2020 Orchestra Compensation Reports: The Big Picture

Each year, one of the most popular items in the orchestra compensation reports is a big picture overview of all compensation alongside Total Expenditure figures. If you’ve been looking for something that shows all the report values in a single chart, this is your article. Did you know? Direct links to most of the orchestra’s financial disclosure documents at guidestar.org are available in the Orchestra Financial Reports or you can save yourself dozens of …

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2020 Orchestra Compensation Reports: Concertmasters

For the third year in a row, the 2017/18 season produced a positive gain in the average concertmaster’s compensation level. Having said that, and not counting years with negative growth, this was the third smallest average increase since the 99/00 season. The Information In order to provide information that is as accurate as possible, info from the 2017/18 season is gathered from the following source: Concertmaster compensation figures were obtained from their respective …

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2020 Orchestra Compensation Reports: Music Directors

If you were a music director during the 2017/18 season, there’s a good chance you had six hundred and forty-five thousand or so good reasons to say it was an exceptional year. One conductor managed to have more than three million good reasons. The Information In order to provide information that is as accurate as possible, info from the 2017/18 season is gathered from the following sources: Music Director compensation figures were obtained …

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2020 Orchestra Compensation Reports: Executives

When it comes to executive compensation, the 2017/18 season saw a sharp uptick in skewed averages since we started tracking numbers thanks to an all-time high number of CEO vacancies and interim appointments. These occurred across the entire budget spectrum but most notably, three of the usual suspects in the Top 10 earners were between executives. As a result, the average change in compensation was artificially low. The Information In order to …

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2020 Orchestra Compensation Reports: Introduction

As is the case with every annual orchestra compensation report, the most important element to keep in mind is these figures encompass the 2017/18 season and not the current season. Although it isn’t unusual to expect that the most recent figures available would cover the previous season, that’s not how things work thanks to these reasons: Most professional orchestras maintain a fiscal year structure that begins and ends at some point from June …

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