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Plan B

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Looks like Sam will be dealing with jetlag as he and the Orchestra begin their week across the pond; I’m coping with my own jetlag, having returned from a two-week visit to my mother in Hawaii this past weekend. Easing myself back into the working-from-home drill that takes up much of my summer (a lot of the planning/producing/arranging for concerts in the upcoming season takes place in the summer months), I’ve been catching up with industry news as well, including the continuing crisis at the Detroit Symphony.

The DSO contract expires on midnight Sunday, and last-minute bargaining talks are scheduled for Friday, although given the hard line that both sides have taken, hope for agreement seems slim. This particular article (and most I have read) focus on the DSO management’s “Proposal A” (which would reduce salaries by 28%, withdraw from the American Federation of Musicians’ pension plan and alter work rules by making certain non-performing duties part of the job) and the musician’s counterproposal (a 22% pay reduction, continuing with the AFM plan and a joint musicians’ committee/executive board job performance review of orchestra management.)

Neither paycut is a pretty scenario, but at least both parties seem to agree on the point that player salaries need to be dramatically altered. There’s been chatter about the proposed changing of work rules to include non-performing elements (such as teaching); musicians are concerned that shifting the focus away from pure performance, even for a relatively brief period (it’s capped at 3 weeks per musician per season) dilutes the musical product of the ensemble.

While there’s an element of truth, doesn’t it seem to be more about perspective than anything? After all, those most strongly voicing their opposition are established players. These days, conservatory graduates are as likely to receive some training in teaching, public speaking and scripting and producing educational concerts as they are to take lessons and orchestral repertoire class. The expectations of a young musician entering the job market is markedly different from those of past generations; what might seem extraneous to older career musicians is a presumed given for many just entering the profession.

But what really interests me about the ongoing conflict is the relative silence about “Proposal B”. Here it is, as outlined by the Detroit Free Press:

Management Proposal B (comes into play if players don’t accept some form of proposal A by Saturday)
• Replace 52-week structure with 36 guaranteed weeks (including three paid vacation weeks). Optional work offered beyond 33 weeks paid at incremental rate based on revenue generated by the work.
• Salary: $70,200 (year one); $72,000 (year two); $73,800 (year three). New hires paid $63,000, rising to $66,600 in year three.
• Pension similar to proposal A.
• Eliminate seniority pay and tenure. Implement comprehensive performance review.

Now, wait a second. This proposal would essentially reduce the actual season by a huge percentage, and if additional pay is based on “revenue generated by the work”, it would never assure any set amount. And then look at the last point: eliminating tenure and seniority pay. This is huge. Essentially, Proposal B completely takes away what a full-time orchestra employment represents; assured pay and job security. Why aren’t more people talking about this?

Perhaps the very existence (or threat) of Plan B is meant to bully the musicians’ committee into agreeing to some form of Plan A. But what if bargaining comes apart and all that’s left on the table is Plan B? It would utterly change the landscape of our profession – it represents a completely altered model of what constitutes an orchestra – and it would set precedence for other ensembles in similar situations to do the same.

But then, here’s the painful question: if Plan B is sustainable from a practical financial point of view, is that such a bad thing?

Posted in all music is local, stirring the pot, the business of music | 2 Comments »

Everything Old Is New Again

Monday, August 9th, 2010

I’ve written ad nauseum on this blog about the various woes and financial afflictions that plague American orchestras during economic hard times, and honestly, even I’m getting a little sick of the subject. But I wanted to seize the opportunity to offer some clear evidence that, as dark as things often seem for non-profits in times like these, a glance at the history of our industry appears to show that we all tend to perceive these things in the moment as being more dire than they actually are.

The ray of hope, in this case, comes in the form of a decidedly pessimistic article about just where orchestras stand at a moment of economic peril. It’s from TIME magazine – go check it out, then come back here. I’ll wait…

…

Pretty dismal, eh? Sounds like the Detroit Symphony’s dangling over the precipice of insolvency, a bunch of smaller bands are either talking merger or bankruptcy, and even the Big Five are commissioning studies that make them seem pretty darn vulnerable. There’s barely a bright spot to be found.

