“Dramatic cuts”

As the Honolulu Symphony attempts to emerge from its bankruptcy, the in-fighting continues. The latest development; reorganization plans will not only be submitted by the Symphony Society, but by the Symphony’s musicians and/or other parties as well.

The Symphony Society has already put together a 258-page analysis that recommends a drastic reduction in both the schedule and budget. Said analysis was created:

Using customized Web crawlers that collected data and documents from federal agencies and industry sources, analysts compiled extensive information on economic characteristics, organizational performance, community dynamics and other areas deemed relevant for understanding the symphony’s current problems and potential solutions.

Is it just me, or does this methodology seem to eliminate any human element whatsoever?

The conclusion? That the symphony’s financial woes were due to:

• A business model based on “an unrealistic and unsustainable” budget driven by a desire to compete with other national orchestras.

• “Expectations that the Society is an employment agency or welfare department responsible for the entire financial well-being of its part-time employees.”

This makes me wonder about that aforementioned analysis, and what “federal agencies and industry sources” were consulted, because these bullet points seem to be talking about a widget factory, not a non-profit arts organizations, much less a symphony orchestra.

A budget driven by competition with other orchestras? Is this about pay parity with comparable organizations, or is the underlying implication that they were paying the musicians too much, or that too many musicians were on the roster (and let’s be clear here, the largest fixed cost (by a substantial factor) in any orchestra is its musicians)?

Now, I don’t think $26K (approximate base pay for Honolulu Symphony musicians for the 06/07 season, the last season for which I could find publicly available data) for a full season of work is too much compensation. In fact, given the incredibly high cost of living in Hawaii, you’d need a second job to make it work.

How about the “too many musicians” idea, which many boards and symphony societies have floated as a cost-cutting conversation? A simplified for-profit perspective on complex artistic criteria; change the personnel in an orchestra, and you change the type of music you can play/product you can produce. In the corporate world, if someone is laid off, the workload can be folded into someone else’s (or several others’) job description(s). Increased efficiency? Sure. But you can’t lay off a tuba player and expect a violinist to pick up the slack.

Speaking of product, let’s skip to bullet point three. Oversupply of seats and performances are two very different things. First of all, Blaisdell Concert Hall, the symphony’s home, seats nearly 2,200. Yes, it’s too big, and always has been, so if you want to call that an oversupply, I suppose that makes sense. However, the oversupply of performance makes me wonder. This assumes that a “performance” is a single, immutable product. Last I checked, Piotr Tchaikowsky is very unlike Peter Cetera, and while concerts of their music both graced the 08/09 season, they are entirely different products. Lumping all concerts into the category of “performance” and suggesting cuts seems to betray either a lack of understanding of the complexity of the product or a disinterest in differentiating within the wide span of both repertoire and types of performances.

Back to wages. And that whole “disproportionate to number of hours and weeks” business. First of all, this assumes the orchestral musicians work only during rehearsals and performances; ie, it discounts the individual practice time which, depending on the musician, can be substantial. Second, it discounts the nature of the work. I’ve held a variety of non-musical jobs in my life (and in fact spent a year contemplating a non-musical career path post-college), from translator at a Tokyo law firm to executive assistant at an ad agency. If I condensed what was required of me in the average workday to its very essence and finished it in an intensely focused manner, I could have left work before lunch every day. Imagine that a rehearsal is such a condensation of spread-out work, accomplished within an extremely compact time-frame. It’s a difference in perspective that’s hard to grasp if one doesn’t know what goes into the creation of the “orchestral product”.

Finally, “Expectations that the Society is an employment agency or welfare department responsible for the entire financial well-being of its part-time employees.” I think I’ve addressed the part-time employee issue. As far as being an employment agency, isn’t the responsibility of an employer to provide fair compensation to it’s employees for services rendered? Is the implication that the Symphony Society is providing welfare for a bunch of lazy, part-time-workin’ musicians?

Listen, I’m sympathetic to both sides (to a degree) here. Musicians are baffled at the way management attempt to utilize criteria for analysis based on business models that take not account of the complexities and particular needs of a symphony orchestra. Management simply wants to find a streamlined way to run a business that, frankly, has not been working, and is not working for orchestras across the country.

The simple truth, however, is that the world is changing, financial realities are changing, and audience attendance is changing – and that means the orchestra business must change. But for rational change to happen, orchestras need to be analyzed as complex entities unto themselves, with a unique set of parameters – and not in a manner in which they are directly compared to any other type of company or organization.

I’ve written before about the Honolulu Symphony’s woes before, and it’s heartbreaking for me to do so. It’s the orchestra I grew up with, the orchestra I soloed with as a young pianist, and the ensemble whose musicians have provided such high quality teaching and coaching to countless students. I, and hopefully many others, watch and wait for an announcement of reorganization in the near future.