Orchestra Summit 2006
McManus: The thing to come back to that we walked away from was the point about the composers having better representation, having that as an avenue of contact with their orchestras.
Lennon: It doesn’t surprise me to hear about what a struggle it is for a composer. You just think about a violinist getting out of Juilliard and a composer getting out of Juilliard. We’re not even talking about the same plane of difficulty. Part of that is that they’re all their own individual representatives trying to hustle their own stuff. If we could do something significant that could help a large group of them.
Again it gets back to what we were hitting on before. Many events that take place in the process that don’t involve the composers are eventually certainly going to impact them. So, obviously one of the biggest tenets of unionism is collective action, and it doesn’t surprise me that these guys get out of school, and unlike a violinist or a bassoon player or a trumpet player who will benefit from a union, will benefit from a collective bargaining agreement, they’re out there in their own hustling, being agents for themselves. I can’t help thinking there are so many other parts of the puzzle that unfortunately hit them hard. One question I would have for Henry, he was talking about effective programming, and certainly New York is a pretty unique town in that this city hosts more symphony orchestras than most other cities. We don’t just have our traditional, standard, resident, full-time, all-year-round orchestras like the wonderful orchestras at Lincoln Center. And I know the economic impacts and realities that have hit them. They’re terrified of taking risks in their programming, a lot of orchestra managers I talk to, so certainly there are all these elements that, unfortunately, will have a negative effect on a composer’s ability to have more opportunities to get his or her work heard. So, again, I think that if we’re going to try to improve that situation, all these parts of the puzzle can’t happen isolated and in a vacuum separate from each other.
Fogel: Well, absolutely true, but you’re leaving out another huge constituency. If you’re talking about orchestras across America in general, you’re leaving out the boards of directors from this conversation, and you can’t. Almost all boards have an artistic advisory committee and how strongly the word advisory is, it varies from institution to institution and culture, but there is a lot of pressure. I mean, there’s one orchestra, and I don’t even mind mentioning it because it has since gone completely out of business, but the Savannah Symphony, where the board says it with pride, others in the community say it with less, that the board basically did the programming. The most modern piece that orchestra played in the last five years of its life was the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, and the conductor was told never to play a piece like that again. So that’s an extreme example, but certainly boards who theoretically represent the community but in truth tend to represent the monied part of the community, have a lot of influence and they, too, need to be brought along and educated. And I personally think that’s one of the jobs of the management. To some degree also the music director, but music directors aren’t there all the time, and I think it’s up to the management to figure out how to bring the board along to be less risk adverse.
Levine: I came of age musically in St. Paul and down the hall from the orchestra offices was an organization that had just been started by two composers, Libby Larsen and Stephen Paulus, called the Minnesota Composers Forum, which became in the time I was there a very key player in that whole community for new music. They represented composers, they got funding for competitions, the put on concert series, they placed works with the local orchestras. I moved to Milwaukee and I went around—Where is the Milwaukee composers forum?—and there was none. And I don’t think Milwaukee’s that unusual. The difference was that in the Twin Cities the composers, neither Steve nor Libby had an academic position. They didn’t have a living, they were out there hustling. In Milwaukee all the composers are on the faculty of UW-Milwaukee and you know they get their works done there, but the energy to get the concept of new music out there in the community was just not there. I didn’t realize until I left how unique Composers Forum was, and yet that’s what made new music work in that town more than any single other element.
Theofanidis: I think if you look at all of the success stories from Bang on a Can forward through the ’80s and the ’90s, they had that in common. They weren’t tied to the security blanket of academia; they had to go out just like any other start-up business did and kind of make it and make a kind of lobbying effort in a sense. And depending on what your situation is, to go proactively as a composer to an organization and say, “This is what I can actually do for you,” it takes an enormous amount of trust from the other side. It takes people like Maestro Schwarz here to be able to choose the people that he really believes are the ones worth investing in. But then to actually do it is the thing. Actually, we have our own kind of unions in a sense, we have ASCAP and BMI and the American Music Center, Meet The Composer, so many organizations that really lobby on our behalf enormously. But yet in the end the wall that’s between the administration, I think exactly as Henry was saying, getting the board involved. The composer is the best asset in that sense. I go back to certain symphonies regularly, and I know the boards because they put me to work in a sense—they get me in there, they have me interacting and sharing, and it’s a delight for me actually. It gives me something to do, but it’s also the kind of a thing that I’m very happy to share.
