Two interesting situations are developing that on the surface may not seem connected but are actually deeply related. For better or for worse.
Detroit. Charleston. One’s a biggie. The other’s a ……… not so biggie ……… though I’m sure that the musicians in Charleston who rely on those jobs to make a living would argue otherwise, and I can’t really blame them. What they have in common is that for years no one has taken adequate responsibility for the long term health of these organizations. Now they’re paying for it.
Charleston is in the worse situation. The orchestra actually closed down in March and is currently exploring ways in which it can be reconstituted. With the debacle in Honolulu fresh in everyone’s memory this cannot be an easy time for the Charlotte Symphony musicians. The announcement of this new Chamber Symphony/Ensemble venture is not going to make anyone sleep any better. No matter how this is spun the truth is that if it goes ahead it will divert precious resources away from the CSO at this most crucial time in the organization’s history.
Of course, there is a long and distinguished history in Classical Music of organizations moving in when they detect a wounded comrade. Just look at the situation in Florida – there used to be several orchestras up and down the East Coast. Now there are residencies by (insert name of Über-orchestra here). Hardly ethical in my book, but that’s the way things go.
Detroit is also at a crucial phase, and once again the usual arguments are being trotted out on both sides of the dispute. There is one argument, however, which I feel has become less and less powerful as the years go by – the “if we aren’t paid as much as everyone else the quality of the orchestra is going to nose-dive and we’ll turn into a intermediate stop for musicians aiming for the big gig.” This is the position posited by the musicians’ negotiating committee, as well as industry guru Drew McManus.
Politely, I disagree, for a couple of reasons. First, it ain’t so easy getting a decent paying gig in this business. For every person who gets that job there are now hundreds of people auditioning. It’s essentially a crap shoot most of the time, but the general quality and number of people who could do these gigs is so high now that the competition is ridiculous. Those people who are so outstanding that they could win any gig they want are few and very far between. It’s also not like there is a 40% turnover in personnel every year. Even if the DSO took a massive pay cut this year I hardly expect that the industry mag would suddenly become replete with page after page of audition notices for the band.
There’s another argument, however – 10 years (or farther) from now the gap between the Haves (Chicago? Boston? etc.) and the Have Nots (everyone else) is going to be much wider than it already is. There are going to be a very, very, very few orchestras who can survive with $40 Million+ budgets, paying their musicians six figures plus benefits, with tours, recordings, etc. For the rest of us that is simply not sustainable. That’s not defeatist – that’s realistic. While the big boys were jacking up their salaries over the past 40 years, and everyone else was trying to Keep Up With The Joneses, some serious systemic imbalances got contracted into the picture. No one seemed to mind deficit after deficit after deficit. But, unfortunately for us, only the Government has license to print money. The general economy is retrenching and the orchestra business isn’t going to be far behind.
The admittedly excellent orchestras like Detroit are now in the position where decades of deficit spending and endowment raiding are going to come home to roost. Whether we like to admit it or not, we musicians have been complicit in this debacle. At some point the long-term health of an organization must be more important than how much the salary will increase during the next year of the contract.
I don’t think Detroit need worry about artistic quality being impacted by what the salary is. Much more dangerous to the artistic quality is a $6.5 million dollar operating deficit. A couple more of those and they’ll never have to worry about the artistic quality again, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
Thanks Bill for a post which inserts a new and difficult topic into the discussion. It’s refreshing to read someone willing to write against the grain at a time when it’s easier to support the status quo.
Living near Detroit, I fear for the future of the orchestra. The economic foundations of Detroit have been eroding for half a century and there may simply not be the healthy corps of potential donors to support the city’s cultural institutions from the art museum to the orchestra. The art museum laid off 50% of its employees to weather the storm and the DSO’s administration cut dozens of positions 18 months or more ago. You can’t cut out half the wind players and still have an orchestra, however, so the only way to reduce labor costs is to cut salaries.
Detroit’s musicians have a legitimate gripe that gambling on the real estate market in the building of the orchestra’s “Max” venue extension has put them on the brink. However, many might make the same bet again if we were in the position in the desperate hope to secure a future for an orchestra located in what seems to be a perpetually declining city. Innovation may lead to recovery, but not in the short term and there doesn’t appear to be an angel donor around who can donate $100 million and reverse the problem. Hope I’m wrong there…
That said, your point must have some truth in it. The CRAZY level of competition for playing jobs must logically lead to the conclusion that there is a large pool of talented applicants. I can’t imagine however that taking full-time jobs down to part-time status will lead to concerts of the same quality only because of the time needed to practice and prepare mentally and physically (not to mention to make oboe and bassoon reeds) would benefit from having 40 hours a week to focus on the task, rather than working a day job to balance the family budget for 20 of those available hours.
