IANAM (though I have relatives that are). My experience ion the corporate world is that HR exists to protect the organization, not to help the employees. The notion that orchestras need an HR organization to address musician's issues should be taken with a big grain of salt.
Why should a musician be different than any other job, without the support of HR. Yes, HR is there to protect the company when there are disputes with employees, but it's also there to help protect employees from other employees.
I remember listening to a piano concerto + symphony one evening live at a concert hall and thinking how it was possible that this orchestra of 50+ plus a famous soloist makes money on our $100 tickets (best seats).
Here we are paying $100 for 50 top notch world class musicians playing for 3 hours.
There were maybe 500 people in the concert hall, so at an average ticket price of $50 each musician (split evenly) would have gotten max 500 bucks.
When I'm at a classical music concert I feel strongly that I'm part of a culture. Here's music written 300 years ago that we're actively conspiring to conserve. None of it really makes any money - not for the musicians who have spent their lives getting good enough to play it, not for the mostly amateur promoters, not for the taxpayers who probably bear the bulk of the costs of the thing - but we do it anyway. Even the bulk of the audience are probably not real afficionados, but still see value in it. I think it's kind of a lovely thing
There's room to disagree about that. Especially with orchestral music, the reality is that so much of the audience is simply there out of habit and not "real aficionados" as you say. Which means they're not really grokking any of the music and do not really care about anything besides the old "workhorse" pieces. The widely-acknowledged outcome is that, far from being actively preserved, much of the potential repertoire simply languishes in obscurity.
There are of course forces pushing against this unwanted dynamic, such as a renewed appreciation for solo and small-ensemble/chamber music (which can at least be easier to understand for the novice listener), as well as recreational engagement with the artform outside the concert hall. In many ways, this is a reaffirmation of the "natural" environment for this sort of music where recorded music was either non-existent or uncommon, and actively playing music was an increasingly accessible, everyday activity.
The financing can be complex, but broadly there are a few things that enable modern American orchestras to survive.
1. Benefactors who give money to the orchestra, rent boxes, etc.
2. Popular (non classical) concerts which have a possibly larger crowd and varied material. Harry Potter with orchestral accompaniment? Tenacious D with orchestral accompaniment? The musicians hate it, it pays the bills.
3. A mostly part time staff. Most orchestral musicians will play in many orchestras, teach, etc.
They made a loss on your concert. But they knew they would.
Typically orchestral musicians are paid salaries concomitant with other similarly high skilled professions, and orchestra budgets tend to be heavily subsidized. An HR department would inevitably be a substantial added expense.
At top-level orchestras this is true. For example, at the New York Philharmonic minimum pay was about $150k pre-pandemic, cut to $110k during the pandemic[1].
It is not true at less prestigious orchestras, where salaries are much lower. For example, the San Antonio Symphony tried to lower its base salary from just under $36k to just under $18k this past year[2], which resulted in a prolonged strike (still unresolved 6 months later).
There are many more less-prestigious orchestras than top-level orchestras, so most orchestral musicians don't get paid salaries comparable to other similarly high skilled professions.
Professional music is not unlike professional sports in this regard.
By comparison, how much do you earn per day? I think $500 per day would be a decent income for them, but as someone else pointed out, the venue probably takes up a big chunk, taxes another, the people involved that you don't see, etc so they wouldn't be getting that amount.
And it's not like they have a 3 hour workday either, before that performance is going to be hours and hours of practice, years of training, and on the day itself X amount of traveling (more if they're international / on tour), getting dressed up, setting up, settling in, etc.
> I remember listening to a piano concerto + symphony one evening live at a concert hall and thinking how it was possible that this orchestra of 50+ plus a famous soloist makes money on our $100 tickets (best seats).
They don't. And this is the problem with classical music.
This kind of thing is almost all about getting money from "benefactors"--and do NOT ever offend them. And those benefactors have normally pretty narrow musical taste in classical music.
When you think how many of hours of study and rehearsal each of those musicians put into creating the 3 hours you enjoyed, it starts to look even better value.
Having spoken with a few professional orchestra muscicians, this doesn’t appear to be true. They have honed their craft enough that they only need one practice before any given performance.
Even worse to me is so many orchestras have to pay the bills with performances of Christmas music or orchestral versions of Motley Crue.
