Allegro captioned the interview as being in honor of Woman’s History Month, which got us at Polyphonic wondering what other articles we have in our archives about women in the symphony orchestra. We did a search and a few items should be of interest.

The most compelling is “An Endearing Legacy,” an article by Julie Ayer, violinist with the Minnesota Orchestra, about how the Spokane Symphony created two endowed chairs in honor of her mother and sister. In addition to a loving tribute, Julie also presents an overview of the history of women in North American symphony orchestras.

Robert Levine, Senior Editor at Polyphonic and principal violist with the Milwaukee Symphony, did an informal survey in 2009 of gender and principal positions among ICSOM orchestras – “Age, Gender and Orchestras.” The results were indeed most interesting, and makes us realize we haven’t come quite as far as we’d thought. Robert notes that “the closest thing to gender balance across the field is in the principal second violin position; almost half of ICSOM orchestras have a female principal second.” But that’s where inequality starts, as only 1/4 of ICSOM orchestras have a female concertmaster.

Yvonne Caruthers, former Senior Editor at Polyphonic and cellist with the National Symphony, interviewed Jennifer Montone as part of her spotlight on the Philadelphia Orchestra. Jennifer addressed the issue of gender equality in discussing her appointment as principal horn with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

We also took a look back at the Harmony archives (Harmony was published by the Symphony Orchestra Institute from 1995 to 2003, and the archives reside on Polyphonic.org). The April 1998 issue had a special section titled Women in the Symphony Orchestra.

• Women in Leadership Roles in Symphony Orchestra Organizations presents discussions with women who served as board chairs, Executive Directors, and chairs of Orchestra Committees. The articles in this section include “Must One Play Viola? Women as Orchestra Committee Chairs in Symphony Orchestras,” “Fresh Dents in the Ceiling: Women as Chairs of Symphony Orchestra Boards,” and “Room at the Top: Women as Executive Directors of Symphony Orchestras.”
• “A Quantitative Analysis of Women in Leadership Roles in Symphony Orchestra Organizations” presents data about the number of women serving on boards and as board chairs, on staff and as Executive Directors, and in orchestras and as Orchestra Committee chairs.

• “Women Conductors: Has the Train Left the Station?” by Marietta Nien-hwa Cheng, a conductor who comes from a town in southern Ohio. She presents a brief history of women conductors, an overview of the obstacles facing women conductors, and then tells her own story about the path that led her to become a conductor.
• “Gender and Leadership: A Review of Pertinent Research,” a discussion with Northwestern psychology professor Alice Eagly about her research in the role of gender in leadership issues, and how this research pertains to the symphony orchestra organizations.

Finally, the October 2002 issue of Harmony published an article by Penny Brill, violist with the Pittsburgh Symphony titled “A New Avenue for Musicians’ Outreach: Music and Wellness,” which describes four areas of activity that the PSO had taken in the area of music and wellness. A breast cancer survivor herself, Penny goes on to describe the PSO’s work with the Susan G. Komen Pittsburgh Race for the Cure.

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.

The original Flanagan report came out what became known as the “Elephant Task Force.” The official explanation for the existence of the ETF, as well as the commissioning of Flanagan’s original analysis, comes from the Mellon Foundation:

In 1999, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation established the Orchestra Forum as part of a ten-year initiative designed to further creative thinking and innovation among orchestras and related organizations. Forum meetings bring together musicians, managers, and trustees of participating orchestras with invited scholars and leaders from the performing arts, and sessions include blocks of time for ad hoc discussions focusing on participant-posed questions.

The so-called Elephant Task Force (ETF), a cross-constituent group of musicians, managers, and trustees, grew out of one such discussion in late spring 2003 – a time when a significant number of orchestras were facing financial challenges. The economy was still reeling from the bursting of the stock market bubble and the direct after-effects of 9/11, and national resources were being reallocated away from the arts. Orchestras, both major and regional, had reported significant financial deficits the prior season. All of the Forum orchestras admitted to projected deficits that year ranging from 5 to 15 percent of revenue.

From the outset, one key issue for the ETF was the question of whether fiscal problems were structural or cyclical. This question loomed large, for the organizational implications of it being one or the other are significant. A verdict in favor of cyclical would imply that the status quo is fundamentally sustainable, and the key financial challenge for orchestras would be to gain greater ability to withstand the inevitable ebbs and flows of the economy. A verdict that the problem was structural would carry with it far greater implications for the long-term management of the organization.

In March 2006, in response to the ETF’s conclusion that there was a need for
independent, third-party research this issue, the Mellon Foundation engaged Stanford University Economics Professor Robert Flanagan to analyze the cyclical and structuralinfluences on the economic performance of orchestras.

This rather spare description begs several important questions. The first, and most important, is: why Flanagan? Robert Flanagan was not, as the Mellon Foundation implies, on the Economics faculty of Stanford University: he was actually on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business as the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Labor Economics and Policy.

