Jay-Z and the voice of Rihanna opened Super Bowl XLIV with a remix of “Run This Town” featuring The Rutgers Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Kynan Johns (read up on that here). The tweet lines immediately lit up with reviews of “dope” and “sick.”
So seriously, kind of America’s truest orchestral music in 2010 if we’re going to get all genre merged and democratic about it, right? All the way down to the high drama, fireworks spectacle, and pulse-manipulating production values…you know, orchestra music. Enjoy it or hate it, in light of that big, scary, plummeting audience graph, it’s worth being conversant about, me thinks.
UPDATE: Lest we get distracted:
about kanye. look at the bloody orchestra. they are
the ones with real talent. fuck that pianist is epic.
Visibility is important, and people still seem to equate the look of an orchestra playing with “class.” Class doesn’t equal money though. One football player makes the equivalent yearly salary of a whole orchestra of professional musicians, but musicians are (usually) not put in the position of being repeatedly hit on the head in the course of a day’s work. These orchestral musicians from Rutgers are college students. They probably didn’t get paid a cent to make this commercial. As usual, the big money goes to the stars (who don’t need it).
One football player makes the equivalent yearly salary of a whole orchestra of professional musicians
And one professional orchestral musician makes the equivalent yearly salary of two or three “emerging” composers! The market supports pro football players’ exorbitant salaries, but it does not support the six-figure pay grade characteristic of American symphony orchestra players. Not that I don’t think great orchestral musicians are worth 100k a year, of course – but the identities of the “stars” and “who needs it” depends, of course, on whom you ask.
Very few orchestral musicians fit into the 100k bracket. Most freelance orchestral musicians barely make enough money to pay the rent from playing work. Most composers of non-commercial music, for that matter, whether they are “emerging” or have “emerged” (whatever “emerged” means) would be hard pressed to make enough money in a year to pay the heating bill.
The minimum salary for a professional football player is $285,000. So it’s only the veteran and star players who would be earning as much as an entire symphony orchestra, if that’s true.
Here’s a database of NFL salaries:
http://content.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/salaries/default.aspx
Here’s a list of the top salaries for 2009:
http://content.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/salaries/top25.aspx?year=2009
The top salary is a little under $26 million. Here’s a chart of orchestral salaries:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ai0UaGoQ2OY/Rok8m9B0CsI/AAAAAAAAAiA/6vkzBFmLS8E/s1600-h/ICSOM-CM.jpg
Plenty of those are well above $26 mil.
So from what I can tell, it’s correct to say that the best-paid professional football players make more than the equivalent yearly salary of some orchestras, but not all of them, and for the worst-paid professional football players (the mode, in terms of salaries), an entire orchestra would make many multiples of the football players’ yearly salaries.
As to who gets the money, while I don’t know the terms under which the Rutgers symphony participated in the commercial, it would seem precedent-setting if the educational institution (at least) was not compensated for its students’ involvement in a nationally televised video. Performer credits and all that. Maybe someone else has actual information on this subject to share.
FWIW, I liked the orchestral remix of “Run This Town” better than the original.
Molly adds: Thanks for the breakdowns!
I suspect we can agree it would be useful for the field to be bringing in more cash, even if it’s not on the NFL level, but that means we need to present our core artistry in a way that excites more audiences, even if that’s not on an NFL level either. I’ve been considering where the goals and current cultural relevance of various performance/genre areas may or may not intersect or piggyback, particularly after reading that the Rutgers conductor had to Google Jay-Z but also having weighed all those studies released of late which demonstrate that fewer and fewer Americans are engaged with the “performing arts” (at least as they are defined by the NEA and company). I mean, like you, I liked the new version, as did quite a few passionate viewers. We tiptoe towards this kind of thing–orchestra as backing band in a stadium on one side, indie band with orchestra on the subscription series on the other–but what if there were truer artistic collaborations or at least more prevalent overlapping spheres of influence across these aisles?
“I’ve been considering where the goals and current cultural relevance of various performance/genre areas may or may not intersect or piggyback…”
From Ned Sublette’s Cuba and Its Music:
“On February 17, 1860, (Louis Moreau) Gottschalk unveiled at the Teatro Tacon in Havana (Cuba) his large-scale work La Nuit des tropiques, subtitled Symphonie romantique. For this monster concert in the tradition of Berlioz…the orchestra included 68 clarinets, 48 violinists, 29 French horn players, 33 tubists, 38 trombonists, 45 drummers, 198 choirsters, and 2 triangle players. In addition…he brought the tumba francesa society six hundres miles from Santiago de Cuba and placed the group’s leader…in front of the orchestra, with his enormous drum. Cuba was the only slave importer in the New World by then, with the negation of the Africans’ humanity and culture a key factor in rationalizing the process. And a French-speaking American Jew put Santiago’s tumba francesa in front of the grandest orchestra Havana had ever seen…Gottschalk – for the first time anywhere – used black drums in symphonic music.”
Reading about Gottschalk and his vision for the orchestra (how radical it must have been back in pre-Civil war U.S.) and Berlioz’s “monster concerts” it seems to me we have at least some points of reference for these questions regarding a vision for a 21st century orchestra and its cultural relevance.
With the Saints win and with a new New Orleans mayor (elected by a landslide), I’m hearing a tone of optimism and hope for the future from my friends in that city that I frankly wasn’t hearing in the years post-Katrina. And Nagin to his credit did follow through on reaching out to Cuba (New Orleans’ longtime trading partner until the embargo) in his last year in office. There are possibilities now for that city’s future as well as the country’s that seemed naive to consider before.
A better writer than I could tie all of this together with this threads’ hating on football players, Jay-Z and Rhianna (who has a voice I really dig), the European model of the orchestra (based on Arabic and African instruments – that’s another topic…), and our own (me included) ignorance of history.
P.S. Who dat!!!
“I’ve been considering where the goals and current cultural relevance of various performance/genre areas may or may not intersect or piggyback, particularly after reading that the Rutgers conductor had to Google Jay-Z…”
In my experience they intersect somewhere in the neighborhood of versatility & connections. I had to Google Maxi Priest when I got hired to arrange “Set the Night to Music” for his Carnegie Hall debut. Things went fine after that.
Tom is a great composer and arranger for orchestra, folks. His arrangements for Le Vent du Nord are incredibly exciting.
And yest, it’s not an issue of whether or not you know who Maxi Priest is as a person, it’s whether or not as a composer/arranger you understand where he’s coming from musically, what his strengths and limitations are technically, and what might compliment him as a performer. The “google” thing is misleading.
” … musicians are (usually) not put in the position of being repeatedly hit on the head in the course of a day’s work.”
That’s only because Ormandy’s aim went off when he got old. 🙂
I think football players are definitely overpaid in comparsion to musicians. Members of an orchestra are probably some of the most talented musicians but they don’t get paid much. Its funny, if you know how to play music you get paid nothing, but if you know how to talk over a beat (like rappers), you get millions.