Ask An Expert: Danger Pay

Whenever I have occasion to visit a school and take questions about what I do from the kids, it's never long before the question, "How much money do you make?" comes up. It's as predictable as adults asking why we never seem to be watching the conductor, and about as tricky to answer. Since we are entertainers, and we collectively bargain our contract, our salaries do tend to find their way into the public record, but I usually find some way to answer the kids with a comparative to another profession, rather than a specific dollar amount. (This is mainly because kids tend to think that any number followed by the word "thousand" is huge, because they've never had a mortgage or a family to support.) This usually results in the kids being visibly unhappy with my answer. Bill in Dallas is about to be similarly disappointed...

Q: What is the range of premium pay for a player (such as Mr McGuire) who is a member of the orchestra but is selected to play a featured solo (like a concerto) on a subscription or other concert?

The short answer, Bill, is that I've no idea, and there's no realistic way for me or anyone else to find out. While the base salary of a Minnesota Orchestra musician is collectively bargained by our union representatives within the orchestra, individual musicians who are asked to play a concerto (or, for that matter, to host a concert as I do on a semi-regular basis) negotiate their own pay scale with our management. (I have a dim memory of there once having been a minimum rate for a soloist from within the orchestra buried deep inside our master agreement, and that it may have been roughly twice the amount we get paid for a chamber music performance, but having just scanned the most recent contract, I can't find such a rate anywhere.) The range, I assume, varies with the nature of the performance, the relative profile of the musician involved, and of course, the negotiating skill on both sides of the table.

As an example of how these things can vary, I host two different concert series for the orchestra at the moment: Inside the Classics, and our Close to Home series at St. Andrew's Church in Mahtomedi, Minnesota. The latter series is a far more casual and unscripted affair than Inside the Classics, and my duties basically involve doing some nominal research, chatting with Osmo in the week before the concert to see what he wants included, and then showing up in Mahtomedi and talking almost off the cuff for 10-15 minutes over the course of the concert. Inside the Classics, on the other hand, takes weeks of preparation for each concert and a pretty extraordinary amount of research, consultation, writing, timing, blogging, interviewing, rewriting, and organizing to pull off. As you might imagine, I'm paid considerably less for the Close to Home series than I am for Inside the Classics.

I have no idea what Peter McGuire was paid for his performances on our January concerts, nor do I know what our concertmaster, Jorja Fleezanis, received for her performances of the Elgar violin concerto last week. They're almost certainly different figures, and it's probably a safe assumption that Jorja made more, but it's between the soloists and our management. However, I would point out that the outlandish figures that you hear tossed around with reference to top-tier soloists like Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell are to our solo fees as Justin Morneau's salary is to Burt Hara's. You may safely assume that no orchestra musician playing a concerto is getting rich off the event...