Coming back to DK after a few years of mostly mobile front-page browsing (and I'll admit, my posts spike, ahem, every four years), I've been struck by the great classical music community here (particularly Dave in Northridge's full-on music-nerdout posts, which are a respite from feeling outraged).
The classical music world, however, has not been a respite of late. Lower corporate and personal charitable contributions have put hard-won contracts on the chopping table as symphonies, accustomed to operating at a loss, can't make receipts. The latest is a lockout by the Atlanta Symphony. Happy Labor Day.:
Atlanta, GA, September 4, 2012: On August 24, in an unprecedented effort to reach agreement on terms of a new collective bargaining agreement, the Atlanta
Symphony Orchestra Players Committee (ASOPA) offered very deep cuts in the
Orchestra to the Atlanta Symphony Management negotiating team and the ASO
Board. The $4 million in concessions offered by the 88 current Musicians of the ASO
would be combined with parallel income cuts for those on the approximately 75-
member ASO administrative staff who are paid at least the minimum salary of ASO
musicians.
ASO negotiators and staff, together with ASO board members, applauded with
appreciation the musicians’ enormous offer of concessions, expressing privately that
musicians have given enough – that the musicians should hold firm while an
agreement was worked out with others. They also asked ASOPA to avoid talking
with the press or even releasing full details of the talks to the Orchestra musicians, a
request with which ASOPA agreed and has cooperated fully. Meanwhile, the WAC
cancelled the musicians’ August 31 paychecks, as well as their health, dental, and
disability insurance.
It's an old familiar song, from the
2010-2011 Detroit Symphony strike to the
Philadelphia Orchestra's 2011 Bankruptcy to April's
Louisville Symphony strike and subsequent search for replacement musicians, from which this memorable
Wonka Macro arose.
I will say my sympathies are certainly with the musicians--I am one myself, and I come from a family of freelance musicians. And yet, these are more nuanced cases that really challenge social values about art, who pays for it, who doesn't and why. A much lengthier coda is under the dal-segno sign.
We're hearing a lot (although not enough) lately about "creative destruction," the Romney business gospel summed up by the Washington Post:
Both the successes and the failures reveal the candidate’s faith in “creative destruction,” the notion that the new must relentlessly replace the old so that companies and the economy can become more efficient. [snip]
But like Romney’s work on all the businesses Bain invested in, the primary goal with these companies wasn’t job creation but making them more profitable and valuable. This meant embracing aspects of capitalism that have unsettled some Americans: laying off workers when necessary, expanding overseas to chase profits and paying top executives significantly more than employees on lower rungs.
Examples of "Creative Destruction" are, of course, everywhere in music. One example is a recording, that essentially fixes the labor costs for all time and exists now as a digital commodity representing the intellectual property. Another is MIDI, digital production, and "libraries" of public-domain samples that further reduce the need for musical labor. And since classical music is not by and large focused on commissioning new works (which are expensive and almost always presented at a loss), most of the pieces being performed are readily available on spotify, youtube, by an amateur or student orchestra across town, etc.
There's also the matter of labor costs. Ever wonder why gigging guitarists sing and play harmonica, why keyboardists program their beats on a laptop, why jazz trios gig more than big bands, why there are fewer 10-piece rock bands that "make it"? Much of it comes down to simple economics: let's say the "door" is $200 (a good night for most clubs in medium-sized cities); how many ways are you slicing that pie?
Baumol's Cost Disease is the economic theory, from 1966, that elucidates why the arts must be subsidized. Since it is the goal of producers to,
Decrease quantity/supply
Decrease quality
Increase price
Increase non-monetary compensation or employ volunteers
Increase total factor productivity
arts organizations with professionalized workforces challenge that. Baumol and Bowen's most famous illustration is that the labor productivity of presenting a Beethoven string quartet 100 years ago were the same as they will be 100 years from now: four people, working for one hour apiece.
There are essentially four areas that complicate some of these labor disputes. I present these not as strawmen but as nuanced ideas I address below. [Although this is blockquoted, these are original to me.]
1) "Management" has a softer, more sympathetic face in the non-profit sector.
2) While government funding for the arts should increase, I'd say (even as a musician) it should probably get in line behind Universal Healthcare and education and a truly empowering social safety net. It's easy for arts funding to be a convenient punching bag as a sort of opportunity cost.
3) There are a glut of underemployed and overeducated musicians in the marketplace who would gladly replace a tenured 80 year-old who already has a large teaching studio.
4) Why classical music? Why not something more vital and relevant to our culture?
1) Management is not taking cuts but rather, in most of these cases (particularly in Atlanta) incentivized for cutting labor costs beyond to a sub-middle class level. Management
is a place where cuts could be made and work outsourced to volunteers. This is one of those cases where management's work is much less specialized but, economically, more valuable--akin to the NFL, but on a much smaller scale. In this respect, the popular notion of an orchestral musician as a tuxedo'd anachronism (like the NFL) works against them in the public imagination.
2) Most symphony orchestras perform vital public-interest functions within their community, not just for their generally wealthy and white clientele but for school groups, educational "run-out" concerts and the like, or service to a local youth symphony, empowering organizations.
