Michael Zirkle
North Carolina Symphony bass player and ICSOM Chairman Bruce Ridge talks with fourth-grade students at a North Carolina Symphony educational program in Wilmington, NC during the fall of 2011.
is music, for in the patterns of the arts are the keys to all learning.” Wouldn’t it benefit every orchestra, every musician, every manager, and every board member if we were more prepared to recite these phrases rather than “structural deficit” or financial analysis from Stanford? I frequently receive calls from musicians asking for advocacy information requested by a particular board member. The trustee tells the musicians how often their board meetings take a negative direction, discussing only what cannot be achieved instead of what is possible. The trustee wants to speak up but feels intimidated. So I supply them with facts they can spread to their friends and community contacts—facts that stand in contrast to the messages often read in their newspapers. Key to these advocacy points is the effect of the arts in the local community. I deeply believe that the solution for success in any orchestra lies in its ability to reflect its own community. In that regard, many of our national conversations don’t provide much local insight. americanorchestras.org
In fact, many of those conversations use terms that often undermine an orchestra’s ability to brand itself within its own city. No two constituencies of an orchestra are better equipped to work toward the same positive goal of community branding than the musicians and the board. They are the ones who have lived longest within the community, and they are the ones who have invested the most time in attending the schools, meeting the residents, and electing the political leaders of their town. Managers and music directors tend to change locations more frequently than musicians and board members, and they should seek the input of the two groups that know the community better than most. Managers should foster a relationship between those two groups, as they would best be able to direct the manager’s skills toward uniquely serving the community. Sadly, in too many places I have visited, I see walls built between the board and the musicians instead of bridges. The destructive rhetoric that permeates our national discussion further widens the chasm.
People will donate to, and invest in, organizations that inspire them. They will not invest in organizations that question their own sustainability. A Rhetoric of Negativity
I often think that those who advocate major change for our field are simply going about it all wrong. How can we fail to see that destructive rhetoric is the enemy of change? Our field appears to be emulating the sociopolitical environment of Washington. We aren’t talking to each other; we are not listening to each other. We are staking out positions that paint us into stereotypical corners. No business, and no society really, can make a case that its workers are earning too much while those same workers see others making quite sizeable increases
within the same field. Musicians are willing to sacrifice precisely because they do love their orchestras and they do love their communities. Labeling the salaries of musicians as out of control at the moment of their greatest sacrifice breeds resentment, and resentment thwarts debate. It simply does not promote positive dialogue, and only serves to make the musicians resistant to change. There is no doubt that our field faces challenges. But why would we promote those challenges more vociferously than we promote our own orchestras? No other field does this to itself. Look at the food industry—according to American Express, 90 percent of restaurants fail in their first year of business, but no one within the restaurant industry would publicly suggest that Americans no longer like to eat! When the United States ended the Space Shuttle program recently, I thought back 50 years to one of the greatest American speeches ever delivered. On May 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy challenged America to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth by the end of the decade. On that day he said, “While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure on our part to make these efforts shall make us last.” In that speech he said that Americans strive to achieve great things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. He told an Irish folk tale where two young boys on a journey confront a stone wall, too high to mount but too long to circumvent. Facing the prospect of a retreat that would end their adventure, one boy throws the hat of the other over the wall, leaving them no choice but to find some way to overcome the obstacle. Kennedy spoke in a time when America dreamt of what could be achieved, what could be built, and what could be created. We must engage in positive advocacy and education of the public. A recent poll indicated that 40 percent of Americans believe that as much as 5 percent of the federal budget goes to support the arts. A shocking 7 percent of respondents
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