Holly Mulcahy has a wonderful article up at The Partial Observer about the rash of program/artist substitutions prompted by the funding crisis at US orchestras. Here at the Oregon Symphony, there haven’t been any mid-course corrections, as such, but guest artists have had their contracts renegotiated at lower rates, and some pieces were not programmed in the first place as they require the hiring of too many extra musicians, which drastically increases the price tag. You’ll note that we end this season with Mahler’s First Symphony, and might have wondered why we haven’t done Nos. 3 or 6 or 2 in quite some time – it basically comes down to money. Hence Holly’s article title: Sorry, We’re Fresh Out of Mahler.
Tag Archives: orchestras
worth noting
Just observing a few trends from the latest rounds of labor negotiations for US orchestras:
- Unpaid furloughs seem to be the way of dealing with labor costs, rather than lowering the pay rate (either per week or per service).
- Managements are trying to trim costs in their own offices as well as in the ranks of the orchestra.
- There seems to be a race to the bottom in terms of slash-and-burn expense cutting, and musicians are largely going along with this strategy.
- Most orchestras are not raiding their endowments to pay off deficits – yet.
- Scaling down rather than shutting down seems to be the order of this business cycle.
the new normal?
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: Continue reading
more cuts for orchestras
- UPDATE 4/08 [link] The Utah Symphony/Opera cut 11.5% of of their benefits plus Keith Lockhart takes 10% pay reduction.
- [link] The Atlanta Symphony musicians have reopened their previously negotiated CBA (which ran through 2011) and will be taking an 8.8% pay cut by the end of 2011 (the first drop will be 5% for 09/10, then a further 3.8% in 2011).
- [link] The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra musicians have agreed to a 12% pay cut for the 09/10 season. Staff cuts were 17% cut of staff positions and a 15.5% cut of top executive pay, and a salary freeze for non-senior management.
- Philadelphia Inquirer arts writer Peter Dobrin writes about a possible sea change in how US orchestras will be structured in the midst and the wake of the current recession/depression. The main point concerns salaries – both executive and musician.
- David Brewster of Crosscut.com writes about the possibility that Seattle over-built its arts infrastructure, and points to Portland as a model of where Seattle might be headed (and that Seattle might be a place that Portland should worry about becoming).
the sky isn’t falling, the sky isn’t falling
Robert Levine has an excellent post today that goes along very well with my post of a couple days ago. It’s a response to a recent posting by Greg Sandow, which you can find here.
Here’s the first two paragraphs of Robert’s excellent response:
Greg Sandow recently wrote a typically insightful and provocative post on “ways that classical music doesn’t connect with the world we live in.†It’s worth reading. And it’s definitely worth a response. So here’s mine.
1.   Most of the music at classical concerts comes from the past. So we’re rarely engaged with contemporary life. (Is this one reason the people who go to these concerts like them?)I could be snarky about how very little music comes from the future. But I won’t; Greg is right that most of is played at classical concerts (orchestral ones in particular) predates WW II. There are good reasons for this. One is that orchestras have learned that programming contemporary music is like a restaurant making all its patrons eat liver; people stay away in droves. There are anecdotal tales of orchestras programming “new music†to great box office success, but I’ve not heard of any that really stand up to hard-headed analysis. (The idea that LA has been successful with such programming ignores the poor houses they experienced prior to building Disney Hall, for example).
I think that orchestras have an obligation to perform and promote new music. But they also have an obligation to play what people want to hear. And they have an obligation to survive. These are not easy to balance. Simply stating that orchestras need to play more new music is not proposing a solution to this problem.
2.   Formal dress looks archaic, and out of touch.
Yes. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. The New York Pro Musica achieved great success when performing the old medieval passion plays by getting it right musicologically and visually – and that meant both using original instruments (or as close as they could come) and appropriately archaic costume. What’s the appropriate costume for performing Beethoven for paying patrons? It may not be tails. But I doubt it’s street clothes either. This also is hard to get right.
When I joined the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in 1978, the guys wore blue velvet suites with white cravats (and good luck trying to find one even in 1978, by the way). That wasn’t appropriate costume for performing anything.