“It’s the same old tired people doing things in the same tired old way,” 1960s publicist Alix Williamson lamented. Others complained concerts had lost their zip, with performers losing rapport with their audience. The postwar immigrants who had been a loyal audience began aging out of the picture. “Every day I look at the obituaries, and every time I see a Russian or Jewish name, I say, There goes another customer,” moaned Ukrainian-born impresario Sol Hurok.
At the New York Philharmonic, the minimum number of weeks called for by the musicians’ contract had crept from thirty-five in 1961 to forty-two in 1963. In the following year, the schedule expanded by ten weeks to fifty-two weeks. Because nine weeks of paid vacation were also added to the contract, the Philharmonic musicians were only working one additional week. “Players had as much free time as they’d had twenty years earlier, but now they were being paid for it,” wrote Alice Goldfarb Marquis, in Art Lessons.6
Managers raided new endowments to pay for quantum leaps in expenses caused by the longer seasons and full-time employee benefits. The strategy was shortsighted, since endowments are meant to generate interest income rather than pay directly for higher operating expenses. Since orchestras weren’t selling out the greater quantity of concerts being produced, they relied heavily on donations and other unearned income.7
The Chicago Symphony had promised its musicians full-time employment by 1968, but the cost of doing so shot up quickly. The orchestra’s endowment shrank from $6.2 million to $1 million between 1964 and 1968, and its deficit tripled. During the same period, operating expenses grew 50 percent, outpacing a 30 percent growth in operating income.8
Cultural expansion continued even during the 1970s economic crisis, the “stagflation” of low growth and high inflation. The Atlanta Symphony’s budget mushroomed from $300,000 to $3 million between 1965 and 1975, as the organization expanded and added events, staff, and services. The syndrome highlighted a chronic problem with arts funding, which nonprofit analyst Waldemar A. Nielsen noted in his 1980 New York Times story “Where Have All the Arts Patrons Gone?”
Whatever happens, funding for the high arts will never be “adequate.” The more the money available, the more troupes and theaters and companies will be formed. This Malthusian, or rabbits-and-lettuce, phenomenon is a considerable element in the putative present crisis of the arts.9
Even former Ford Foundation chair McNeil Lowry, inventor of the foundation’s matching grant, denounced the maniacal growth. He blamed elitist motivations and predicted a regression to “ritual circuses of the lowest sort.” In desperation to raise income from ticket sales, groups turned away from their artistic mission and instead employed pop stars, crossover artists, and programs of hackneyed classical warhorses.
As the concept of culture as a public good became more accepted, arts organizations received—and spent—more money than ever before. In 1970, symphonies collectively took in $30 million but spent $76.4 million. By 1990, they took in $290.4 million but spent $688.9 million. More fund-raising resulted in more spending, even for debt-ridden organizations. The initial 1960s funding boom was meant to stabilize struggling groups, but monies were funneled into new expenses that were related to supporting additional performances instead of paying for existing needs.10
Full-service marketing departments in the 1980s were employed to sell all those extra performances, where orchestras in the fifties had simply announced concerts by sending a postcard to existing subscribers. Famous soloists and conductors, and their rising fees, were soon considered a necessary lure. Starting a relentless cycle, orchestras hired expensive development executives to pay for it all.
The business of classical music grew exponentially with this expansion of arts management, analysis, and lobbying. Some thirty colleges offered arts management degrees by the 1980s. Before long, arts funding struggled to finance not only performers but also a widening field of cultural scholars, consultants, and analysts, who pored over ways to increase the efficiency of artists and musicians.
Arts funding kept pace with spending growth during the phenomenal economy of the mid-1980s. Over twenty-five thousand leveraged mergers had driven the stock market to spectacular heights. The net worth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans tripled, and the new multimillionaires sought both tax exemptions with cultural donations and the instant elitism that comes with arts patronage. However, the age of excess came to an end one Monday afternoon, just two months after the Philharmonic returned from its 1987 tour. On October 19, the Dow fell 508 points, nearly 23 percent, marking the largest one-day drop on the New York Stock Exchange.
