Unanswered Question: December 2010 Archives

About a week ago I received a phone call from a reporter from Detroit Public Radio inviting me to comment on the Detroit Symphony strike. I told him I had no special knowledge of the Detroit situation, but was amenable to commenting on some of the general issues at hand.

"Service conversion" is something I have long thought, spoken, and written about - e.g., in my blog of Jan. 29, 2010, on how the Memphis Symphony has succeeded in prioritizing musician "services" beyond rehearsing and performing. This seems to me an idea long overdue. It addresses the surfeit of concerts, outstripping demand, bedeviling many American orchestras. It also addresses the insularity of orchestras as cultural institutions, by inviting musicians to engage with the community in new ways.

To my surprise, I was then quoted saying that orchestra musicians "should no longer expect to work full-time." I in fact opined that they could expect a more varied work menu - one of the sticking points of the current Detroit negotiations. Drew McManus picked this up on his "Adaptistration" blog - and I offered a response. In response to that, Brian Bell of WGBH Boston - who's done fascinating research into the early seasons of Henry Higginson's Boston Symphony - contributed some historical perspective. I then offered a further comment, as follows:

Yes Henry Higginson invented the Boston Symphony - and the full-time American "symphony orchestra." By 1900, the BSO was giving 100 concerts a season and more. Nothing in Beethoven's or Brahms' Vienna predicted an institution remotely of this kind; then as now, the Vienna Philharmonic was essentially a pit orchestra. The template fit Boston - its singular appetite for Beethoven and other symphonic masters. It was not then and is not now self-evidently a universal template.

A useful point of reference may be Dimitri Mitropoulos's Minneapolis Symphony (1937-1949) - one of the most impressive American music directorships of the twentieth century. With Stokowski's Philadelphia Orchestra, this was one of two American orchestras with an instantly recognizable sonic signature (listen to the edgy recordings and broadcasts, more remarkable than what Mitropoulos later achieved with his "full-time" New York Philharmonic) - it sounded like no other. In Minneapolis Mitropoulos regularly purveyed important new and unfamiliar music. He was trusted and beloved. The orchestra magnificently fulfilled Theodore Thomas's credo - it both challenged and embodied "the culture of the community." Though it toured ambitiously, its subscription season was exceedingly modest by today's standards. I have no doubt that the musicians did not earn a "living wage" as members of the Minneapolis Symphony - but they had ample spare time to earn money in other ways.

It seems to me merely self-evident that frequency of performance cannot be predicated on the number of rehearsals and performances necessary to amass a full-time salary for the instrumentalists. An orchestra's chief beneficiaries are not its member musicians - fundamentally, it serves others first.

If I sound unsympathetic to the musicians, it's because I've heard one too many times the strident union litany blaming ignorant boards and incompetent managers. Running an orchestra is a thankless task. I've done it.

PS - The Mitropoulos/Minneapolis recording to hear first is his scorching Schumann Second Symphony (1940) - a work to which he felt exceptionally close, and which he radically reconstrued. This ranks with Furtwangler's famous studio recording of Schumann's Fourth as one of the two most galvanizing Schumann symphony performances I know. On youtube, you can sample his Minneapolis Symphony in Franck's D minor Symphony. You can sample his Minneapolis Mahler First on my website. These performances are unique, unforgettable.