Red Ink Blues : A Crescendo of Crisis for Symphonies

DENVER — Christopher Dunworth remembers it as a sublime moment in cultural history.

The plush seats of Denver’s staid concert hall were afidget with 2,600 football fans lured in by the promise of a Super Bowl pep rally. Naturally, it came as a bit of a shock when the Denver Symphony Orchestra filed out and started playing Dvorak’s Slavonic Rhapsody No. 3 in A-flat Major.

Even more surprising was what happened after intermission. All the musicians--and even one of the cellos--reappeared in orange Bronco T-shirts. The program switched to fight songs and the crowd undulated across the hall in a synchronized stadium wave.

“We may never see those people again,” Dunworth, the symphony’s executive director, said of the audience that evening, “but, talk about a positive experience!”

Successes Becoming Rare

A positive experience, in fact, is becoming as rare as a Stradivarius violin for many of America’s symphony orchestras. Deficits are mounting, donations dwindling and concert halls going dark for seasons at a time.

The American Symphony Orchestra League reports that two-thirds of its 80 largest symphonies ended their last seasons in the red. Their aggregate net deficit was $10 million; six years ago, it was just $500,000.

In this stormy climate of debts, pay cuts, layoffs and strikes, some orchestras are resorting to unusual survival tactics. They are trying everything from Denver-style pep rallies to supermarket promotions and matchmaking.

The list of the names of orchestras in trouble is long. It stretches from Honolulu to Houston, from Colorado Springs to Columbus.

Last week, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra took out a full-page newspaper ad appealing for community help to ward off bankruptcy. Its musicians are being asked to take $8,400 cuts in salary next year, and to play a shortened season.

Holdouts Form Orchestra

In San Antonio, musicians are forming a dissenters’ orchestra and considering legal action to claim the symphony’s endowment, rather than accept a 30% pay cut and other contract concessions. In Oakland, a concert percussionist is clerking at Macy’s and a bassist is spending the summer installing windows while efforts are under way to rebuild that city’s symphony, which folded last year.

“Our official name seems to have become The Financially Troubled New Orleans Symphony,” lamented Anne O’Brien, spokeswoman for the 80-member orchestra, in debt to the tune of $3.8 million and once six weeks behind in its payroll.

The reasons behind the crescendo of crisis are as complex and interwoven as a fugue, and there seems to be little agreement within the industry on how it came about or what should be done to meet it.

Management, union officials and musicians suggest a number of possible causes:

--Fund-raising woes due to corporate mergers and takeovers, reductions in grants and confusion over how the new income tax rules affect philanthropy.

--Failure to build endowments while promoting rapid growth in communities that were unwilling or unable to support full-time orchestras.

--Labor strife triggered by what unionists regard as a concessionary climate.

“It’s very hard to make national generalizations,” said Catherine French, chief executive officer of the American Symphony Orchestra League, a national service organization with 800 member orchestras.

“Often, the situation reflects local economies,” she said. “Houston, San Antonio, Oklahoma and New Orleans are all directly affected by the oil economy.

“If people are out of work, it’s tough to buy tickets and tough to contribute.”

Operating at a Loss

The situation is alarming even for healthy institutions such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The orchestra has doubled its number of concerts and quadrupled its audience over the last decade. Yet the average winter concert costs about $80,000, and it ends up losing at least $25,000 even if every ticket is sold.

Without the lucrative summer seasons at the 17,600-seat Hollywood Bowl “we obviously would be in severe trouble,” said Ernest Fleischmann, executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He added: “At the bowl we are at the mercy of the elements. If we lose a single night, it cuts a tremendous hole in our budget.

“It’s a tougher time than any I can remember.”

In Denver, where musicians recently took a 20% pay cut to save the symphony from bankruptcy, Dunworth has embarked on an ambitious plan to boost public support and whittle away at the orchestra’s $1.7-million debt.

The symphony is borrowing an idea or two from the Denver Broncos, in the hope of firing up some of the rabid hometown loyalty that the football team enjoys.

Know Your Musicians

A “players’ book,” with pictures and biographies of the 84 orchestra members, will be sold at concerts in the fall. It will divulge tidbits such as a violinist’s passion for digging wild mushrooms.

“When you find out that a person playing in the symphony went to the same school as your sister, or their hobby is fly-fishing or their favorite movie is ‘Apocalypse Now,’ a bonding develops,” Dunworth said.

In another effort to foster a casual image in a casual town, the symphony printed invitations to a cocktail party on boxer shorts to promote a benefit foot race.

Dunworth defended the pep-rally approach, reasoning that “you’re at a concert to have fun. It should be no different than a Grateful Dead concert.”

The Phoenix Symphony Orchestra’s managing director, Richard Contee, thinks that orchestras in the West suffer from a lack of tradition. “There just isn’t a history out here of giving in general, and to the symphony in particular,” he said. His organization has a $1.3-million deficit.

Contee, however, resists what he calls the “standard approach” of raising funds through Hollywood celebrity appearances.

