No leadership

…which leads to a less happy followup.

I found myself late one night in a discussion with a dozen or so orchestra people, mostly musicians, from a variety of orchestras, both large and medium-sized. When I joined the discussion, they were talking about why orchestras don’t move more on stage, why they don’t smile, why they don’t acknowledge the audience, and even (when appropriate) perform to it. Everyone in the room, without exception, wanted these things to happen.

But everyone, again without exception, didn’t think it would be easy to change the way orchestras behave. Who would lead the change? It couldn’t be orchestra managements, everyone heartily agreed. Their endorsement would be the kiss of death. Musicians wouldn’t want managements to tell them how to look onstage. No, that’s an understatement; musicians would fight back with everything they had.

Naively, I asked what would happen if an orchestra’s board of directors asked the musicians to show more life on stage. (Not that I thought that was likely. As a thoughtful board member — a real leader in the field — put it recently, boards still see their role as fiduciary, not strategic. They watch to make sure the organization is soundly run, in other words, and don’t yet think their job involves planning for the future.) The answer I got was wonderfully specific. The standard musicians’ contracts, I was told, have a clause requiring musicians to carry out “reasonable” requests from the board. This request, to show more life on stage, would be considered unreasonable, and musicians might actually file a grievance with the union!

Music directors, everyone agreed, could take some leadership here. But mostly they don’t, and when they start to, the musicians agreed, they rarely follow through.

So how could change ever happen? It would have to come from the musicians themselves, everyone agreed, though how that would happen seemed a little vague. Some of the musicians in this conversation thought they might go back to their orchestras and start talking about this, but the odds (at least for the moment) seem not to be in their favor. Which doesn’t mean change won’t happen. It just means that it’ll take a while, and that the early steps aren’t very clear at all. But there really are some orchestras where musician/management relations are more or less relaxed, where musicians already have made some changes, where musicians already talk about these things, where musicians are starting to take some leadership inside the institution. Maybe in these places we could see some movement toward a someday tipping point.

But there’s one thing very sad and discouraging that I took from this discussion. Orchestras don’t have leadership. Most of them don’t have any governing body, or even any CEO, with the power to set policy for the institution. This is amazing, but true. And, quite honestly, it’s ridiculous. I started thinking of other management situations that seemed just about insane. Like the New York City public schools, in the past. School custodians didn’t report to the principals of the schools they worked in. They reported to the custodians’ hierarchy, headquartered in the Board of Education office. So if a principal wanted to get a broken window fixed, he or she would have to ask the Board of Education, which would pass the request on to the custodians’ hierarchy, which would relay it downward to the custodian of the broken-window school. Crazy! Broken windows often weren’t fixed.

The orchestra situation seems just as bad. I have great sympathy for orchestras, and the musicians in this discussion were a great group of people, full of spirit, hope, and ideas. But that evening I couldn't help but wonder. If orchestras don't change -- if they can’t pull together any real internal leadership -- will it be anybody’s fault but their own if they all go out of business?