scraping

With a number of US orchestras undergoing fairly dire labor-relations processes -- the Atlanta Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, among others -- there's been a fair amount of grousing among Oberlin Conservatory graduates on fb. Some are wondering whether it's worth it even to bother auditioning these days. Others point to top-heavy management numbers at some of these institutions. If those numbers are accurate, it's reminiscent of the situation in our state university system, where there's plenty of room in the budget to pay the Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief, but for the actual Educating part of the enterprise they can only afford adjuncts who get paid a dried-peas-and-gravel wage, and one warm body is considered as good as another. Because, you know, money is tight, and the most important thing in a university education is that Management have flexibility.

But as Utah Phillips said about the last baseball strike: "It's the players who create the wealth." Which is to say that in the same way no prospective college student chooses a school because it has a really outstanding Associate Dean of X, nobody buys a ticket to a Yankees game because they love to watch Brian Cashman in action. Neither is anyone drawn to attend a performance of a Beethoven symphony because the back office -- even the Development Office -- has mad administrative skillz. Even though some of those skills are critical to having the event at all, and even though, in this sad privatized system of ours, there is likely no ballgame without the Development Office.

In the end, it's the audiences who get what a given organization pays for. If audiences aren't drawn by what's on offer -- because the top players have of necessity dispersed to other gigs or even professions -- well, the entertainment business (if you'll forgive the term) is a buyer's market. There are plenty of other distractions out there. But more to the point, if there's no way to make a decent living* as an orchestra musician, how many conservatory graduates will even bother to audition?


*in which we include not having to rely on scraping up freelance gigs, which the management of the Minnesota Orchestra, in the spirit of Randian libertarianism and no doubt proudly waving their own 1099's, claim as "one of the benefits of an orchestral career."