Unless, of course, you were to check the date at the top of the article.

Yup, 1969. America was mired in an unpopular war in Asia, things at home had turned decidedly nasty on the political front, the economy was stuck in a major slump, and government had been forced to cut way back on funding for arts and culture in the name of austerity. Sound familiar?

On top of that near-perfect mimic of the conventional 2010 assessment of orchestras, check out this paragraph:

“Even though symphony-going is not dominated by the rich to the extent that it was 40 years ago, it is still a formal experience that most turned-on youth regard as static, outmoded and irrelevant. As the conservative, 19th century-oriented programming of most orchestras proves, the institutions are trapped into patterns of pleasing the wealthy patrons who support them—and by and large, the patrons like Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. This does not mean that the orchestras would automatically attract larger audiences with avant-garde programs. The real problem is attracting the young today so that there will be an audience tomorrow.”

Gee, how many times have you read something that sounded exactly like that in the last few years? It would be hilarious if it weren’t so infuriating. I guarantee that a little research would turn up multiple articles from the 1920s and ’30s expressing this exact same (citation-free) sentiment, begging the question: for exactly how many decades do we plan to allow the prophets of doom to continually shout from the mountaintop that orchestras are withering on the vine before pointing out that their dire predictions have been consistently, unceasingly, 100% wrong?

Bottom line: there’s not a single orchestra said to be at risk in the TIME article that doesn’t continue to exist today. Buffalo and Rochester never merged, and both are still model regional orchestras. Neither did Cincinnati and Indianapolis, and many would place both of them in the nebulous “major orchestra” category. That’s not to say that recessions don’t hurt orchestras (Detroit always struggles badly in tough times, for obvious reasons,) and certainly, some smaller ensembles that were already being mismanaged in a good economy tend to fold their tents when the seas get rough. What I’m saying is that the chattering classes are just monumentally, staggeringly bad at accurately assessing how a localized crisis applies (or doesn’t) to the wider industry. (Also, most of them never seem to learn anything much from crisis periods of the past.)

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t talk about the problems we have as an industry, or what changes could be made to our overall business model to make us less vulnerable. There are some quite reasonable things being written these days by orchestra managers, veteran union types, and others on the subject. I just think that we’d do well to take a step back whenever the drumbeat of bad news approaches soul-crushing levels, and remember just how many times this has all happened before.

Posted in all music is local, state of the art, the business of music | 1 Comment »

Austerity Measures

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

An article on budget cuts, layoffs, and salary cutbacks in Portland, Oregon’s arts scene this past weekend was a sad, if unsurprising, thing to read. This is happening all over, including here in Minnesota, of course, and while those of us here like to talk a good game about how much worse things could be if we weren’t lucky enough to live in a place where so many people care deeply about what we do, the frightening reality is that, based on everything we know from past downturns, the arts will be one of the last sectors to fully recover.

So yeah, we’re cutting, they’re cutting, everyone’s cutting. But hang on. There’s this guy Michael Kaiser – runs the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., became a legend in the arts biz by dragging orchestras and dance companies back from the brink and making them solvent again – who’s running around the country telling everyone that we’re doing this exactly wrong:

You can’t save your way to health. You don’t get healthy by getting smaller, by doing less… [Also,] focus on today and tomorrow not yesterday. There’s no time for blame. When things are bad many people sit around talking about where it went wrong. That’s not healthy.

Hm, okay. I guess that’s more or less what Joe Dowling was saying last week when he told MPR that it had been a mistake to cut the Guthrie’s rehearsal schedule to save money this past season. Still, that kind of broad pronouncement is easy to make in a speech, but harder to implement in the real world. If you’re not supposed to cut your way back to fiscal stability, but you have 33% less in your endowment than you did last year (and everyone else is in the same boat,) how can you possibly survive as an organization?