“We won’t bring in a non-music performer to stand up and tell jokes while the musicians look at their shoes,” he said. “If the community can’t support the orchestra for its music, then we’re just kidding ourselves. No matter how much money we made, we’d just be postponing the time when the symphony will crash and burn.”

Aiming for younger concert-goers is the key strategy in Columbus, Ohio, where a five-month symphony strike last season stemmed from artistic disputes between management and musicians as well as economic issues.

An audience survey two years ago found that the average Columbus ticket holder was over 50, and Edward Moulton, the orchestra’s president and general manager, said he fears that fund-raising disasters lie ahead unless younger supporters are recruited now.

So the symphony’s fall season will include “singles” concerts with open seating, a pre-performance “mixer” and a post-concert dance.

Moulton said he is confident that the idea will catch on, and noted that the night life in Columbus could use the help.

“You know downtown Los Angeles at 11 o’clock at night?” he said. “Well, Columbus, Ohio, is not exactly where the action is, either.”

Conductor Pitches In

New Orleans is also taking a swipe at the elitist image of the symphony. When a supermarket offered prime aisle display space for grocery products in exchange for big donations to the symphony, music director Maxim Shostakovich--son of the famous Soviet composer--participated in the fund-raising by starring in a grocery commercial. The campaign brought in more than $20,000 in a week.

Still, some experts question whether there really is a crisis at all.

Liza DuBrul, a New York City lawyer who represents several orchestras in labor negotiations, thinks the problem has been overblown.

“I don’t agree that these orchestras are all on the rocks, for starters,” she said. She argued that symphonies in the past have usually run deficits, and that the real change is a new emphasis on balanced budgets rather than artistic standards.

“There are troubled orchestras, but there’s a certain amount of exaggeration,” she said. She added: “The first thing an orchestra will do . . . is come to the musicians to take cuts. They don’t look to other ways of saving money. Musicians are very tired of having every little trouble taken out of their hides.”

Lew Waldeck, head of the symphony department of the 8,000-member American Federation of Musicians, charged that some symphonies are using the threat of bankruptcy as a negotiating tool.

“The whole labor climate in the United States is concessionary, with everybody demanding give-backs,” he said.

“An orchestra is an extraordinarily expensive institution, like a museum. Nobody would suggest that the Metropolitan Museum of Art pay for itself, and there is no way for a symphony orchestra to pay for itself,” Waldeck said.

He said that salaries average $50,000 a year in the top orchestras and $35,000 in mid-sized ones.

Waldeck said that when musicians have asked for more money, several cities have suggested that they rehearse and perform at night and “get real jobs during the day.”

“It’s very hard to get across the fact that we’re professionals,” he said. “Nobody would suggest that a doctor flip hamburgers during the day and practice medicine at night to reduce rates.”

Auditions Are Swamped

Competition in the business is so intense and unemployment so high among musicians that even symphonies in dire straits routinely draw 150 hopefuls to an audition, orchestra managers say.

Brady Graham, who plays French horn with the Denver Symphony Orchestra, said that many musicians are reluctant to bail out of a troubled organization.

“People with families are less likely to go anywhere else, because they get settled,” he said. He said that musicians are relying more on moonlighting jobs, mainly giving lessons.

A pay raise for an orchestra, however, can sometimes mean major concessions in other areas.

In San Diego, musicians locked out in a contract dispute since Sept. 15 recently signed a new contract that will increase base salaries from $472 a week to $575, but will shorten the season from 45 to 32 weeks.

Juan Carrillo, deputy director of programs for the California Arts Council, contends that Californians have had “more than our share” of symphony troubles.

The council has commissioned what it says is the most comprehensive study in the nation of trends and issues affecting the stability of orchestras, one that it hopes will identify danger signals and aid development of an assistance program.

The report, due out in January, will examine city symphonies in Long Beach, San Jose, Sacramento and San Diego, as well as the Los Angeles and Pasadena chamber orchestras. A separate report is being prepared on the failure of the Oakland symphony.

One orchestra that has managed a major turnaround in recent years is in Dallas, where a triumvirate of prominent businessmen is credited with bringing the symphony back from the brink of bankruptcy.

In the mid-1970s, the Dallas orchestra had fewer than 5,000 subscribers and 800 contributors.

Then, what executive director Leonard Stone called the largest, most comprehensive fund-raising campaign in the symphony world raked in $46.5 million within about three years.

Stone ticked off the orchestra’s gains over the last eight years: audience size up 500%, contributions up 400%, 15 albums recorded and the concert season extended to 52 weeks. The orchestra has toured Europe and will soon move into a new hall designed by I. M. Pei.

Yet, given the oil price slump and the current economic climate in Dallas, Stone said: “I’m convinced we couldn’t do it now.”

Fleischmann, the Los Angeles Philharmonic director, said he believes “the symphony orchestra as we know it needs to look deeply into itself, become more flexible and change its structure.”

He advocates a “community of musicians” pooling the talents of symphonies, chamber ensembles and chorales, which he says would reduce competition for “the same limited corporate funds” available to support symphonies.

Symphony orchestras, he said, are “a symbol of much that is valuable and profound in our culture.

“I hope symphony orchestras will not have to rely on Bronco rallies to keep themselves alive.”