Posted on April 26, 2012 at 12:55 am by Robert Levine
in General |

Finally some good news from Louisville:

After 20 months of contentious negotiations, the Louisville Orchestra’s musicians and its management have reached a one-year labor agreement that will allow for a 30-week season beginning this fall, and both sides are optimistic that a long-term deal will be reached by next spring.

The deal, announced Wednesday onstage in Whitney Hall at the Kentucky Center, calls for performances with up to 57 musicians during the abbreviated season and a budget of $5.3 million.

The agreement also calls for an expert to review all aspects of the orchestra’s operations, then serve as a binding arbitrator on any issues upon which the two sides don’t agree when negotiating a multi-year contract.

The musicians will receive base pay of $925 per week, along with medical and pension benefits. The season begins Sept. 8.

This appears to be quite similar to what the musicians had been proposing for the past month or so. So what changed?

One hint is contained in an article earlier yesterday:

Leaders for the Louisville Orchestra Musicians Association announced late Tuesday that the group had ratified an agreement for a new contract with the orchestra management – potentially ending a months-long impasse.

“We are really please to be bringing symphonic music back to Louisville,” said Kim Tichenor, a violinist with the orchestra and the players’ negotiating committee chair, who stood in the musicians’ union hall surrounded by her colleagues, who cheered her announcement.

The agreement calls for a one-year contract covering 57 musicians for 30 weeks with a base salary level of $925 per week, including medical and pension benefits. It also calls for a binding arbitration process involving a mutually agreed-upon orchestra professional to work with both sides to establish a longer-term contract….

Orchestra CEO Robert Birman responded to a request for comment with a text message saying, “We’ll reserve comment until we see the proposal.”

Birman was conspicuously absent from the press conference announcing the deal. Perhaps he was busy canceling the online ads for replacement musicians. He certainly didn’t appear to be in the loop regarding the pending settlement.

This dispute had always seemed to me to be about Birman’s desire to make his bones by doing something that hadn’t been done before in the orchestra business. That “something” was originally the conversion of occupied full-time positions in the orchestra into part-time jobs, but then morphed into replacing musicians who were on strike (or locked out, depending on one’s point of view) with new non-union musicians. The dispute was only going to end when his board took a fresh sniff of the Kool-aid they’d been served and decided they no longer trusted the mixologist.

There are lots of lessons for musicians to learn from this epic labor dispute, and some for board members and managers as well. But for now it’s enough to be happy that the desire to get the orchestra back on stage has at least temporarily trumped ideology.

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Posted on March 27, 2012 at 11:50 am by Robert Levine
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While there’s been some public discussion about the Flanagan book, as I mentioned here, there’s been almost none about its genesis, with one exception that I’ll discuss below. This is unfortunate; how and why an analysis originates can be very informative about the substance of the analysis. So I will try to rectify that and provide some speculation about why we’re all now dealing with the Flanagan book. (more…)

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Posted on March 6, 2012 at 1:57 am by Robert Levine
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Japanese scientists have succeeded in making violin strings out of spider silk:

Shigeyoshi Osaki at Nara Medical University in Japan has studied the properties of spider silk for 35 years. In the past decade he has focused on trying to turn the silk into violin strings, even taking lessons on what was required of a string in terms of strength and elasticity.

Osaki learned how to coax Nephila maculata spiders to spin out long strands of dragline, the strongest form of silk. He bundled filaments together and twisted them, then twisted three of these bundles together to make each string. The thickest of these, the G string, holds 15,000 filaments.Shigeyoshi Osaki at Nara Medical University in Japan has studied the properties of spider silk for 35 years. In the past decade he has focused on trying to turn the silk into violin strings, even taking lessons on what was required of a string in terms of strength and elasticity….

