At two hundred pages, the guide hit on multiple hurdles: a video generation, lack of ethnic diversity, pricey tickets, disappearing arts education, busy schedules, and working women (but not, apparently, working men). Aging audiences, measured by the average age of concertgoers, provided a particularly ominous sign for the end of classical music, the Americanizing report warned. The terror about older listeners was misplaced, ignoring the fact that average audience age had hovered in the late forties for some time. It was logical for people to wait until midlife to begin attending the symphony. With children grown, tuition paid, and more leisure time, concerts fit well with mature baby boomers’ rich lifestyles, tastes, and income. In addition, half the classical music audience was younger than the average, with 29 percent under thirty-five in 1992, according to the National Endowment for the Arts.
Older people will always be there, rationalized the orchestras, which alienated this loyal army by appealing to a more diverse group with the “extras” recommended in Americanizing the American Orchestra. Orchestras tried incorporating the suggested frills into performances, including giant video screens and vaguely multicultural pops concerts that diluted several musical styles. In doing so, musical integrity was compromised, driving off both core audience and newcomers.
The problem also extended to the administrators, who were isolated from the music itself. Orchestra executives wanted to increase earned income by selling more tickets, but they did not do so by examining the music and programming and perhaps offering fewer concerts of higher quality. (To them, music was known as the product and the particular orchestra the brand.) Instead, they overspent on marketing and advertising, office facilities, cosmetic concert hall extras (interior decorators and multiple renovations of the same hall for acoustic purposes), excessive vacation time for musicians, astronomical salaries for conductors and soloists, and, finally, high-priced fund-raising services to raise enough money to pay for it all. The mounting expenses were justified by the insistence that classical music was a cultural necessity at any cost. Curiously, the salaries of these administrators surpassed those with commensurate jobs in nearly every other type of public endeavor except for university endowments and public hospitals.
Shortfalls began appearing with such regularity that executives coined the phrase structural deficit to explain away chronic debt. Just when the situation looked dire, economic salvation swept across the United States when the tech boom arrived to boost the stock market. Orchestras and other charities benefited as their existing assets grew in value. In 1995 alone, the average endowment increased among the nation’s fifty largest orchestras by 76 percent.
Although the gain dropped substantially the following year, average increases in U.S. orchestras’ endowments bounced between 7 and 19 percent through 2000, peaking with an average annual increase of 8.7 percent in 1997. Blessed with sudden wealth, orchestra boards lavished money on administrators, conductors, programs, and facilities, each of which was considered more relevant to increasing audiences than the music itself.
By 2003, at least seven orchestras paid their music directors (the primary conductor, who also makes programming and music personnel decisions) more than $1 million, with two earning over $2 million. Ten paid their executives over $300,000, with three paying more than $700,000. Player pay, which steadily averages around 43 percent of an orchestra’s budget, saw raises of 3.2 to 5 percent between 1994 and 1999.
These increases surpassed the same period’s rate of inflation by as much as three times. As money poured in, a hierarchy formed as leadership became removed from the musicians. In turn, a class structure emerged even among the musicians, as principal players earned two to four times the minimum salary earned by the rank and file.
The annual base pay of a New York Philharmonic musician in 2003 was $103,000. Glenn Dicterow, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster, made $366,000; Carter Brey, the principal cellist, $255,000, Philip Smith, the principal trumpeter, $243,000; Philip Myers, the principal hornist, $227,000; and Cynthia Phelps, the principal violist, $216,000. The have-nots in this scheme were primarily section string players, who had to pay for instruments costing significantly more than woodwinds or brasses, worth five or even six figures.
The hierarchy widened, not only among members of the same orchestra but also between the largest orchestras and the smallest. Minimum pay was much lower in symphonies of cities like Baltimore ($73,000), Milwaukee ($56,000), Nashville ($35,000), and Charlotte, North Carolina ($27,000). Another division became clearer as well, between contracted members of these orchestras and freelance musicians like me, who competed over a diminishing market of per-service performance work.
Like nearly all Broadway musicians, I accepted outside work and took advantage of our generous contract, which allowed us to hire substitutes for up to half of our 416 annual shows. I performed the occasional recording gig or played in a few of the freelance orchestras, like the Encores! series at City Center, the New York Pops, Basically Bach, and the Metropolitan Opera Guild, which produced operas for children. Some of the old groups where I was once first-call still hired me when the latest hot oboe player was unavailable.
The Philharmonic called me to play after a two-year absence. Avery Fisher’s backstage was expansive, almost like an office complex within the building. The area was in need of renovation. The hallway’s concrete floor was cracking, sofas in the central lounge were fraying, and the washroom’s tissue dispenser was filled with scratchy brown paper towels. Vertical blinds were missing, and the coat rack was held together with rubber bands.
