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IF you’ve been following the creative economy lately, it’s hardly a surprise, but this makes for dispiriting reading: A New York Times story chronicles how American groups are responding to tough times. Through the 19th century, orchestras got bigger.
But as some American orchestras struggle in the post-downturn economy, they are taking a page from the corporate world and thinking smaller: They are downsizing, shedding some full-time positions while making up the difference with less costly part-time musicians.
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra ended a contentious labor dispute and a two-month lockout this month by agreeing to a new contract that will effectively keep it smaller for the next few years — placing it in the company of major ensembles in Philadelphia, Detroit, Indianapolis, Minnesota and elsewhere that have temporarily or permanently trimmed their number of full-time musicians in recent seasons to save money. Some are now slowly rebuilding.
… musicians warn that an overreliance on freelancers endangers the things that make orchestras great: the cohesion that comes from playing together over many years, the performing traditions that are developed
and passed down, even the ability to divine in a flash what a familiar conductor is seeking with a cocked eyebrow or a flick of the wrist.
Is this move inevitable? Is there a point — a number of players or proportion of shrinkage — where serious and irrepperable damage to an orchestra’s mission takes place? How low can you go?
We’re surely better off with these groups surviving in smaller form than shutting down completely, but isn’t there a better way?
Anytime that you have less than a full complement of musicians who perform together full-time irreparable damage is done (or at least long-term damage). Those who know what playing in a classical ensemble of any size is like will know that it takes time to develop a convincing way of playing together, both musically as well as technically. With the latter, I mean intonation most specifically, since an orchestra is tuned in a “tempered” way like a piano. The greatest string and wind ensembles – or any combination thereof – will develop a way of playing which makes different keys sound differently. And make no mistake: that’s why composers wrote music which didn’t include a piano.
As for what size orchestra is appropriate – well, that varies. For symphonic music up to and including Mendelssohn and Schumann an orchestra of 50-60 musicians is optimal. If you want to move up to and including Brahms, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, 75-90 musicians is required. For late romantic music like Mahler, Strauss, Bruckner and Wagner, you’re looking at 110-130 musicians.
Few orchestras in the world have 110-130 musicians, though. The Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics can muster that many members, but that’s exceptional. Most full-time professional orchestras count between 70 and 90 musicians. Some have 100-110.
Arguably, an orchestra with 90 full-time musicians can play most of the orchestral repertoire and add free-lance extras for the largest romantic orchestral extravaganzas. Today, musicians have such a high standard that adding 20-30 musicians – most of them on specialized instruments like Wagner tubas, cow bells, double bass clarinet, mandolin etc. – won’t affect the quality of the core orchestral sound. Adding an extra stand of 2 musicians to the string sections won’t affect quality noticeably if there are 8-14 permanent musicians sitting in them already.
So if you shrink an orchestra below the roughly sketched parameters above, damage to the quality of performances will go down.
Correction: since and orchestra is NOT tuned in a “tempered” way like a piano.
The gradual demise of orchestras would be healthy if we were developing meaningful forms of classical music to fill their place. The symphony orchestra and its literature is one of the great achievements of the human mind. And yet orchestras are also anachronistic, authoritarian, hierarchical, patriarchal vestiges of a form of romantic, 19th century cultural nationalism that ultimately brought horror upon the world. Orchestras and their ethos have little place in the modern world. We should be happy they are dying.
The problem is, we are developing very little to replace them in classical music — largely due to a lack of funding for non-commercial art forms. We are left with a one-dimensional wasteland where only commercially oriented art remains. Yeah, yeah, commercial art has some valuable forms. And yeah, there are still interesting developments taking place in classical music. But none of that changes the overall trend toward a narrowed world where only the marketplace defines what art will exist. The totalizing ethos of 19th century cultural nationalism is being replaced with the borderless totalitarianism of an unmitigated plutocracy.
William, what would you have replace an orchestra? A rock band? a string quartet? Your contention that we should find something to “replace” orchestras as a natural evolution of classical music is patently ludicrous.
I understand that a communist like you would see an orchestra as an evil, unjust factory of classical music led by authoritative – nay, dictatorial – conductors and managers. Yet blaming orchestras for fostering a kind of nationalism that you imply caused Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin is so overblown that this contention, too, is patently ludicrous.
Sometimes you write insightful comments, but this is not one of them. Please do not feel the need to comment on every blog entry just so you can read your own typing on the computer screen. If you have something intelligent to say, then by all means do share. If not, realize that you don’t have anything intelligent to say and spare us from needless drivel.
I outline some of the relationships between the history of orchestras, totalitarianism, and cultural nationalism in this article which was published by the M.I.T. Press — that band of nitwits and commie perverts… See:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/prophets.htm
The article you link to (which is very interesting) is about the orchestral tradition in Germany and Austria, with a focus on the Vienna Philharmonic. It says nothing about the orchestral tradition in, say, France, England, or the U.S. If it has bearing on the the orchestral tradition in the Western democracies, I do not see it. In fact you single out the Vienna Philharmonic for its lack of diversity in gender and ethnicity, implicitly comparing it unfavorably to the orchestras of the West. I don’t see how the weak and declining American orchestra can be construed as a threat to democracy.
In a word, the authoritarian, patriarchal, hierarchical, and highly nationalistic social structures of the symphony orchestra as a social metaphor remain whether in Europe or America. They reflect the values of an earlier time and do not represent the ethos of the 21st century – or at least so we should hope. The Romantics developed the symphony orchestra as an instrument of their worldview. Can we not develop ensembles in the so-called high arts to reflect the values of our own time? What would those ensembles be? Or is this not even a question that should be asked of average people outside the field?
Well, yes, the orchestra reflects the values of an earlier time, which have–in time–proven to have remarkably enduring powers. And actually there are replacements for the orchestra: radio, recordings, streaming music on the internet, DVDs, et al.–all the electronic ways of conveying orchestral music without an actual symphony orchestra to attend. So no, we don’t actually need an orchestra to play in our hometown (wherever that may be). But I don’t think most of the people who are concerned about the fate of orchestras consider that a happy development. And the people who don’t care–don’t care.
As for new ensembles to perform new music, I’m all in favor of that. But I just don’t see how the great literature for orchestra (as you describe it in your first post) can survive without an orchestra to play it.
I too hope there will long be orchestras as something like historical ensembles to perform the symphonic literature — one of Western culture’s greatest achievements.
There has not been a significant body of literature added to the ensemble’s core repertoire in about 80 years. The average date of compositions lies in the century before last. In spite of all the transcendent coitus, the orchestra and conductor were a childless couple.
There are quite of few very good composers writing for orchestras. Their work is decent, but it never really catches on because the ethos of the whole thing is just too anachronistic. People hear all that grandness, flash, and even bombast. They see seemingly important, big statements. And yet it falls on deaf ears. People just think, yeah, been there done that.
Classical music no longer has a central, flagship ensemble like the symphony orchestra. Maybe we don’t need one. Tyrannosaurs Rex has died. Those little scaly, warm blooded, rat-like creatures are the future — if there’s a future at all…