As a music educator, I’m curious to see what effect if any the press about Detroit and other struggling orchestras will have on music school applications. Will this lead to some soul searching on the part of students and faculty or will we all just retreat a bit further from the practical reality in search of art? There are lots of great GREAT reasons to study music today, but making a living by doing so is becoming more and more difficult. Music schools are encouraging entrepreneurship training, yet the goal of winning a top-10 orchestra job remains so competitive that it requires complete focus. The musicians in Detroit made the sacrifices to win the big gig and now the ground is washing away beneath their feet.
Mr. Edins-I would like to address a few of your statements:
1)”For every person who gets that job there are now hundreds of people auditioning. It’s essentially a crap shoot most of the time, but the general quality and number of people who could do these gigs is so high now that the competition is ridiculous.”
Mr. Edins-I have been doing auditions for the Detroit Symphony for almost 30 years now. In a typical audition 100’s of players do and always have shown up (there were 130 when I auditioned in 1981)-and if we can find one or two applicants that meet the standards we require we consider ourselves lucky.
It took us 9 years to fill our principal cello position, 5 to fill our principal bass-in fact typically for a principal position it can take many years, and for a section position more often than not we don’t hire anyone if we don’t find the “standard”.
So I politely disagree with your statement “the general quality and number of people who could do these gigs is so high now that the competition is ridiculous.” In 30 years I haven’t seen much change in quality ,numbers, or competition. There are always a high number of “competent” applicants-but we look for something more than that, and the numbers of those who meet that standard have stayed very consistent.
As for the rest, I would ask you to read this Time magazine article:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,942093,00.html
This article could have been written word for word today-except notice the date-1969!!
How is it that orchestras found themselves in exactly the same situation in all respects then, yet managed to continue and improve for 40 years after this article was written?
Perhaps one should look to the people running the orchestras then, their ideals and philosophies of what was important, and compare to some running the show now?
It seems that “the long term health of the organization” in the past came from first maintaining the artistic standards and thus the product.
Cutting the product never sells or improves anything. But then as they say, those who don’t know history are condemned to make the same mistakes.
Of course one only needs to look at the present history-at an orchestra like Baltimore to see how this “new” strategy of cutting the player’s salary works. Ask the musicians how many of their key players have left in the last year, how easily they were replaced, how the artistic quality of the orchestra is doing, and what the long term prospects for the orchestra look like.
Sincerely,
Geof Applegate
Principal Second violin, Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Mr. Applegate: I’m not going to comment about the DSO’s current labor situation but there’s something I don’t understand. When you say it took the DSO 9 years to fill our principal cello position, 5 years to fill our principal bass..
Is this something you are proud of?
One other thing…you say: In 30 years I haven’t seen much change in quality… I would be willing to bet a million dollars (which I do not have, sir!) that you could not find another music educator — a director or dean of a major music school or music department in the USA – who would make such a statement.
The time it has taken to fill our positions in the DSO has nothing to do with pride or emotion.
It has to do with hiring a person with the high quality to maintain the artistic quality of our orchestra. Believe me we take no joy when we are unable to hire anyone due to that standard not being met, but we also take the responsibility of maintaining the quality of our orchestra very seriously. Despite the perception by some that the current crisis in Detroit is only about money, it is in our perspective about maintaining the standards of a great orchestra that have been in the making for 100 years, and not letting these be destroyed in a quick and easy fashion.
I am also a music educator and a college prof.-in fact quite a few of my former students play in major orchestras across the US.
When I say there hasn’t been a change in quality-it is simply that the numbers have stayed remarkably consistent over the years. As I stated-if we find 1 or 2 that meet the standard in a given audition to pass to the finals we are very happy. That number has not changed in my 30 years of judging auditions. This is simply fact.
An interesting thread.
Bill seems to suggest that the direction that orchestras are headed is into one of extremely stratified classes, with large organizations essentially maintaining and smaller organizations significantly downsized. While I agree with this probability, I also think that if we continue to experience slow growth in the economic sector, there will be other, deeper cultural effects that may impact orchestras. One of these, I believe, may be a general decrease in domestic travel, by either air, car or rail, and increasing dependence on localized goods. This could actually have a positive impact for smaller organizations, and orchestras might again be able to be the jewel of their communities.
