Critical Thinking In A Critical Time

Continuing with my attempts to find silver linings in this dark period for the arts (and, let's face it, for most every other industry as well,) I'm feeling the need to talk a bit more about the way the media covers downturns and their effect on non-profits. Specifically, I'd like to encourage a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to a lot of what gets written about symphony orchestras, whether online or in print, by people who claim to be experts on the subject.

I'm a big fan of the international affairs columnist and author Fareed Zakaria, partly because he regularly gives me new ways of looking at the world which wouldn't have occurred to me, but also because he's very good at seeing the forest for the trees in big, complicated situations. In his book, The Post-American World, Zakaria spends several early pages laying out all of the horrible, violent things that have occurred in our world since 2000, only to turn around and point out that, compared with most other historical eras, ours is a comparatively peaceful one, with the likelihood of a given person dying from political or terroristic violence at an all-time low. What makes the present seem so much more violent is the way that the 24-hour news channels portray comparatively minor bloodshed as an Armageddon-like event, and the simple fact that, today, we get pictures and descriptions of violent acts almost in real time, and it's nearly impossible to turn away.

A similar effect can be seen in press coverage of the arts whenever the economy dives. The steady stream of budget cuts, layoffs, and salary reductions at American orchestras has some within our industry alarmed, and the journalists who cover us can smell that fear. So articles like this one start to appear, suggesting that orchestras are doomed unless we completely overhaul the business model we've relied on for decades, and dump the idea that musicians should be able to expect year-round employment and/or comfortable salaries. (Of course, the vast majority of musicians enjoy neither year-round employment nor a comfortable salary, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Such articles usually contain a lot of scary but isolated numbers (an orchestra CEO who makes $1 million a year!! a stagehand who makes north of $400K!!! a newly minted orchestra musician right out of school making $130K!!!!) designed to drive home the idea that orchestral finance is completely out of control, thus relieving the author of actually having to prove his thesis with real economic data that applies across the broader industry. (My favorite example of this technique came from notorious doomsayer Norman Lebrecht, who in 1997 penned a terrifying book called Who Killed Classical Music? It was a genius title: before you even opened the book, the author had dispensed entirely with the necessity of proving that classical music was actually dead, and had moved the discussion straight on to the autopsy. The fact that, in the real world, the subject of the autopsy was, in fact, very much alive, went unaddressed.)

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The headlines trumpeting layoffs and salary givebacks aren't evidence of the failure of a business model. They're a demonstration of how the model bends without breaking.
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Again, forest for the trees: orchestras, when they're being run correctly, function according to the broader economies they are a part of. Since we're dependent on donations from individuals, foundations, and corporations, we function as a tiny subset of the larger "charitable giving" economy, so what we can spend in a given year (on salaries, benefits, day-to-day expenses, whatever) is directly tied to how much our supporters can afford to give us.

We also function as part of the distinct American orchestral economy, in which a small number of "major" orchestras compete (through the salary and benefits offered) for the services of the most elite musicians emerging each year from music schools, in the same way that elite law firms compete for the best law school grads. 99% or more of the students who emerge from college with a music degree will never earn anywhere near the amount of money that the alarmists cite - most won't even wind up with careers as performers at all.

So taken in a broader context, pronouncements of the unsustainability of our business model (and if history is any guide, there will be many more of these in the coming months) are more or less entirely contradicted by the self-evident ability of most orchestras to adapt to changes in our specific economies. The headlines trumpeting layoffs and salary givebacks aren't evidence of the failure of a business model. They're a demonstration of how the model bends without breaking.

Earlier today, I was riding Minneapolis's light rail line, and I overheard a conversation between two businessmen in town for a conference. Neither was from Minnesota, but one of the two had apparently been here a number of times before, and he was attempting to give his friend a general orientation of where things in the Cities can be found. Over the course of five minutes or so, the "expert" managed to impart that Dinkytown is an area of St. Paul, south of Minneapolis, situated fairly close to a well-known neighborhood called Woodbury. He also responded to his friend's question as to what the "Hiawatha Line" might be by stating confidently that it was "some sort of highway."

