Orchestral musicians have unusually challenging jobs
van-magazine.com
van-magazine.com
Human Resources is about limiting damage to the company. Sometimes that overlaps with protecting workers. Most of the time it doesn't.
Not always. The main goal of HR is to protect the company and keep things running when sorting out problems between employees, not fairness.
Here we are paying $100 for 50 top notch world class musicians playing for 3 hours.
There were maybe 500 people in the concert hall, so at an average ticket price of $50 each musician (split evenly) would have gotten max 500 bucks.
There's room to disagree about that. Especially with orchestral music, the reality is that so much of the audience is simply there out of habit and not "real aficionados" as you say. Which means they're not really grokking any of the music and do not really care about anything besides the old "workhorse" pieces. The widely-acknowledged outcome is that, far from being actively preserved, much of the potential repertoire simply languishes in obscurity.
There are of course forces pushing against this unwanted dynamic, such as a renewed appreciation for solo and small-ensemble/chamber music (which can at least be easier to understand for the novice listener), as well as recreational engagement with the artform outside the concert hall. In many ways, this is a reaffirmation of the "natural" environment for this sort of music where recorded music was either non-existent or uncommon, and actively playing music was an increasingly accessible, everyday activity.
Just an aside: There's especially the fun in-between. I had the amazing fortune of getting to see a cross-section of the TSO perform all of the music to Home Alone live while they displayed the movie on a screen above stage. It was fantastic. What a treat.
All this spoken as someone who spent a good portion of his 20's playing 'small-ensemble' and solo around cheap clubs in Toronto. (And continue to nurture those delusions happily into my 30's, and I'll never stop)
(Just another fun aside: my brother in law happens to be a player in the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and I'm pretty sure we're both jealous of each other to some extent)
Of course, I agree about that wrt. music in general. My cautionary comments about appreciation being both hard and not seriously engaged in, as a matter of fact, by many listeners were specifically about commonly-performed orchestral music. (Some people might even consider that alone "real music", while excluding that status for movie soundtracks and the like. Of course, this is self-defeating if you actually care about "real music" being more broadly appreciated: lighter works are a necessary stepping stone to that lofty goal.)
(Just open up your favorite music publishing platform and see how common it is to market just about any piece of orchestral music as something purposely bland and good for "relaxation". Needless to say, this is not what real appreciation looks like. It's not even a "shallow" level of engagement with the music itself.)
People who show up to listen to an orchestra—it doesn't matter on what level they're enjoying it, it serves to enrich lives regardless and on many planes.
I think your beef might not be with music appreciation, and the modern role of an orchestral performance and more with the commoditization of music. That's more of one of the cancers of marketing (hashtag notallmarketing). That kind of marketing only aims to make everything cheap to supply and as profitable as possible to the 'sticky' middlemen. I would agree with you there.
Signed, a lowly but enthusiastic shitposter
1. Benefactors who give money to the orchestra, rent boxes, etc. 2. Popular (non classical) concerts which have a possibly larger crowd and varied material. Harry Potter with orchestral accompaniment? Tenacious D with orchestral accompaniment? The musicians hate it, it pays the bills. 3. A mostly part time staff. Most orchestral musicians will play in many orchestras, teach, etc.
They made a loss on your concert. But they knew they would.
To me, if felt more like a Michelin chef having a go at a burger. You wouldn't do that all the time, but it could be a fun distraction once in a while. If anything, it feels like you would need quite a bit of creativity to adapt a piece that was not meant for a classical orchestra.
It is not true at less prestigious orchestras, where salaries are much lower. For example, the San Antonio Symphony tried to lower its base salary from just under $36k to just under $18k this past year[2], which resulted in a prolonged strike (still unresolved 6 months later).
There are many more less-prestigious orchestras than top-level orchestras, so most orchestral musicians don't get paid salaries comparable to other similarly high skilled professions.
Professional music is not unlike professional sports in this regard.
[1] https://nonprofitquarterly.org/new-york-philharmonic-players...
[2] https://www.sacurrent.com/sanantonio/san-antonio-symphony-mu...
And it's not like they have a 3 hour workday either, before that performance is going to be hours and hours of practice, years of training, and on the day itself X amount of traveling (more if they're international / on tour), getting dressed up, setting up, settling in, etc.
I do not know how they are paid, but if they are on a salary then their job is similar to mine and others (from a general workload/pay perspective)
They don't. And this is the problem with classical music.
This kind of thing is almost all about getting money from "benefactors"--and do NOT ever offend them. And those benefactors have normally pretty narrow musical taste in classical music.
>When a piece of harrison Birtwhistle was performed a few years ago in Paris by Boulez with his ensemble intercontemporain, i remarked to Boulez that i had never heard a work by that admirable composer sound so convincing and effective. “We had thirty-five rehearsals,” Boulez replied. This may seem excessive and it is beyond the means of most musical organizations today, but when Beethoven’s symphony no. 9 was undertaken during the late 1820s at the Paris Conservatoire, the first rehearsal was so terrible that it was rehearsed every day for a year. Berlioz reported that the result was a triumph, although it was conducted by habeneck, who was his deadly enemy.
