The Orchestra Now (or TON) fills a dual role: it is part of a master's degree program at Bard College in upstate New York, but it also has performed around the greater New York area and beyond. It has also made several recordings for Bridge and other labels.

The Orchestra Now proclaims itself "a group of vibrant young musicians from across the globe who are making orchestral music relevant to 21st century audiences." The group was founded in 2015 by its conductor, Leon Botstein, music director since 1992 of the American Symphony Orchestra and co-director of the Bard Music Festival and Bard SummerScape. He has also served as music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Campus Grafenegg, and the Grafenegg Academy in Austria, and he has been the president of Bard College since 1975. The members of TON have been selected from top international conservatories, including the Curtis Institute, Juilliard School, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and Royal Conservatory of Brussels. The group demystifies classical compositions by giving on-stage introductions and demonstrations, writing its own concert notes, and emerging from backstage to interact with audiences during concert intermissions.

TON is based at Bard's Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, where it plays several concerts yearly and also performs at the Bard Music Festival in the summer. TON has also performed at New York City's most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Lincoln Center, among others, as well as beyond New York. Guest conductors who have worked with TON include JoAnn Falletta, Neeme Järvi, and Gerard Schwarz. In 2018, TON made its debut on recordings as part of the successful Romantic Piano Concerto series on the Hyperion label, backing pianist Piers Lane in piano-and-orchestra music by Ferdinand Ries and becoming one of the few American ensembles on the roster of that British imprint. Beginning in 2020, TON released albums of unusual 19th and 20th century repertory on the Bridge label, with Botstein as conductor. These included Buried Alive, featuring music of Arthur Honegger, Othmar Schoeck, and Dmitri Mitropoulos (2020); Piano Protagonists, an album of piano concertos (2021); and Classics of American Romanticism, containing orchestral music by George Frederick Bristow and William Henry Fry (2022). ~ James Manheim, Rovi