You have to plan your art. Most organizations plan their art too close to event. You need to plan four and five years out. First, you can make art better if you take more time. Second, you can do a better job fundraising. “I listen to the funder, find out what do they like to fund. I have a menu of five years of projects, so I can choose best event for funder.” Finally, “It helps me to educate my audience to want to see something that is not so accessible. I’m excited about projects that are transformational. But this requires some education of the audience. And with time, you can educate in advance. Creativity has been beaten out of so many arts organizations. Planning ambitious work four years out, creating big vision is what’s needed.”

Now, that makes very good sense, and it’s also demonstrably true – Kaiser will be happy to reel off the evidence for you. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. What he’s talking about is a wholesale shift in how we run our industry, and a much higher level of competence than a lot of arts leaders currently have, quite frankly. (Please note that I’m not talking about a lack of passion, or commitment. But the sad truth is that far too many American arts managers are thrown into the deep end of a very big pool without ever having been taught anything more sophisticated than the dog paddle.)

Another hard truth is that, when arts leaders who are competent and do have new ideas start talking about massive systemic change, a lot of the people who work under them (orchestra musicians, say) get very, very nervous, and even angry. Because change is scary, and to be perfectly honest, it’s very hard without the benefit of hindsight to tell the difference between a leader who’s genuinely trying to do something fantastic and new that will benefit everyone in the long run, and one who’s just in way over his/her head and has started babbling about “unsustainable business models” when what s/he really means is “My job is way too hard, so you’re all going to have take massive salary cuts to make it less hard.” (The orchestra world is littered with the carcasses of ensembles that cut and cut and cut in the name of some sort of ill-defined “transformation,” then discovered too late that they’d cut themselves out of all relevance to their community and ceased to have a reason to exist.)

Throw in the additional wrinkle that most large non-profit arts boards are made up of very wealthy and generous people from the decidedly for-profit world, and you have a recipe for combustion when times get tough. Since for-profit companies exist to make money, and to preserve capital, it can be very difficult for people used to that world to remember that cultural groups exist for entirely different reasons, and that they therefore need different strategies to weather fiscal storms. Likewise, it’s easy for those on the receiving end of a board’s largess to forget that we quite literally wouldn’t have careers without their continuing generosity. It’s a very understandable disconnect, but it does lead to a lot of frustration on all sides.

Chaos is frequently the enemy of progress, and my take on why so many orchestras, in particular, flounder in tough times is that too many of us don’t find a way to pull on the oars together when we need to most. Faced with a crisis, some musicians dig in their heels and insist everything will work itself out, some managers see an excuse to make the massive cuts they’ve been wanting to impose for years, and some board members feel caught in the middle of it all and eventually do what they would do at their for-profit firms – find the route with the least apparent risk and set a course down it.

But if Michael Kaiser and an increasingly audible chorus of others are to be believed, that less risky route might actually keep us with our heads barely above water for far longer than we can afford.

Posted in money, state of the art, the business of music | 1 Comment »

First Abuse From The Podium, And Now…

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

Judging by the comments appended to Sarah’s post back on May 12, a lot of you were horrified when audio surfaced of conductor Anshel Brusilow brutally dressing down the musicians of the Richardson (TX) Symphony Orchestra during a rehearsal. One musician being singled out by Brusilow for his organizing efforts on behalf of the musicians quit on the spot. You may also recall that the grave sin that the musicians had committed to inspire this spittle-flecked rant from the podium was to pass out leaflets to audience members noting that the RSO’s management hadn’t been paying them anywhere close to on time for two full years.

Anyway, where there’s a spittle-flecked rant that someone thought to record, there’s probably a lot more dissatisfaction bubbling beneath the surface. One of the commenters on Sarah’s original post asked, “Where is the management in all this?” Someone else asked, “Where is the board?” This week, we got an answer to that, as the RSO’s management and board quite dramatically declared war on the musicians of the orchestra, who, as I noted back in May, make an average of $2625 per year from the RSO. (When they’re paid at all.)

