Searching for Joe Kluger's successor

DAN ROTTENBERG

When Stephen Sell died of lung cancer in 1989 after seven years as executive director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Orchestra’s board did not spend months searching for a successor, as it is doing now. Instead, within days it promoted Sell’s industrious and self-effacing second-in-command, Joseph H. Kluger, who was just 34 at the time. Kluger wasn’t picked because anyone perceived him as a boy wonder; he was simply a known commodity who had functioned capably in a Number Two role and was available.

In fact Kluger was too young to take charge of one of the world’s great cultural organizations; he was unprepared for the job; and he was an introvert who lacked Sell’s ability to project confidence and optimism. But these deficiencies (which Kluger himself sometimes acknowledged privately) weren’t his fault; every leader lacks some dimension; the price for his services (less than half the salary of other major orchestra chief executives) was a bargain; and the Orchestra’s board assumed that, in time, Kluger would grow into the chief executive’s job.

Nobody seems to have imagined that, during Kluger’s tenure over the next 16 years, the very existence of major symphony orchestras would be threatened by a convergence of forces beyond their control, such as shifting musical tastes, the decline of non-visual entertainment, aging audiences, cutbacks in school music programs (which help generate younger audiences), format changes at classical radio stations, reduced newspaper coverage and competition from suburban orchestras. In the ensuing fallout, the Philadelphia Orchestra lost its recording contract and its radio sponsor, suffered chronic deficits, endured a 64-day strike by its musicians in 1996 and managed to alienate Philadelphia’s largest foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Yet by the time Kluger announced his departure last May to become an arts management consultant, the Orchestra was finally performing in a genuine orchestral concert hall (Verizon) rather than an opera house (the Academy of Music)— a dream the Orchestra had pursued in vain since 1908. Also for the first time, musicians were sitting on the orchestra’s board as well as its board of overseers— an important governance step (more on this below). The Orchestra had signed a multi-year recording agreement with Ondine Records and had become the first major symphony to offer audio “streaming” on the Internet. And the Orchestra’s endowment had increased from $34 million to $120 million.

How much credit or blame Kluger deserves for these developments is difficult to say. Like Robert Hall, the Inquirer’s publisher from 1990 to 2003, Kluger chalked up an unusually long tenure even as his organization seemed to be tumbling downhill. In sports, a losing record usually triggers the coach’s dismissal, on the theory that it’s better to do something than nothing and that firing a coach is easier than firing the whole team. Yet Kluger (like Hall) appears to have survived thanks to sheer inertia— either that, or to an unusually shrewd perception by his employers that no one else could have coped with the challenges of the ’90s any better. And by the end of his tenure last spring Kluger had indeed grown into the job, just as the board had originally hoped.

So while the Orchestra conducts its search, allow me to challenge some other tenets of conventional arts management wisdom.

1. An orchestra president today must possess the charisma to convince musicians, audiences, contributors, politicians and the public that classical music is one of the few sure-fire antidotes for life’s daily batterings— that whereas food, sex, drugs, tobacco, booze, business deals, the Eagles and "The Daily Show" occasionally disappoint us, Mozart and Beethoven never fail. But the president can’t be so charismatic that he competes with the fragile egos of the artists who work for him. Nor will salesmanship alone suffice: The ideal president must know his music, too. It’s unreasonable to expect any human to meet all three of these criteria. Kluger lacked charisma but he possessed the requisite humility and musicianship (unlike say, the marketing expert James Glicker, who recently resigned as president of the Baltimore Symphony just 18 months into his tenure). Two out of three is probably the best an orchestra can expect.

2. Contrary to conventional wisdom, symphony orchestras per se aren’t suffering today— just major symphony orchestras. Thanks to suburban sprawl, changing commuting patterns and a surplus of qualified musicians, suburban orchestras are actually sprouting and flourishing all over the country, and in the process they’re siphoning audiences away from the majors. Roughly two out of three people in America’s large metropolitan areas (including greater Philadelphia) live in the suburbs, and many of these suburbanites are only too happy to trade off a perceived minor decrease in performance quality for convenience and lower ticket prices. Just as the Inquirer has lost audiences to suburban daily papers, so the Philadelphia Orchestra finds itself competing with, say, the Haddonfield Symphony and the Lansdowne Symphony. The good news for the Philadelphia Orchestra is this: Center City’s current upscale population explosion— from 78,000 in 2000 to a projected 110,000 by 2010—offers the Orchestra a rare chance to break this suburban syndrome, if a forceful leader can seize the day.

3. According to conventional myth, back in the good old days the Philadelphia Orchestra was celebrated not only for its musicianship but for its staff’s gracious manners, whereas today it’s supposedly a charnel house of cutthroat petty jealousies. Maybe so, but I’m not convinced the past was all that civil. Less than two years before the much-lamented Stephen Sell died, the musicians who now recall him so fondly passed a vote of “no confidence in the ability of the Philadelphia Orchestra management to represent the Orchestra as the world and cultural asset that it is.” Prior to Sell’s relatively collegial tenure, the Orchestra’s management was characterized by autocratic executives like Boris Sokoloff and Roger Hall and equally autocratic board leaders like Orville Bullitt and C. Wanton Balis Jr. They may have been cultured and polite, but they ran the Orchestra largely as a paternalistic plantation, with little input from the musicians. Not until the 1996 strike did the musicians win significant participation in the Orchestra’s governance: For the first time in their history, the musicians were given two seats (now four, out of 77) on the Orchestra’s board. More important, they won the right to appoint three of the nine members of a new board of overseers. They also formed a joint partnership with management to market the orchestra to radio, TV and record companies; they even won the power to approve the Orchestra’s travel itineraries. Which leads to my next observation.

4. Arts organizations prefer to stock their boards with financiers and captains of industry rather than arts people, on the conventional theory that business executives are hard-nosed and artists are ditzy. I would frame the issue slightly differently: Business executives are hard-nosed about business matters and ditzy about arts matters; artists are ditzy about business and hard-nosed about the arts. During those 1990s debates over whether to build a new orchestra hall, for example, the objections came mostly from the business executives on the Orchestra’s board, many of whom emotionally resisted leaving their beloved Academy of Music; it was the musicians who pushed for the new building, arguing, “You can’t imagine what an orchestra sounds like in a real orchestral concert hall.”

A collateral problem: The Orchestra’s board, like most major arts boards, consists of high-powered businesspeople so dazzled by the Orchestra’s prestige that they tend to check their brains at the door when they attend board meetings. As individuals they may be bold and brilliant, but collectively they’re often wimps. They also lack the pressing personal and financial stake in the Orchestra’s survival that the Orchestra’s own musicians feel.

The late business management guru Peter Drucker contended that businesses can learn many lessons from voluntary organizations— especially about engaging the enthusiasm of their volunteers and about turning their customers into marketers for their organization. Which is why it’s important to have musicians involved in Orchestra policy. Except….

5. As I put it in 1996 (in the Philadelphia Forum), “Will the musicians’ participation in management improve the Philadelphia Orchestra as an organization? No doubt. But will the new arrangement improve the quality of their music? That strikes me as a very interesting question, and one that nobody seems to have asked.” And one that persists in my mind ten years later.