Posted on October 30, 2009 at 2:08 pm by Robert Levine
in General |

A couple of weeks ago I linked to a story about one of the many musicians who formed the great diaspora of Jews from Europe during and after the Nazi era. Here’s another one:

The Lost Cellos of Lev Aronson. Its sounds like the title of one of those wistful, purposely sentimental novels that seem to be pouring out of publishing houses by the barrel-full these days. But, in reality, the work, written by poet Frances Brent, is another heartbreaking Holocaust tale, this time about a real artist who was brutalized by his experiences on several levels, but who, after liberation, managed to reclaim his career and, indeed, triumph. (He became the principal cellist with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and, by all accounts, was also a masterful teacher). Still, none of these accomplishments quite fit the way he’d first envisioned his creative life in Europe, which seemed so promising before the outbreak of World War II. (more…)

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Posted on October 30, 2009 at 6:00 am by Ramon Ricker
in General |

Many of you may follow the writings of Greg Sandow in his Arts Journal Blog.  If you do you will know that for the past couple of years Greg has been writing a book, and presenting it piece by piece in his blog.  This project went dormant for a period of time, but now he’s back, and as they say, bigger and better than ever.  He calls each entry a riff.  Below is Riff #2. It’s his thoughts on what he calls alternative classical music or alt-classical. He also asks an important question–where’s the money? As musicians we can always find a place to play. Our challenge is to find a place to play that will pay us to do it.

Rebirth: The Future of Classical Music

by Greg Sandow

[Again from Chapter I, Rebirth and Resistance, extending my previous riff about how the chapter -- and the book -- might start. This is how the chapter might continue.]

So we’ve had a dose of heady inspiration. Rebirth! What a terrific concept for classical music. Where do we go from here?

Well, it might be time to step back, and ask some questions.

First:

If classical music really is changing, which it is — and if, through those changes, it might be reborn — why are the changes happening?

For two reasons, I think.

First, there’s the crisis in classical music, the fear that classical music is slipping away from the contemporary world, and that its audience is shrinking. That leads people, even at the biggest classical music institutions, to wonder how they might reach out, and speak to the outside world.

Second — and, I think, much more important — there’s the simple fact of change. Cultural change, going very deep, and gaining speed for the past two generations. Ever since the 1960s. Maybe since the ’50s!

So who does that cultural change affect? More or less all of us. Including those of us who work in classical music. We’ve all changed. We think differently, we have different ideas. And so we want to do classical music differently. Thus, we — individually, collectively, sometimes independent of each other, sometimes inspired by each other — start doing new things.

And that’s especially true of younger people in the business, music students, young musicians, younger people in classical music management. Younger people in classical music — as I’ve seen from teaching them, for a start — live in two worlds at once, the classical music world, and also in the wider cultural world they share with everyone else their age. They watch the same TV shows their friends do, go to the same movies, listen to the same bands.

But their friends, often enough, don’t pay attention to classical music at all. So younger people in classical music become a bridge to the rest of their world. They can leap the gap, if anyone can. They can find ways to present classical music, that will grab the attention of people their own age.

Which is a big reason why I’m hopeful for the future. But don’t think classical music won’t change, when younger people start giving classical concerts in their own way. Rebirth won’t be rebirth, if it’s only a new way of packaging something old.

More questions. How far have the changes gone? Not all that far, to tell the truth. So many exciting things have happened, as I’ve said (in my first riff). But you can still go to classical concerts — as we all know — and see more or less what we would have seen five, ten, or twenty years ago. Musicians in formal dress. An older audience. And, on the program, the same old lovely, familiar, comfortable classical masterworks. Nothing against them, but they just don’t reflect our own time.

And yes, I know some things have changed. Musicians might talk to the audience. Program books, at least at a few of the biggest orchestras, might be designed to look like slick, professional magazines.

