When bad boards happen to good orchestras

There’s a very interesting story going around the Twin Cities, but this one’s about baseball.

Apparently the management of the Minnesota Twins has decided that they need a retractable roof after all, for about a $100 million price tag. The chances of public funding are essentially zero, so the management is planning to reduce player salaries by about 40%. Given their current payroll of about $94 million, this should produce enough revenue to pay for the roof in three seasons. Of course, the management expects that a number of their current players will leave for greener pastures, but they are confident that they will have no problem recruiting qualified replacements; in fact, the General Manager has been quoted as saying that there will be “hundreds” of applicants from college teams for every open position. With the new roof in place, as well as their exciting fresh young roster, management believes that the future is indeed bright for the team – as well as for them personally, as not only are their salaries tied to the team’s profits but, as the re-inventors of what a Major League baseball team should be, they will have their pick of jobs in cities they might actually want to live in.

So why didn’t you believe a word of that?

Of course, the artistic quality of an orchestra is harder to measure than the competitiveness of a baseball team. And it’s likely true that for a major league team to lose most of its games (as the mythical “New Model” Minnesota Twins would surely do) would have a quicker and surer impact on its economic foundations than the deterioration in an orchestra’s performance if its strongest players leave would have on its funding. But that’s no excuse for the surprising number of experienced industry professionals who seem to have bought into the idea that it doesn’t really matter if salaries are cut and the best players leave as a result, because there are “hundreds” of good young unemployed conservatory graduates willing to take their place for however many bags of Purina Viola Chow managements might deign to offer as salary.

The most glaring error in this faulty picture of how the orchestra labor market lies in how auditions really work. Let’s imagine, for example, that an extraordinary principal oboist (“K”) gets fed up with working for an orchestra (call it “The Saint Paul, Minnesota, Orchestra”) that thinks that the New Model means she’s worth about half of what they thought she was worth last year  – and, in response goes off and wins the next big oboe job. Who did she beat at the audition to win that job? Most likely the very same people (minus her, of course), who will come and audition for her old job. But, almost by definition, none of them will be as good as her – after all, she beat all of them to get her new job. Of course the winner of the audition for her old job is likely to continue to audition for better-paying jobs; he’s going to get tired of eating Viola Chow in a hurry. Being the second-best oboist on the recent audition circuit, he’s likely to get one, too. And so the cycle continues, and not to  the artistic benefit of The Saint Paul, Minnesota, Orchestra.

“Ah,” says the SPMO CEO. “That won’t happen because all of the orchestras we used to compete with for talent are going to have the same salary ‘reset’ as us, and will be also paying their musicians in Viola Chow.” I’m told from people close to the situation at the Minnesota Orchestra (the real one) that this is precisely what the board is being told (although they likely are using language like “sustainable salaries” instead of “Viola Chow”). I wonder what effect today’s news about a new agreement in Cleveland (without, apparently, any regression on economics)  might have on that thinking, not to mention the recent Chicago settlement or the recent National settlement or the other settlements that orchestras are making that pay in the range of what Minnesota agreed to in 2009. Sure doesn’t look like a top-end “reset” to me.

But the sad fact is that nothing like facts will likely have any effect on the thinking of the Minnesota Orchestra board, at least in the short term. Ideologues don’t usually have much respect for reality, and the folks driving the train at the Minnesota Orchestra appear to be motivated more by a belief in what things should be like than in what they really are. It will take a while for a critical mass of the local power structure to figure out that those driving the train have no belief in the value of track signals.