Another Round Of Navel Gazing

Veteran arts observer Terry Teachout had an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, in which he looked at the fiscally troubled Pasadena Symphony and used their situation as a springboard to ask a very loaded question:

What, if anything, justifies the existence of a regional symphony orchestra in the 21st century? Many people still believe that an orchestra is a self-evidently essential part of what makes a city civilized. But is this true?

Quick timeout to define a term here: within the orchestra business, a “regional orchestra” is considered to be one that has a relatively small annual budget, pays its players an hourly wage rather than a salary, performs a limited concert schedule, but is nonetheless made up of professional musicians, many of whom play in several of these regional orchestras in order to scrape together enough money to live on.

(The term “regional” is sometimes used in an entirely different way by the press. The New York Times has a bizarre habit of referring to any orchestra that isn’t in either the Northeast or California, including ours, as “regional,” even when the orchestra in question is pretty much universally agreed to be a major international ensemble. I suspect this probably happens because New York writers are used to referring to all theater companies outside New York, no matter how prestigious, as “regional companies,” and they just assume that it works the same way for orchestras. It doesn’t.)

Anyway, Terry’s using the term correctly, and he’s asking a very important question. He also makes several other good points that I’m not going to get into here, but I highly recommend reading the whole article. It’s just one of a slew of pieces that have been popping up in recent weeks questioning how sustainable orchestras are, just how much we need to change to adapt to modern realities, and whether some orchestras might not be better off just blowing the whole thing up and starting over as  a Different Kind Of Organization.

It’s not a coincidence that so many analysts are jumping on this particular meme just at this moment, either. It just so happens that the League of American Orchestras, which is a group comprising orchestra management types from around North America, is currently in the middle of a huge online/offline brainstorming session they’re calling Orchestra R/Evolution. Catchy title, and one that might just make a number of musicians nervous.

Anyway, the LAO is basically encouraging anyone and everyone interested in the orchestra business to weigh in with their ideas for the future, and to do so in as many different ways as the social media universe allows. I suppose the idea is that crowdsourcing has been effective in some other industries, and besides that, anything that gets more people on the interwebs talking about orchestras has to be a net positive, even if most of the ideas are either unworkable, unrealistic, or contradictory. I can get behind that, in a general sense.

But what tends to take me from a place of genuine interest in a project like this to a place where I find myself rolling my eyes at 90% of what gets said/written/posted/tweeted in the course of the project is the realization that most of the big ideas are coming from people with only the vaguest grasp of how orchestras actually function from a business point of view. And that includes a scary number of people who call themselves experts on the subject.

I started thinking about this last night after reading a fascinating blog post by a venture capitalist in California named Bill Gurley. He was writing about the cable TV business, not music, but his broader point struck me as awfully relevant to a lot of the stuff I’ve been reading lately…

More often than not, we here in Silicon Valley are prone to idealism. We see a scenario the way we want to see it, and make predictions that fit our view of how we think the world should work, or perhaps even how we would like the world to be… Outsider “luddites” who do not immediately grok the remarkable disruptive power of our latest and greatest technologies are doomed to the business trash heap – driven there by obsolescence and an obstinate refusal to accept their fate. Often times, our version of them “accepting their fate” would require them to abandon everything they know, walk away from the majority of their revenue, and terminate 80% of their employees. But hey, that’s their problem, not ours. We love disruption. It serves our purpose.

Now that, in my opinion, is just an excellent description of the disconnect between those who think about orchestras for a living and those who actually make our living by them. Which is not to say that the outsiders are always wrong and we’re always right – the whole point of bringing in a consultant is to get a fresh take on your company’s situation from someone with no internal baggage. It’s just that so many of those wringing their hands about the future either seem to be suggesting that we magically conjure a massive new audience for orchestral music that absolutely adores both Brahms and Stockhausen; or that we slash overhead to a point where the constant fundraising that keeps orchestras afloat can cease to be so difficult. Both of these are completely bubbleheaded notions that cannot be achieved in the real world, and they are therefore unhelpful, no matter how prettily they’re packaged.

So here’s my contribution to the din: All Music Is Local. I’m utterly certain of this, and I’m further convinced that the reason so much broad-based thinking on “the orchestral model” hasn’t been terribly helpful to individual orchestras is that each of  us is a completely different beast, with different challenges, different strengths, and entirely different constituencies. The National Symphony is not a model for how to run the Minnesota Orchestra, and we’re not a model for Pittsburgh or Philadelphia.

In fact, I’d venture to say that a far better way to evaluate orchestras is against other large non-profit organizations in our own cities. In our case, MPR and the Guthrie can tell us far more about what’s realistically achievable in Minneapolis/St. Paul than a horror story from some orchestra in crisis 1500 miles away. Is there a thriving theater scene in your city? A lot of philanthropic money pouring into higher education? Is yours a company town, where one or two high-profile bankruptcies could throw the entire local economy (and your funding base) into chaos? These are the relevant comparison points that matter to an orchestra, not whether someone in another city programmed 50% more pops last year.

I’m not saying that I don’t think there’s value in orchestras getting together to share information and swap strategies for the future. I am saying that, in my experience, there’s no shortage of people within the industry who think they have all the answers (but have strangely not yet managed to implement them,) and a startling shortage of people looking outside our cloistered subculture for ideas.