Osaki tested the new strings by comparing their performance with three established materials: steel, nylon and gut. He says that the spider silk has a unique and “brilliant” timbre, or quality of tone. You can judge for yourself in this snippet of Tchaikovsky, played by Jun-ichi Matsuda on a Stradivarius violin using all four types of string…

The timbre seems to result from a difference in how harmonics – frequency multiples of the main note – reverberate in the spider silk strings compared with other materials. Spider string has strong high harmonics, while steel and nylon tend to be stronger in low harmonics. Osaki does not yet know what mechanical properties lead to this acoustic performance.

Selby is impressed. “What people crave about natural gut strings is a certain complexity,” she says. “Spider strings also have this brilliant sound – even more than gut.”

Add autotune to that, and it’s really a breakthrough.

Meanwhile, those who believe that concerts aren’t visually interesting enough will enjoy this breakthrough performance:

And, while not really a triumph of “science” per se, this little parody of technological “progress” must have taken quite a bit of work to put together:

I wonder if anyone at the New York Phil has seen this – and what they thought of it.

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Posted on March 5, 2012 at 2:55 am by Robert Levine
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The Flanagan Report has recently been resurrected by its author, Robert Flanagan of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as a book, recently published and currently being promoted by the Yale University Press. The promotion has not yet paid off in reviews outside our field, but is beginning to cause reactions from industry groups. The first in print appears to be a review of the book by ICSOM Chairman Bruce Ridge in the most recent edition of ICSOM’s newsletter Senza Sordino. ICSOM has kindly allowed us to run the review as an article on this website as well.

Bruce’s review could well be described as “dismissive”:

No one is going to read this book.

Well, perhaps I exaggerate. A handful of people will read this book, and maybe a few will actually make it all the way to the end. Such brave souls will earn my admiration, because reading this book is like shaving with a cheese grater.

Many people, though, will claim to have read it. It will sit on prominent display in the offices of executive directors, and they will reach for it whenever they need to point to a chart or graph, probably out of context, to support some negative claim about the future of classical music in America. Some will even engage in some “marginalia,” but others, I suppose, will follow the lead of The Great Gatsby, a character who at least knew enough not to cut the pages in the unread books that merely decorated the library in his East Egg Mansion.

My initial instinct was to ignore the book, but I decided that I had to write a review. Since virtually no one will actually make it to the end (or beyond the first five pages, really), reviews will become what the book is about, and there will most certainly be reviews written.

Bruce goes on to identify his fundamental objection to Flanagan’s analysis:

…this book seems to be written by someone who simply doesn’t understand his subject. It analyzes the state of symphony orchestras in America, but the tale is told in the unauthoritative voice of someone who sounds like he might never have been backstage at a symphonic rehearsal.

I was reading it backstage at one of my orchestra’s concerts, and when I went onstage to perform with my colleagues, I felt disoriented. Nothing I had been reading in this book seemed to have any relationship to the music I was playing–nor to the nearly sold-out audience of young and old music lovers listening to the innovative program we were presenting.

The whole thing is worth reading (and it’s a lot shorter – and  better written – than the book itself), so go read it.

Having said that, though, I think that Bruce’s review (in common, I suspect, with others in the pipeline) misses what’s fundamentally wrong with Flanagan’s analysis. But I’ll save my criticism of the book for tomorrow.

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Posted on February 23, 2012 at 1:47 am by Robert Levine
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The most recent attempt by the board and management of the Louisville Orchestra to appear to be trying to settle what has turned into the orchestral equivalent of WW3 was to propose an interesting form of arbitration; one that would have required the Louisville Orchestra musicians to agree in advance to several provisions that they had already demonstrated clearly were bright-line issues to them; as Drew McManus described the rejection of the offer by the musicians:

…This comes as no real surprise in that the offer had a number of provisos tailored to ensure that any decision would conform to financial and operational parameters contained in their previous proposals, all of which have been previously rejected by LO musicians.

Moreover, the lack of any input on selecting the pool of arbitrator candidates made the offer more of an empty gesture than a shared risk effort to end the work stoppage.