Given that labor economics

seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the markets for labour. Labour markets function through the interaction of workers and employers. Labour economics looks at the suppliers of labor services (workers), the demands of labour services (employers), and attempts to understand the resulting pattern of wages, employment, and income…

a labor economist would seem an odd choice to analyze the “cyclical and structural influences on the economic performance” of a given industry unless the people doing the choosing had already concluded that the fundamental issue was labor-related – which, I suspect is a major reason he was hired by Mellon. Labor economists spend their entire careers viewing problems through the prism of labor issues – compensation, bargaining, and the like. Hiring a labor economist to analyze whether orchestra financial problems were cyclical or structural almost guaranteed that the answer would be “structural,” given the slow-moving nature of the orchestral labor market.

I suspect that those who know why Flanagan was hired aren’t going to tell anyone. The most likely process, in my view, was that, when the subject of commissioning a professional analysis of orchestra finances came up Mellon staff offered to find some willing candidates. (According to Bruce Ridge’s review of the Flanagan book, the musician member of the ETF suggested Ron Bauers without success.) Staff then brought one candidate (Flanagan) to the ETF and the ETF said “OK; sounds good; can’t see any reason why not.”

If true, this would suggest that the ETF didn’t perform the necessary due diligence on the choice of Flanagan, but that kind of due diligence is often offloaded onto staff. It is pretty typical for a committee such as the ETF to essentially rubber-stand a decision that was really made by senior staff without anyone on the committee asking the right questions.

Which still begs the question: why Flanagan? Well, one of those senior Mellon staffers was Diane Ragsdale, who at the time was a senior Program Officer for the Mellon Foundation’s performing arts programs. One of her formative experiences was attending the inaugural session of the Executive Program for Nonprofit Leaders at – ta da! – the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

My guess is that Flanagan and Ragdale met there and found they agreed on things. Given Ragsdale’s oft-stated belief that arts organizations need a great deal of change, I suspect that Flanagan was at least open to the idea that orchestras were badly run and needed to change as well. Given that Ragsdale had worked as an arts administrator in smaller organizations and had dealt with many of the issues that lead arts managers to obsess about labor issues, I wonder if she sensed a kindred spirit in Flanagan. So, when the subject arose of finding someone to do a report on orchestras – the largest and arguably the most static of the performing arts fields – she thought of Flanagan as someone who would do the kind of report she might agree with.

This is all conjecture, of course. But absent a more plausible and more informed explanation of what happened, it’s what I believe happened.

There’s been much more discussion, and criticism, of what happened next. Bruce Ridge expresses ICSOM’s point of view in the most recent Senza Sordino:

One of the most controversial aspects of [the Flanagan] report was the data it used. The data was supplied by the League of American Orchestras and was widely acknowledged to be inconsistent at best. In fact, the League joined with ICSOM, ROPA, and the AFM in the Collaborative Data Project (CDP) to see if sense could be made by having a shared data set. But instead of achieving success in gathering accurate industry-wide information, the CDP process was injured when the data we were examining was given to Professor Flanagan, with virtually no restrictions aside from the direction that specific orchestras could not be identified through the data.

This is a little reminiscent of the old joke about the two little old ladies in the deli (“Waiter, this soup is terrible!” “And such small portions too!”) It is true that the League’s dataset on orchestra finances is imperfect. It’s also true that it’s unquestionably the best such dataset in the performing arts, that its flaws are well-known and obvious, that no one seriously contests its accuracy in painting a broad-brush economic portrait of the field as a whole over decades. And it is also true that the data was given to Flanagan without restrictions.

Was this wrong? ICSOM and the AFM strongly believe that the League should advocate for orchestras in specific ways, the most important of which is to portray the field in a positive light. In a speech that Bruce Ridge gave last week at an event at the University of Michigan, he said:

… I think the field needs the League, but we also need the League to change. We need the League to use its resources in developing positive messaging. There is a seemingly instinctive negativity that comes from the League at times, and it is being noticed by some of its own members. The League relies on the collection of $1.9 million in dues money to survive, and to pay considerable salaries to its upper staff. This year, one ICSOM orchestra left the League, citing the “dispiriting” rhetoric that emanates from the League. There are other managers who have privately expressed this same thought.

Putting aside the question of whether or not this is an accurate portrayal of the League’s “messaging” (and I believe it’s a simplistic portrayal at best), it does raise the question of what the League is supposed to do. The whole point of collecting masses of data over decades of operation is because it’s felt that the data is useful. One of the ways in which it’s useful is to figure out what’s happening to the field as a whole and to figure out how to deal with changes that the data identifies.

Should the League place restrictions on how the data is used? To some extent, it already does (especially in the context of labor negotiations). Should the League not make the data available to researchers? That would, in my view, deprive the field of potentially valuable analysis by people with the skills to do that analysis and provide valuable insights to us – insights that the field itself doesn’t have the time, energy, or technical skills to develop on its own. Should the League make the data available to such researchers with restrictions? It’s interesting to imagine what such restrictions might look like.

