Culture, the suburbs and the Orchestra

Editor's Notebook

DAN ROTTENBERG

This sounds familiar

In his attack on “The Capital ‘C’ Culture syndrome,” Patrick Hazard argues that the top-down notion of uplifting the masses by inundating them with museums and such is the wrong approach: “You build a decent society of fairness and accessibility and the Culture follows,” Hazard contends.

Hmm. Didn’t some guys in Eastern Europe recently spend about a half-century experimenting with such a strategy? And didn’t they, in the name of fairness and decency, inadvertently create the most boring and repressive cultures in the history of the planet?

Marooned in the suburbs

In a letter to the Inquirer (March 9, 2006), Isabel Seymour of Media bemoaned the cultural deprivation of retired suburbanites in an age when all the best films seem to play only at the Ritz Theaters in Society Hill.

“My husband and I are in our 80s,” she explains. “A day at the Ritz is hard for us. It includes not only dinner but also a hefty parking fee. A lot of people miss seeing some of Hollywood’s best because they can’t afford the cost. Is there any answer for this besides waiting until the movies you want to see are available to rent?”

Mrs. Seymour should be pleased to know that (a) she and her husband aren’t alone and (b) there is an answer to her quandary that many off her neighbors are choosing: Move closer to the Ritz.

As I noted in this column in January 2006 (click here), “Suburbanites are lately abandoning their cul-de-sacs and Muzak malls and flocking to Center City, happily spending $1 million and more to live in condos within walking distance of arts and culture. Center City’s population, which grew modestly from 73,000 in 1980 to 78,000 in 2000, is now estimated at 88,000 and projected to zoom to 110,000 in the next five years.”

Is this lifestyle expensive? Of course. But if you subtract the cost of maintaining two or three cars in a suburban household (one for each adult, plus a spare in case one car breaks down), not to mention downtown parking and gas at $3 a gallon, maybe a move downtown isn’t as costly as you’d think.


The price of classical music

After totting up the cost of a recent Philadelphia Orchestra performance of the Brahms First Piano Concerto, our critic Dan Coren exclaimed, “So much money and so much work involved in enabling [Rudolf] Buchbinder to scale this Matterhorn of a piece, in letting Brahms speak through him for 40 minutes!” The result of this effort and expense, Coren added, was that “yet again a major work by Brahms had filled barely half the seats in Verizon Hall.” (See “The music and the money.")

Coren will be happy to know that, like Mrs. Seymour above, he too is not alone and certainly not crazy. A study by the American Symphony Orchestra League concluded that if most orchestras cut their ticket prices in half, they’d sell out their halls routinely. “Once you remove the economic barrier, there’s an enormous interest in serious music,” argues Robert Capanna, president of Settlement Music School.

So why don’t orchestras cut their ticket prices? Capanna traces the problem to the ‘70s, when major orchestras began paying decent full-time salaries to their musicians and professionalizing their operations to raise the necessary funds. The Philadelphia Orchestra, which barely a generation ago managed with a staff of five, now has a staff of 74— 22 in fund-raising alone—all to serve an on-stage ensemble of 102 musicians. Where once Eugene Ormandy worked 25 weeks a year, today Christoph Eschenbach puts in 14. To make up the difference, guest conductors are paid $100,000 a week; top soloists command upwards of $50,000. This high-overhead arrangement isn’t merely expensive, Capanna argues: “It means the Orchestra is also less willing to take risks with its repertoire.”

The moral of this story is: There’s no such thing as an unmixed blessing. In 1936, my father spent a summer as the Orchestra’s business manager at Robin Hood Dell. In those days the concerts were not run by the Orchestra per se, but cooperatively by the musicians to drum up some extra pocket cash at the tail end off the Great Depression. The impoverished musicians, my father often recalled, arrived at rehearsals looking like bums, or at best stevedores: “Then they’d take out their instruments and create this beautiful music.”

Nobody suggests a return to those days. On the other hand, great orchestras ignore certain immutable laws of economics at their peril. Usually a surplus of labor drives down labor costs; such a surplus exists in the orchestra world today, yet musicians’ wages keep rising. It’s only a matter of time before music consumers discover, as Dan Coren is discovering, that quality musicianship needn’t cost a fortune. Curtis Institute’s student orchestra, to cite one example, is in many respects as good as the Philadelphia. And in some respects— specifically the musicians’ enthusiasm— it’s better.


To view a response from Patrick Hazard, click here.
To view another response, click here.