One possible option for the musicians, in the face of what was intended by management t0 be seen as a reasonable offer, would have been to make a reasonable counter-offer, which could have led to them, as political spinmeisters would say, “winning the news cycle” if not actually getting any closer to any kind of settlement, given management’s intransigence on the core issues. They chose a different path; choosing to reject the offer and calling the Mayor to convene a panel:

Louisville Orchestra musicians rejected the board’s offer Thursday to settle a nearly yearlong contract dispute through binding arbitration, calling the details of the proposal “draconian.”

Kim Tichenor, a violinist with the orchestra and the players’ negotiating committee chair, declined to elaborate on the musicians’ decision or on the next action they are considering.

A letter from the musicians to the orchestra board’s attorney stated that the musicians rejected the proposal in part because the board chose the initial list of arbitrators, set parameters that would limit the arbitrator’s authority and refused to entertain counterproposals.

…Tichenor stressed that the musicians hope the Fund for the Arts and Mayor Greg Fischer will convene a special panel to resolve the dispute, as suggested in a report by orchestra industry consultant Henry Fogel, who visited Louisville in January at the musicians’ request.

“That would get things back on track,” she said.

But Fischer, in a statement Thursday night, said: “Until both sides can agree to a course of action that is binding on both of them, any attempt to further study the issue seems futile. I am happy to offer any assistance from my office once the parties come to a binding agreement on a process … for moving to resolution. I urge both parties to take a fresh look at the impasse and resolve it for the good of our community.”

Drew McManus wrote, in the same post,  that the musicians:

missed an influential opportunity to push the ordeal toward a better direction vis-a-vis their latest PR and public demonstration efforts and instead decided to endorse a course of action that has already failed to resolve the conflict.

I wondered about that too. But I think what the musicians’ rejection really means is not that they missed a PR opportunity but rather that they’ve decided to fight a different battle. It’s not about pressuring management, through PR, to come back to the table in any form, I suspect, but rather about bringing to bear external pressure to get new leadership for the orchestra.

There’s not much point, after all, in getting a leadership as malign and inept as their board and management, as perceived to be by the musicians, to agree to anything; it’s rather like a battered spouse returning to the family home after the 10th call to police over a few months. At some point the promises to do better have no credibility, especially when made under external duress.

I suspect that’s the real goal behind this:

Louisville Orchestra musicians are determined to not stay quiet. Monday their chorus of protest grew as dozen of union members from the Jefferson County Teachers Association, AFL-CIO, firefighters’ union, and the UAW threw their support behind the musicians. “We want the Louisville Orchestra to remain alive and well here in Louisville,” says James Carrico with CWA Local 3310.

…Musicians seem ready to balk the latest arbitration deal while other union members launched attacks at Fund for the Arts with many promising not to donate to the fundraising campaign that kicked off 2 weeks ago. “I will go to our members and advocate that they do not donate any money to the Fund for the Arts for these sinister acts upon the Louisville Orchestra,” says Craig Willam with Louisville Firefighters Local 345.

This is hardball with a vengeance, and, to the best of my knowledge, has never been tried before in an orchestral labor dispute. Obviously there are risks, one being that a power play of that rawness is going to be viewed by some as unseemly. But it’s hard to imagine anything else that could bring the major player in Louisville, the Fund for the Arts, into the equation as effectively. Stepping on someone’s oxygen line is seldom met with gratitude – but it can cause the oxygenee to want to fix the problem.

One other point should be made, though. There is a temptation amongst analysts of this (and many other disputes) to try to balance coverage and commentary by distributing blame more or less evenly; a problem that James Fallows at The Atlantic calls “false equivalence.” An excellent example was provided by Louisville Orchestra CEO Rob Birman when he said of the proposal to involve the Mayor:

Orchestra CEO Robert Birman said Monday that he has no comment on the unions’ request, except to say that Fischer’s office participated in the negotiation process last fall, when it brokered the hiring of labor relations expert Ralph Craviso with money from an anonymous donor. Those negotiations failed.