Now, if you live in California or New York, and your closest connection to Minnesota is that you enjoy listening to A Prairie Home Companion of a Saturday evening, that all sounds perfectly reasonable, and if you'd overheard this conversation, you might even repeat the information to a friend if you were asked about the subject. (After all, who would ever have reason to lie about geography?) But your confidence in what you'd heard from someone who clearly considered himself knowledgeable on the subject wouldn't change the inarguable facts that a) Dinkytown is in Minneapolis; b) St. Paul is east of Minneapolis, not south, c)Dinkytown is a 20-25 minute highway drive (in good traffic) from Woodbury, which is a suburb, not a neighborhood; and d) the Hiawatha Line is the train we were all riding on when I overheard the conversation.

My point? There are a lot of self-styled experts out there. Make them prove to you that they actually know what they're talking about before you assume that they do.

The Long-Awaited Silver Lining?

NPR's All Things Considered ran a great story on Tuesday's program asking experts of various stripes (futurists, historians, urbanists and the like) to imagine what America might look like when it emerges from what appears likely to be a transformative recession. And there, in the midst of all the gloomy theories, I heard what sounded to me like a major opportunity for those of us who make our living in the arts.

One of the experts pointed out that recent surveys of affluent Americans indicated that they are responding to the recession by cutting back on what they spend on "things," but not what they spend on "experiences." In other words, people who still have some pocket change to spend on luxury items are continuing to go out to movies, plays, concerts, and restaurants, but they're cutting back on the amount of actual stuff they acquire.

The same expert who pointed out this phenomenon goes on to speculate that America's retail sales may take a permanent hit even after the economy returns to positive growth, and that bankrupt chain stores like Circuit City and Linens 'N Things are unlikely to be replaced by similar stores if this recession results, as many believe it will, in a fundamental shift in American attitudes about money and what we do with it. If we no longer find it necessary to acquire as much physical stuff as we once did, there simply won't be a need for as many stores to peddle that stuff.

Now, economic shifts are always painful, and I don't mean to suggest that those of us peddling Experiences instead of Stuff should be rejoicing at the closing of our local big box retailers. Fewer stores obviously mean, at least in the short term, more people out of work, and therefore fewer people in a position to even make the choice between spending on the Minnesota Orchestra's Experiences or Best Buy's Stuff.

Still, the idea that Americans might move away from using the acquisition of material goods as a barometer of our success and happiness, and towards a greater interest in the experiences that the world has to offer, is frighteningly seductive, and it made me think of our orchestra's recent tour of Europe. While staying with friends in Vienna, I noticed that it is not at all uncommon there for people with what most of us would consider a good deal of money to live in relatively modest apartments without much in the way of material trappings.

But these same people think nothing of dropping €100 or more on a ticket to opening night at the Wiener Staatsoper. Which, of course, is no less ostentatious than spending €100 on some gewgaw for the mantelpiece of your 3000-square-foot suburban palace with 2-acre lawn. It's just different. And that difference - wealthy and even moderately well-off citizens choosing to spend their money on Experiences rather than Stuff - is what makes Vienna the cultural mecca that it is.

Obviously, no one really knows what the fallout from this period in our economic history will be, and how long it will take for everyone to define our own new "normal." But if you ask me, the possibility that Americans might choose to start leaning away from material consumption and towards experiential consumption is something that arts groups ought to be salivating over, and seriously preparing for.

Run, Ludwig, run!

Fun and frolics at the Fairbanks Symphony - their annual "Beat Beethoven" 5K run. Why not an upgrade for next year? If taken at a profoundly deliberate pace, perhaps Mahler's 3rd Symphony would be the perfect marathon benchmark.