But guess what — these changes, and others like them, aren’t enough to make a big difference. A conductor can say a few words to the audience, and then turn around — wearing formal dress — and conduct the same familiar masterworks to the same older audience.

Same with other changes — conductors not wearing formal dress, for instance. By themselves, these things don’t change the essential concert ambience. Maybe they’re first steps down the road of change, but they’re only first steps.

Even new works — classical pieces written this month, or this week — may not make much difference. The audience might hate them. And, more crucially, they may taste like they were written for the classical concert hall, without any savor, not even a trace, of the world outside.

Which brings me, to end this riff, to what I think are the two kinds of classical music change. First, changes made by mainstream classical institutions. And, second, changes made outside the classical music mainstream, which, taken together, create a new kind of alternative classical music world, which I’ve been labeling (on the model of indie rock), alt-classical, though maybe indie classical would be just as good, if not better.

The alt-classical changes go a lot further. Here we see classical music starting to be fully reborn. But of course there are more of the mainstream changes, since there are so many mainstream classical music institutions, and alt-classical is still something new.

There’s also money. You can make a living in the mainstream classical world. If you’re lucky, if you get an orchestra job, if you really hustle. It might not be easy, but many people (especially including musicians) do it.

But you can’t make a living in the alt-classical space. Maybe a few people can, but the financial models for doing it basically don’t exist. If you’re a string quartet, life might be hard, but at least, if you’re booked by a mainstream performing arts center, you get a fee.

Play in a club, and maybe it’s a thrilling gig, with a new young audience right in front of you, but where’s the money? Well, you’re not doing it for money, but without your mainstream bookings — and, most likely, your university residency — you won’t survive.

The mainstream is shrinking, though. So chances to make a living from it may well start to disappear. So here’s a challenge for the future. How can we develop financial models for the alt-classical space, so musicians (and everyone else who makes a living from classical music, managers, administrators, publicists, you name it) can survive in it? And even thrive.

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Posted on October 29, 2009 at 1:31 pm by Robert Levine
in General |

I’d bet it takes quite a few, if this is the video:

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Posted on October 29, 2009 at 5:30 am by Ramon Ricker
in General |

Ask any musician ten years older than you how business is, and he will probably say, “It’s OK, but it was much better ten years ago.” If that same person asks the identical question to another musician ten years older than he is, he will probably get the same answer.  “It’s OK, but it was much better ten years ago.”  Why was it always better ten years ago than it is today?   A possible answer is that the music business constantly evolves, and the person who was busier a decade ago than he is today may not have moved ahead with it.  Perhaps this person has skills that were well suited for yesterday’s business, but not for today’s.

In my lifetime alone I’ve witnessed several major changes in the music business.  In the 1970’s and ‘80’s our Eastman graduates who wanted jazz careers often did their “graduate school” in the bands of Buddy Rich, Count Basie, Woody Herman and Maynard Ferguson.  At the same time symphony orchestras were finding increased support from foundations.  They expanded their seasons. They were growing.  In New York City, Broadway was a convenient thing to fall back on, but the crème de la crème was freelance recording.  That is, until synthesizers and samplers appeared on the scene.

Synthesizers changed everything in the music industry and   made it possible to have a very high-end product, at least to the undiscerning listener. Those musicians who embraced technology and moved with it could hope to remain relevant, but those who continued to do what they had always done probably woke up one day to find that time had passed them by.  The industry had evolved without them.

For musicians today, more than ever, it is Generation Entrepreneur or Gen-E! Musicians must put together careers that have several different income streams.  One source of income usually doesn’t do it all.  The good news is that with a diversified set of talents it is possible to build a career that perfectly suits your interests and strengths.   Not only will that help to assure your continued relevance in the business, it will also provide you with a very satisfying and fulfilling musical life.