3) The myth of the starving artist has got to stop. Believe in a living wage. Struggle to make it, or get a less fulfilling job and pursue your talent in an organization for talented amateurs, but the case for not degrading yourself is a terrific one. Few get rich from performing music, and perhaps mandatory retirement ages could be a decent concession to meet the generational upswell.
4) This is a more complex case, and one without a clearer answer. Occupy Musicians, for example, touts music as a force for social change. And yet a Haydn symphony, as beautiful as it may be, was written for the aristocracy of his time--we're not talking Tom Morello here.
Perhaps the time to assume that your town deserves, or must have, a symphony that you never go to, but you're happy to know exists--is over. But classical music is rebuilding itself from the ground-up as a more diverse sector, fromEl Sistema to The Congo to Harlem.
If you care about an arts organization, support it. Volunteer for it. Seek matching contributions from your employer. Be vocal in your support that recognizes that being a classical musician is not just, for these skilled best-of-the-best, "a hobby," but "a livelihood." Make it clear to management that your support is contingent upon the musicians being paid a living wage.
One other defense of classical music is something that I think we forget as liberals too often. We have a different belief in what constitutes "quality of life." The dream of American liberalism is to have enough decent material comfort to be able to engage in morally fulfilling and renewing leisure, whether that's brewing beer, taking in a symphony, biking in clean parks, or swimming in uncontaminated lakes. We demand to be basically respected during the week so that during the weekends and in the evening, we can have an enjoyable life with our families and friends away from our jobs. So no, I don't think doctors or firefighters or teachers should quit their jobs and start playing the violin 24 hours a day--but spending some time in the wonder of sonic masterpieces, amazed by the sheer glory of human evolution and spiritual fulfillment, is good for the soul.
The dream of American liberalism is to live a life that is more "creative" and less "destruction."
I haven't even touched on corporate funding, which is a giant cluster-youknowwhat (the David Koch theater, the David Koch players, etc--what are the ethics of that?) but you get the idea. Nor have I touched on the American Federation of Musicians, but if anyone has a link for their strike fund, post it in the comments. Keep your ears open, keep your eyes open, and support live and local music.
Lastly, for some of you who don't dig classical music, I want to share an article with you about consumer habits and music that lays low some of the common arguments around the "free culture" movement. (That is, that you should never pay for recordings, or seldom; and that "I go to the live concert," etc.) As an open letter to an NPR intern who bragged that she "never pays for music," Camper Van Beethoven's David Lowery pointed out that we easily have accepted pay models that eliminate remuneration for artists without thinking of hidden costs. Lowery's example is of a neighborhood where everything is free for you to loot--but the cost of transportation for getting there is something you're willing to pay for:
It turns out that Verizon, AT&T, Charter etc etc are charging a toll to get into this neighborhood to get the free stuff. Further, companies like Google are selling maps (search results) that tell you where the stuff is that you want to loot. Companies like Megavideo are charging for a high speed looting service (premium accounts for faster downloads). Google is also selling ads in this neighborhood and sharing the revenue with everyone except the people who make the stuff being looted. Further, in order to loot you need to have a $1,000 dollar laptop, a $500 dollar iPhone or $400 Samsumg tablet. It turns out the supposedly “free” stuff really isn’t free. In fact it’s an expensive way to get “free” music. (Like most claimed “disruptive innovations”it turns out expensive subsidies exist elsewhere.) Companies are actually making money from this looting activity. These companies only make money if you change your principles and morality! And none of that money goes to the artists!
And believe it or not this is where the problem with Spotify starts. The internet is full of stories from artists detailing just how little they receive from Spotify. I shan’t repeat them here. They are epic. Spotify does not exist in a vacuum. The reason they can get away with paying so little to artists is because the alternative is The ‘Net where people have already purchased all the gear they need to loot those songs for free. Now while something like Spotify may be a solution for how to compensate artists fairly in the future, it is not a fair system now. As long as the consumer makes the unethical choice to support the looters, Spotify will not have to compensate artists fairly. There is simply no market pressure. Yet Spotify’s CEO is the 10th richest man in the UK music industry ahead of all but one artist on his service.
Part of what allows "creative destruction" to encroach upon the "cost disease" is our implicit acceptance, as web citizens, of the separation of content from labor. We have followed (and I follow, as a writer right now) the notion that "words should be free," "sounds should be free," "images should be free," "videos should be free." But let's not forget that there are such people as writers, musicians, photographers, videographers. If we can do it better than they can, good for us--long live the amateur. But if they're awesome, let's do everything we can do to help them live a fulfilling life.
Or maybe it's time to Kickstarter the Atlanta Symphony.
Wed Sep 05, 2012 at 5:14 PM PT: UPDATE: Minnesota Orchestra is next, as well as the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. (Perhaps a city can't sustain two world-class orchestras: http://www.startribune.com/... )
Thanks for your thoughtful comments from skeptics and musicians alike. This is not an entirely simple labor issue, and one that cuts across class lines in interesting ways, but it clearly seems to be an industry-wide trend.