My fellow blogman Andrew Taylor raises a smart and sensible point about orchestras — that there’s a “panic” in the press about their threatened demise, which might distract us from serious problems elsewhere in the arts.
And I’d add that the orchestra thing has very likely been blown up more than it ought to be. Yes, we’re hearing all the time about orchestras in trouble — and always the same ones, Florida, for instance, or Louisville, or San Jose. But what does that tell us about orchestras as a group? There are lots of orchestras. Some are weaker than others. In a bad economy, the weak ones suffer. (All non-profits are likely to.) If the entire field were seriously hurting, I’d have expected to see, long ago, the list of the next candidates for death. Where is it? Has anybody even thought to look for it? Maybe it doesn’t exist! Maybe orchestras, as a group, aren’t in very bad trouble.
The serious news about orchestras is something different, which you won’t much read about. (Though James Oestreich did a good job in a New York Times piece, which ran next to the Bernard Holland one Andrew mentioned; you can search for both of them on the Times website, but because they ran more than a week ago, on 6/29, you’ll have to pay to read them. it does no good to link to them, by the way; the links come up blank.) 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. This has to be parsed carefully. What it means is that orchestras are spending more than they can reasonably expect to raise, and that those spending patterns got locked in place in the ’90s, when money seemed to be available. But the money really isn’t there, so orchestras, as a group, will have to cut their spending.
How that will work out over the next few years is what we ought to watch. One model might be the recent deal between the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and its musicians. The musicians take a pay cut, but get more artistic control.