1 of 8

The orchestra's work week begins with an educational concert in a suburban elementary school. The 27 players of the orchestra "core"—full-time, contracted musicians—wait at their stands for the children to arrive. Violins chitter at scales; horns peck at their adenoidal high notes. At the other end of the long multipurpose room, behind a folding partition, early lunch is beginning; there is an indistinct hubbub of talk and the odor of gravy.

The children file in, whispering, curious, well-behaved. The "concert" is really a lecture-demonstration, with the orchestra's young, female associate conductor giving the lecture. She has the children identify a viola and an oboe. She leads them in clapping exercises. "What does this kind of music remind you of?" she asks, wheeling toward the players.

At Mozart's Figarooverture, that shameless invitation to monkey business, the children grin at each other, bounce, crane in their seats, as if the music had switched them on. At the theme from Beverly Hills 90210 the applause begins before the music ends. At "On the Beautiful Blue Danube," written by Johann Strauss the Younger for the Vienna dancehall in 1867, the air is suddenly full of half-suppressed giggles. The children know this music, probably from Cartoon Express.

Some players grin back at the excitement, but for most of the period they seem detached and a little restless, leaving the occasion to the conductor. Such concerts are not what their conservatory educations prepared them for. They may or may not have anticipated that they would have to find and colonize a space in American culture as the condition of professional survival.

The American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL) estimates that there are 1,600 orchestras in the United States, and yet for many of them—the ones between college ensembles and the Gibraltars of New York and Chicago—survival is the question. Many organizations are now living on a financial precipice, cobbling budgets together out of sponsorships and dwindling ticket sales to an aging audience. Even in sizable city markets, such as Sacramento and San Diego, orchestras have gone bankrupt. Strikes have paralyzed seasons for ensembles of all sizes—Philadelphia, Atlanta, Shreveport—strikes that ended leaving enormous inequalities in the profession: a base salary of $84,000 in Philadelphia, $18,000 in Tucson.

The orchestra's struggle comes amidst a swamp of troubles affecting American cultural life as a whole. At the time when the Walkman is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, the entire recording industry is in recession: the classical music labels' share of a stagnant market shrank from 7 percent in 1987 to 2.9 percent in 1996. Not even the Philadelphia Orchestra, the first (in 1917) to make a classical recording, has a standing contract. Government arts funding is under suspicion. People organize such dubious events as the Congressional Sing-a-Long for the Arts (in February 1999), with Edward Kennedy and Peter Yarrow leading a few hundred NEA supporters in song on the Capitol steps.

At the center of the orchestra crisis are two mutually hostile facts. The first is that orchestras are expensive, especially in the full professional form. You must pay conductors and soloists, administrative staff, PR people, ushers, sound people, and roustabouts. You must support, or contribute crucially to the support of, a concert hall ill-adapted to other moneymaking uses. Above all, you must pay a standing roster of highly trained, mostly unionized musicians.

next page... |  1 of 8

share this page