Radical Within Reason

Okay, Hicks, you caught me. In the course of trying to write an even-handed, reasonable post about the difficult choices orchestras and their supporters face, I did, as you suggest, offer up the somewhat radical notion that not every city needs a full-size symphony orchestra. (And before anyone gets the idea that I'm suggesting that Columbus is one of those cities, let me state unequivocally that I'm not. As of now, I'm officially taking this discussion entirely into the hypothetical realm, and leaving the Columbus debate behind.) This is an idea I've been toying around with for years now, and without going into a ridiculous level of detail, my thinking on the issue more or less breaks down this way:

Most large and medium-sized cities (let's draw an arbitrary line and say we're talking about metro areas of more than a million people, of which the US has roughly 50) have the population and resources available to sustain a professional symphony orchestra of some description, if one is desired. How large a musician complement and how sizable an annual budget that orchestra will operate with is determined by how much money the local board believes it can raise. Conflicts will, of course, arise over these funding levels, but it can be safely assumed that the resources to support a cultural organization of the size and scope of an orchestra are there to be mined.

Still, in many of these cities, an orchestra seems to exist for no other reason than that cities are expected to have orchestras, just as they are expected to have museums, theaters, and professional sports teams. And just as with museums, theaters, and sports teams, the value of an orchestra to its community is only as great as the creativity and commitment those in charge bring to the table.

(I'm including musicians as part of "those in charge," although in many orchestras, the rank-and-file musicians are effectively shut out of all decision-making processes, and in many others, a majority of musicians believe that their only job is to play their instruments, and that tasks like marketing the group, planning for the future, and creating a sustainable organization should be left to others. I find both of these kinds of situations to be exceedingly backward, so I'm just taking it as read that musicians should be given a voice in the leadership of an orchestra, and that they should accept that role. If you disagree, that's fine, but my larger argument is based on an assumption that musicians are not just drones with instruments and batons, and that managers and board members are not just bean counters who happen to like Mozart.)

So here's the problem: not every city is the same, yet we seem to think that orchestras can be one-size-fits-all organizations, shoehorned into any urban area and made to thrive. This is why symphony orchestra performances tend to look exactly the same in every American city. There's no effort to create an orchestra that fits the community, because the word "orchestra" is thought to be a static one, implying precisely that there will be musicians dressed in white tie and tails holding instruments, looking dour, and playing serious music for a serious audience of serious people, who will be expected to stay seriously quiet and react to the performance only at pre-approved times. So a city like Minneapolis, which wholeheartedly embraces indie rock music, avant garde visual art, and theater of all kinds from classic to downright subversive, has an orchestra that, on most nights, offers roughly the same concert experience you would get in a city with far more conservative artistic tastes, like Philadelphia.

I could speculate for hours about the reasons behind this bizarre addiction to sameness. Musicians tend to be averse to large-scale change and fearful of anything that might appear to dumb down the art we've dedicated our lives to. Wealthy concertgoers in many cities, especially smaller ones, value the stilted formality of the concert experience, because they believe that it makes them seem more cosmopolitan. And because orchestras are so expensive and so dependent on the financial support of the community, no one in charge is ever eager to rock the boat by asking fundamental questions about why we do things the way we do.

All of this brings me back to what Sarah called my "radical bit of thinking." Granting that orchestras are a commodity that many cities desire and support, why are we so determined to foist them on cities that clearly would like something else better? Why do we insist on calling a paltry group of 25-30 musicians a "symphony orchestra," as so many US cities now do, and hemming them in to everything that description implies when they could do far more interesting and relevant work as a chamber orchestra, a loose musical collective, or something else entirely?

The conundrum of the professional musician in our era is essentially this: if you want the security of a steady paycheck, health insurance, and the knowledge that your job will likely still exist next week, you need to find an orchestra to play in. But if you want the opportunity to have a real say in your musical life, to create new and interesting art and find an audience for it, you have to forgo that security and lead the life of a freelancer, supplementing your art with an endless succession of wedding gigs and teaching jobs.

What I'm proposing, basically, is an amalgam of those two extremes for cities where an orchestra has either failed to sustain itself or just never gotten off the ground. In larger cities, or places with a deep and abiding love of all kinds of music, there's no reason that such an organization can't exist alongside a larger orchestra, and many already do. New York's Orchestra of St. Luke's and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra are two of the more famous examples. You could make the argument that, in recent years, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra has been moving in exactly this direction, too, offering an ever-wider diversity of concerts, partnering with the University of Minnesota, involving its musicians with the community in new and interesting ways, and still maintaining their more traditional concert offerings at the Ordway.

Somehow, though, this kind of thing never seems to get tried in cities that don't already have a large and successful orchestra. Traditionally, smaller musical groups in small cities operate as cheaply as possible, paying their musicians as freelancers and just keeping their fiscal heads above water. But wouldn't it be great if the moneyed interests in a small or medium-sized city decided to throw themselves into creating and sustaining a really fantastic group of resident musicians who could create dozens of different performance experiences every year, yet be paid a reasonable wage, given benefits, and put down serious roots in the community? And wouldn't that be better than those same moneyed interests engaging in an endless battle over how big their symphony orchestra can be, and how much it should be paid?