It’s also important to remember the context in which the data was given to Flanagan. Mellon is, after all, a major funder in our field – of the League as well as of its member orchestras. I suspect a request from a foundation of that importance is very hard to refuse, or even to answer conditionally. And, of course, the intention of the report was to assist the Elephant Task Force, which was generally viewed as a legitimate and balanced group trying in the best of faith to get to the bottom of a core issue.

My own conclusions are that, while one core purpose of the League is advocacy, another is learning. The purpose of collecting all that data was that member orchestras could learn from it. If skilled analysis from outside can also help the field learn from the data, it should be encouraged. Placing the kinds of restrictions on the use of the data is not going to encourage that kind of analysis.

But I’ve always found it curious that the League, and not Mellon, has been the main target of criticism in discussions of how the Flanagan report came to be. It was Mellon that commissioned the report (and, I assume, paid for it, although I don’t know that for a fact) and it was Mellon who picked an analyst who was likely to focus on compensation issues as the core problem of the field. Why is Mellon exempt from criticism for unleashing Flanagan on us all?

It is a pleasure to be a guest blogger on Polyphonic.org and I am excited to share a behind-the-scenes look at my latest project: Dreams of the Fallen, an exciting new work for orchestra, chorus, and solo piano commissioned by a consortium of orchestras, private sector donors, and acclaimed pianist Jeffrey Biegel – a champion of new music.  With each of my posts, I plan to discuss an aspect of composing a new work: from the planning stages through to the premiere.

Project Beginnings

When Jeffrey approached me about this commission, we immediately began a discussion about a theme for the work.  We explored a few ideas but nothing really stuck with me and so I retreated into my introspective-composer-state (a trait of any self-respecting composer type…) and began to rack my brain to find the perfect answer.  After years of utilizing this brain-racking technique, I have found that a great idea often appears after allowing my subconscious mind to process a question or a topic. Unfortunately, the timing of the epiphany may or may not be in my schedule’s favor.

As I was waiting for the “ah-ha” moment, I went about life as normal: working away on other commissions, catching up on emails, fulfilling score orders, checking Facebook…and while partaking in the highly-academic, latter activity, I came across a video about men and women from the U.S.A. who had served in Iraq and returned home with severe cases of PTSD.  Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), is an anxiety disorder resulting from a psychologically traumatic experience and can be exhibited as “flashback episodes, nightmares, emotional numbing, difficulty concentrating, hyper-vigilance, repeated upsetting memories of the event,” and more.¹ I was incredibly moved by their stories and began to think more deeply about the experience of war and its impact on an individual; not only while one is in the thick of it, but also once one is removed from it and attempts to assimilate back into everyday life. These lasting impacts change a veteran’s (and anyone else who has had an intensely traumatic experience) day-to-day feelings and societal interactions and have for hundreds of years.

Click here for videos about returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan:

Instrumentation

The instrumentation of solo piano, large chorus, and orchestra is massive.  The sheer number of performers and musical power that this ensemble can put forth demands a topic to match its weight. While there are very few pieces in the repertoire for this instrumentation (Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy and William Bolcom’s Prometheus being two of them), I found it to be perfect for this theme. The choir provides contextual information through the singing of words while the experiencer of war, represented by the solo piano, provides an emotional response to the sung text. The almost limitless timbral and textural possibilities of the orchestra create the sonic landscape as we are taken through the various stages of the war experience.

Stay tuned for my next entry as I begin to discuss the title, “Dreams of the Fallen,” and how and why I selected the texts by acclaimed poet and Iraq War veteran Brian Turner.

Be the change,

Jake Runestad

www.jakerunestad.com

We have created a Kickstarter campaign to help raise funds for this important project. Please feel free to view our Kickstarter page and share it with your friends and family.

Click here to find out more:

Jake and I spoke a few days later and I found his project fascinating. I suggested that he become a guest blogger for Polyphonic and take us with him through the process of creating such a large work. He readily agreed and his first post follows.

Jake holds a Masters degree from Peabody and has an impressive list of commissions from a variety of ensembles, including Seraphic Fire, the Baltimore Concerto Orchestra, the Grammy-nominated Peabody Children’s Chorus, and the Lunar Ensemble. His newest opera, The Abbess and the Acolyte, was performed at the Virginia Arts Festival, and his Lux Aeterna for SSAA choir was recently selected as a winner for the Essentially Choral Reading Session with Minneapolis-based VocalEssence and conductor Philip Brunelle.

The piece he is writing for Jeffrey Biegel is titled Dreams of the Fallen, and is based on poetry by an Iraqi war veteran, Brian Turner. Jeffrey is hard at work finding orchestras to join the consortium, and the project has already raised over $4,435 on Kickstarter, surpassing their goal.

I’ll let Jake tell you the rest of the story.

Ann Drinan

Beethoven Eroica conducted by Leonard Bernstein