Drew McManus has his annual compensation reports available over at adaptistration.com – I’d encourage you to take a look of how much we all get paid is of interest to you. What I found interesting was the relationship of executive and music director compensation to that of the orchestra members.
First, a bit of perspective. Here’s the ratio of average CEO compensation to average worker compensation from 1980 to 2006:
Basically, in 1980, the average CEO was making 42 times what the average worker was making. In 2006, it was 364 times worker compensation. That’s some rate of inflation!
So, here are the numbers that I came up with based upon Drew’s figures from 2007, using the top 7 orchestras:
I’ve highlighted the three numbers that initially jumped out at me.
First, the highest ration of executive pay to musician pay is in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda makes just over 10 times the base pay of the LA Phil’s musicians. This may be well-deserved, as LA is riding on top of the world right now, moving from one acclaimed music director (Esa Pekka Salonen) to the hottest wunderkind on the planet, Gustavo Dudamel in 2009, plus they’ve got the best hall in the nation with Disney Hall. Not a bad place to be.
But here’s the interesting number, Salonen makes just over 1.3 times Borda’s salary. It’s the lowest ratio in the top 7, and it may be the only number which truly reflects what a team effort it is to run a major orchestra in this day and age, with a partnership between the business arm and the artistic arm being crucial to an ensemble’s success.
Compare this to Chicago, where Barenboim was making over 4 times the salary of Deborah Card, the orchestra’s president. This from a music director who abruptly left the orchestra over being unhappy about the amount of administrative/fund-raising work he was required to do. Does that somehow earn him 4 times the salary of someone who is doing most of that work already?
The final statistic that is of interest to me is how relatively in-line the salaries of the executive directors/presidents of these orchestras are to the base wages of their musicians. Compared to the for-profit sector, which is now paying an average of 364 times workers’ wages to its CEO’s, orchestras’ boards are keeping executive pay (and music director pay, for that matter) much better in line with their musician’s wages.
One could argue that a music director isn’t so valuable that he/she is worth between 11 and 20 musicians’ salaries, but I’m certain that in some cases that is very much the case in terms of drawing audiences to hear concerts, with all the ticket sales that that entails.
Anyway, some food for thought.
