Classical music links: Detroit reaches out and Philadelphia risks $50 million

Has Philly risked $50m by filing for bankruptcy? Appears so.

By Barry Johnson

We have made our bed, and now we must sleep in it. I'm cliche-ing about the ongoing situations of two major American symphony orchestra, the Detroit Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra, about which we've written at length in the past. Their situations are different -- Detroit is coming back to life after a toxic strike and Philadelphia recently filed for bankruptcy, an action that is still open to interpretation and one that may have repercussions the board hasn't considered.


The Detroit Symphony goes suburban: Although the story doesn't say so, Detroit's striking musicians played a few concerts outside Detroit's city limits -- where the vast majority of Detroit metro population can be found. Continuing to connect to the existing classical music fan base in the suburbs and proselytizing among the uncommitted extends that idea. Another story talks about music director Leonard Slatkin's programming for the 2011-2012 season, which may or may not have an impact on attendance and fundraising (the story assumes it does, I have my doubts), and a few other changes the symphony has in store, lowering some ticket prices 50 percent, for example.


Was the Philadelphia Orchestra bankruptcy a $50 million mistake?: That's the provocative question that Peter Dobrin, the Philadelphia Inquirer's fine music critic asks. It has to do with a $50 million endowment gift in 2003 to the orchestra by the Annenberg Foundation. That gift had a little stipulation: If the orchestra went into bankruptcy, then the foundation could ask for the money back. Complicating matters: Since the death of Leonore Annenberg, The Annenberg Foundation now rarely funds Philadelphia non-profits -- most of its giving occurs in California.  In another story, Dobrin suggests that the orchestra's current financial situation is worse than it seems.


A few more related links: One of the key questions -- and maybe it's not even a question -- is whether the Philadelphia Orchestra board is using bankruptcy as a negotiating tactic to get out from under its contracts with its musicians, the pops orchestra and the concert hall in which it plays. The symphony in Louisville attempted to do something similar but the bankruptcy judge ruled it. Drew McManus's Adaptistration blog gets into the issue via a post from conductor Bill Eddins on the blog he keeps, Sticks and Drones.

The Detroit Symphony has lost several musicians during the strike and its aftermath, most recently its concertmaster, Emmanuelle Boisvert, who has played with the orchestra since 1988.

 

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?

The Philadelphia Orchestra and the changing financial model for symphonies

By Barry Johnson

As I browsed the half-dozen or so classical music sites I frequent, I half-way expected to find lots of blog posts about the Philadelphia Orchestra bankruptcy situation. I didn't. Maybe it's too early. Maybe the bloggers think it's a "local" problem.  And the issues involved are complicated -- most of us glaze over at phrases such as "pension fund obligations" -- and the data is scarce, as we pointed out yesterday.

Classical music provocateur Greg Sandow didn't do an extensive analysis of the Philadelphia crisis on his blog, but he did place it in a larger context, the one he's been describing for the past few years. Sandow believes in the Le Poisson Rouge approach to preserving classical music, meaning that musicians and the institutions they play for need to figure out ways to enter the worlds of the people they aren't reaching now.

Le Poisson Rouge is a New York City club that mixes modern classical music, jazz, indie rock, performance art and almost anything else as long as it has an avant edge. It has proven to be very popular and helped to develop a new generation of art music composers (think Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, David Lang). Sandow thinks the future of classical music is in the hands of clubs of this sort, because how else will we breach the wall between Gen Y and classical music?

Intiman Theatre, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the issue of transparency

The venerable Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy.

By Barry Johnson

The news over the weekend was grim, confusing and bi-coastal. The mighty Philadelphia Orchestra filed for  bankruptcy, though it has an endowment of $116 million. And Intiman Theatre in Seattle closed its doors for the rest of its season, though it successfully reached it Phase One $500,000 emergency fund-raising goal a couple of weeks ago.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has threatened this course for a while, but Intiman's decision came as a surprise. Still, what was missing from both organizations, both the mighty and the small, was the degree of transparency about their operations that would give potential donors confidence to contribute to them yet again.

At the end of the day, didn't they owe the public better numbers and better explanations than they gave us?