>The music world has not changed as much as one might think. radically unfamiliar works require much more rehearsal than is practical when they first appear, before they can work their way into general musical consciousness: the first performance of elliott Carter’s double Concerto for harpsichord, Piano, and two small orchestras needed ten days of rehearsal; several years later, with a different orchestra that had never played the work, it needed only two days—the idiom had gradually permeated the musicians’ world. When hans rosbaud directed schoenberg’s Moses und Aron at the Zürich opera in 1957, he spent almost the entire budget of the year on rehearsals of this one work.
And how many (unpaid) hours, across how many years, did it take to "hone their craft" to such a degree?
Young musicians and professionals often practice in excess of eight hours per day if/until they win an audition for a group that has enough salary to sustain them.
Most professional orchestras rehearse 3-4 times for what's usually called a "Masterworks" ie the usual subscription concerts. Only something like a pops or light classics concert will be one rehearsal and a show.
Imagine putting in that many hours of practice on the classical masters to end up with a low paying job playing Frosty the Snowman and Def Leppard "Pour Some Sugar On Me".
The vast majority of work in any given profession is lower tier work like this.
The electrician you paid to install a dimmer could be doing much more advanced work but he does what pays the bills.
The folks in the uniforms, especially the ones playing instruments, in that video are world class.
They're having the time of their professional lives.
And here I am wishing I could play Pour Some Sugar On Me somewhere for free...
And other such tidbits which suggested their lives were anything like described in the article. Maybe both situations are possible, but it seemed that tenured orchestral musicians lived a Life of Riley, and good for them.
They will spend a full working day in rehearsal, then go home and spend a few hours doing solo practice. They will spend hours of time (often uncompensated) notating scores ahead of the first rehearsal of new work or production.
As others have pointed out, the economic model for orchestras and just about any live performance cannot support high salaries. Many musicians will have instruments worth thousands of dollars, so they will have loans against them. Then there is the venue and equipment hire, the transportation costs and the wages for the crew behind the scenes - people to set up the stage and run the show (like me), lighting and sound designers and operators, etc (14+ hour days are not uncommon).
It is a very hard way to earn a living, and on top of it all most jobs are contracts measured in weeks or months, not full-time positions. Not only do you have to be unbelievably talented and passionate about it, you also have to possess superhuman resilience to handle the lifestyle. I have nothing but respect to people who do this job for a living.
People tend to want to think of themselves as being objectively talented and as being deserving of credit; but in certain professions, there is no such thing.
Art is rich people's subjectivity being passed off as objectivity. It can't be easy to base your entire professional self-esteem on the whims and moods of the rich people who fund the industry. In a slightly different world, the definitions of 'good' and 'excellent' would be completely different.
The problem is that the industry has very few open positions and a good number of talented applicants. Imagine if every software engineering position had 100+ applicants and all of them could code very well, so you disqualified the 99 of them who had to use a backspace key more than once. This is what this industry is like.
(Have multiple orchestral musicians in my family)
So the layer of subjectivity that the audience experiences is supported by a foundation of objective choices.
Now, if you hold an audition for a violinist, enough people will show up who can demonstrate those skills (the ultimate coding interview), that your final choice will be a toss-up, like in any profession.
And as in any profession, your self esteem has to come from within. I can't imagine basing my self esteem on what funds the IT industry. I know a lot of professional musicians. They tend to be fairly well adjusted people.
Disclosure: I'm at the next level down, a "semi professional" musician.
There must be something else beyond 'not making mistakes'; that thing is subjective, not objective. It's pretty clear if someone hits the wrong note, but who gets to judge that a particular musician held a specific note for 10 milliseconds too long? Or who is to say that some notes were given 'too much emphasis'?
I'm sure that there is consensus among the elite musicians about all these subjective judgments, but it doesn't change the fact that it's subjective... The audience might not care at all either way or they might even disagree with the elite musicians' consensus... Who is right in this case? Isn't the customer always right? What does it mean to have a 'trained ear'? Can't the ear be over-trained or mis-trained.
If you teach someone how to do something the wrong way (e.g. inefficiently) and they learn how to do it the wrong way perfectly, isn't it still the wrong way?
It's a very different beast from popular art that holds up Selene Gomez, and even then you'd be remiss to try to explain her success as the result of subjective judgements.
Perhaps you might argue, receded from view but still significant, is that fair?
HR is there to protect management. The union is there to protect employees as a collective. Individual results may vary.
With regards to HR, I think finding a HR person that understands how an orchestra works will be prohibitively hard. We have the (assistant) orchestra manager for all immediate personnel questions. When HR gets involved it is usually the regular grinding to make people quit or accept some sort of termination offer.