Orchestra Hall

[pvg]

Salaries in San Francisco are nearly 100% more than what is being offered to Minnesota Orchestra musicians.Whether we compare salaries with orchestras of the same quality and reputation, and ambition, of the Minnesota Orchestra members or the ambition of the Minnesota Orchestra management and Board seems to be the question. If the Board has the ambition of mediocrity, which I can only assume from the proceedings thus far, set in the pretty facade of the new Hall, then they are certainly on the verge of succeeding. The complacency of praising the bland, Target-esque architecture in light of the deeper impact the lockout is having on the city is emblematic of the trouble with focusing too much on design over substance. The orchestra's impact is not a 1% percent impact. Salaries on the low six figures are hardly high today and one cannot even begin to quantify the value of imagination that music brings to everyone, however relevant you think classical music in the Western tradition may be. I'd say that if there's ever evidence that Minneapolis does not really want to be a cosmopolitan, creative city, the Board is leading the way.

[John]

PVG, I agree with some of your concerns and support of the musicians, however, Urbanmsp is about urban development. planning, transportation etc. and the lobby expansion is very relevant to the focus of this website. As far as the lobby expansion, this was very much needed. The original lobby was horrible and very user unfriendly.

[talindsay]

Should we cut teacher pay until it's lower than every other school district in the country? Should we cut athletes' pay until it's at the bottom of the range? Should we cut *YOUR* pay until it's the bottom of the range for your occupation? If you want good people you have to pay a competitive salary. The Minnesota Orchestra has musicians at a very high level: comparable to Chicago, Detroit, and even San Francisco. Our section leaders in many cases would be comparable to the musicians in the world's very top orchestras. This is despite us already paying less than almost all of these, and it is somewhat surprising that more musicians haven't already defected. The losses will certainly accelerate, and the new pay scale will reduce our competitiveness in getting new talent. You might be okay with that; but the Orchestra's TRUSTEES shouldn't be - they're supposed to be the caretakers of the orchestra.

Full disclosure: as a holder of a music degree I have a few friends in the Minnesota Orchestra including a friend I've known since we played in the Saint Louis Symphony Youth Orchestras together in the early 1990s. I'm passionate about it and non without partisanship. So I'll largely avoid arguing the points, but before anybody starts with a "yeah it sucks but they're overpaid" remember that these aren't the top 1%, they're the top 0.01%. They all spent a great deal of time in expensive music schools, they work extremely long hours since, unlike a 9-5 job, there's no distinction between their job and their life. They all hold advanced degrees. You can value classical music or not, but nobody should be told their salary will be cut 30% in one year because the board told all the funders that the operational budget was fine and they should be donating their money to a capital fund, while hiding a structural deficit in operations.

[woofner]

Thanks PVG for injecting some facts into this debate. Unfortunately I only have subjective experiences to contribute: take my word for it that while solidly in the middle class, I am by no means a 1%er, yet I bought subscriptions to the MN Orchestra every year until the Peavey Plaza shenanigans. It's at the least an oversimplification to say that this is a 1% institution.

As for the lobby, I must have been to over 100 concerts there over the years, and I never had a problem with it. There were some circulation issues at the entry point but those could have been fixed with some alteration to the first floor instead of blowing the whole thing up. I wouldn't say there was any more crowding than any other concert hall, and there was far less than at most of the old theaters in town, and even some new ones, like the Cowles.

[Wedgeguy]

PVG, I agree with some of your concerns and support of the musicians, however, Urbanmsp is about urban development. planning, transportation etc. and the lobby expansion is very relevant to the focus of this website. As far as the lobby expansion, this was very much needed. The original lobby was horrible and very user unfriendly.

Hate to say but the underlying story here is the labor agreement and how the books were allegedly cooked to build a fancy addition while letting the main reason you have the building is rotting away. The board should be working to make sure they keep the quality that they have, but they are not.

It is like buying something overpriced with a fancy package, only to get home and find what you could have gotten for a lot less of the quality than you paid for. They spend money to on packaging to make you think you are getting quality, but what is on the inside is not what you paid for. They put their eggs into one basket and they have now dropped the basket and have a huge mess with labor, with the bad PR campaign, and with future donors who will be less likely to support with big checks a 2nd rate orchestra if it comes to that. Like I've said before, time for a new board! BTW love the addition, they should have done a better job at making it happen without they problems that they have created.