Levine: From a union standpoint, from a union analysis, what you need is more rank-and-file activism.
Lennon: What we were talking about before on advocacy, and it’s obvious that you can advocate for your interests much greater and much stronger in a group than just one person going out there and trying to hustle his music.
McManus: So here the really interesting point where all this is leading: there’s already a structure within orchestras that allows for collective representation and that’s the collective bargaining agreement that the musicians use to negotiate with management and the board. Why isn’t there a composer within their CBA?
Levine: I think there are reasons. It’s a very different model of how to work, but you know the concept is what’s important, not the mechanism, and the concept is collective action driven by the grass roots which is what I think made Minnesota Composers Forum such a key player. It was a locally driven organization by composers. You know, ASCAP and BMI aren’t going to do it any more than the Federation is going to do it for musicians who basically sit on their tushes and do nothing. Any kind of collective action, basically it’s most effective when it’s ground up.
Schwarz: But, Henry, what you said earlier about the composers-in-residence. Our composer-in-residence in Seattle is on our board of directors. Now it took me about five years to get him on. I lobbied to get this composer to be a member of the board and a member of the artistic advisory committee. He’s on both. It wasn’t easy, but very important.
Fogel: What a terrific idea.
Lennon: By the way, when I’m suggesting that these discussions should be taking place earlier in the collective bargaining process, I’m not necessarily suggesting that the composer be part of the bargaining unit with the orchestra, but certainly what Chris was saying, the groups that do advocate for you, and what Henry was saying, the decisions that are going to ultimately be made by the board, and then the negotiating that happens on behalf of the players between the union officer and the management, when these things all happen separate and apart from each other, it’s not surprising that they collide and conflict with each other. I just think that collaboration is important.
Fogel: Well, that’s the idea of having a composer-in-residence. I love Gerry’s idea; I’ve got to think about how we can maybe make that happen or at least spark the discussion around the country about that, but even if the composer is not a member of the board, just the fact that they have an office in the [orchestra’s] offices. And certainly in Chicago all three of our composers-in-residence came to any meetings that discussed anything about the artistic aspect of the Chicago Symphony, which at least means the composer’s point of view was heard around the table. That’s very important. But I also think we’re making a mistake to think of this as merely a new music problem. One of the things about classical music, and particularly symphonic music, in America is a desire on the part of many of the people who are its funders to a large degree or its biggest supporters—to quote from many letters I’ve received over the years, “After a hard day at the office I want to come to the hall, have this music wash over me, and make me feel good.” Which is the wrong kind of listening! I mean, excuse me, the Shostakovich 8th is not a feel-good piece. And we haven’t done enough as an industry, I believe, to, I don’t want to say teach, because there’s something condescending there, but to encourage active, involved listening and not passive listening. There are too many people who want to go to the concert and have a slightly high-quality Montovani or Muzak.
Levine: Henry, I think that’s unfair. I think people don’t want to deal with a lot of novelty. It may be some fallout from the whole concept of having a library of recorded music you can listen to, and you become familiar with. You know, one of the things that’s unusual about our art form—and it’s as true of Bruckner as of anything being written now—it’s not easy to hear it for the first time. You know, this is hard stuff. This is not movies. And it’s not that they want to hear Montovani, but it’s a lot to go to a concert and get challenged, to sit through an hour of a Bruckner symphony if you haven’t heard it before and try to make sense out of it. I couldn’t.