A new model for symphony orchestras?

A new model for symphony orchestras?

Posted on April 8th, 2009 by Christopher Guerin

This recent piece by the Philadephia Inquirer’s Peter Dobrin is one of the best things I’ve seen on the state, the woeful state of symphony orchestras in this country. He diagnoses the problems accurately — shrinking endowments and audiences — and suggests it’s time to explore a new business model. That he doesn’t have any recommendations on that score (so to speak) is hardly surprising. No one else seems to have any either.

I left the symphony orchestra field after 26 year — 20 of them as a manager — for a number of reasons both private and personal, but there was one thing more than anything else that had just worn me out. Trying to sell tickets to an ever-diminishing pool of potential audience members.

It wasn’t just the persistent cultural shift away from high art that has taken place over the past 50 years, or the death of real music education in the schools. I came to think that the phenomenon of cocooning was just as important, that every home theatre represented another lost season ticket holder.

One thing the Dobrin piece doesn’t make clear, and which most national commentators miss, is that the real financial issue isn’t related to classical music audiences only. Most orchestras built their budgets up on the backs of Henry Mancini, Dave Brubeck, and the great popular artists of the 20th century. Of course, many of those have either passed on or are grown old and there’s no new generation of pops artists of that stature (and box office appeal) to replace them. A Paul McCartney, and other artists of that stature, if they got together symphony charts, could salvage the industry, if they didn’t charge more than $70,000 per performance. (Not bloody likely.) But, instead, orchestras have the likes of Art Garfunkel, the Smothers Brothers and the Beach Boys (sans Brian Wilson) to offer. A steady decline in pops audiences has been the result.

The other big problem, and one it is suicide to talk about too openly if you have to deal with them directly, is the structural problem the orchestra industry faces in the form of the American Federation of Musicians. There’s much that I admire about the musicians’ union, but a union of lawyers or doctors would make about as much sense. The union will negotiate scale, leaving each individual free to negotiate their real salary with management. The hyper-rigid work and schedule rules codified in most collective bargaining agreements are a stark contradiction of the notion of artistic quality, and individual musicians will confess that to you in confidence. (And don’t get me started on how the union has priced American orchestras out of the recording market.)

The AFM came into being to counter the tyranny of arrogant and oblivious conductors and it has turned being a symphony orchestra musician into a real job for thousands of players in non-metropolitan cities where they were once little more than volunteers. But, I think the argument can made that the AFM, at least as it is currently structured, has outlived its usefulness. But, having negotiated 8 contracts with them, I’m happy to leave that to others.

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Christopher Guerin

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.