Tag: The Business

But How Much Will He Make?

As Marcia Adair points out in her Los Angeles Times article today, the appointment of Yannick Nezet-Seguin as the next Philadelphia Orchestra music director may have been a bit of a surprise to some, not necessarily because of his youth–a lot of American orchestras are choosing young leaders–but more because he’s only appeared a couple of times with the group.

Adair looks back on Nezet-Seguin’s career to point out that he has never been one to move gradually in his career, and the orchestra clearly sees his lack of experience with them as no kind of roadblock to success. Both sides are gushing over each other.

Peter Dobrin of the Philadelphia Inquirer, quoted in the article, sees Nezet-Seguin’s hiring, and the hiring of young conductors in general, as the result of a dearth of experienced, world-class, 50-somethings on the podium.

Young conductors are no doubt cheaper, and the Philadelphia Orchestra can’t afford to throw a lot of money around right now. We won’t get to find out for a while how much they’re paying Nezet-Seguin: the orchestra won’t say. Is this even legal?

For those of you who understand French, here’s a video of Jennifer Love-Hewitt talking about Nezet-Seguin. I haven’t watched it yet, but maybe you’ll like it.

In Texas, More Orchestra Labor Trouble

The Richardson Symphony Orchestra in Texas has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against the musicians’ union, which put the band on its unfair list.

As Scott Cantrell reported last week, the orchestra has missed payments to musicians in the past and is trying to get them to sign a contract without union representation. That was the last straw for American Federation of Musicians local president, Ray Hair.

Being on the unfair list means that AFM musicians can face huge fines for doing work for the orchestra. The orchestra, led by executive director George Landis, is complaining that the AFM is acting arbitrarily and with malice by penalizing players and their organization.

New York Phil’s New Year’s Eve, or How to Invigorate a US Orchestra

It was great to see the New York Philharmonic ring in the new year with its all-American program of Copland, Gershwin, and show tunes with Thomas Hampson. This is entertaining music, and certainly more a part of New York culture than the dusty old 19th-century European stuff the orchestra did last year. 

Alan Gilbert has made a strong commitment (at least relative to most) to American music this season, and that’s a good thing. It’s invigorated the orchestra and its audiences too.

Struggling orchestras such as the Charlotte Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra might do well to follow the Phil’s lead. Don’t assume that people want the usual classical-music standards all the time. And don’t apologize for presenting American music that’s new to audiences–believe in it, make it an important part of your programming. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Charlotte Arts City?

Something’s going on in Charlotte. On Saturday, only a few months after the city’s orchestra was bailed out by former Bank of America head Hugh McColl and the C. D. Spangler Foundation, a new performance space, the Knight Theater, hosted an open house.

The 1,150-seat hall is part of the so-called Wells Fargo Cultural Campus, a two-block-long strip on South Tryon Street that includes new homes for the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture and the Mint Museum, as well the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, set to open in January.

Further uptown, the North Carolina Dance Theatre is building its own headquarters, complete with administrative offices, a costume shop, and, most importantly, six studios for rehearsals and teaching. There are also plans to open a black box theater within the 34,000-square-foot space, which sits beside the ten-year-old McColl Center for Visual Art.

This mini-boom shows that there’s definitely philanthropic interest in beautifying the Queen City, but it remains to be seen whether there will be a sustained commitment to the organizations that curate the exhibitions, play the music, and dance the dances in the new buildings. The Charlotte Symphony plays in a good-looking, relatively new concert hall built in the mid-1990s, but struggles financially and nearly folded over the summer.

It also remains to be seen whether the public will show sufficient interest to keep funders engaged. For most non-profit arts organizations, ticket sales aren’t a significant revenue source, but nobody–not big-money donors, not the government–wants to give money to groups that appear irrelevant to the community at large.

Gilbert Smartens Up the Phil

Recent New Yorker and New York articles have depicted Alan Gilbert as leading the New York Philharmonic away from old-world stuffiness and toward a more laid-back intellectualism.

