took the stage at Royal Albert Hall in London with the Heritage Orchestra back in December for the television special, An Evening with Dua Lipa. Louis Cole’s most recent album, nothing, was a collaboration between the Dutch Pops orchestra Metropole Orkest and the composer and arranger Jules Buckley. Anderson .Paak performed his lauded 2016 album, Malibu, at the Hollywood Bowl alongside Derrick Hodge’s Color of Noize Orchestra.
“One thing drives the other. Artists are seeing it done more. Then they’re seeing it realized more in a way that feels like the original intent. It’s taking it to a different dimension without it having to be something that feels like a whole other expression that no longer belongs to them. I know firsthand that’s a big thing for them,” Hodge tells Chartmetric. In addition to .Paak, he has arranged orchestral parts for Nas, Common, and the parts for LL Cool J’s section of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s (LA Phil) Coachella set. “It’s something that I always knew was a possibility. So I was trying to write and speak to it even before the opportunities came, so that when they came I could be really efficient and act on them fast.”
Hodge’s niche generally veers toward hip-hop, as he has considerable experience in other musical exploits within the genre besides orchestra (he wrote and recorded the iconic bassline on “Be” by Common). However, artists within every genre, from alternative jazz via Louis Cole to dance music via Pete Tong, are experimenting with the format. Now these orchestras are performing in the most popular forums in the world. Clearly, the value of orchestras is both historical and universal, and artists reap the benefits.
Every Audience Loves An Orchestra
“It broadens their audience reach,” says Karen Garrity, owner of Karen Garrity Music, an orchestra contracting service based in Southern California. She has hired musicians to record and perform with pop artists like deadmau5 for his album, Where’s The Drop, and the ska band Streetlight Manifesto. When Garrity attended one of Streetlight Manifesto’s orchestral performances last year, she saw the broadening with her own eyes:
“I stood in line for probably an hour as we were going in, and it was so cool to see the vast age range. There were kids as young as school age. And then there were people in their eighties,” Garrity says. “I was asking them why they were there, and Streetlight Manifesto was on the periphery of their interest range. It was on the periphery of their interest range, but when they brought in the orchestral element, it brought it home to the older ones, and then the older ones wanted to share that with the younger ones.”
More than bringing in new fans, the orchestra expanded the interest of the current fans as well. “They have an intense fan base that is just doggedly loyal to them. They follow the band all over the world. They know every word to every song and sing and chant and cheer. They chase the orchestral musicians out the back door, asking for autographs. You don’t experience that coming out of a symphony hall,” Garrity says.
The visual element is certainly a reason why the orchestra persists today. Seeing 50-100 musicians in action is a spectacle to behold, and fans appreciate it both live and on YouTube.
In the case of Dua Lipa, the live video of her performing “Training Season” at Royal Albert Hall has reached 23.5 million views, which is more than any of the 65 videos she’s shared in the Radical Optimism album cycle besides the official music videos for the album singles.
The video of Nas performing “One Love” at the Kennedy Center has the 16th highest number of views on the “PBS Great Performances” YouTube channel. While that is not generally a top mark, there are over 500 videos on the channel in total. Plus, the videos with more views than Nas feature artists traditionally revered by an orchestral audience, such as the famous Italian tenor, Andrea Bocelli, and the celebrated Broadway actress, Sutton Foster.
Considering Nas’s turn was the first time a rap artist performed with an orchestra at the Kennedy Center (which had been open for over 40 years at that point), this amount of views demonstrates how these two worlds are coming together in a public manner after hip-hop has sampled symphonic music for decades.
“Rappers and hip-hop producers were hearing that sound often in the samples they use. What Pete Rock sampled all the way to Timbaland. So the curiosity was always there from that side. You couldn’t listen to Tupac’s music and not think, ‘Oh, man, there’s a symphonic element to it. I can imagine that happening.’ It was more, will it be accepted?” Hodge says.
