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Minnesota From Far Away: Right and Wrong

Janos Gereben on November 26, 2013
The new $50 million Minnesota Orchestra Hall: no money left for musicians
Renovation of the Minnesota Orchestra Hall cost $50 million: No money left for musicians

Views of the Minnesota Orchestra's tragedy from London and New York last week couldn't be more different.

London Times music critic Richard Morrison writes in BBC Magazine that the plight of the Minnesota Orchestra is "all too symptomatic of what's happening in many American musical institutions," citing recent strikes or lockouts in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Detroit.

Morrison then comes to a simple and utterly wrong conclusion:

All these disputes have a common cause. On one side are the musicians and technicians, backed by hardline unions brandishing rule books drawn up in the palmy 1950s.

On the other side are managements faced with hugely diminished endowments, a prolonged recession affecting sponsorship and donations ...

One side bad; one side good and downtrodden. Can anything be that simple? Of course not. For a balanced report on the same important subject, there is Alex Ross in the current New Yorker.

He doesn't make it one-sided (bringing up, for example, how "well-paid musicians in Chicago and San Francisco lacked the nobility of the players’ stand in Minnesota"), but he puts the blame where it belongs (management incompetence in Minneapolis) and posits that the Chicken Little act is premature: Professional worriers in the classical business have portrayed the Minnesota and the City Opera situations as symptoms of a systemic disease. To be sure, many other institutions find themselves on shaky footing. The Brooklyn Philharmonic, which has been struggling for years, currently has no staff. More than a few opera companies have scaled back their schedules and ambitions.

But other organizations are in surprisingly robust shape. The Chicago Symphony reported a record year of attendance and fund-raising. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is basking in wealth and thriving on innovation. The Cleveland Orchestra has increased revenue by attracting thousands of students to its concerts. And the Detroit Symphony is gradually rebounding from a fractious labor dispute a few seasons back, even as the city contemplates selling off some of its art collection. He could have added SFS to orchestras in a decent enough place financially, even in the immediate wake of the Great Recession, and numerous other organizations. But what about where the blame lies in Minneapolis and several other places?

Citing deficits, the Minnesota Orchestral Association had announced a 32% pay cut; the musicians balked, and the management locked them out. In the war of words that followed, the musicians easily held the high ground: the management had stooped to ruthless union-busting tactics, going so far as to buy up Internet domain names that could be used to support the musicians (SaveOurMinnesotaOrchestra, SaveOurOrchestra, and so on).

George Mitchell, the Northern Ireland peacemaker, tried to mediate a compromise: the musicians accepted his proposal, but the M.O.A. rejected it. A number of players have taken jobs elsewhere, although those who stayed have been mounting concerts on their own. The swift plunge of this magnificent orchestra looks to be one of the most flagrant cases of mismanagement in the recent history of American classical music.

Ross also calls to task New York City Opera's management for "a disastrous series of decisions in the period from 2007 to 2009, when it raided its endowment and put itself on a year’s hiatus," the 70-year-old company going out of business. Balancing the picture again, Ross adds: "Mismanagement cannot be blamed for all ills. Unions are too quick to jump into conflict mode ..." The larger picture:

If there is a crisis, it stems from the culture at large. The extant network of orchestras and opera houses is an artifact of a very different America. City Opera, a pet project of Fiorello LaGuardia, emerged from the ethos of the New Deal, when government funds were allotted to the propagation of the arts for the masses. These days, political leaders are largely absent from the discussion, and the winner-take-all economy is as prevalent in the arts as everywhere else. While smaller groups struggle, donors flock to the Met and other deluxe institutions. A week after City Opera’s demise, Juilliard announced a sixty-million-dollar gift from Bruce Kovner, a hedge-fund billionaire. Mayor Bloomberg, when asked about the fate of City Opera, feebly commented that "the business model doesn’t seem to be working." In the face of this mentality, it’s remarkable that "the People’s Opera," as LaGuardia called it, lasted as long as it did.