For months now I have been reading stories of the impasse between management and musicians in Minnesota. The lock-out of the Minnesota Orchestra has many complicating factors: the lavish expenditure to renovate the orchestra’s hall, the departure of Music Director Osmo Vänskä, the bad blood between the parties, and the attempts at settlement both public and private by big name mediators. It’s a sad story. From what I can determine, the editorial pages of the local press tend to be siding largely with the musicians, whose main talking point seems to be that continuing to pay them their six-figure salaries will decide whether or not Minnesota’s orchestra continues to be a “world class” ensemble.
Leaving aside for the moment the thorny question of whether or not Minnesota needs a “world class” orchestra, whatever that means, as opposed to, say, a “continental class” orchestra, let us look at this claim a bit more closely. What the players are suggesting, simply, is that musicians who are paid the most invariably play the best. Is this true? Of course it isn’t. Anyone active in the field of classical music today knows perfectly well that excellent, “world class” performances—or so close as to make no difference—can be given even by conservatory orchestras these days. The fact is that today’s young musicians are superbly trained, and abundant. Conservatories are churning them out by the thousands. Under a dynamic conductor, astonishingly fine results can be achieved pretty consistently.
In order to prove the veracity of their claims the musicians need to show that an ensemble with a base salary of, say, $85,000 would necessarily be quantifiably less “world class” than one starting at a bit more than $100,000, for that is what we are talking about in this case. Now most people would probably agree that $85,000 is a pretty tidy sum of money, particularly when you consider that this is a starting figure. It does not take into account teaching fees and other traditional sources of a musician’s income, and we also must factor in the cost of living in or around Minneapolis—probably not cheap, but also likely not as costly as New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. So taken as a package, how much extra “class” does a $15,000 to $20,000 salary difference purchase? I would very much like to know how this could be determined.
Take a typical repertory work, say, a Beethoven symphony, and have it played under the same conductor by players with six-figure salaries versus those in the high five figures. Will the result automatically be “world class” in the first instance, and demonstrably less in the second? Exactly how much less than “world class” would the results be? Is “class” a commodity that can be quantified objectively in dollars and cents, or measured on a scale? Are there no “world class” musicians, especially in today’s market, willing to accept a job starting with a high five figure salary? Such questions, let’s face it, are absolutely impossible to answer in any definitive way, but that is what the orchestra’s musicians purport to do. Moreover, they rely on a wholly false picture of the actual state of affairs in terms of opportunities for the best musicians. The reality is that the entire Minnesota Orchestra could be reconstituted with young, talented players willing to make a reasonably long term commitment to the ensemble at a fraction of its current cost, and not suffer a substantive reduction in musical quality.
This is a fact. Management knows it, and so do the musicians. It is the giant Bruckner symphony (the musical equivalent of an elephant) in the room. It is what makes this particular dispute so bitter. The musicians won’t admit it, and management can’t because they dare not appear openly to be trying to bust the union if they want to retain public support, never mind insuring that the orchestra will survive in anything like its present configuration.
“Pay them less, and the best musicians that the orchestral already has will leave Minnesota,” the group’s representatives insist. Perhaps this is true, but that claim presupposes that there are an unlimited number of openings in “world class” orchestras which those musicians can occupy essentially at will, and that is simply not true. Some players might be perfectly happy with their quality of life in Minnesota, or have ties to the community. Others might use the orchestra as a stepping stone to bigger things, for make no mistake, even at six figures the Minnesota Orchestra, fine as it is, never will be the Chicago Symphony or the Berlin Philharmonic, nor will Minneapolis ever be another New York . No amount of money would keep such artists in Minnesota. The effect of a big salary cut might be very damaging to the current orchestra’s morale, but that is a temporary problem, one which would vanish as soon as the disgruntled have departed for theoretically sunnier climes. The real problem they have, and the reason they are so shrill in their insistence on the necessity of preserving their “world class” salaries, is that there may not be any sunnier climes willing to take them.
At bottom, the altruism of the Minnesota musicians, seen from a distance, rings hollow. I am not suggesting that they don’t care about quality, but what I am saying is that their concern for quality is neither greater nor smaller than management’s. To suggest that management is willing to accept lower standards merely to pay the musicians less is both false and disingenuous, and I don’t need to know anything about the orchestra’s management in order to say this. It’s just common sense. Everyone here has an interest in securing the best possible results for the amount of money invested. There is no evidence whatsoever that quality would suffer over the long term by paying the musicians less. What is certain is that some musicians would suffer over the short term, but that is not the same thing at all. The orchestra is bigger than any single player, and its artistic identity does not rest on satisfying the pecuniary demands of its musicians at a given moment.
Base salaries in the top twenty US orchestras range widely from about $60,000 (San Diego) to approximately $145,000 (Chicago). On any given day, any one of these ensembles may give a performance that could be considered “world class.” Minneapolis, which never makes any ranking of the top ten most expensive places in the US to live (Forbes lists its cost of living at 1.2% below the national average), currently stands around number eight in the overall salary list, at $111,000. That is disproportionately high, comparatively speaking, for the region. This number threatens to drop into the high teens based on recent proposals by management. Is that a tragedy? Would Minnesota become a cultural desert as a result? Are cities with orchestras at salary levels comparable to those proposed for Minnesota, such as Baltimore, Atlanta, St. Louis, Houston, and Indianapolis suffering from a dearth of “world class” music? Some of them, Baltimore and Atlanta in particular, have a healthier recording schedule than does Minnesota, with results that are equally impressive.
There is a certain bravado, as well as hypocrisy, in the statements of the Minnesota musicians about their “world class” credentials. The precise phenomenon that accounts for their alleged exalted status–the glut of talented musicians and the excellence of “second tier” or “provincial” orchestras—has in fact led to their current sorry position. They were happy to take advantage when it helped them, but they conveniently disregard its implications for them now. As record collectors have long known, it is possible to purchase top quality performances at cut rate prices, because of both an excess of recordings generally as well as the overall high standards of countless lesser-known ensembles who charge less to make them. The Minnesota Orchestra’s own highly acclaimed Beethoven cycle for BIS Records only exists because the orchestra willingly accommodated itself to the current market reality. Essentially, they gave it away to the label for nothing by funding it themselves. This trend has been a bonanza for consumers of recorded music, and why should it be any less of one for concertgoers?
There is a natural price level that concertgoers are willing to pay for “world class” results in Minnesota, and there is no reason that they should pay one cent more, or expect anything less, whatever that number happens to be. The musicians are not fighting the evils of bad management as much as they wish to ignore the reality of the marketplace. It is a fight that ultimately they cannot win, even if the bizarre system of subsidies and the not-for-profit business model under which they operate shelters them for a time. What made orchestras like Cleveland and (more recently) San Francisco so exciting is that world class results took root in local soil, adapting to local economic circumstances. They still can, and still do, and whether or not that happens in Minnesota does not depend on what the orchestra’s musicians would have us believe about the tradeoff between quality and money.
