Settled Strike at Cleveland Orchestra Reveals Classical Music Troubles

副 非常;很;甚;颇;不怎样! Even though it’s over, one of the first high-profile labor tussles of 2010 points to troubled times for the nation’s elite classical musical ensembles amid the Great Recession.

Orchestra members struck on Monday, the first such work stoppage here in 30 years. It was a day off for them anyway, so there was little immediate effect, but the strike forced the cancellation of a two-day teaching and concert trip to Indiana University and threatened a lucrative residency in Miami, both scheduled for this week. The two sides spent much of the day together in talks with a mediator.

In troubles elsewhere, the New York Philharmonic has just reported a record deficit for last year of $4.6 million, with nearly that much of a shortfall expected this season. The Seattle Symphony musicians have authorized a strike if need be.

Many of the nation’s top orchestras have reduced staff positions and administrative salaries in the last year. Orchestras have downsized seasons, canceled tours, programmed smaller works and left jobs open.

Current economic hardships, of course, are partly to blame. But industry experts point out that in the flush years of the 1990s, orchestras went on spending sprees without building up their endowments for a rainy decade. Now the crunch is on. At the same time, the old system of making the majority of ticket money from season-long subscriptions is breaking down. Big recording contracts are long gone.

In Cleveland, the fight revolves around several thousand dollars a year in salary for each player. But implicit is a debate over the worth of exquisitely trained musical artists in our society and how much we are now willing to pay for them.

The problem is especially acute here. Cleveland presents one of classical music’s great anomalies: a top international orchestra in a shrinking city, an ensemble in a Rust Belt town that plays with the greatest of ease among the Viennese.

The Cleveland Orchestra, founded in 1918, was born out of the city’s industrial might. While a couple of fiery plumes in the night sky are reminders of that legacy, much of the industry has died or moved away. The population has declined by nearly half in the last 50 years, and 10 percent over the last decade. Corporate headquarters have shut their doors. No new industries are minting millionaires. Old-money families are dispersing. Ticket sales have declined, although loyalty remains fierce.

“The orchestra is living off of historic wealth,” said Edward W. Hill, a professor of economic development at Cleveland State University.

According to numbers provided by management, the orchestra has been operating at large deficits for nearly a decade, averaging around $4 million for the last seven seasons with a budget now at $42.3 million. It has plugged the holes by using most of the money it had set aside to pay off $28 million in bonds when they come due in 2028 and by raising $18 million in emergency funds — which run out this season.

Orchestra officials say finances were hurt by dipping excessively every year into the endowment, which has plunged to $97 million from about $146 million in 2006-7.

Yet the orchestra remains undiminished artistically. Last Thursday’s concert gave ample evidence. The music director, Franz Welser-Möst, conducted impeccable accounts of works by Strauss, Adès and Brahms. The orchestra’s famed sound, transparent yet golden, glowed as usual. Entrances and cutoffs were typically precise. Melodies were caressed as much as played. The concert was well attended but not full.

But before the first notes of Strauss’s “Don Juan,” the players engaged in the equivalent of hurling Molotov cocktails in the genteel confines of Severance Hall, the orchestra’s splendidly renovated home: they left the stage and passed out leaflets among the patrons.

Clevelanders, whether they go to Severance Hall or not, know that the orchestra is one of the things about their city that register best around the world. (The Cleveland Clinic, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Lebron James are up there, too.)

In town, players say they are often treated as celebrities. Lines of yellow school buses on East Boulevard near Severance Hall attest to a widely experienced rite of passage for Cleveland youngsters: a trip to hear the Cleveland Orchestra.

“The orchestra has become almost like a church in Cleveland,” said Ross W. Duffin, a music professor at Case Western Reserve University here.

But it has become increasingly clear that this church must find a flock outside Cleveland. It has embarked on a kind of “globalization strategy,” establishing residences in Miami; Vienna; Lucerne, Switzerland; and in the future, New York, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. It is going, basically, where the money is.

The orchestra says it has raised $9 million from Miami donors in the last four seasons. They dominate the category of gifts over $100,000 in the last annual report.

The strike was strategically timed. The orchestra was scheduled to leave Thursday for its 10-day Miami residency.

The players and management are deadlocked over salaries. The musicians have proposed freezing their pay through the season, then re-examining the situation in the summer. The orchestra’s leadership has asked the players to take a 5 percent pay cut this year, go back to par next year and accept a 2.5 percent raise the following year. It is also seeking cuts in benefits.

Management argues that administrators and staff members have taken pay cuts, and that the players should share in the sacrifice. Mr. Welser-Möst, whose last reported income was $1.3 million, took a 20 percent pay cut. Gary Hanson, the executive director, whose last reported salary was $404,000, took a 15 percent cut and said he now earns what he started at in 2004.

The players say they have made numerous concessions in recent years. But more critically, they argue, any further slippage in pay will threaten the orchestra’s greatness by putting it far behind the pay scales of its peers, which consist mainly of the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony — America’s so-called Big Five. (The San Francisco Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic resent the phrase.)

The Cleveland players’ minimum salary now stands at $115,000, seventh in the nation, but most earn more through additional payments; principal players can earn two or three times that amount.

As the musicians see it, losing further ground will make it tougher to attract the absolute best players, and to keep them, threatening the orchestra’s greatness. “Continuity and stability have been the backbone of this orchestra,” said Michael Sachs, the principal trumpeter.

Mr. Hanson, the executive director, dismissed these arguments. “The proposal that we’re making is fair and reasonable and will not cause any artistic impact such as they’re predicting,” he said…….

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/arts/music/19orchestra.html?ref=music


Just in case you think this is an isolated problem, 形 独特的, a one-off, check out this memo with a detailed study of what American Orchestras are facing. Better fasten your seatbelt - it's gonna be a very bumpy ride!
http://www.americanorchestras.org/images/stories/knowledge_pdf/NEA_memo.pdf