Come to think of it, that’s actually a better example of chutzpah, defined unforgettably by the late Leo Rosten as someone who murdered his parents pleading for mercy on the grounds that he’s an orphan.

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Posted on February 13, 2012 at 6:06 pm by Robert Levine
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The situation in Louisville continues to make for colorful reporting. Today’s development was that the Music Director of the Kentucky Opera, Joe Mechavich, is bowing out of this week’s production of Merry Widow because the company hired replacement musicians instead of the musicians of the Louisville Orchestra:

…“Given these circumstances, I am unable to continue my role as conductor for this production,” wrote Mechavich in an email to the Kentucky Opera board and opera patrons.

Contract negotiations between the Louisville Orchestra and musicians have stalled since last year and performances have ceased. Last week the Louisville Orchestra extended a final offer to musicians, saying it would enter into binding arbitration with musicians or replace the orchestra with non-union members. The musicians have not yet announced whether they would take the deal.

Mechavich is the latest to feel pressure from the union and to fear losing credibility in the industry. According to a Kentucky Opera email Mechavich was told by other companies he could not conduct their performances if he continued with the Louisville Orchestra.

In his letter, Mechavich writes:

“The patrons, board members, musicians and staff of the Kentucky Opera remain dear to my heart. The strength and character of this great city has had a profound effect on my life; I will always be a part of this community.

It is my fervent hope to return soon to The Brown Theatre and the wonderful people of the Kentucky Opera –- as your conductor and as your friend.”

I have long thought that a major obstacle to replacing an orchestra with non-union musicians would be the refusal of industry professionals to have anything to do with the replacement orchestra. This would suggest that the Louisville Orchestra will have the same problem, assuming of course that they could even put a replacement orchestra together – something that the latest offer of binding arbitration, as bogus as it is, would indicate is proving problematic.

But the kicker is in the last line of the article, which assures the public as to the competency of the replacement conductor, whoever he or she may be:

Opera officials say Mechvich will be replaced by an individual not being named at this time. That individual holds a degree in conducting according to officials.

And I hold a certificate in piloting an aircraft, according to the FAA. I’m looking forward to the many job offers to fly A380s to exotic destinations I’m sure will now flood my inbox.

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Posted on February 6, 2012 at 12:40 pm by Robert Levine
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The major function of Twitter appears to be enabling people to write things that, after 24 hours or so of reflection, they probably would rather not have written. Case in point is an outpouring of frustration on the part of the violist Jennifer Stumm, who wrote on her Twitter feed last week:

Bigwig last night: “why do we need viola soloists when there are violists in orchestras?” Why do we need pitchers when there’re 1st basemen?

and

Principal violists have come to expect all concerti as well. There is no way for a viola soloist choice not to be a hotbutton

As a principal violist myself, I found this of considerable interest. I can certainly understand her frustration at finding obstacles to building a solo viola career. She is a wonderful player who is definitely worth hearing. And, as unpolitic as it was for her to express herself so publicly, she is basically correct – as is the Bigwhig she quoted. But it’s worth exploring why.

There are several issues at play here. The first is that solo guest artists are, first and foremost, marketing tools to help sell tickets. That’s not only why their fees vary so much but why those fees aren’t always related to how well they play. The fees are far more closely correlated with how famous they are and consequently how many tickets they can enable the orchestra to sell.

Aspiring viola soloists face a tough problem here; how do you become famous if you’re not already famous? That problem is largely a function of the quantity of great music for solo viola and orchestra. To put it bluntly, there isn’t any.

There’s Harold in Italy, of course, but even its commissioner, Niccoló Paganini, infamously complained about Berlioz’s thoughtlessness in not providing anything spectacular for the violist to do. The Bartok concerto is basically a fragmentary remnant of a time when Bartok desperately needed to earn some cash; minor Bartok at best. The Walton concerto is inter-war romantic-tinged mournful English modernism; hardly a crowd-pleaser. And the Mozart, of course, is not a work for solo viola and orchestra.

