Conductor Bill Eddins has a great post on the issues facing orchestras in the face of massive shrinkage of their endowment principal and subsequent attempts to adapt to what many are referring to has “the new normal”. Here are two paragraphs that I found particularly interesting:
The other side of that coin are the Musicians. God help us but we all know people who think that their contribution to the orchestra consists entirely of just showing up and playing, with the expectation that everything else that concerns the organization should be taken care of for them. The phrase “The Board should just raise more money†has been used as a panacea for deep structural problems more than once in my 20-year professional career and it shows a fundamental misunderstanding as to the workings of inter-organizational dynamics, especially since we live in the non-profit world. Why should the Board just raise more money if you have not given them a compelling reason to actually care? Remember, please, that the odds run strongly towards said Board members having very little knowledge of your many years of lessons, your skipping classes @ Juilliard/Eastman/USC/Curtis/Cleveland/Cincinnati/etc. conservatories so that you can practice, and the dedication necessary to get into a decent orchestra through that horrible audition process. From the outside – and a musicians whole life style/concept is utterly foreign to many Board members – it seems that Musicians (at least in the more stable orchestras) are pretty well paid (with fairly decent benefits) to sit around and do something on the weekend that’s supposed to be fun. Just because we can tell that the 2nd Trombone player isn’t really up to snuff does not mean that the Board Chair can, and the idea of me practicing 3 hours a day in June so that I have a hope of getting together a recital in February, 2010 – the reality of that probably doesn’t make much sense to them. We musicians have been doing what we do since we were 6 years old. The Board chair decided on what he/she/it was going to do in life during grad school. There’s a huge difference right there.
But if one looks at the organization as a whole then probably the greatest concern is the non-profit system itself. The Board is not directly effected by something going horribly wrong (they have their day jobs), administrative salaries lag so far behind the for-profit world that rapid and debilitating turnover is inevitable and consistent quality performance is almost unheard of, and then there is the negotiation process between the orchestra and the musicians. This last point seems designed to divorce the concepts of 1) long term fiscal health for the organization; and 2) the well being of its most important employees – the musicians themselves. This negotiation process is straight out of the for-profit world and generally has little to do with the disadvantages of the non-profit reality. Who cares who “won†the negotiations if 1) the musician’s salaries/benefits become so paltry that they’re miserable and it becomes increasingly hard to fill open positions because people start bypassing your auditions (let alone the extra jobs they’ll have to take to make ends meet); or 2) the musicians are promised so much in salaries/benefits that the organization is forced into permanent stop-gap fundraising mode with a constant sense of living on a knife’s edge as the result? What is too often ignored in the negotiation process is that the health of the organization and the health of the orchestra (meaning the musicians) is intertwined. The us vs. them mentality of the 1950s is naïve when it comes to the reality of the 3rd millennium. If the three stakeholders in the orchestra want to continue with that concept then, if you are lucky, that orchestra will survive, but it will never thrive. The next depression/recession will find you in the exact same position that this one did, and good luck with that.