Hodge has been a major player in helping classical music become accepted in the world of rap, and Jules Buckley has been equally important in introducing orchestras into the world of dance music.
Orchestras At The Rave
Pete Tong, the legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ and dance music pioneer, first curated an orchestra performance of dance classics during the 2015 BBC Proms season with the help of Buckley, and the two have been partners in the project ever since. Now entitled “Ibiza Classics,” Tong and Buckley are touring the newest rendition of the show throughout this year.
In furthering how Ibiza Classics has brought together dance music and classical music, dance titan Tiësto remixed the orchestral version of “You Got The Love” from Ibiza Classics. This brought Buckley Tiësto’s 40 million monthly listeners that he had when the track was released in May 2022. Beyond Tiësto’s individual audience, his remix was added to Spotify’s premier playlist for dance music, mint, which had 5.9 million saves at the time.
Buckley’s audience has seen marked benefits with this kind of exposure. Before the release of the 2021 Ibiza Classics album, his Spotify monthly listeners were at 301.6k. That album brought them up to 521.6k, and the Tiësto remix launched them up to their peak of 1.5 million. Since then, Buckley hasn’t dropped below 586k, spiking up to 1.4 million again upon the release of the Florence + The Machine album, Symphony of Lungs, Buckley’s orchestra arrangement of the band’s debut, Lungs.
Buckley’s widespread experience demonstrates how orchestras are adapting with the times. When Garrity was in college studying cello, her 20th-century music professor told her class that their jobs would be obsolete by the time they graduated. Yet, in 2017, Garrity hired an orchestra to perform a piece composed by an AI program called AIVA, Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist.
“The smart orchestral musicians are the ones who realized that they had to make a shift at some point in their career and expand beyond just the orchestral repertoire. The ones that are working constantly are the ones who can play any genre, whether it’s in a recording session or on a live concert stage or in a rock band,” Garrity says.
The Power of Special Guests
These players populate the prominent orchestras that are backing artists like Dua Lipa and Laufey. Before Laufey joined the LA Phil at Coachella, she recorded the live album, A Night At The Symphony: Live at the Hollywood Bowl, with them back in 2024. Prior to this album, the orchestra’s monthly listeners fluctuated around 450k. The album with Laufey saw them reach 730.2k, and they have yet to drop below 600k. The album version of “Bewitched” also brought the orchestra into Spotify’s Women of Jazz playlist, which currently has 875.3k saves.
To further demonstrate how these collaborations increase the reach of orchestras, Laufey also recorded her 2023 album, A Night At The Symphony, with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Their monthly listeners were in the 33k range before this album, rising as high as 802.3k upon release.
While it is easy to relate this success to Laufey, who currently has 14.5 million monthly listeners, there are other pieces spread throughout the Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s discography that have millions of plays on their own. This suggests that there was already interest in the music; Laufey simply expanded it just as she surely did for the LA Phil at Coachella.
Coachella has said that 125k people attend the festival per day, and in 2018, 41 million people reportedly watched the live streams on YouTube. While there is no way to measure exactly how many people saw the LA Phil perform at Coachella either live or on their computers, it is a fact that they broke into an entirely new audience with the help of the festival, and their Wikipedia views tripled on the day of their set.
Another artist who has performed at Coachella throughout the years is deadmau5, and Garrity still remembers the audience’s reaction to his orchestral performance of Where’s The Drop:
“I was back in the booth, watching the show, watching the orchestra, and looking around the audience. They were so into it, and they were mostly young people. They were all pretty standard deadmau5 fans, but just watching them react and interact with a symphony orchestra was really cool,” Garrity says.
And then, according to Hodge, the result of more audiences loving it is more artists exploring the format:
“Artists’ managers and friends are bringing to their attention examples of live performances. As they see the possibility of it live, it’s affecting how they approach the studio process,” Hodge says. “One side is impressing the other.”
Orchestras punctuate performances at Coachella and Beyond first appeared on Hypebot.com