[mullen]

without the people writing the "big checks" there wouldn't be a symphony orchestra here. it's amazing the number of free tickets the orchestra distributes. "papering" the hall here is quite common. comparing minneapolis and san francisco is apples and oranges. nyc, london, LA....we're vastly different markets. not just in size, which is of course the biggest difference. this isn't professional sports which receives the bulk of its outlay from television rights.

maybe we'll have to come to grips with being a market similar to kansas city or cincinnati. i know that's difficult for some who have an inflated opinion of the importance of the twin cities.

[Wedgeguy]

^^^^^^
I'm not sure if we have an inflated opinion of ourselves, but we do have one of the top orchestras in the country. When you get to play Carnegie Hall you are not not 2nd rate, you are top rate. We have the chance of losing our standing which we built up over several years and probably decades. This board will have brought down in 2 years what it took 20 years to build.

[pvg]

One last reply before this gets kicked out to Anything Goes:

I'm not surprised that my comparison of the Twin Cities to San Francisco raised an eyebrow or two, but let's come back to some endowment numbers cited by the Minnesota Orchestra since it's not a "market" question but rather an endowment question:

1. The Minnesota Orchestra has raised well over $100 million in recent years:
http://www.minnesotaorchestra.org/give- ... /endowment

2. Yet the Minnesota Orchestra VP of Finance justifies management's salary offer by stating that the orchestra's endowment has lost over $90 million in value since 2007 (there is more to this story of loss as well):
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/lett ... 97851.html

Bryan Ebensteiner, Eden Prairie
The writer is vice president of finance for the Minnesota Orchestra writes in May 2013:
[...]
The orchestra’s endowment is $90 million less in value than was projected when the board signed a contract with the musicians back in 2007. This significant gap was created by the enormous market drops of 2008 and 2009 — and was then exacerbated by our reliance on the endowment to honor the costs of that five-year contract through a recession.
[...]

Someone is writing checks in a volume well beyond what some might expect of a Midwestern burg, but that's the beauty of having such a lovely orchestra in this 'ah, shucks' humble place, right? Minneapolis is what it is because some members of earlier generations had a bit of courage to think.

And I certainly have nothing against Kansas City or Cincinnati, or Columbus, but I'd rather just stay focused on actually existing orchestras so here are some more numbers:

3. Details of recent orchestral negotiations found here help elucidate the company with which the MinnOrch can be compared in terms of both endowment and average salary:
http://songofthelark.wordpress.com/2013 ... rchestras/

Cheers.

[mullen]

yea it is the beauty of having some wealthy benefactors...but at some point the outlays dry up. the modern day symphony orchestra is not sustainable at the level it was once is in this market. that is the issue.

ken dayton passed away...all of those wonderful european tours? thanks to ken dayton. the wealthy donor base is dying off and sadly the new generation of wealth just isn't as interested in the symphony.

kansas city, cincy and columbus all have existing orchestras. the comparisons to markets of similar size is valid.

[Tyler]

kansas city, cincy and columbus all have existing orchestras. the comparisons to markets of similar size is valid.

LOL. What? If Columbus is a similar market size so are Philly and San Fransisco. So, no.

[MNdible]

I thought that this was an interesting piece, not specifically speaking to the MN Orchestra. Especially this bit:

While in most industries productivity rises over time, a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica takes exactly the same number of orchestral musicians the same amount of time today as it did two centuries ago. Because the wages of orchestral workers, whose productivity has not increased, have risen over time in line with those of other workers, the relative cost of a performance is far greater today than it was then. There are only two ways to confront the cost curse: cut expenditure year after year or increase income.

This obviously isn't unique to orchestras, but would be true of any live performance.

[Tyler]

While in most industries productivity rises over time, a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica takes exactly the same number of orchestral musicians the same amount of time today as it did two centuries ago. Because the wages of orchestral workers, whose productivity has not increased, have risen over time in line with those of other workers, the relative cost of a performance is far greater today than it was then. There are only two ways to confront the cost curse: cut expenditure year after year or increase income.

This is gobbledegook.