So the lack of a suitable solo repertoire makes it impossible for a solo violist to build a career by playing warhouses more thrillingly than anyone ever has before, which is how most solo pianists and violinists get noticed. But it has another pernicious effect on the career prospects of solo violists; it means that people like me, who would like to play the odd concerto now and then with their orchestra, get precious few opportunities to do so either. It’s hardly surprising that those people mind when outsiders get those opportunities.

I am a very respectable principal violist (you’ll have to take my word for that unless you want to listen to this, which is me about 20 years ago playing a version for viola and tape of a concerto I helped commission). Since I came to Milwaukee in 1987, I’ve played Harold in Italy twice, Don Quixote (which is hardly a solo viola vehicle anyway) three times, and Mozart once. The only other solo viola appearances were made by Pinchas Zukerman, who played Bartok (on a concert he also conducted) and Mozart. From anecdotal data, this appears to be a pretty typical record for an American princpal violist.

Contrast this with the experience of the average concertmaster, who gets not only to play better pieces more often, but doesn’t corner the local market on violin soloists when he/she does play. Our concertmaster in Milwaukee, Frank Almond, plays a concerto or so every season. But we have lots of other violin soloists as well, because there are lots of marketable violin soloists and lots of great pieces for them to all share.

For all other orchestral instruments (with the possible exception of the cello), the aspiring solo violist or clarinetist or oboist is in direct competition both with the desire of the local principal to play the occasional solo work and the need of the orchestra to accommodate them for multiple reasons. Absent any compelling reason to hire someone like Jennifer Stumm other than the fact that they play really, really well, most orchestras will take the cheaper and safer route of using their own people for oddball instrument concerti.

Besides, if she really wants to have fun playing the viola, she ought to be playing in a quartet. Would any sane person prefer trying to make a silk purse out of the Bartok concerto (in any of its “completed by someone other than Barkok” versions) to playing the viola part to Op. 132 with a quartet that’s really clicking? Pick the right quartet and the pay is better too.

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Posted on January 26, 2012 at 2:19 am by Robert Levine
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It’s axiomatic in the non-profit sector that, more than any other single factor, it’s the quality of the board of directors that determines whether institutions succeed or not. Of course, it’s axiomatic that the way to make money in the market is to buy low and sell high. That doesn’t mean it’s helpful advice.

But, if a good board is key to an orchestra being a good employer for its musicians, those musicians ought to be both concerned and informed about the quality of its board. But, while musicians may have an opinion about the quality of their board, generally it’s an opinion uninformed about anything other than the end result, which means of course that it’s essentially useless in informing the musicians about what they might contribute to building a stronger board.

So what makes a good board? There seems far more art than science to answering that question. But a good place to begin would be two recent blog posts (both of which I find through the email list that Ray discussed yesterday).

The first is on a blog run by the Western States Arts Federation:

Ideally, of course, we seek board members who are passionately committed to the goals and missions of our organizations.  Smart, involved people with deep ties to various segments of the community who will be active in helping to increase the capacity of our organizations, improve their sustainability, and be responsible stewards in the discharge of their fiduciary duties.  We want high profile people, solid business contacts, diverse representation and people eager to right our financial ships.  From the perspective of most staff, the goal is people who will get involved but not micromanage; partners in community outreach, fundraising and as advocates and boosters.  We seek people who have some knowledge of the arts and in particular the ecosystem of the given organization, who understand their role, and who bring something to the table as it were.

But the reality is that there are really two principal criteria that invariably govern our decision to invite someone to join our boards:  1) without meaning to sound specious, the main qualification we look for is really just a warm body – someone who will actually show up at meetings and contribute in some way, someone who will accept the position; and 2) people willing to write a check – the bigger the better.  Less important, but an added bonus is if the candidate has a high profile that we believe will somehow inure to the benefit of our organization.