Imagine putting in that many hours of practice on the classical masters to end up with a low paying job playing Frosty the Snowman and Def Leppard "Pour Some Sugar On Me".
>Imagine putting in that many hours of practice on the classical masters to end up with a low paying job playing Frosty the Snowman and Def Leppard "Pour Some Sugar On Me".
The vast majority of work in any given profession is lower tier work like this.
The electrician you paid to install a dimmer could be doing much more advanced work but he does what pays the bills.
I once saw a FoF playing in the Sydney Symphony and then met them at the bar in the harbour for a messy evening of drinking. They were joined by many colleagues. The conversations I eavesdropped on were quite epic:
“No I don’t think it was a mistake to do crystal meth, it was just a mistake to do it in the first day”
And other such tidbits which suggested their lives were anything like described in the article. Maybe both situations are possible, but it seemed that tenured orchestral musicians lived a Life of Riley, and good for them.
A family member who is a professional classical musician told me it seems that excessive drinking, and sometimes substance abuse, is a coping strategy for the high stress of playing on stage, which is very exposed. Doesn't seem very healthy. There are pro orchestras whose members get drunk in the interval so the second half of the concert is not so good, especially if they are away from their normal base, or don't like the conductor.
In a former life, I worked as a stage and orchestra manager, including a few contracts with some of Australia's most well-known professional orchestras and opera companies. tl;dr: They work harder, for longer hours, than the vast majority of people in tech.
They will spend a full working day in rehearsal, then go home and spend a few hours doing solo practice. They will spend hours of time (often uncompensated) notating scores ahead of the first rehearsal of new work or production.
As others have pointed out, the economic model for orchestras and just about any live performance cannot support high salaries. Many musicians will have instruments worth thousands of dollars, so they will have loans against them. Then there is the venue and equipment hire, the transportation costs and the wages for the crew behind the scenes - people to set up the stage and run the show (like me), lighting and sound designers and operators, etc (14+ hour days are not uncommon).
It is a very hard way to earn a living, and on top of it all most jobs are contracts measured in weeks or months, not full-time positions. Not only do you have to be unbelievably talented and passionate about it, you also have to possess superhuman resilience to handle the lifestyle. I have nothing but respect to people who do this job for a living.
Miserable job. Highly competitive, low pay, limited autonomy. Had a colleague once who switched to IT from being an orchestral musician. Caveat: single data point.
This seems to me like a job where the output quality of a worker is extremely difficult to measure; it's difficult to tell if one excellent musician is better than another excellent musician. Surely beyond a certain point, it's subjective.
People tend to want to think of themselves as being objectively talented and as being deserving of credit; but in certain professions, there is no such thing.
Art is rich people's subjectivity being passed off as objectivity. It can't be easy to base your entire professional self-esteem on the whims and moods of the rich people who fund the industry. In a slightly different world, the definitions of 'good' and 'excellent' would be completely different.
Performance is a part of music that is less subjective than composition or song writing. It is difficult for a lay person to measure differences between players at a professional level, but other professionals with a deep understanding of technique can.
The problem is that the industry has very few open positions and a good number of talented applicants. Imagine if every software engineering position had 100+ applicants and all of them could code very well, so you disqualified the 99 of them who had to use a backspace key more than once. This is what this industry is like.
Subjectivity is certainly a part of it, like in any profession. But just being able to play that material requires years of training and practice. And the stuff that is subjective to the audience has to be worked out in objective terms by the members of the orchestra (most likely decided by the conductor) so that the performance sounds like it has a coherent style. Imagine variations on: "Let's play it this way instead of that way." And the musicians have to understand and physically implement those decisions instantly.
So the layer of subjectivity that the audience experiences is supported by a foundation of objective choices.
Now, if you hold an audition for a violinist, enough people will show up who can demonstrate those skills (the ultimate coding interview), that your final choice will be a toss-up, like in any profession.
And as in any profession, your self esteem has to come from within. I can't imagine basing my self esteem on what funds the IT industry. I know a lot of professional musicians. They tend to be fairly well adjusted people.
Disclosure: I'm at the next level down, a "semi professional" musician.
Having played the violin for ~16 years and been in many competitions, I'd have to say it's fairly easy to differentiate musicians. There are pieces of music that push the the limit of what your fingers can do, and some interpretations generally win out over others.
