Who you callin' minor league?

The professional orchestras of the world tend to spend an unseemly amount of time and energy trumpeting just how excellent we are. In fact, the tenor of such discussions frequently gets downright silly, as it did earlier this fall, when Marin Alsop began her tenure as music director of the Baltimore Symphony. In reporting on her historic debut, a number of national publications described her (accurately) as the first ever female music director of a "major" American orchestra, sparking howls of outrage from orchestras and listeners in cities like Buffalo and Denver who believe their local bands to be deserving of the label "major." The fact that a Major Orchestra is typically defined within the industry by factors like annual budget, endowment size, length of season, and musician pay scale was lost in the face of protests that "our orchestra is every bit as good as theirs!"

I once found myself on the receiving end of a similar protest when, in my role as a news editor at ArtsJournal.com, I wrote a blurb describing a medium-sized regional orchestra on the East Coast as just that, sparking an angry e-mail from the orchestra's PR chief, who demanded that we rewrite the blurb and identify her band as "major," even though their rank in all the categories I mentioned above places them in roughly the same tier as orchestras in Alabama, Columbus, and Louisville.

The protesters in these debates over the use of the word "major" may well have a point - Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote an excellent piece earlier this year about how much better second, third, and even fourth tier orchestras have become in recent years, and how narrow the gap between the top US orchestras and those considered to be beneath that standard has become. But the real heart of these sorts of debates is simple civic pride, and the wound that people feel when their city, state, neighborhood, etc. is defined by an outsider as being less than major league caliber in any way. Look at how quick arts groups are to trumpet phrases like "world class" as a way of supposedly impressing the local populace, and you'll see how important perception and rank are in the cultural marketplace. (The Minnesota Orchestra has been living high on the marketing hog for more than three years now through the power of a single line from a London newspaper, where a critic was kind enough to say of us that, "out of nowhere, the world seems to have gained a new superstar band with a maestro to match." I often wonder if that critic knows just how many times we've reprinted his words for our own purposes since he wrote them back in 2004.)

Still, I've long suspected that the bulk of our ticketbuyers could care less about national and international accolades, and are basically looking for us to provide them with an entertaining night out. Sure, it's nice to be able to say that your local theater troupe, opera company, or orchestra is among the best, if you care about that sort of thing, but since no one ever really tells you who's doing the ranking, it feels a bit silly to me.

Besides, tell me that the fans of Britain's Really Terrible Orchestra (and there are apparently thousands of them) aren't having as good a time at the RTO's concerts as the concertgoers in Baltimore, Buffalo, New York, or Minneapolis. Somehow, I don't think they're spending a lot of time worrying about where their band ranks among the world's best...