Fortunes shrank overnight. The country was already weakened by a 1982 recession and by the dual crises of farm debt and savings-and-loan deregulation—which cost thousands of Americans their life savings as well as $166 billion in government bailouts. Additional public resources were limited, since taxes, which had been cut by Ronald Reagan in 1981, brought in no additional revenue.11
Backstage, a small number of the busiest musicians with money to invest rued individual losses, yet few saw how Black Monday would affect the performing arts world as a whole. Foundations had given 14 percent of their grant money to the arts through the mid-1980s, but now began turning their attention toward poverty and other social issues. By 1990, only the Getty Trust, the Pew Trust, and the Wallace Readers’ Digest Fund still significantly supported the arts.12 Federal arts spending had decreased 24 percent between 1980 and 1988, while states slashed appropriations for their arts councils. In the private arena, the 1986 Tax Reform Act had decreased philanthropic incentives by lowering the maximum tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent.13
Ten to 12 percent of all corporate gifts in the mid-1980s had gone to cultural causes, but the flood of corporate mergers reduced the number of actual donors. Companies that had once sponsored the arts (in order to soften a harsh corporate profile) wanted, after a decade of excess, to support universally acceptable causes like health and education.14 Oil companies that had cashed in during the 1970s had less to spend after petroleum prices plummeted in 1986. In 1987, Exxon withdrew its $1.5 million sponsorship of the New York Philharmonic’s weekly radio broadcasts, which had been on the air since 1922 with only an eight-year break. In 1989, Exxon also ended its thirteen-year sponsorship of the television series Live from Lincoln Center and stopped funding the orchestra’s free summer parks concerts.
Corporate America was downsizing, but arts organizations, isolated from the financial reality of earned income, stuck to their growth model. Only a month before Black Monday, Donal Henahan described the malaise in a New York Times story:
The irony is that arts administrators, orchestra trustees, critics and others in influential positions have worked hard for generations to help bring about the current state of doubt and confusion. Driven by economic winds and, in some cases, fearsome ambition, they have sold the American public on the need for quantity in music rather than quality, on the necessity for glamour at the podium and on the crippling belief that music is a product that must be promoted, advertised and devoured like so much fast food.15
By 1990, twenty-seven of America’s forty largest orchestras reported deficits, nine of them over $1 million. Washington’s National Symphony was running a $17 million annual budget on its $13 million endowment.16 Managers blamed musicians’ salaries, which exceeded inflation by 6 percent in the late 1980s. At the best orchestras, musicians were taking home increasing salaries (their raises almost always outpaced inflation), but they weren’t the only ones. Frantic board members turned to orchestra executives and conductors to serve as figureheads and potential saviors of their organizations. In return, the executives and music directors used the symphonies’ financial woes to exact even higher salaries. Conductors topped the list of earners by averaging $700,000 at America’s top five orchestras in 1990. By jetting to multiple directorships around the world, they grossed hundreds of thousands more. Both Ricardo Muti and André Previn made $2 million a year.
News
paper arts critics rang the death knell, reporting that audiences had fled. To the contrary, classical audiences had grown slightly over the 1980s and would continue increasing up to the millennium. With 21.3 million attendees in 1982, that number reached 23.8 million by 2002, according to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Because the audience was now spread more thinly over so many more performances, attendance at each event appeared more sparse as a result.
The music industry not only produced more concerts but more musicians as well. Starting music education in kindergarten and elementary grades, Suzuki string classes and grade school bands across America encouraged bright young people to develop skills for which there was little demand. Though only 250 orchestra jobs were advertised each year—many paying under $20,000—music conservatories in New York, Boston, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Rochester, and Hartford churned out thousands of graduates each May.
