Bernard Holland’s June 29th article in the New York Times, “How to Kill Orchestras,” (which managed to offend both orchestra managers and arts administration programs like mine…so it can’t be all bad) is just the latest in a series of panic pieces on the death of the American symphony. Certainly, the orchestra’s operating model is facing a trying time (along with every other nonprofit on earth). And the seemingly more frequent news of budget troubles in Texas, Florida, Colorado, and elsewhere is only adding gasoline to the already fiery rhetoric (there’s some slightly better news from Pittsburgh).
But since when did the local or regional symphony become the canary in our cultural coalmine? The troubles of symphonies are certainly, well, troublesome. And given their relative budget size in their communities‹and the number of musicians they employ‹there’s good reason to raise the red flag. But symphonies are a very specific species of nonprofit arts organizations‹generally larger, generally better endowed, generally sustaining a higher production cost. It would be a shame to define policy based on the whale, and miss the kelp and the krill (okay, bad metaphor, but you get the point). Symphonies are part of an ecosystem. If we’re going to panic, let’s panic in a more general and systemic way.
Fellow blogger Greg Sandow will be focusing on the orchestra issues in his new ArtsJournal blog. In a recent post, he points to a more specific root of orchestra woes:
“:Some of the better people in the field are quietly saying that orchestras spend too much — that they’re spending more than they take in, and have been doing so ever since the ’90s, though they didn’t notice because of the economic boom.”