Prolific orchestra blogger Drew McManus has a lot more detail than I’m going to go into here, so click on over to Adaptistration if you want the full story, but in a nutshell, here’s how it went down: the musicians were summoned to a meeting that was supposed to be to discuss “structural changes” to the orchestra’s operations. When they arrived, the representatives of the musicians’ union, the AFM, were barred from the meeting by a sheriff’s deputy and the Dallas Police. (I’m pretty sure this would actually have been illegal in Minnesota, but Texas is one of them so-called “right to work” states, which basically means “no right to a union.”) The musicians were then summarily told that their union would no longer be recognized, and the RSO would refuse to negotiate any new collective bargaining agreement with its musicians under any circumstances.

The union has responded by placing the RSO on the “Unfair List,” which basically means that union musicians (which is to say most of us) are strongly discouraged from accepting gigs there. A lot of non-union players also don’t take gigs with Unfair List-ed bands, because it’s not a designation that’s handed down lightly, and it’s usually a pretty strong sign of a very unpleasant working environment. Presumably, the entire complement of the RSO’s musicians will not be back, which is exactly what their management and board seem to want, anyway. Essentially, the orchestra’s leaders have decided that the people who actually play the music are so expendable, so dime a dozen, that there’s no harm in just blowing the entire organization up and starting fresh with, presumably, musicians who don’t mind not getting paid for months at a stretch and being shrieked at by an overpaid, washed-up has-been of a conductor.

It honestly takes a lot to get me worked up about union-management disputes in the orchestra business. On the whole, I’m glad to be in a union, but I also have a lot of philosophical disagreements with those who think musicians should always be in lock-step on every issue simply because we are unionized. I’ve never understood the attitude from some musicians that anyone working in management is automatically the enemy, but I’ve also known more than one orchestra manager or board member who treated musicians like hired help, thus encouraging such animosity. I feel very fortunate to play in an orchestra that gets amazing support from our board members, but I remember what it was like to play in an ensemble where that wasn’t the case.

I like to think I’m pretty fair-minded, is what I’m saying here, and that’s why you don’t see me writing a whole lot about labor disputes that I don’t have a stake in. But this RSO thing… this might be the most chilling, heartless, mean-spirited display of executive and board incompetence that I’ve ever seen in the music industry. Yeah, it’s on a small scale – it’s not like the RSO is the Boston Symphony or anything. But these are real people, with real careers, cobbling together a modest income by playing as many gigs as they can find, driving all over creation to play for any audience that will have them. And now they’re being kicked to the curb as if they did something wrong, and being told that their oh-so-extravagant $2625 salaries are just too greedy for today’s world.

Back when Sarah linked to Brusilow’s petty little rant, I hoped it was an anomaly, a momentary lapse of self-control that didn’t really reflect how bad things might be in Richardson, Texas. But now we know the truth: the RSO’s music director, its managers, and its board well and truly deserve each other.

Posted in conductors and conducting, orchestras not named minnesota, the business of music | 4 Comments »

Great expectations

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

I’ve written about the response to Dudamel’s first national tour with the LA Philharmonic, and noted the pitfalls of being a highly-hyped young conductor. Now the Philadelphia Orchestra has named as their new music director a young conductor who, along with Dudamel, is touted as a leader of his generation, Yannick Nezét-Séguin.

Much that’s been written about this appointment, most referencing the expected topics: his youth, his vibrant podium presence, and the possibly galvanizing effect a youthful, charismatic music director could have on an organization fraught with financial woes and (through an extended music director search) a lack of artistic leadership.

I’ve not seen Nezét-Séguin live, but I’ve heard from my Philly Orchestra friends that he’s generally well-respected by the band, and from people in the know that he’s a major emerging talent. Both of which carry cautionary statements, of course: first and foremost, because no orchestra is entirely satisfied with its artistic leadership, simply because there are too many perspectives about musicianship and personal rapport among the 90+ members of a symphony for a unified opinion to exist. As mentioned in a Philly Inquirer article an anonymous Philly Orchestra musician commented that they had stopped hoping for an overwhelming mandate to gather around a particular conductor “because of the danger of creating an ideal so perfect that no one would ever meet it.”

