Nearly three-and-a-half years ago, I wrote an article about the dangers of stagnation among the middle budget American orchestras…
Given recent events in Omaha and San Antonio (to name a few) I think the article is just as relevant now as it was in the beginning of 2004. As such, take a moment to read the article and I encourage everyone to weigh in with their thoughts:
Currently, two of the top eight orchestras with the highest base musician annual salary are negotiating new collective bargaining agreements: National Symphony and Philadelphia…
1 thought on “Are Orchestra Still Being Dismantled?”
My comment would be yes, it is still relevant more than three years later Drew.
The problem that we are seeing in San Antonio is the unusual situation of the orchestra finally lining up with the positive growth found in the community. This is really the first time in who knows how many years that this has occured.
It presents our current board and management with the delima of, “Do we go with the flow and energy that the community is producing or do we stay hunkered down and make damn sure we don’t create another deficit”.
When you have the poiticians knocking on your door basically offering to help you get out of a situation that has had a strangle hold on your organization for the past eighteen years (i.e., our hall), you would think it would be time to make some serious plans for the future. But when organizations that have had the past history of many of our peer, mid to lower level orchestras, I think the boards even though they may be energized with new membership still carry a good bit of the past snake bites making it difficult for them to be forward thinking.
All we can do in SA is hope that the economic energy in the community can overpower the caution of the board. Nobody wants to see the orchestra go into debt again and our current buisness model certainly guards against that, but the past is very hard to shake off particularly when you were struggling to come out of bankruptcy only three years ago.
My comment would be yes, it is still relevant more than three years later Drew.
The problem that we are seeing in San Antonio is the unusual situation of the orchestra finally lining up with the positive growth found in the community. This is really the first time in who knows how many years that this has occured.
It presents our current board and management with the delima of, “Do we go with the flow and energy that the community is producing or do we stay hunkered down and make damn sure we don’t create another deficit”.
When you have the poiticians knocking on your door basically offering to help you get out of a situation that has had a strangle hold on your organization for the past eighteen years (i.e., our hall), you would think it would be time to make some serious plans for the future. But when organizations that have had the past history of many of our peer, mid to lower level orchestras, I think the boards even though they may be energized with new membership still carry a good bit of the past snake bites making it difficult for them to be forward thinking.
All we can do in SA is hope that the economic energy in the community can overpower the caution of the board. Nobody wants to see the orchestra go into debt again and our current buisness model certainly guards against that, but the past is very hard to shake off particularly when you were struggling to come out of bankruptcy only three years ago.