On the fungibility of musicians

One of the uglier memes being spread by the proponents of the Great Attempted Orchestral Downsizing of 2012 is that cutting the pay of musicians won’t damage the quality of the orchestra because everyone is replaceable. A recent post by Chicago lawyer Kevin Moen summarizes it perfectly:

Perhaps most disturbing, however, is the response from some orchestra managers
and board chairs to the argument that players, faced with these draconian measures, will  pack up and leave.  The message is simple and blunt:  we don’t care.  Go ahead and leave.  After all, you’re totally replaceable; we’ll just hire one of those fantastic kids coming out the conservatories.

This message is being delivered with stunning candor.  The chairman of one major orchestra demanding huge cuts noted the “quite remarkable” number of music-school graduates, characterizing it as “a large supply.”  Another manager acknowledged a “risk” that his players would “find their way to another place” if forced to accept management’s demands, but shrugged it off:  “those who can leave will.”  Yet another board chairman told one departing principal that he wouldn’t care unless nine or ten players left – and then, only because it might be “bad PR.”  (And of course, who can forget the manager who thought he could hire a brand-new Louisville Orchestra on Craigslist.)

What we are seeing is the public manifestation of a belief that has long simmered in the background among some managers:  that players are really just interchangeable parts, and if one leaves, the orchestra can easily find someone just as good.  As a player, I knew managers who held this belief privately; as an attorney, I’ve encountered it in negotiations.  It represents nothing less than the commoditization of symphonic musicians.  It is perhaps the most dangerous trend at work today, and left unchecked, it will ultimately destroy musicians’ livelihoods.

In one sense, of course, everyone is replaceable; as Charles de Gaulle was reported to have once said, “the cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people.” But the argument that there are lots of great players out there available to replace every departing musician, and thus it’s not a problem to lose musicians to other orchestras, is a weak one.

For one thing, musicians who leave an orchestra for a better-paying job elsewhere in the field are, by definition, going to be hard to replace; after all, the candidates for the audition to replace them very likely also auditioned for the departing musician’s new position – and lost. Our experience in Milwaukee with auditions is not unusual; we’ve had several rounds of auditions for most openings before finding someone acceptable to the Music Director and audition committee, and have often had do so active recruiting to get quality candidates to come to the audition at all. It certainly hadn’t felt to us as if our problem has been choosing between hordes of musicians we’d love to have in the orchestra.

There are definitely more applicants for openings than there used to be two or three decades ago. My personal belief is that the overall level of applicants is higher, but that the best players auditioning for us now aren’t noticeably, or consistently, better than the people we hired  two decades ago.

There is also the issue of experience. Playing in an orchestra is a skill that takes a while to develop for most musicians. In fact, playing in a given orchestra is not necessarily a skill that transfers immediately to a new orchestra – something I found out when I played principal for two weeks in 2009 for the Hong Kong Philharmonic. While I thought I did well enough (especially considering that I never completely got over the 13-hour jet lag), my lack of familiarity with the members of the viola section, the acoustics on stage, and the overall style of the orchestra was a significant hindrance to doing as well as I might have had I been there a year or so.

Lastly, there’s the clear preference audiences have to attend concerts performed by people they know, or at least recognize. I have no doubt that my orchestra’s board could find orchestras of comparable quality to mine to come to Milwaukee to perform the same concerts we do, and possibly for less money. But experience, here and elsewhere, demonstrates that they wouldn’t sell many tickets over the course of a season of such concerts. It’s not because they’d be worse concerts than we’d do; it’s because attending a concert is in part about connecting to the people on stage. Audiences know good concerts from bad concerts, but  wanting to go to a concert isn’t just about it being good. It’s about it being an experience, and part of that is seeing familiar faces on stage.