Second is the emerging talent part: 35 is still awfully young in conductor-years (even the most fortunate among us didn’t get to stand in front of an orchestra until our late teens, in stark contrast to the average violinist, who’s been playing their instrument since 5 or 6), and there’s always the concern that there will be a certain amount of repertoire-learning (and general music director job-learning) in the glare of an international spotlight. That being said, some artists grow gracefully, spotlight or not. Time will tell, and I hope it works out for the fabulous Philadelphians.

What irks me a little is the armchair prognosticating about how the arrival of a youthful, energetic music director will do much to revive a flagging organization; conductor as savior. No doubt, in the Philly Orchestra’s situation – artistic leadership at the helm after an extended period sans music director – this might be partially true. But to me it has the chime of an unreasonable expectation, in the end. It’s much like the Dudamel hype – this young man will change the classical music world! – hanging hopes on an individual to rejuvenate a field which needs an entire health-regime makeover, not just a touch of Botox.

I know newspapers are prone to hyperbole, but it always seems unfair to have such great expectations. Why can’t we just say that a new conductor may bring new ideas and new repertoire to a venerable old institution, without all the game-changing talk?

Posted in conductors and conducting, orchestra culture, orchestras not named minnesota, philosophical musings, the business of music | 4 Comments »

Another Round Of Navel Gazing

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

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.

Posted in all music is local, state of the art, the business of music | 2 Comments »

Stop Helping. Please.

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

This one is going to turn into a rant. I can already tell. Which isn’t ideal, because I think I actually have some coherent ideas behind what I’m about to write, but I’m having a lot of trouble organizing them into anything more focused than general explosions of frustration and irritability.

But here goes. I read a lot of articles, both in mainstream publications and in your more insider-y blogs and magazines aimed at those of us in the music business, all purporting to detail either what’s wrong with the orchestral business model, or what should be done to fix it, or why it can’t be fixed at all. Every once in while, I find an article claiming that there’s actually nothing systemically broken in what we do, which you’d think would be reassuring, but is usually just frustrating in a new way, since I’ve never read anything on the subject that couldn’t be directly and succinctly contradicted by something else I’ve read elsewhere.

Basically, to hear the self-styled experts tell it, orchestras are utterly doomed to eventual extinction (or not) because we don’t play enough new music; because we play too much new music; because we wear tuxes and have formal concert rituals; because we dumb down the concert experience and try too hard to be casual; because we don’t talk to the audience; because we insist on talking to the audience; because we fail to put our music in context; because we force context no one asked for on our audiences; because no one under 60 cares about what we do; because we’re far too focused on attracting younger audiences; because we’re too market driven; because we stubbornly refuse to give our customers what they want; because the musicians are paid too much; because we’re too incompetent to properly capitalize ourselves and pay our employees a reasonable wage; because ticket prices are too high; because ticket prices aren’t high enough to pay our overhead costs; because we haven’t figured out how to use the internet properly; because we’re more focused on our websites than we are on getting people into the concert hall; because our CEOs and music directors are grossly overpaid; and because we’re too provincial and small-minded here in City X to realize that the salaries of our CEOs and music directors are set by what the market will bear in what is, truly, a global industry.

You can see how this sort of “advice” would start to drive you up the wall after a while. And what’s really infuriating is that these screeds tend to come either in the form of snarky, condescending reports from consultants or analysts who usually seem to think that they’re stating wildly original ideas (they aren’t) that should shake the orchestra business to its core (they don’t,) or from some supposedly hyper-creative and dynamic think tank made up of individuals from wildly different corners of the business, all of whom usually came into the process with exactly the same set-in-stone opinions that they’ll leave with after writing their final report.