Most of my time at Avery Fisher had been spent on the ground floor of this backstage maze, where the locker rooms were located. I’d never gone downstairs to the basement, where the Philharmonic stored its tour trunks and unusual instruments, like the alto flute used in Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe and a hand-cranked wind machine, the size of a bass drum, used in Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote to make the whooshing sound of windmills. I’d rarely visited the higher floors, which housed the music library, soloists’ dressing rooms, the executive offices, and the green-room where soloists greeted well-wishers.
In a backstage washroom in Avery Fisher, I tugged on the nylons the Philharmonic required in its dress code, whacking my elbow on the broken toilet paper dispenser. Subs had long ago been ejected from the ladies’ locker room by the orchestra’s regular members. When I finished dressing, it was almost time to warm up. I took my reeds out of the film canister where they’d been soaking by the sink, gathered my music, oboe, and garment bag, and looked around the bathroom to make sure I’d collected everything.
Outside in the corridor, the associate principal oboist Sherry Sylar handed me a copy of my debut review. She said she’d been saving it all year. At that moment, my former teacher, Joe Robinson, came around the corner from the locker room used by the men in the woodwind section. He hadn’t responded to the invitation I’d sent for my recital and never even asked about it. I tried to show him the clipping, but he waved it aside.
On my way upstairs to the stage, a violist friend asked me to go with her to a before-concert Singles at Symphony mixer, one of the Philharmonic’s new audience-building experiments. The administration had asked a few musicians to mingle with the guests. I accepted gladly, thinking the party would give us both the rare opportunity to meet concert-going men who were, by default, our admirers. Working six nights a week, I could never figure how to meet people outside my own world of classical music. Now that my friend, an adorable blonde, was divorced, she found herself in the same boat. Visualizing a room full of bow-tied daddies, I primped in the elevator’s reflective brass, feeling like Cinderella on her way to the ball.
We exited on the fourth floor, where the event had already started. I opened the greenroom door. Inside, a sea of floral polyester dresses clustered into two pods around not one but both men who had come. The room was quiet and sedate, without the usual chatter of a party. What was I thinking? If regular singles events marked desperat
ion, a classical-music singles event meant utter hopelessness.
I tried to start conversations without much success, then met the violist back at the elevator, disappointed. At least tonight’s upbeat concert would thrill the lonely hearts. We were playing Vaughan Williams’s familiar Fantasia on Greensleeves and William Bolcom’s new clarinet concerto, a jazzy splash of rock chords, Broadway, and blues that was almost like popular music.
“Onstage!” Personnel manager Carl Schiebler’s voice crackled over the intercom. The violist headed for the crossover corridor behind the stage that doubled as the cellists’ locker room, in order to reach the door nearest her seat on stage left. I stashed my bags under the offstage piano and headed toward the oboe section.
I sat in the second oboe chair and started arranging my accessories: the usual cigarette paper for leaky keys, my swab to clean spit out of the instrument, and a pencil for marking anything in the music I wanted to remember when we repeated the program tomorrow night. The Bolcom was far more accessible than most contemporary music the Philharmonic played, I thought. It was nothing like Anton von Webern’s Concer to for Nine Instruments that I performed here years ago. Though my conservatory professors venerated that 1930 work for its twelve-tone serialism, I secretly filed it under H for honk-beep-squeak. Perhaps it was no accident that an American soldier shot and killed the composer during World War II.
Still, I had been nervous about doing a good job on the Webern, especially in placing my delicate entrances precisely. The sparsely orchestrated piece was transparent and challenging, and Avery Fisher’s unforgiving acoustics would emphasize any flaws in my tone and articulation. The hall’s properties also amplified the sounds of a fidgeting audience, and before long I could barely hear the other eight musicians over the coughing in the house. The cacophony had grown. At last, conductor Zubin Mehta was straining to hear as well. We finished the first movement, and the audience applauded prematurely, then cleared their throats en masse. Reddening with anger, Zubin waited for silence before starting the next movement. Someone giggled loudly. A nose trumpeted.
We waited for nearly a minute—which felt like an eternity onstage with audience and orchestra staring at each other—and began again, to the accompaniment of another wave of coughing. Now enraged, Zubin signaled a mid-movement cutoff. I was shocked. Conductors stopped concerts rarely, and then only if the musicians were irretrievably lost. Zubin swiveled toward the audience, steaming with fury.
“The orchestra has played only five measures when nobody coughed.” He spoke deliberately, as if lecturing a room full of toddlers. “The last movement is a minute long. Would it be possible to get through it without interruption?”
A few days later, a concertgoer from Hoboken had written to the New York Times in defense of the audience’s behavior:
Perhaps Mr. Mehta should have realized he was inflicting on the audience not one but several compositions by Anton von Webern. Since many concertgoers regard performances of Webern as the musical equivalent of a visit to the dentist, audience unrest should not have been a surprise.
It is no accident that selections by Webern are generally programmed before, not after, intermission. Otherwise, few would return for the second half.
Happy that we weren’t playing Webern tonight, I opened the Bolcom concerto’s second oboe part while my violist friend tightened her bow hair and tuned. As the Philharmonic fell silent, conductor Leonard Slatkin, on loan again from the St. Louis Symphony, ushered the orchestra’s principal clarinetist, Stanley Drucker, ahead of him. Applause thundered, and a young couple sitting front row center hooted as Stanley bounded downstage.