[MNdible]

Really?

Makes perfect sense to me. And if you look at the finances of any live performance arts operation, you'll see that ticket income now can only cover a fraction of their operating expenses, and they are exceptionally dependent on their endowments and donations.

[RailBaronYarr]

MNdible, good link. The same concept applies to industries like education and health-care (though not necessarily as much). While professors may be able to teach a little more in a given hour thanks to productivity enhancements like powerpoint, video aides, etc, the reality is that it still takes more or less X number of hours to get across information to students. Barring a complete shift to online education, costs of housing students in a building with a seat per student have not dramatically fallen, either. So over time, the cost of education relative to every other industry has risen. (obviously there are other factors at play in both health care and education, mostly that you can justify basically any expense as it improves education/care but there is no hard value to tie the expense against to measure an actual ROI, which is a major contributor to cost increases).

In any case, as MNdible's link says, either costs need to be cut (by paying people less or actually coming up with a way to improve productivity of symphony orchestras), or income needs to rise (ticket prices, fundraising, or government subsidies).

[FISHMANPET]

People today are more productive than they were 200 years ago, because of technology. A person can make more shirts now, because instead of hand weaving the cloth and hand sewing them, machines do most of that work. A baker can bake more bread, because there are machines to do the mixing and bigger ovens. A single farmer can tend more land and achieve more crops from each acre, because of improved seeds and fertilizer, and the automation of tractors and other things. Technology has made us more productive across nearly all sectors.

But where as 100 people could play Beethoven's Eroica 200 years ago, now we can do it with just... 100 people. The same 100 people. There's been no productivity increase in the orchestra market, no labor saving devices. Now if someone invented a double violin where one person played but two instruments made sound, then maybe we'd be getting somewhere. But obviously that's not going to be a good idea for a lot of reasons.

Because of productivity increases across almost all sectors of the economy, labor is worth more than it was $200 years ago, and pretty much the whole economy is built on things becoming cheaper due to increases in automation. It's the reason a loaf of bread costs a dollar at Aldi and a fancy loaf of bread made by hand is going to cost $10. Because there have been no productivity increases in playing instruments, their cost has gone up relative to other things. And that's where the problem is.

[talindsay]

The arts have always been dependent on benefactors, it's the nature of the beast. Kings and lords, wealthy businessmen and powerful families like the Medici displayed their power and wealth by commissioning works and retaining performers. "Popular" music was never symphonic or operatic music, though at various times its popularity to the masses has been higher than it is now (and it's been lower at other times). For most of opera's history and much of the symphony's history, tickets weren't even sold - the orchestras and performers relied 100% on benefactors. The democratization of symphonies and operas has brought with it a certain degree of market force, but at no point has "the Market" supported this type of art. This isn't a simple supply and demand or production-consumption issue, and efforts to reduce it to that are problematic.

This dependence on endowments is as old as the music itself. Eroica, for example, was commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz and its premier was at the Prince's castle on the prince's dime. The ticket sales were non-existent as it was a private event entirely paid for by the prince. I don't know whether its later performances in Vienna were fully or only partially underwritten by the Emperor.

[Wedgeguy]

The point that is missed is that there has been no technology that allows there to be increase in productivity unless we want to sit and listen to computers do the work. Don't think the experience would be the same. If that is the case we don't need this hall as we would just listen to it at home on our computers. You still need natural talent to be able to play the instruments at top levels.

[FISHMANPET]

They were never "market" supported but it was easier for a benefactor to support them, because their cost was not so high relative to everything else. Perhaps 200 years ago I could buy a loaf of bread or support an orchestra for a week. Now I can buy 100 loaves of bread or support an orchestra for a week (all made up numbers). The cost of supporting an orchestra, be it through ticket sales, wealthy benefactors, or bikini clad carwashes, is higher in relation to other goods and services than it was 200 years ago.

[RailBaronYarr]

^Exactly. Whether it 500 people in a hall paying to support the orchestra or one extremely wealthy person commissioning and attending the performance, there was still a mixture of "paying audience" and "benefactor" system where the price to support these arts was weighed against other investment or opportunity costs.

[Didier]

Regardless of anything else, can we agree to agree to stop comparing the orchestra and teachers?