And then, there’s the most pointless, misleading, and utterly unhelpful article prototype of all: the kind in which some journalist discovers that there’s something called “crossover classical” in the world, goes and interviews someone who’s made a lot of money playing it, and then asks whether this sort of utterly groundbreaking thing could “save” traditional classical music. Which absolutely does (or does not) need saving. (See above.)

It’s not just that so many of these supposedly helpful analyses are self-evidently dead wrong (some of them have to be, since they all contradict each other!) It’s that, for those of us working in relatively healthy organizations (which, contrary to what many would have you believe, most major symphony orchestras in America are,) who spend several nights a week staring out at the literally thousands of people who have paid quite a bit of money to sit and watch us perform week after week after week, all the dread premonitions and proposals to overhaul the entire industry from the ground up start to ring awfully hollow. Yes, there are things that need to be fixed. Yes, there are some outmoded traditions that could stand to be kicked to the curb. But for the love of God, could all the Chicken Littles just shut the heck up for even a week and stop trying to help us into our professional graves?!

(See there? Ranting. Told you it was gonna happen. Apologies – I’ll finish up with something positive.)

I was actually quite happy to read a piece that popped up on the Wall Street Journal’s site this weekend. (Aside from its truly bizarre editorial pages, I happen to love the WSJ, read it regularly, and think its cultural coverage, while sometimes maddeningly inward-looking, is quite impressive given that it’s primarily a paper about finance.) The story was written by a guy who seems mainly to write about rock and hip-hop, and in writing an article about the sort of classical crossover music that “serious” music writers are forever wringing their hands over, he seems to have immediately latched onto an obvious truth that eludes so many others.

Basically, he took what could have been a fluffy little interview with Dutch showboat Andre Rieu about his attempt to bring his waltz-based dog and pony shows to the US, and used it to point out that, far from driving new audiences either towards or away from traditional concert music, Rieu represents an entirely different genre with its own audience base. Which is obviously true. Everything we know of people who adore Rieu’s schmaltzy, over-the-top (and, truth be told, not terribly skillful) concerts tells us that they’re the same folks who loved Yanni at the Acropolis, John Tesh at Red Rocks, and it’s probably not a reach to suggest that most of them have a few Barry Manilow records at home, too.

Basically, Rieu’s crowd is the lite-rock crowd. He just happens to play the violin and have an orchestra, but there’s nothing remotely classical about him. In fact, I’d argue that the kind of audience we attract to Orchestra Hall has far more in common with the sort of people who pack indie-rock shows at The Varsity than with what I’ll call the PBS Pledge Drive fan base. Our crowd (and the Varsity’s) tends to be passionate about music, pretty seriously engaged with their local scene, probably goes out to see live music quite a bit, and is maybe just a bit snobbish towards genres of music that they consider less than serious.

That doesn’t even begin to square with the PBS crowd, who likely consume most of their music at home, from TV, radio, or recordings, and consider a concert ticket to be an occasional splurge for special occasions such as Andre Rieu making an appearance in their town. In other words, the consumer behavior these fans exhibit is the exact opposite of the behavior that would make them a good candidate to come to one of our orchestra concerts, a fact which the WSJ’s pop writer spotted immediately, even as so many others steeped in classical culture fail to see it.

And maybe that’s what’s really ailing the orchestra business. We’re so inundated with consultants, commentators, and other self-styled experts, each with his/her own highly specific agenda, that we’ve started to miss the larger (and fairly obvious) truths of how people decide what music is worth their time and money. Maybe it’s time for us as an industry to start tuning out all the internal babbling (and yes, I realize I’ve just added 1300 words of babble to the pile) and just look around our immediate surroundings to see how others are creating the passion and loyalty that every musician needs in our fan base.

Posted in all music is local, state of the art, stirring the pot, the business of music, the media | 12 Comments »

“Dramatic cuts”

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

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.

• Wages disproportionate to the number of hours and weeks worked.

• An oversupply of seats and performances.

• “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.