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Posted on October 28, 2009 at 5:52 am by Robert Levine
in General |

This joint venture seems like a very good idea for both parties:

…Naxos of America will begin physical and digital distribution of the renowned Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s premiere record label CSO Resound. (more…)

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Posted on October 27, 2009 at 2:26 pm by Robert Levine
in General |

…but it’s pretty amazing nonetheless. In case you were thinking it was faked, this video will show you how it was done.

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Posted on October 27, 2009 at 5:00 am by Robert Levine
in General |

It’s good to be reminded now and then of what an orchestra looks like in the wild, and why virtually every professional orchestra in the known universe is unionized:

Musicians, however, look to a conductor for musical guidance, and they say [Illinois Symphony Music Director Karen Lynne] Deal simply doesn’t do enough homework to provide much of that. They talk about times when she has conducted in the wrong meter, dress rehearsals where her score wouldn’t stay open because the book hadn’t been cracked before, and the Holiday Pops performance where she kept cueing the violins to play on a piece for brass and bagpipes only.

Mark Moore, ISO’s principal tuba player and the designated spokesman for the musicans’ unionization effort, says players first asked the board to conduct an official evaluation of Deal during her third season here, and repeated that request during her sixth season, during her ninth season, and as recently as January. “The requests were made by three different people, at least four times,” Moore says. “These are people who have more than 30 years in the music business.”

Most currently contracted musicians are reluctant to speak on the record about Deal, for fear of losing their jobs. However, Matt Monroe, a French horn player who currently plays with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra (among others), resigned last season because of Deal.

”It seemed like much of the time she was figuring it out as she went along,” he says. “She’s a pretty good improviser, which can be a useful skill, but being a hard worker is also a useful skill as a conductor.”

It’s not enough for each musician to know his or her music; the conductor is the only one with the score that shows how all the parts fit together. “Train wreck” is a term musicians use for the shaky sensation of the ensemble running off-track, and Monroe and other musicians say they get that queasy feeling too often with Deal. “There are those crisis moments where it seems like everybody’s not in the same place, and in those moments you look to the podium,” Monroe says. “Frequently what you’d see is the top of her head. She was looking down, with her head in the score, trying to figure out where we are.”

Christina Spa was one of Deal’s earliest fans. A fellow flutist, Spa attended Deal’s 2000 audition concert. “I remember thinking she’s easy to follow, she has a good pattern,” Spa says. Two years later, Spa began volunteering in the ISO office, and in 2005 she was hired full-time as the special events and education coordinator. As she spent more time around Deal, her impression changed.

”I realized that she has a stage presence that gets the audience, and if you don’t know her, you’re probably taken in,” Spa says. But as a staff member, Spa attended ISO rehearsals, and observed a different side of Deal. The conductor rarely appeared prepared, but would chastise the players when the music fell apart… ”Karen never seemed to respect anybody,” Spa says. “Her attitude was always, ‘I’m the conductor, I’m above you.’ ”

But, for the musicians, the last straw was apparently the firing (and attempted deportation) of the orchestra’s personnel manager:

After last May’s mass exodus, personnel manager Kamen Petkov was the only long-term full-time employee left in the ISO office. He has played violin with the ISO since 1994, though it’s not his main talent. “I consider myself a musician, but I know that there are much better musicians than me out there,” he says. At the managing gig, which he took in 2000, after earning a business degree and accumulating four summers’ experience working as an operations intern at Grant Park Music Festival, he’s true prodigy. “…

Petkov says his troubles with Deal began in October 2006, when he arrived at a rehearsal to discover that the maestra had rearranged the seating chart, abruptly assigning Laura LaCombe — a contracted violinist who for 11 years had played near the top of the second violin section — to sit at the last stand, behind subs who had never even auditioned for the ISO. LaCombe, who also taught orchestra and violin at Lincoln Land Community College, walked out of rehearsal and never returned. “It was just my turn to get hit on, I guess,” she says.

A few months later, Deal tried to seat a violinist who had never played with the ISO ahead of the assistant concertmaster, and stood on stage arguing with Petkov about it loudly enough that other musicians could hear….

