Life in the Pit

While there are many pit issues to deal with, the most crucial is the threat to our very existence by ill-informed management and apathetic audiences. Pittsburgh Ballet Orchestra was eliminated from the PBT during the 2005-06 season, but by getting our outrage into public immediately, we were able to marshal the forces of our labor union and our legal advisors, our musician colleagues in other orchestras, the public and the press, and came away with an orchestra for part of the ballet season. Not a cure, but certainly better than elimination. Now the challenge is to continue the campaign of public awareness to restore the orchestra to full-time status. Believe me, it gets harder as time goes by, because even our musicians lose focus on what we should be doing and become resigned to a part-time orchestra. And if the orchestra musicians don’t care, we’ve lost the war.

In Pittsburgh, our union has a renewed commitment to public awareness of live music. We will mount audience leaflet campaigns for any production that replaces live music with canned, we make sure that management is aware of our irreplaceable contributions. I like Nancy Nelson’s idea of a youth engagement program that brings the musicians in the pit closer to the audience, and I hope we will start something like that for our ballet and opera orchestras. Education toward prevention is better than trying to replace something that has already been lost.