Chicago Symphony Orchestra

An Updated Look At Top-Tier Musician Compensation 2016

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Currently, two of the top eight orchestras with the highest base musician annual salary are negotiating new collective bargaining agreements: National Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra. Interestingly enough, both of these ensembles are in positions where the outcome of those negotiations will likely have a larger impact on their future competitiveness than some of the upcoming negotiations for their peers. In order to visualize these distinctions, here’s a chart illustrating the current …

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Let’s Take A Look At Big Eight Musician Compensation

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Big 8 Base Musician Salary

Now that Cleveland has settled, we can begin to get a sense for how base musician compensation compares across the highest tier of big budget orchestras, which we’ll call The Big Eight (Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, LA, National, New York, Philly, and San Francisco). Granted, we’ll be updating this chart with Cleveland’s figures once that data is available and when it is, it will be interesting to see how they compare with Philly, …

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Chicago Settles

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Adaptistration People 021

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) becomes the latest group from our list of mid to large budget orchestras with expired agreements to reach a settlement. The rumor mill was rife with fodder about a potential showdown over the musicians’ defined benefit pension but when the dust settled, the retirement benefit ended up with an improvement. Terms of the new three-year agreement will be enacted retroactively to 9/13/2015 and includes modest increases …

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Negotiation Update: Philly Enters Limited Play & Talk, Chicago Lyric Settles, And More

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Play and Talk

Following up on our 9/14/2015 list of orchestras with expired agreements, here’s an overview of what’s been going on. Philadelphia Orchestra The employer and musicians initially announced a limited play and talk agreement that will take them through Monday, 9/28/2015, which should come as no surprise that the date falls just after the orchestra is scheduled to perform for Pope Francis. Since then, both sides have agreed to continue the arrangement …

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Another Example Behind Why HR Policies Matter

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HR Matters

Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) bassist Michael Hovnanian published an article at his blog, Bass Blog, on 8/8/2015 that references some recent CSO Ravinia Festival events. Shortly after the piece was published, several dozen musicians and orchestra managers reach out to me via private messages expressing varying degrees of concern over the content and tone of Hovanian’s piece. One item in particular from the original version was referenced by a number of individuals …

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