They had a major clash over the 2008-09 season contracts when Deal asked Petkov to use a new method she thought would reduce the percentage of subs. She made that request days before Petkov was scheduled to travel to Bulgaria for six weeks to produce a music festival. He couldn’t complete the task before he left, so Deal did it herself, imperfectly, while he was gone. When he returned in August, he says, he began scrambling to fix the contract mess, which only increased tensions with Deal. In October, when a violinist called in with a family crisis hours before a chamber orchestra rehearsal, Deal fired Petkov on the spot for seating a contracted ISO violinist who hadn’t auditioned specifically for the chamber group…

That wasn’t all: ISO management also reported Petkov to U.S. immigration authorities, ostensibly on the belief that he had an H-1B visa tied to his employment as orchestra manager. They also reported him to a federal law enforcement agency for possible identity theft, because he had orchestra payroll information stored on his Palm Pilot and a flash drive. Petkov sees these actions as beyond firing. “The life I tried to build for the last 14 years almost went down the drain,” he says.

Through his attorney, Petkov provided Snyder with a copy of a petition she herself had signed on behalf of the ISO a year earlier, indicating to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that he had a Class 01 visa (not H-1B) based on his extraordinary artistic ability. No charges were filed; in fact, Petkov was subsequently hired as personnel manager with the Peoria Symphony Orchestra, where executive director Judy Furniss sounds happy to have him.

At that point:

…a small group of longtime ISO players retained a Bloomington CPA to conduct a no-confidence vote. That CPA, Mary Ann Webb, says she mailed two types of ballots — plain white ballots to the 62 contracted musicians, and orange ballots to 37 regular subs. Her office received 49 white ballots and 23 orange, all but two marked to express no confidence in Deal.

ISO board president John Wohlwend says the anonymous vote means nothing to him. “That committee of musicians is absolutely out of order,” he says. “I’m not ever going to consider that an official vote.”

I wonder if he’ll consider the orchestra’s vote last week to unionize “absolutely out of order” as well. He’ll certainly be hard-pressed to consider it other than “an official vote.”

There are at least two lessons to draw from this episode. One is that life in an orchestra without union protections is what Thomas Hobbs described as “nasty, brutish, and short.” The second is that orchestras without effective boards will be run by someone who is accountable to no one, and they likely won’t be run very well.

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Posted on October 26, 2009 at 5:30 am by Ramon Ricker
in General |

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll put on a businessman’s hat and look at a young musician’s career from that perspective.  What are the challenges facing this person as he or she steps into the profession?  One might say a musician’s challenge is to utilize and evolve the skills obtained in school in order to excel in a highly competitive market.  His or her goals will be to become financially stable and to remain relevant. Here are some possible barriers he or she may face:

• It’s a commodity market.
• There is changing demand.
• There are price pressures.
• There are reduced resources.
• The field is highly competitive.
• There is a large talent pool.

Looking at the barriers can make the future seem pretty grim, but when these challenges are recognized and acknowledged, we can take steps to put together a successful career.

It’s a Commodity Market

A commodity is a good or a service that is basically the same regardless of who produces it.  Oil is oil.  Rice is rice.  Gasoline is gasoline and chickens are chickens.  There is little differentiation between producers, and the price within a region will be about the same.  A classic case of a producer who was able to break from the commodity pack was Frank Perdue former CEO of Perdue Farms.  Through extensive and brilliant advertising and using a marigold-laden feed that imparted a yellow color to the skin of his chickens, he was able to convince the American consumer that his product was superior to others, and his birds were sold at a premium price.

Perdue was able to rise above the others because he demonstrated, at least in people’s minds, that his sunny-skinned chickens were superior.  Musicians must do the same thing because, in reality, we operate in a commodity market.  Each type of service that a musician performs has a price on it that is either mandated by the musician’s union (minimum scale wages) or (if it is non-union) by local custom.  The musicians who play wedding receptions or bar mitzvahs in Des Moines, Denver, Las Vegas, Atlanta, you name the city, will expect to be paid in a range that is unique to the area.  There will occasionally be a gig that pays considerably above the norm, but by and large there won’t be much variation in wages.