For Alex Ross, Gilbert’s first season marks a great awakening after “two drowsy decades,” a return to programming that puts his orchestra’s “virtuosity in the service of ideas,” part of a tradition that dates back to Mitropoulos and includes Bernstein’s championing of new American music, Boulez’s Rug Concerts, and Zubin Mehta’s Horizons festivals.
Similarly, Justin Davidson describes a concert with Gilbert as “a little less drafty temple and more of a campus coffee house,” where audiences can “hear and think about music in an atmosphere of animated informality.”
It wasn’t quite that casual, but the September 30 concert certainly felt more friendly, rewarding, and entertaining than any show I’ve been to in a while.
Most conductors, in fact most classical-music “experts,” who talk about music rely on ten-dollar words that sound fancy but don’t really say much; like a sermon, or Chinese food, they leave you feeling overwhelmed yet unsustained. Gilbert, on the other hand, introduced Magnus Lindberg, whose EXPO opened the night, to the audience with a straight-talking ten-minute interview session. Using the orchestra to demonstrate, the two discussed the thinking behind EXPO, and Lindberg talked thoughtfully about his approach to writing music.
This talk primed people for the piece; the woman to my left noted that she “liked it … I thought I wouldn’t, but I did. More than I thought I would.”
It’s been a while since I’ve had any real interaction with other audience members at concerts, but Gilbert finds a way to get people talking. After Ives’s Symphony No. 2, another concertgoer commented on how different the piece was from her assumptions about Ives. The performance certainly made a case for this piece as part of the mainstream symphonic canon, and I ended up spending the entire intermission locked in an absorbing discussion. Usually, I don’t even wake up until the second half starts.
Both Ross and Davidson fear that Gilbert is too egg-headed for his own good, that he “lacks heat” or forgets that people “go to concerts to have fun.” I had plenty of fun on September 30 and am happy to give up some glamour (or whatever) for a night that stimulates. If you want spectacle, go to Cirque du Soleil; I’ll be at the coffee house, sitting cross legged on the floor with Alan Gilbert and the New York Phil.

Responses to Blow’s Music Industry Death Watch

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a note questioning Charles Blow’s assertion in The New York Times that the recording industry is on its last legs. Responses from Times readers to Blow were mixed.

Of course, letters from industry muckety-mucks such as Mitch Bainwol, Chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, found Blow to be “unduly pessimistic” and spoke euphemistically about “transformation” (this from Rich Bengloff of the American Association of Independent Music).
Bill Rosenblatt of GiantSteps raised a good point that the “business-to-business side” of the music industry is booming, with streaming services providing constant and growing revenues. As I said in my original post, these streaming companies are customers.
Those without supply-side skin in the game were much less enthusiastic, and cited their own reasons for the decline of the industry. One reader bemoaned “the growing unavailability of music we might like to buy”; another blamed the inferior sound quality of digital downloads.
Sheila Johnson was a little more hopeful, noting that, as a classical music fan, she prefers listening to CDs, and reminded readers that it’s not just “the 13-to-17 demographic” that buys music.
Age aside, there are fans of particular artists in any genre that will buy their albums, either as CDs or as downloads. Imogen Heap has developed a huge online fan base in advance of her album release later this month (thanks to Taylor at Naxos for pointing this out), and we’ve seen the success that Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and AC/DC have had, in their own ways, over the last couple of years hocking their wares.
If you really want to read more about this, there are more responses online at the Times website.

So Many Haters: Another Music Industry Death Report

In a New York Times op-ed piece Saturday, Charles Blow declared that the music industry (by which he means the recording part of the music business) will cease to exist “before Madonna’s 60th birthday.”

According to Blow, people are going to stop buying music because they can stream it for free online. But the music streaming companies aren’t the killers here: they’re new customers. They have to get their content somewhere; if labels stop recording, streaming services will have nothing new to play.
Also, people are still buying music. They still like their iPods. And they still like having control over their playlists. They may not buy as much in the future, and may not buy for the same reasons as before (for example, they may not be willing to shell out $20 for an entire CD of junk just to get the one hit song), but they will buy.
So don’t stick a fork in the recording industry yet. It’s far from done.