dividual markets. He points to population size, per capita income, and unemployment rates as important factors. He dips his toe in the water of local competition by testing for the interrelationship between audiences for opera and for orchestras in his sample markets, and finds a “statistically significant but small” correlation. There is room here for more analysis of the impact of local presenters, particularly those that present orchestras and classical music, regional clusters of orchestras, university concert series, ballet, and commercial arts activity, in a metro area. An analysis that looks holistically at an arts ecology could stimulate planning that would take in to account a variety of external factors beyond an orchestra’s own ambitions. The result could be greater efficiencies, collaborations, and scaling the activity to the market. Incidentally, the discussion of local market diversity raises some cautionary flags about our field’s traditional benchmark-
ing practice. Comparing one orchestra to another with a similar annual budget is a blunt and potentially misleading form of assessment. As a field we have tended to compare ourselves to one another while looking at single “national” models of suc-
Too often, financial challenges come as a surprise when the time for remedy is short and the options for solutions narrow. cess in all arenas, from musicians’ wages to length of seasons, expenditures on soloists, return on income generating investments, etc. How helpful can this be when local competitive markets and economic capacity are so widely variable? Elsewhere in the book Flanagan takes time to wonder whether high-priced soloists generate a sufficient return to justify their expense, and whether or not
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A previous study, Phil Hart’s landmark 1973 book Orpheus in the New World, looked at the history and growth of American orchestras— and found orchestras’ uncertain financial status to be “a matter of national concern.”
orchestras have even asked the question. While the economic impact of such choices is worth noting—and in my experience orchestras routinely do the cost-benefit analysis—these choices are typically informed by artistic drivers, as they should be. He examines musicians’ salaries and finds that they increased at rates in excess of equivalent jobs in the economy. However, other data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, cited in a blog by my predecessor Henry Fogel, showed that the annual increase in the salary of the orchestras Flanagan studied was generally equivalent to rates of compensation growth for liberal arts college faculty, employees of hospitals, and other health service industry employees. Here it is appropriate to acknowledge the limitations of national aggregated data. Regardless of any discrepancy noted by Flanagan, among the individual orchestras in the sample (to say nothing of the hundreds of smaller orchestras outside the sample) there is a wide variation of salary for both staff and musicians. So there may in some circumstances be very good reasons to increase and even accelerate the rate of increase of musicians’ wages. However, no individual or orchestra benefits from adding expense that cannot be sustained. Flanagan’s prescription for orchestras’ future is not news; he concludes there symphony
spring 2012