Symphonies by the numbers

By Barry Johnson

Comparing the financial numbers of symphony orchestras is tedious business.  You have to go to GuideStar and look up each symphony's IRS 990 form, scroll through the form and find the right row. Those 990s have lots of good information, but they don't have base musician salaries. For those you need to go to the American Federation of Musicians and the International Guild of Symphony, Opera and Ballet Musicians. It's a pain, especially if you want to be comprehensive. And the 990s are always a couple of years behind -- the 2008/2009 numbers are now available for just about everyone.

I'm happy to report that Drew McManus at his Adaptistration blog has done all that work for you! You can compare and contrast to your heart's content. Want to know how much Michael Tilson-Thomas makes conducting the San Francisco Symphony? It's there ($1,588,816). How much does a fulltime percussionist without tenure or title make at the Boston Symphony? That's there, too ($128,180).

Of course, McManus can't speak to the actual numbers -- just the ones the symphonies reported to the IRS. And remember, this is a slice of data from two years ago. We know that a lot has changed in the symphony world since then.  Nonetheless, the numbers are fascinating, if you're trying to make sense of how symphonies operate, though many of them beg for more explanation (for example, severance packages swelled the compensation numbers of some of the music directors).

Below, I've collected a few of McManus's numbers into my own chart.  I'm in Portland, so the Oregon Symphony is in my first line. I've compared it to some geographically pertinent orchestras and others that have a similar overall budget.

Symphony Orchestra Salary Comparison/2008/2009

	Total expenditure	Music director	Executive director	Base musician
Oregon Symphony	$14,930,007	$424,000	$240,330	$45,924
Seattle	$23,760,741	$785,113	$304,253	$82,250
San Francisco	$63,732,771	$1,588,816	$480,989	$124,800
New Jersey	$15,171,040	$375,000	$204,427	$39,712
Utah	$17,788,364	$323,731	$212,176	$61,828
Indianapolis	$35,619,798	$455,856	$281,933	$79,040
Houston	$23,550,981	$359,323	$226,732	$75,735

Source: Drew McManus, Adaptistration

It's easy to start drawing conclusions from just the bare numbers. And the numbers are all over the place. For example, both Houston and Indianapolis paid their musicians about the same base salary in 2008-2009, even though the budget at Indianapolis was far larger. Seattle paid its music director more than double what Houston paid, even though their budgets are roughly equal. These are local decisions, even personal decisions, and they are made from different financial circumstances -- total expenditure isn't necessarily a good barometer of the economic condition of an orchestra. Without knowing the specific background and history of those decisions, it's unfair to comment. On the other hand, the numbers do suggest questions and in some cases should require some explanations from the symphony orchestras themselves. By the way, I suspect that Michael Tilson-Thomas is worth every penny.

How can we interpret the Philadelphia Orchestra bankruptcy filing?

The Kimmel Center, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra

By Barry Johnson

Just as the Detroit Symphony strike did last fall, the Philadelphia Orchestra bankruptcy filing last month presents thorny problems for its interpreters. (Unless they come fully equipped with a simplistic ideological response to such problems -- I'm thinking of the anti-labor reflex of the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout here.)

In an earlier post, I complained about the lack of transparency by the board of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Without much better financial information, the argument for bankruptcy was almost impossible to judge.

We don't have tables of year-to-year attendance, revenue and expense figures, a reliable narrative of major initiatives (administrative and artistic), demographic data for the orchestra and the city, survey results from subscribers and donors, a good picture of the overall classical music "ecology" in Philadelphia and how the Philadelphia Orchestra participates within it, or a solid general sense of how Philadelphia Metro feels about its world-class orchestra and its appetite for funding it. All of these are important to know, both to understand the immediate situation and how the orchestra landed there.

At this point, following Peter Dobrin's analysis this Sunday in the Philadelphia Inquirer, I'm convinced that the bankruptcy is a screen behind which the board and orchestra management hope to re-make the orchestra and its current financial structure. Orchestra consultant Drew McManus agrees in his own probing analysis of Dobrin's article.

From my many posts on the Detroit Symphony, you know that I oppose this top-down approach because it alienates so many individuals and segments in the orchestra's community. The popular word today for those individuals and segments is "stakeholders," but I like the word community, because it points us in the right direction for possible solutions -- community organizing and community building -- to the underlying problems that orchestras face nationwide.

Before we go further, one important point must be made: The Great Recession of 2008 lingers with us still. I'm starting to think it may be the new reality, but if a real broad-based recovery ever occurs, then that will improve some of the immediate conditions -- depressed revenues -- that orchestras face.  On the other hand, lots of orchestras, especially smaller ones but also Top 10 symphonies, faced chronic declines in attendance and revenue even before the Recession.

 So, what are some of the explanations for this general decline?

Christopher O'Riley and the non-apology apology

Christopher O'Riley: not SO sorry.