We don’t, for the most part, vet potential candidates much more than that… Bottom line:  almost never does an arts organization reject a potential board candidate.  We can’t afford to – the pool is too small, the competition too fierce and the options too few.  And, we have so little time to devote to this enterprise.  We take what we can get and give the whole process precious little thought or energy.

Of course, it is difficult to find a slate of candidates clamoring to join the typical arts organization board.  And that is particularly true for those candidates every organization wants – the well heeled, people of color, business and civic leaders, people with cache.

The whole post is definitely worth reading carefully. The second post worth looking at is about specific questions that might be asked of prospective board members – and that those prospective members might ask of the board before joining:

The most important area to explore is specific to what your organization is seeking someone to do (rather than seeking what someone is):

• One of the reasons we’re talking to you about possibly joining our board is because we think you can help us connect with other public school parents in the African American community. Are these connections you could help us make? (Don’t assume, for instance, that a gay person can connect your organization to the gay community.)

Other questions can help spark conversations:

• What interests you about our organization? Which aspect of our organization interests you most?
• What are some of your previous volunteer experiences or leadership roles?
• What appeals to you about board service as a volunteer activity?
• If you were to join our board, are there any experiences you’d like to have as a board member or people you’d like to meet?
• What skills, connections, resources, and expertise do have to offer and are willing to use on behalf of this organization?
• Do you have any worries about joining the board?
• Is there anything you think you would need from this organization to make this experience a successful one for you?

If fundraising is an important activity for board members, be sure to raise it now:

• We’re hoping that if you join our board, you’ll be a member of the fundraising committee. In fact, we hope that you will be able to ask five or ten of your friends for contributions of over $1,000 each. Is this something you think you could do?

Again, the whole post is worth reading carefully.

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Posted on January 13, 2012 at 2:52 am by Robert Levine
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There’s been lots of chatter in the arts blogosphere the past few days over “the model,” most prominently in the email publication You’ve Cott Mail for January 11, which cited a number of online commentaries on the subject, including a very good one from Drew McManus at Adaptistration. But the commentaries invariably miss crucial points and end up in an analytical mush. Most of this is caused by the conflation of lots of different issues into one pernicious concept – the “business model.”

Personally I despise the term as applied to arts organizations. The term “business model” is entirely appropriate when it is applied to entities whose fundamental and primary purpose is to make money for its owners – in other words, businesses. But there are vanishingly few arts organizations in this country whose mission statements include the words “owners” or “profits.” Businesses exist to make money for their owners by making things, or providing services, for sale to other entities or to the public at large. Arts organizations exist to make art for the public. They need to arrange for a revenue stream in order to do that. But in  no sense is the revenue stream, either gross or net of expenses, the point of the exercise. For non-profits, the “bottom line” is not the bottom line – the service provided by the non-profit is the point, not the revenue.

The term “business model” simply cannot be divorced from its implication, which is that the point of the model is profit derived from an excess of revenue over expenses. Using the term to describe any aspect of non-profits is to invite non-rigorous thinking on a level too deep to extirpate.

But I’m not going to win that battle, at least not today. So let me try something simpler: to point out that a “business model” for an arts organization has at least four components, all of which need to be examined before anything meaningful can be said about current of future models. Those four components are

• How decisions are made (governance)
• What the organization does (mission)
• How money is spent in doing those things (expenses); and
• How money is obtained to pay those expenses

What’s important to remember is that these four components not only interact (which is obvious), but that some of the most important interactions are very non-obvious indeed.

Take, for example, the recently reported events at the New York City Opera. These can be best viewed as attempts to revamp the expense component by radically reducing how much the organization spends on the people actually making the art. But doing so will, of course, radically impact what the organization does, and will do so in ways that are both obvious and subtle. One of the most important, yet subtle, ways will be to change how management and the board view putting on performances at all.

In the current model of paying artists, most of the cost of putting on performances is in the form of fixed annual expenses composed of compensation guaranteed to the artists by the labor agreements between the NYCO and the various performers’ unions. This means that the marginal cost of each performance is far less than the average cost (marginal cost being defined essentially as the costs associated with doing a performance that would not be incurred by not doing that performance). The “new model” might lower NYCO’s total expenses, but would radically raise the marginal cost of all performances.

