This one is hard to write.
Over dinner a while back, a colleague I affectionately call my “sister from another mother” and I kept circling a pattern that is difficult to name without sounding ungenerous. We kept starting sentences and abandoning them, because every version seemed to insult people we both admire. But the pattern is real, it is showing up in some of the best orchestras and opera companies in the country right now, and I think it explains why so many of this fall’s labor fights have been so bitter. So let me try to do this carefully.
In some cultural organizations, the people closest to the mission start to be treated as the people the mission is for. Once that happens, almost any structural change becomes impossible to discuss, and right now our sector cannot afford to avoid structural change.
I am not saying artists are selfish or entitled. The players, actors and singers I have in mind are usually the opposite: trained for decades, paid less than their skill would earn almost anywhere else, and more devoted to the work than anyone else on the payroll (including, very often, the CFO). No arts organization ever votes to redefine its mission around its own roster. It just stops asking who the art is for, and over time that question gets answered by default.
Centrality and Ownership
Program centrality and program ownership are different things. In the symphony world, for example, musicians are the people through whom an orchestra’s mission is delivered, and that deserves to be honored in the budget, the schedule and the boardroom. The trouble starts when an institution begins acting as though the mission exists for its musicians rather than through its musicians for someone else.
In most of the nonprofit world this confusion never takes root because the beneficiary is obvious. A caseworker at a family shelter knows exactly whom the work is for. There may be fierce internal arguments about strategy or staffing, but nobody confuses the staff with the families.
Cultural organizations are more complicated, and let’s be real about why this is the case. Without musicians there is no concert. The people delivering the program are central to the institution’s identity in a way that is not true of a food bank or a shelter.
But consider this asymmetry within the same tax-exempt status. A food bank that loses its staff is still a food bank, and the people who depend on it will still be hungry tomorrow. An orchestra without its musicians is an empty hall, and the audience will find something else to do with its Saturday night. Which brings me to the audience.
Audiences Can Walk Away
The National Endowment for the Arts’ most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that the share of American adults attending at least one arts event fell from 53.8 percent in 2017 to 47.9 percent in 2022. Classical music attendance fell from 8.6 percent of adults to 4.6 percent over the same five years, close to half. (Attendance at other live performances, which the NEA counts in a catch-all category, rose from 15.0 to 21.2 percent over the same period, so Americans kept going out, less often to hear us.) Theater tells a similar story: TCG’s most recent Theatre Facts found nonprofit ticket income in 2023 still 29 percent below 2019 after inflation, with attendance down 22 percent over TCG’s four-year trend period.
A food bank’s beneficiaries cannot walk away from their need. An orchestra’s beneficiaries can walk away from the orchestra, and the data says many of them already have. Cultural institutions therefore have less room for mission confusion than a social service agency does, because their beneficiaries are, in effect, volunteers.
Musicians are the engine of the institution, and any leader who treats them as a cost line deserves the resistance they get. An orchestra’s mission exists for its audience, and beyond the audience, for a public that will outlive all of us.
A Fall of Strikes
The San Francisco Opera orchestra struck in September, cancelling five performances including opening night. Management described a $15 million annual shortfall on an $87 million budget and a $30 million draw on the endowment, roughly 10 percent of the fund. Musicians said management’s opening proposal cut their pay by 26 percent, and tax filings reported by the San Francisco Standard show the general director’s compensation had risen 72 percent. Cleveland Orchestra musicians struck for three days after warning that unfilled vacancies put the orchestra’s standing at risk, Boston Symphony musicians voted to authorize what would have been the first strike in the orchestra’s 145-year history after the board declined to renew the music director, and Minnesota Opera’s orchestra authorized a strike ahead of its season opener. San Francisco Symphony is barely a year past a settlement that followed its music director’s departure over the board’s cuts to tours, commissions and education concerts.
San Francisco Opera’s numbers show why both sides dug in. A $15 million gap on an $87 million budget is 17 percent of the entire operation. A 10 percent endowment draw is roughly double the rate most institutions treat as sustainable, which means every year at that pace shrinks the fund that is supposed to cover the next gap.
Some of the musicians’ complaints in these disputes were fair, and some of management’s process was clumsy (a 72 percent raise for the general director did management no favors at the bargaining table). But I read a great deal of coverage this fall about artistic excellence, talent vacancies, base compensation and tenure process, and very little about the question that ought to decide these fights: what does this city’s audience need from its orchestra right now and more importantly over the next twenty years, and what has to change for the institution to keep providing it?
Leadership Owns Half of This
I’ll start with myself. As a CFO, I have been the executive who walked into a room talking about money before meaning.
Executives and boards create this dynamic by talking about margins before mission and by treating artists as an obstacle rather than as partners. When the only language leadership speaks fluently is financial, musicians learn to hear every proposal as a threat to their livelihood, because in their experience it usually is. Mission confusion takes two to tango: leaders who have stopped articulating who the institution serves, and artists who have stopped hearing themselves described as anything but a cost.
The closer people are to the sacred center of an institution, the easier it is for them to experience structural change as betrayal. That is an occupational hazard of caring deeply, and it would be strange if a principal cellist with thirty years in the section did not take a restructuring personally. But much of what our field calls defending the mission turns out to be defending the org chart, and the two deserve separate arguments.
The Faculty Parallel
The arts have company here. Tenured faculty are the people through whom a college delivers its mission, and their academic freedom deserves fierce protection, but when every proposal to change the academic program is heard as an attack on the institution’s soul, the college stops asking what students need, and students, like audiences, can walk away.
Listening Outward
Researchers who study mission drift, including a study of two social enterprises in the Journal of Business Ethics, have documented how organizations can drift away from the people they were built to serve. The best evidence I know of for the alternative comes from Listen4Good, which helped more than 1,250 nonprofits and government agencies systematically collect feedback from the people they serve; in an evaluation of its first four years, 81 percent of participants made at least one change as a result. That falls well short of proof that listening to audiences saves orchestras (“made a change” is a low bar), but it is evidence that organizations which listen outward do change.
A Test for the Next Negotiation
So here is a test I would put on the table at the start of every restructuring, contract negotiation or season redesign, and I would ask musicians, managers and trustees to answer it together. Who is this decision for? What does the audience lose if we change, and what does it lose if we don’t? Does this protect the music, or the current structure of the people making it? Will this institution still be able to serve this city in 2040? If every side answers the first question with the audience, the rest of the argument gets far more productive, even when it stays painful.
The healthiest arts organizations treat their artists as stewards of the mission rather than its owners. Their expertise should shape strategy, their pay should be protected as fiercely as the budget allows, and their voice belongs in artistic planning, which the Boston musicians just won. But the final test of any decision is whether it strengthens the institution’s ability to serve the audiences and the public for whom it exists, and for whom it receives its tax exemption.