By Barry Johnson

Public people often apologize for giving offense -- not for the content of their remarks but for the effect those words have on people who hear them. These aren't real apologies.  Instead, they blame the offended for being of such tender sensibility that they find the truth, roughly spoken as it may be, to be offensive. The interior dialog may go something like this: "It's not really my fault that you're so fragile and have taken offense at what I've said, but if you have, gee, I wish you hadn't. I wish you'd left thinking that I'm a great person, deserving of your support. And I'm a little sorry for myself that you've misunderstood me to such an extent. So, I'm sorry. Poor me."

How about saying, "I got it wrong," instead? Because most of the time those public figures are just that -- wrong.

That's how I feel about pianist/radio host Christopher O'Riley's "apology" for his comments about the Detroit Symphony musicians strike on his NPR blog. Here's what he said:

"Meanwhile, another similarly endangered orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, might fail partially because the musicians of the Motor City crew don't feel that any community service is their responsibility; that their practice time is sacred; and they can't be bothered to get out and serve their community, or prove in any way other than their musical excellence their civic worth and integrity. This ivory-tower attitude is a failure to listen to that portion of the community that wants to be shown, in sincere and substantive ways, why an orchestra is an essential part of the city's life."

This is simply wrong, as many in the comment thread pointed out.

Orchestra troubles: What ails Charles Noble?

By Barry Johnson

Yesterday, I had coffee with my old colleague David Stabler, and he mentioned that violist Charles Noble had written an interesting post on his Noble Viola blog. Here's how the post begins:

"I’m dissatisfied.  Not super unhappy, not depressed, just dissatisfied.  With playing in an orchestra.  There. I said it." 

He's not specific about his discontent, although from the post and the subsequent comment thread we learn that he hasn't taken a vacation in a long time and that the artistic achievement of the Oregon Symphony isn't the issue. He also suggests that he often feels this way during the orchestra's season, but usually not until March. And though he's tried to do some things to keep the music fresh, they haven't worked: "But I still find myself on the ragged edge of burnout already."



Finally, he asks for some advice from his colleagues. In the comment thread that advice includes, taking up Chinese cooking, playing more chamber music, studying the scores more closely and just sucking it up and forging onward, Beckett style: I can't go on. I can't go on. I must go on.

I'm not a musician, let alone a symphony musician. I don't know Charles Noble personally. And my advice on this sort of thing is often terrible. But that's not going to stop me from hypothesizing, now, is it?

I will argue from analogy and from my experience with daily newspapers.

Detroit Symphony update: Strike ahead

By Barry Johnson

Negotiations in the the Detroit Symphony labor dispute collapsed over the weekend, as management dug into its "last best offer" position and the musicians refused to submit. Drew McManus's Adaptistration blog has the goods.  Management is also playing hardball on insurance -- health, dental, vision, musical instrument.  The musicians offered to pay 100 percent of the premiums while the strike continued, but management decided to cancel the policies anyway.

As you may have gathered from my previous posts, I am sympathetic to two general ideas the symphony management is advancing: an arts organization must live within its means and sometimes those means change; creative reinvention is crucial to the health, artistic and financial, of all arts organizations.  At the same time, I think that all members of the symphony's community, the musicians centrally,  should have a voice in that creative reinvention.

At this point, symphony management is playing the bully with its violists, oboists, cellists and the great music they play, and it is failing miserably to engage the musicians in a common and ongoing discussion about the future of the symphony.  The game with the insurance just underscores that, but maybe the citizens of Detroit honor that tactic.

I continue to follow this particular case because I've observed the same forces and conditions at work in lots of other organizations -- arts groups and for-profit corporations alike. And the power play at work by management, if it succeeds, has wide ramifications throughout American orchestras and other arts groups. The strike doesn't officially begin until the first scheduled concert is missed -- Oct. 7.

The symphony: How democratic should it be? (Phone lines are open)

By Barry Johnson

One of the channelers to the Arts Dispatch post on the Detroit Symphony strike vote is Drew McManus  through his Adaptistraton blog, which linked to our original post yesterday, according to our o-so-advanced analytic system. (Thanks for the link!)

When we clicked through to Adaptistration (which we have bookmarked in any case -- McManus follows issues related to American orchestras closely and writes about them provocatively), McManus said that he didn't have time at the moment to comment on the Detroit case, but he did referred his readers to a previous essay he wrote way back in 2004. It's called "The Money Drug," and it's worth a read because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

"The Money Drug" starts with a study that revealed the unhappy condition and job dissatisfaction of symphony musicians -- compared to almost anyone else.  The study, which was published in 1994, says that "a lack of control in the musician’s workplace, both artistic and not" is "the primary source for this problem," in McManus's words. McManus then hypothesizes that the drive for ever higher salaries by musicians is directly related to the stress and lack of control they feel in their workplace. In other words, happier musicians would demand less financial compensation.

That makes sense as far it goes, I suppose. But I'm interested in the mechanics of "control": how does McManus envision the orchestra with the musicians "in control" (or at least feeling that way)? How democratic a system does he imagine? Because I believe that our ability to operate in democratic systems has been diminished by our lack of practice in them, I'm curious about what exactly McManus has in mind.

But maybe we don't have to wait, dear readers! Is McManus's diagnosis correct? If so, how would you go about fixing the problem? The comment thread is open...