Posted in orchestras not named minnesota, the business of music | 1 Comment »

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Or, as we’d say on this side of the Atlantic, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Throughout my conducting career I’ve faced the dreaded “How is it being a woman in a male-dominated field?” question, and my customary reply is that 1) I choose not to make a big deal of it and 2) musicians are fine with anyone on the podium as long as they are prepared and competent.

My reasoning lies in my belief that we largely create our own realities; if I choose to ignore the potential minefield of the woman-as-authority-figure model, and assume that others will as well, that’s the way it will be. If I act like it’s no big deal, everyone else feels like it’s no big deal. Classic group psychology.

On the other hand, if I ever became hyper-conscious of long-held assumptions about gender and leadership, it would probably cause me some anxiety, which would then affect both my work and relationship with the ensemble or organization in question.

In terms of the inroads women have made in the conducting field, to paraphrase – we’ve come a long way, baby. But as far as we’ve come, there are constant reminders of the underlying discomforts that still exist.

Case in point; the recent firing or conductor/Baroque specialist Emmanuelle Haïm. Slated to conduct a run of Mozart’s Idomeneo at the Opéra de Paris, she was dismissed and replaced by Philippe Hui two days before opening night. What ensued was a she-said/they-said unusual in the music world in that the Orchestra made a public statement in response to Haïm’s declaration. Haïm claimed that the musicians were unwilling to work with her to achieve a different (Baroque) aesthetic. The orchestra countered that they were disappointed in the lack of precision in both musical ideas and in conducting style/gestures, and that all they care for is the quality of a performance.

A vote of no confidence from an orchestra is rather extraordinary. In her defense, neither a contracted rehearsal period nor musicians unaccustomed to the very particular technical and musical needs of historically informed performance is conducive to an amicable work environment. In the orchestra’s defense, Haïm is a self-taught conductor who, while generally highly regarded for her musical expertise in the Baroque repertoire, is admittedly not a technically adept conductor.

The situation is fully outlined in this article from Le Monde; for the non-Francophones, a translation of most of the article here.

What struck me about this commotion is the inclusion of an obvious fact that the author of the article decided to add at the end of a paragraph (I’m using Charles T. Downey’s translation from Ionarts):

The orchestra, “called out” by Mme Haïm, broke its customary silence — a very rare thing — by the means of the commission elected by the musicians, which declared on January 22: “The musicians were delighted to try a Baroque approach, [but] there was great disappointment in the lack of precision as well of musical ideas in the conducting style.” In other words, the orchestra, which wanted only “to guarantee the excellence of the performances,” denounced a lack of competence, for this production, of one of the few woman conductors in the world. (emphasis mine)

We don’t need to be reminded that there are not a whole lot of female conductors in the world. Anyone not living under a rock is aware of this. So, assuming that the goal was not simply an unnecessary statement of the obvious, I can only infer that this phrase was added as some sort of snide insinuation.

Yes, I’ll admit, I’m probably more sensitive to gender slights than your average male conductor. It’s simply a matter of experience; I’ve been on the receiving end of backhanded commentary and dealt with interactions fraught with undercurrents of chauvinism countless times. Again, as I said earlier, my response is to completely ignore it, and when one ignores it, one at least has the possibility of neutralizing an unfriendly environment.

But when publicly presented in international media, it seems gratuitously provocative (a conductor declared incompetent – and she’s a WOMAN!). And let me be clear here; it’s the author of the article that rankles me. I know nothing about the actual situation and can only assume a conductor would be ousted only because a production was in serious jeopardy and was artistically compromised.

I strive to dispel any notion that my gender marks my work. In fact, most of the time I pay it no heed (yes, even in the four-inch heels). And, again, when one endeavors to disregard traditional societal norms, with enough time one can establish new norms. Media insinuations like this one merely do a disservice to the very real work we’ve undertaken to eradicate those boundaries and assumptions.

Just when you think we’ve made progress, all you need to do is scratch the surface to discover the underlying bias. Plus ça change… (and do read down through all the comments; the vitriol is extraordinary.)

Posted in music and psychology, the business of music, the media, women in music | 2 Comments »