Stanley had something of an underground following as father to Lee Rocker, bass player of the Stray Cats rockabilly band. In fact, Stanley and his wife were the only parents who’d let the band practice in their garage. Later, when the band had become successful, the couple proudly followed them around the country like groupies.
A virtuoso showman nearing seventy, Stanley bobbed and danced, one moment a klezmer player, the next, ragtime. Today, though he didn’t miss a beat, I could see he was distracted by something in the audience. During a rest, he glanced at the front row. Once, twice more. After the Cantabile movement, Slatkin shot an icy look over his shoulder. Even the outside string players were grinning, which was a rare sight. Was there a babe? The cellos blocked my view. Finally, the first-chair cellist adjusted his chair and I could see clearly.
The Philharmonic marketers had won their quarry. The young couple sitting front row center were sipping cans of beer.
Paying audiences often attended Thursday morning open rehearsals. It was an opportunity to observe Philharmonic musicians at work. Many regular concertgoers were curious about how the conductor and orchestra prepared their performances, and seeing the musicians onstage in casual clothing served to humanize them.
At one of these dress rehearsals in 1996, on the morning of a performance of Hector Berlioz’s opium-driven Symphonie Fantastique, an audience of two hundred took their seats in the back two-thirds of the hall that was reserved for them. Was the audience too far away from the stage to understand what they saw that morning? Two violinists, bored and frustrated from playing the same musical work many times over during their careers, started behaving like children. It was a scenario unimaginable to audiences paying high ticket prices, who expect that classical musicians live cultured, erudite, and fulfilling professional lives.
The listeners provided a smattering of applause as Czech conductor Zdenek Macal walked onstage and arranged his large score, the conductor’s sheet music that includes every instrument’s part in the symphony, printed one beneath the next. The second violins began rumbling, however, as soon as the Z-man, as some musicians called Macal, began the “March to the Scaffold” movement. Violinist Nathan Goldstein leaned to turn the page of his part, but his stand partner, Mark Schmoockler, whipped it back.
“Too early!” Schmoockler hissed.
Goldstein shrugged, returning to his fiddle. He reached for the next page, Schmoockler whacked his bow against the music, locking it to the stand.
Goldstein snorted. “If you’re not happy with my page turning, turn them yourself!” Schmoockler stormed offstage, with Goldstein in pursuit.
It wasn’t unusual for musicians to leave the stage during rehearsal—for earplugs from the backstage dispenser or a replacement string. My oboe teacher, plagued by intestinal problems, had even fled during concerts. The orchestra would wait quietly for his return, which was at least once accompanied by an audible flush from the offstage commode.
Today, these fiddlers ended up before personnel manager Carl Schiebler, who subsequently issued a written reprimand to both men, stating that their behavior was unacceptable, “absolutely unprofessional,” and would not be tolerated in future. The letter warned of unspecified but “most serious consequences” for any future offense. Goldstein countered with a two-page letter to the personnel manager, which made the rounds backstage after some musician obtained a copy. The text mentioned many of the Philharmonic’s members who routinely left the stage during concerts:
The deceitful skulduggery on Schmoockler’s part enables you to cite “unprofessional behavior”... now let me review some history relevant to leaving the stage during rehearsals: I recall a musician, whose name I’d rather not mention and that you certainly must know, who has a physical problem, which has forced him to leave the stage several times. This colleague at one point left the stage during a concert of the subscription series. The whole orchestra and conductor waited on stage for nearly ten minutes, until he returned to his seat, and then we resumed the concert....
I also remember that [a violinist] some years ago left the stage because I dared criticize her rudeness toward me at the previous rehearsal. And what about the incredibly infantile attitude of [another violinist], leaving the stage also during a rehearsal because I asked him to turn a page now and then, in the spirit of good fellowship and collegial cooperation!
Just as the Goldstein case finished, another argument from across the Lincoln Center plaza came before the trial board. New York City Opera clarinetist Charlie Russo had accused French hornist Stewart Rose of yelling “You haven’t played one note in tune here in two years!” The incident was sparked when Russo warmed his instrument by blowing loudly through it.
Exhibits included a letter from one City Opera violist certified as a social worker, confirming that Russo routinely annoyed the orchestra with abusive comments and ostentatious noise. He testified that this “unpleasant and hostile work environment” had momentarily driven Rose over the edge.
We were sensitive artistes indeed. Or perhaps we were just miserable employees caught in a version of cartoon character Dilbert’s cubicle but with union protocol available to vent our frustrations. Why weren’t we blissfully fiddling and tooting our evenings away? “All of this may come as a shock to the average concertgoer, who, from the perspective of the second balcony, sees only the ‘glamorous’ side of concert life,” noted composer Gunther Schuller, who had also played as a New York Philharmonic French horn substitute.
Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music Page 24