Wouldn't all musicians who are good enough to work for a professional orchestra be able to play all of these difficult pieces without making any mistakes? Being able to play difficult pieces without making a mistake is the objective definition of perfection. Yet among the people who can all play difficult pieces perfectly, not all of them can work for the New York Philharmonic or more high prestige group. What differentiates one player who plays perfectly from another player who also plays perfectly?
There must be something else beyond 'not making mistakes'; that thing is subjective, not objective. It's pretty clear if someone hits the wrong note, but who gets to judge that a particular musician held a specific note for 10 milliseconds too long? Or who is to say that some notes were given 'too much emphasis'?
I'm sure that there is consensus among the elite musicians about all these subjective judgments, but it doesn't change the fact that it's subjective... The audience might not care at all either way or they might even disagree with the elite musicians' consensus... Who is right in this case? Isn't the customer always right? What does it mean to have a 'trained ear'? Can't the ear be over-trained or mis-trained.
If you teach someone how to do something the wrong way (e.g. inefficiently) and they learn how to do it the wrong way perfectly, isn't it still the wrong way?
Art -- as demonstrated by classical orchestras -- really isn't subjective at all. Talk to a professional musician, and it's all technique. Somewhere, deep down there at the bottom of it all, is a squishy place where an artist's passion and poetry is burning bright to fuel everything else...but by the time you get to an orchestral hall, everything you -- specifically as a non-professional musician -- will hear is objective technique you might expect an AI to be able to grade.
It's a very different beast from popular art that holds up Selene Gomez, and even then you'd be remiss to try to explain her success as the result of subjective judgements.
Thinking that performance is that subjective is a bit weird to me. I can’t imagine a world in which it eg. not being able to play precisely or fast would be considered better.
They said "beyond a certain point". I can't imagine a world where being able to play precisely or fast is what distinguishes B.B. King from some shredder on YouTube.
At least in the US, almost all full-time orchestras are union shops with the American Federation of Musicians. The first stop for major issues should not be with management's HR, but with the union local and the union steward for the orchestra. Most of these orchestras also have an Orchestra Committee made up of musicians, and it is this committee's job to help as well. And most of the largest orchestras do have an HR rep.
HR is there to protect management. The union is there to protect employees as a collective. Individual results may vary.
Readit News
Human Resources is about limiting damage to the company. Sometimes that overlaps with protecting workers. Most of the time it doesn't.
Not always. The main goal of HR is to protect the company and keep things running when sorting out problems between employees, not fairness.
Here we are paying $100 for 50 top notch world class musicians playing for 3 hours.
There were maybe 500 people in the concert hall, so at an average ticket price of $50 each musician (split evenly) would have gotten max 500 bucks.
There's room to disagree about that. Especially with orchestral music, the reality is that so much of the audience is simply there out of habit and not "real aficionados" as you say. Which means they're not really grokking any of the music and do not really care about anything besides the old "workhorse" pieces. The widely-acknowledged outcome is that, far from being actively preserved, much of the potential repertoire simply languishes in obscurity.
There are of course forces pushing against this unwanted dynamic, such as a renewed appreciation for solo and small-ensemble/chamber music (which can at least be easier to understand for the novice listener), as well as recreational engagement with the artform outside the concert hall. In many ways, this is a reaffirmation of the "natural" environment for this sort of music where recorded music was either non-existent or uncommon, and actively playing music was an increasingly accessible, everyday activity.
Signed, a lowly but enthusiastic shitposter
1. Benefactors who give money to the orchestra, rent boxes, etc. 2. Popular (non classical) concerts which have a possibly larger crowd and varied material. Harry Potter with orchestral accompaniment? Tenacious D with orchestral accompaniment? The musicians hate it, it pays the bills. 3. A mostly part time staff. Most orchestral musicians will play in many orchestras, teach, etc.
They made a loss on your concert. But they knew they would.
It is not true at less prestigious orchestras, where salaries are much lower. For example, the San Antonio Symphony tried to lower its base salary from just under $36k to just under $18k this past year[2], which resulted in a prolonged strike (still unresolved 6 months later).
There are many more less-prestigious orchestras than top-level orchestras, so most orchestral musicians don't get paid salaries comparable to other similarly high skilled professions.