Below are some union scale wages for playing a show in four different cities in New York State. The three upstate cities are geographically close in proximity, which is exactly what their scales reflect.  New York City, which is widely considered a market unto itself is considerably above the others.

Rochester                        $105

Buffalo                        $100

Syracuse                           $97

New York City            $187.59

When a contractor puts together musicians for an event, regardless of the geographic region, he could hire the concertmaster of the local symphony or a high school student.  Either way the pay to play violin in a section will be the same.  That’s a commodity.  The market as a whole determines the price for the goods or service.  The musicians’ challenge is to differentiate themselves like Frank Perdue did, and create a reputation (read: brand) that because of its unique qualities will command a premium price over the others.  They can do this by becoming the in-demand player that everyone wants.  The person hiring such a person knows that he will get a certain level of performance that is above the norm and is well worth the extra money.  When the pay is less flexible, as in the case of a show, a first-call musician might benefit over others by getting literally all the work.

During the Vietnam War, I was a musician and stationed at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  At that time we had more personnel on each instrument than was needed to adequately staff any event that had to be played.  This surplus of musicians on each instrument meant that for any given service there were always some musicians who were not playing and enjoyed some “off” time.  An interesting commodity market was created among the musicians, as we bought and sold our duties.  Let’s say that I was assigned to play a parade on Friday afternoon.  If, for some reason, I wanted to do something else, I would look at the roster, see who was off and ask that person if he wanted to play in my place.   There was no negotiating.  The price was fixed.  Parades went for five dollars and funerals for two.  (Funerals were much shorter.)  KP (kitchen police—working in the kitchen—it wasn’t fun) went for $25.

Looking back, it is evident to me that we created a very efficient market where everyone benefited.  The entire West Point band operation was housed in one building, and the majority of the musicians who were single lived right in the building.  The married personnel received a subsidy for the number of dependants that they had, and they lived either in Army supplied housing or off post in one of the neighboring small towns.  Because the bachelors (there were no women in the band at that time) lived in the same building as the rehearsal room, it was no problem for them to be ready to play a service on short notice.  The married men, on the other hand, had wives who often had jobs outside of the home.  This gave them discretionary income.  Consequently, it was usually the married guys selling their duty to the single guys.  Everyone won.  I understand that this buying and selling of duty is not so widespread nowadays.  It’s a leaner Army.

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Posted on October 26, 2009 at 5:26 am by Robert Levine
in General |

A candidate for the position of King County (Seattle) Executive is touting her executive experience rather than her decades as a local TV news anchor, and basing the claim on having been board chair of the Seattle Symphony:

In her campaign for King County executive, Hutchison has highlighted her 2 Ω years as chairwoman of the symphony’s volunteer board of directors more than she’s touted her 20-year career as a KIRO-TV news anchor, and more than her current job heading a two-person nonprofit foundation, the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences.

As a political newcomer, the symphony work is the closest she’s come to executive experience running a large organization.

It’s prominent in her brochures, stump speeches, debates and interviews, especially when she is asked about her qualifications for the county’s highest office. (more…)

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Posted on October 25, 2009 at 5:20 am by Robert Levine
in General |

Concerts get cancelled all the time, but usually not high-profile concerts conducted by the music director two weeks in advance of the concert:

The Honolulu Symphony board has done something unprecedented that will shock some patrons while possibly giving encouragement to people who have written big checks for the orchestra.

It has canceled a concert on the grounds that the cost of it would return the Symphony to serious financial trouble. The concert, which had been scheduled in two weeks, was to have been a performance of Haydn’s “Creation,” a large choral work. (more…)

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