A little rain…

…falls into every life.

Today, with regret, I’m going to rain a little on the Atlanta Symphony. Of course I’m celebrating their return to life, especially for the musicians’ sake. They’re once more doing what they love, getting paid, and (no small thing) getting healthcare.

But along with that, here are three things to think about:

The contract

Crucial to the settlement was an increase in the number of fulltime musicians (receiving full pay and benefits). Once the Atlanta Symphony had 95 fulltime members. That number fell, once the bad financial troubles started. In 2012 (after an earlier fight between musicians and management, plus a lockout) it was reduced to 88 players. Now, thanks to musicians retiring or leaving, there are fewer than 80.

This, the musicians said (with much support), is untenable. The orchestra can’t maintain its quality without more fulltime players than it currently has.

So here’s what the new four-year contract promises. 77 players in the first year, and then in the remaining years, increases to 81, 84, and 88.

But where will the money for that come from? The musicians think that management has been holding money back, but even if that’s true, orchestras everywhere are feeling rough financial pressure. Which gets worse over time. Can Atlanta really buck the trend, and bring back what might be more financial comfort than other orchestras have?

“Cultural Jewel ”

Atlanta’s music director, Robert Spano, in an extraordinary statement he released during the conflict, pretty much took the musicians’ side, and called the orchestra “a cornerstone of Atlanta.”

And in an interview with the New York Times, he called the orchestra the “flagship” of Atlanta’s culture, and the city’s “cultural jewel.”

But for whom area those things true? In a League of American Orchestras publication, called Fearless Journeys: Innovations in Five Symphony Orchestras, we can read about the Memphis Symphony. It found that only four percent of people in Memphis were “generally aware” of its existence. Leading the orchestra to ask whether, if it went out of business, the other 96 percent would care.

Let’s assume the numbers would be better in Atlanta, because the city might support high culture more, or because the orchestra is more famous than the one in Memphis. Or because it fought a public struggle to survive.

So what would its percentage of awareness be? Twenty-five percent? That seems wildly optimistic. Ten percent? Even that — given four percent in Memphis —  might be a stretch.

So if — with whatever honest passion — we say that the Symphony is Atlanta’s cultural jewel, do we convince the wider world that this is true?

(Some context: In the midst of the Symphony mess, the Atlanta NPR station, WABE, announced that it would cut classical music broadcasting, replacing 30 hours of it each week with news and talk.)

27 Grammys

We’ve heard that number quite a lot during the Symphony fight, from Symphony supporters, including the Mayor of Atlanta, who proudly referred to the Grammy-winning Atlanta Symphony. Which has won more Grammys than almost any other individual or group.

But does anyone remember that many of those wins were controversial? Nobody challenges the Grammys won in recent years with Spano. But the numerous awards (the bulk of the total) that were won under Robert Shaw, in the 1980s and ‘90s, caused a commotion.

Two newspaper stories can document that, one published in 1987 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the other appearing in 1993 in the New York Times.

The Inquirer story starts like this:

During last year’s Grammy Award event, recordings by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra – generally recognized as a good but not first-rank ensemble – so completely monopolized the list of classical-music nominees, and then won so many of the awards, that a number of observers suspected something was amiss.

They were right.

The Times story gives full details, which I’ll summarize.

The Grammys are awarded by NARAS, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which is the trade association of the record industry. It’s a membership organization. Anyone who’s participated in some minimum number of recordings can join. The members vote on the Grammy awards, just as members of the Motion Picture Academy vote on the Oscars.

Most of the members, of course, don’t work in classical music. So a small number of votes can sway the classical tally, and that’s apparently what happened in the ’80s and the ’90s, when the Atlanta Symphony won. The Atlanta NARAS chapter recruited players from the Symphony and singers from the symphony chorus, offering them discounted memberships.

As a result, The Atlanta chapter jumped from 265 members to 430. And then, according to the Times:

…the addition of 165 members, heavily concentrated in the small classical field and clearly interested in promoting their own work, was enough to throw the classical Grammy process into chaos nationwide. The Atlanta Symphony, which had never won a Grammy, was suddenly nominated for 12 and won 5 for two different recordings in 1986.…An immediate uproar lit up the pages of Billboard magazine [the trade journal for recording], which seldom finds much excitement in the classical end of the recording industry.

No one ever proved that voters from Atlanta tipped the scales. The votes are secret, and NARAS doesn’t say how many members vote in each category, so we don’t know for sure that more people voted for classical music in 1986 than previously had.

But (as I remember from my own experience back then) the feelings reported in the Times were widely shared. And NARAS later banned the kind of recruitment its Atlanta chapter did.

So please understand me. I’m not saying the Atlanta Symphony is an evil institution. Or that it doesn’t deserve — richly deserve — the Grammys it more recently won. Or that anything that happened in the past means that the Symphony doesn’t now deserve support.

I just think that in a time of crisis, of course we cheer for the home team, sometimes loudly. But we still have to see reality.