Professional music is not unlike professional sports in this regard.
[1] https://nonprofitquarterly.org/new-york-philharmonic-players...
[2] https://www.sacurrent.com/sanantonio/san-antonio-symphony-mu...
And it's not like they have a 3 hour workday either, before that performance is going to be hours and hours of practice, years of training, and on the day itself X amount of traveling (more if they're international / on tour), getting dressed up, setting up, settling in, etc.
I do not know how they are paid, but if they are on a salary then their job is similar to mine and others (from a general workload/pay perspective)
They don't. And this is the problem with classical music.
This kind of thing is almost all about getting money from "benefactors"--and do NOT ever offend them. And those benefactors have normally pretty narrow musical taste in classical music.
Imagine putting in that many hours of practice on the classical masters to end up with a low paying job playing Frosty the Snowman and Def Leppard "Pour Some Sugar On Me".
The vast majority of work in any given profession is lower tier work like this.
The electrician you paid to install a dimmer could be doing much more advanced work but he does what pays the bills.
The folks in the uniforms, especially the ones playing instruments, in that video are world class.
They're having the time of their professional lives.
And here I am wishing I could play Pour Some Sugar On Me somewhere for free...
And other such tidbits which suggested their lives were anything like described in the article. Maybe both situations are possible, but it seemed that tenured orchestral musicians lived a Life of Riley, and good for them.
They will spend a full working day in rehearsal, then go home and spend a few hours doing solo practice. They will spend hours of time (often uncompensated) notating scores ahead of the first rehearsal of new work or production.
As others have pointed out, the economic model for orchestras and just about any live performance cannot support high salaries. Many musicians will have instruments worth thousands of dollars, so they will have loans against them. Then there is the venue and equipment hire, the transportation costs and the wages for the crew behind the scenes - people to set up the stage and run the show (like me), lighting and sound designers and operators, etc (14+ hour days are not uncommon).
It is a very hard way to earn a living, and on top of it all most jobs are contracts measured in weeks or months, not full-time positions. Not only do you have to be unbelievably talented and passionate about it, you also have to possess superhuman resilience to handle the lifestyle. I have nothing but respect to people who do this job for a living.
Deleted Comment
People tend to want to think of themselves as being objectively talented and as being deserving of credit; but in certain professions, there is no such thing.
Art is rich people's subjectivity being passed off as objectivity. It can't be easy to base your entire professional self-esteem on the whims and moods of the rich people who fund the industry. In a slightly different world, the definitions of 'good' and 'excellent' would be completely different.
The problem is that the industry has very few open positions and a good number of talented applicants. Imagine if every software engineering position had 100+ applicants and all of them could code very well, so you disqualified the 99 of them who had to use a backspace key more than once. This is what this industry is like.
(Have multiple orchestral musicians in my family)
So the layer of subjectivity that the audience experiences is supported by a foundation of objective choices.
Now, if you hold an audition for a violinist, enough people will show up who can demonstrate those skills (the ultimate coding interview), that your final choice will be a toss-up, like in any profession.
And as in any profession, your self esteem has to come from within. I can't imagine basing my self esteem on what funds the IT industry. I know a lot of professional musicians. They tend to be fairly well adjusted people.
Disclosure: I'm at the next level down, a "semi professional" musician.
There must be something else beyond 'not making mistakes'; that thing is subjective, not objective. It's pretty clear if someone hits the wrong note, but who gets to judge that a particular musician held a specific note for 10 milliseconds too long? Or who is to say that some notes were given 'too much emphasis'?
I'm sure that there is consensus among the elite musicians about all these subjective judgments, but it doesn't change the fact that it's subjective... The audience might not care at all either way or they might even disagree with the elite musicians' consensus... Who is right in this case? Isn't the customer always right? What does it mean to have a 'trained ear'? Can't the ear be over-trained or mis-trained.
If you teach someone how to do something the wrong way (e.g. inefficiently) and they learn how to do it the wrong way perfectly, isn't it still the wrong way?
It's a very different beast from popular art that holds up Selene Gomez, and even then you'd be remiss to try to explain her success as the result of subjective judgements.
HR is there to protect management. The union is there to protect employees as a collective. Individual results may vary.