NYCO management might think that won’t change their thinking about doing performances – but it will. If everyone is getting paid regardless of whether the company schedules 1 or 4 performances in a week, the incentives are all to do 4 performances; putting on opera performances are, after all, why there is an NYCO in the first place. But if the company can save a ton of money – or the staff doesn’t have to go out and raise a ton of money – to do a particular performance, the incentives all lean towards not doing that performance and justifying to the board and the funders why that particular performance was just too damned much trouble. After a while, most performances will be seen as being just too damned much trouble, and the company will end up doing just enough performances to justify having a full-time staff.

Interestingly, two components of the current model appears to be left unconsidered by the NYCO management and board -  revenue and mission. The most interesting quote from the New York Times article on the situation came from Gail Kruvand, chair of the orchestra negotiating committee:

“We can’t keep sacrificing if this effort by current management is doomed to failure,” Ms. Kruvand said. “You can’t run a nonprofit performing-arts company on 10 percent earned income,” she added, referring to the rough proportion of ticket sales to donations.

10% earned income? Wouldn’t they be better off by trying a new model of revenue and mission? Why bother to sell tickets at all if all it does is produce 10% of the company’s revenue – especially as that is most certainly not net of expenses, such as marketing, associated with selling tickets? Wouldn’t they be more likely to raise money if they thought of themselves as a cultural service agency and not a Broadway show that never turns a profit? Wouldn’t that liberate them to explore new ways to bring opera to the masses?

It is impossible to have an intelligent discussion about new models without identifying core components of what a model is and putting them all on the table.  Demonstrating that is the only service that NYCO management and board have done anyone during this debacle.

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Posted on January 11, 2012 at 1:43 am by Robert Levine
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My orchestra did, and it was kinda fun:

When Joshua Phillips signed on this season as a French horn player in the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, he had no idea the job description included taking a snowball to the head.

“I was trying to do what I was told,” he explained.

The instructions were coming not from a sadistic conductor, but from Milwaukee export and funny film director David Zucker of “Airplane!” and “Naked Gun” fame. He agreed to direct a humorous new ad to promote winter tourism in Wisconsin. The spot will begin airing in parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois this week.

The 30-second commercial opens with the orchestra peacefully playing “Winter Wonderland” on a stage covered in artificial snow. A caption says, “A winter evening in Wisconsin.” All is well until two stage hands, trying to sprinkle flakes on the performers, accidentally dump a whole box of snow on Ted Soluri, the principal bassoonist in real life but a French horn player in the ad.

Phillips, who plays a violin in the ad, smirks at his colleague’s misfortune, prompting Soluri to throw a snowball at him. Then pandemonium erupts, with snowballs flying everywhere. The conductor – an actor hired for the shoot – is hit in the eye with a snowball fired from a trombone, causing him to sway and the orchestra to go out of tune and rhythm. Captions at the end read: “Winter’s here. Sound like fun?” and the tourism website appears.

The idea was to draw attention to the arts in Wisconsin this time of year, fuel desire to play in the snow and pry us off the couch, all while getting a laugh.

“If it makes it look like Wisconsin is a fun place to go, then we’ve done our job,” Zucker told me.

Whether or not it’ll actually do that is completely beyond my ability to predict. But it was good PR for the orchestra and a pretty painless way to spend an afternoon. Lots of breaks, snacks for the orchestra, weird stuff to do – definitely a change of pace.

The arrangement of Winter Wonderland was done by veteran Milwaukee composer and freelance violinist Eric Segnitz. The only reason he wasn’t on stage with us as usual was that he was helping with the audio recording.

For those of you still curious to know what instrument I play, I can be seen at the bottom right corner of the screen from 0:03 to 0:05. No snowballs, unfortunately. But I was picking fake snow about of my clothes for the next 24 hours or so.

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