Allison Vulgamore's quandary

Steve Fried's profile of Allison Vulgamore in the November Philadelphia Magazine portrays the Philadelphia Orchestra's chief executive as a conservatory-trained singer and generally creative soul who this year finds herself mired in a financial crisis not of her making. (To read Fried's piece, click here.)

"We lassoed a thoroughbred, and then we hooked her to a plow," Fried quotes the Orchestra's board chairman, Richard Worley.

That got me to thinking: How many people have taken a job that didn't turn out to be exactly what they expected? Like, possibly, everyone in the whole world?

Time Magazine was launched in 1923 with Britten Hadden as its brilliant young editor and his Yale classmate Henry R. Luce as business manager. But when Haden died suddenly of an infection in 1931, Luce took over the editorial side and stayed there until his death in 1967. Not at all what he expected.

Richard Nixon spent a generation hungering for the White House; how happy was he once he finally arrived there? How many journalists in the past 20 years have aspired to become editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, only to flee in terror once they actually achieved their ambition?

"'Notre Dame of the East'

Sometimes the problem is the job seeker's failure to engage in due diligence beforehand. When Steve Sebo became head football coach at Penn in 1954, he excitedly told his friends at Michigan that Penn was "the Notre Dame of the East." He was right, except for his tense: Penn had been the Notre Dame of the East, but in 1954 it had just committed itself to the de-emphasized principles of the Ivy League (no athletic scholarships, no spring football practice) while it was still saddled with a schedule of national powerhouses. Sebo lost his first 19 games at Penn.

But sometimes it's a matter of mistaken assumptions. In the first issue of the short-lived Philadelphia weekly The New Paper in 1975, editor Howard Coffin praised the paper's founder and owner, D. Herbert Lipson, introduced the staff and concluded, "We feel like kids in a candy store."

His implication was that Lipson had given Coffin and his editors a journalist's dream: their own publication to play with. But no publisher can deliver the key ingredient: an audience. Although Lipson made (and still makes) a great success of Philadelphia Magazine, The New Paper folded after just 21 weeks.

Elephant in the room

Which brings me back to Allison Vulgamore and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Fried's profile discusses several challenges she confronts: the need to raise $3.3 million by years' end to qualify for challenge grants; the counterproductive competition among the Orchestra, the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music; and the high cost of the Orchestra's bankruptcy process itself. Yet the article makes no mention of the Orchestra's most critical problem:

As Worley himself has readily acknowledged, over the past two decades, annual attendance at the Orchestra's concerts has declined from 250,000 to 150,000, and half of that decline has occurred in the past five years— this at a time when some other major orchestras are holding their own and a few are even flourishing. As I've suggested before, what's the point of balancing your books if you can't sell your product?

Whether Vulgamore is a thoroughbred or a draft horse, if she can solve that problem, she'll richly serve her salary as well as the gratitude of music lovers everywhere.♦


Broad Street Review will sponsor a panel discussion on "Saving the Philadelphia Orchestra" on Wednesday, November 30, 5:30-7:30 p.m., at the Franklin Inn Club, 205 S. Camac St. in Center City. For details and reservations, click here.

To read a response, click here.