No leadership

…which leads to a less happy

class=SpellE>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?