In the end, though, I must take issue both the statements of Mr. Eddins and Mr. Clague. The musicians in Detroit have much more than “a legitimate gripe.” The state of the symphony in the United States is now at a critical level. Will orchestras in America continue to rely more and more on gimmicky, kitschy marketing – an unfortunate product of our culture – or will they aspire to the degree of their European counterparts? Will they seek shock-and-awe marketing tactics to appease audiences, or will they try to educate them through serious discussions about music? Presented with music that is not dumbed down and not over-intellectualized, audiences readily respond to music as it was intended: for the communication of a message from a specific cultural context.
Unfortunately, the average symphony orchestra has in this country become institutionalized, just as the discipline of music has become institutionalized within the average university program. The result? Opportunities for some, while others are misled to believe that somehow there is a place for their music career within the already crowded waters, but encouraged to continue because their pocketbooks comprise tuition dollars.
Most symphony orchestras are now comprised of any various configurations of a board, an executive director, and any number of marketing, development, and operations positions. Many have begun to look like the average American corporation, despite the fact that the orchestra has literally nothing in common with – for instance – Proctor and Gamble.
The basic problem as I see it is that while indeed there are many administrators who are superbly skilled in their areas, they often lack the artistic abilities and training to know the impact of the decisions they make on the most important part of the organization: the product. Without a quality product, the administrators in Detroit would not have a job. Wrapped up in their own tangled web, they forget that their own future is assured by the musicians, not the other way around.
A cursory glance at the plethora of information about this situation indeed confirms that the musicians are not only paying for the mistakes of the big automobile companies, but the management of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, in this case. Look at some of the moves in the last few years and it is clear. While the financing of the Max Fischer music center certainly stands out, disastrous moves such as the hiring of star Principal Guest “Conductor” Yitzhak Perlman must have cost an enormous amount of capital, perhaps resulting in a short-term boost in ticket sales but certainly not helping the quality of the orchestra.
In many ways, I would respectfully argue that the one-size-fits-all approach to the way that the League of American Orchestras has together with the trends in administrative management of these organizations have caused the present crisis. The emphasis for too long was on their exclusive club, and now musicians too are paying the price.
Musicians cannot expect that they will not have to make sacrifices in this economic environment, and I see no evidence that they have any such attitudes in Detroit. It seems clear to me that they have already made those sacrifices. The management has proposed cuts without guidelines for eventual reinstatement. That makes these cuts permanent.
Finally, I find the argument that the “musicians have been complicit in this debacle” hard to swallow. To what degree of influence would you say that the orchestra musicians would have had voice in the Max Fischer center? To what degree do you think they had in the hiring of Mr. Perlman years ago? Perhaps Mr. Applegate could answer these questions. The fact is, boards and administrators have the power in this country, not the musicians.
“Anonymous,” the sum total of your solution to the problem of dwindling audiences seems to be to “educate them through serious discussions about music.” I can only respond, “good luck with that.”
I have been marketing or administering orchestra concerts in one way or another for 25 years, both at large and small institutions. Yes, orchestras have a Board, executive director, marketing and fund raising people — not because they want to look like Procter & Gamble, but because they are not-for-profit organizations: a Board and CEO are legal requirements of nonprofit status. Marketing and development staff are not a requirement, but if you’re suggesting orchestras would be more successful by doing away with them, again I can only respond, “good luck with that.”
My experience working with orchestra administrators is that most of them are trained musicians, passionate about the art form and, if anything, are fanatical about protecting and advancing it — so much so that sometimes they may forget that we not only exist to serve the art form, but the community that supports us.
And I’m not sure where you get the idea that the League of American Orchestras is “one size fits all.” On the contrary, they serve an incredible variety of sizes and shapes of orchestras, and they try very hard to serve them well. Contrary to being an exclusive club, they bend over backwards to make it possible for everyone, from the biggest-budget major philharmonics, to the smallest and humblest of rural community orchestras, to be members.
I agree that it is to everyone’s benefit that the musicians have a greater voice in the governance of the organization. The separation between musicians and management is one of the biggest flaws in the business! But trust me, this is a two way street. I have certainly seen “chauvanistic” managements that shut the musicians out of all decision making. I’ve also seen the shoe on the other foot, where the management and Board try to reach out and involve the players, only to be met with indifference.
The problems in our business that lead to a Detroit or a Charlotte are not simple. No one is entirely to blame and no one is entirely guiltless. The solutions are not going to be simple either.
One final note — orchestras do resemble Proctor & Gamble in one importance sense: I have never yet encountered an orchestra nor a corporation that could suspend the laws of mathematics. You can’t pay people with money you don’t have.
I think the following blogpost succinctly sums up any point I was going to make: http://artsdispatch.blogspot.com/2010/08/if-cellists-salary-declines-in-detroit.html