it’s a huge difficulty at this point—is that we have absolutely no shared understanding of what “serving the community” could mean, aside from what we already do. Many orchestras have small programs that could be considered baby steps toward a community-service mission—generally in the education area—but, as an industry, we have brought very little money, time, or thought to what “serving the community” would look like in practice instead of simply words in a mission statement. I disagree with Bruce, however, when he writes that community engagement has been “hotly debated for at least 25 years, especially at the bargaining table.” In most orchestras, it’s barely been discussed. The very assumption he makes that community engagement is something that orchestras don’t already have the “flexibility” to do is, at best, untested. A few years ago my orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony, was on tour in northern Wisconsin shortly after six teenagers were murdered in a mass shooting in the small town of Crandon. We were 50 miles away and we had a night off. Why didn’t it occur to anyone—staff, board, or musicians—that we could have done something remarkable by going to Crandon and playing a memorial concert? But no one thought of it. I doubt that more than a handful of American orchestras, or managers, or board members, or musicians, would have thought of it. What does that say about the depth of our belief in community engagement? What I see instead is that things that look like the beginnings of community engagement are the first that get cut from our budgets when times are tough. And they get cut by boards and managements, not musicians. Last season we did a holiday concert for families with children with autism and Down’s syndrome as part of what we called our “Hometown Holiday Tour.” Kids with major developmental disabilities were literally dancing in the aisles. Some of their parents were in tears to see their kids moved by live performance. This season, that week got cut because of lack of funding and a looming deficit, even though the americanorchestras.org
major expense—musicians’ salaries—was paid as required by the collective bargaining agreement. Most people running American orchestras would have made the same call: why absorb the marginal costs of putting on those concerts with no offsetting revenue when money was tight simply on the basis that they were “community engagement”? Entertainment companies don’t act that way—but community service agencies do it every day. Getting community engagement right will involve orchestras rethinking themselves top-to-bottom as cultural service agencies rather than high-end entertainment companies. I see no constituency in our business that has truly wrestled with how that will change orchestras. Instead, we load up the concept of community engagement either with our fears (in the case of musicians) or with our agendas (in the case of boards and staffs). Neither is a substitute for thought, analysis, honesty,
and a proper humility in the face of a very complex world. “Beseech you—in the bowels of Christ— think it possible you may be mistaken.” —Oliver Cromwell Which leads to the third principle I take from Bruce: We don’t have the answers. We often don’t even know the right questions. What we have are agendas, which are a truly lousy substitute for both. Bruce writes at length about the success of musicians in bargaining economic improvements over the years. I think he overstates the disparity between musicians’ ability to negotiate collectively and that of managers and staffs (a disparity that most musicians believe overwhelmingly favors management, by the way). He is, however absolutely right that musicians have focused tightly on traditional labor issues. But the reason that musicians Continued on page 29
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