Musicians became increasingly isolated from cultural economics, as nonprofit organizations provided a buffer between performer and patron. Sequestered in specialized arts schools and full-time symphony employment, musicians could avoid the very people who attended and paid for their concerts. This, as sociologist Paul DiMaggio has noted, further mystified the artists and gave them the illusion of sanctity. The mission of art as public service was forgotten, and many in the arts community came to believe that they were entitled to federal funding, as Joseph W. Zeigler pointed out in his book Arts in Crisis:
You, the United States, should be paying for me to create, because I’m here and I’m creating. As an artist, I’m an important member of the society—and so the society should be supporting me.17
Orchestra musicians demanded to be compensated just like employees in the private sector, even as the symphonies in the late 1980s failed across the country. Their musicians compared their conservatory training and twenty-hour weeks to those of professionals with advanced degrees who sometimes worked round-the-clock shifts. “Doctors make the same salary here as they do in other cities. So do lawyers. Why should musicians be the only ones to subsidize music?” said one Buffalo musician. The director of the American Symphony Orchestra League echoed that musician’s protest, saying, “The arts, unfortunately, don’t remain a high priority when budget deficits strike.”18
At a time when artists had come to expect government entitlements, citizens and politicians began questioning the need for a federal arts agency. Even choreographer Agnes de Mille, an initial supporter of the bureau, lamented the disappearance of a mission to help the best and brightest. “The whole tendency today is to help the unknowns and the unproven, but all that does is encourage mediocrity,” de Mille said.
The agency had granted money to controversial projects from the beginning. There had been the $500 grant for the seven-letter poem “Lighght,” $5,000 for Erica Jong to revise her zipless fuck in Fear of Flying, and $6,000 for a “space-sculpting” artist to throw party streamers from a plane. NEA funds helped create a film in which a dog was killed and a Mafia-themed opera production of Verdi’s Rigoletto.
Finally, two NEA-affiliated exhibitions ignited a firestorm of controversy in 1989. Artist Richard Serrano, who received a $15,000 grant from an NEA-funded organization, was targeted by the American Family Association for his Piss Christ, a plastic crucifix suspended in cow’s blood and the artist’s urine. The Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C., canceled The Perfect Moment, an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s gay-themed photography, because uproar over the show threatened the Corcoran’s federal funding. As NEA opponents hurled charges of obscenity, artists countered with accusations of censorship.
Marketed as a panacea to enlighten and unify, American culture had mushroomed into an industry far removed from its initial mission. The NEA episode provoked outrage among writers, actors, dancers, artists, and musicians, and I was among them. Believing that society would and should support culture even if its citizens showed little interest in attending arts events, I forged ahead with my “career.” I was thirty years old, and it seemed too late to change course.
CHAPTER
13
Danse Macabre
AVERY FISHER HALL was dark, with only center stage lights shining on a solitary music stand. Toward the back of the auditorium, a long screen hid the audition committee. I took a deep breath to prepare myself for the next fifteen minutes. I had been practicing and making reeds at least eight hours a day for a month. I was well prepared in terms of the music, but the best of my reeds was awful. Its tone was harsh. It didn’t always articulate clearly, and its intonation was funky.
I crossed the strip of carpeting (laid to muffle women’s shoes), as if I were walking the plank. Personnel manager Carl Schiebler adjusted the stand for me and then sat twenty feet away. The familiar gold and wood panels flanking the stage suddenly looked like a phantasmagorical maze. Shadows threatened from every corner. Usually, a hundred other musicians sat onstage. Now, every sound I made boomed through the hall.
I had discovered the stage fright drug Inderal, or propanolol, which blocks the receptor site for adrenaline. Unlike anxiety medication like Valium, Inderal lessens physical symptoms without affecting the brain. I’d gotten mine over the counter in Ecuador, but Inderal is best prescribed by a doctor. Too much sends people with low blood pressure or asthma into a tailspin. But at least my nerves wouldn’t flare up.
The orchestra had automatically advanced me to the semifinals, since I had substituted with the Philharmonic for a decade. As I blew into my reed to make a crowing sound, I imagined my teacher behind the screen, screwing his face into the lemon-sucking scowl he used whenever I played. A good reed should have sounded two octaves of the note C, but this one squawked a nasty C-sharp. Sliding it into my oboe, I tooted a few notes and began.
Missing the Mozart Concerto’s very first note, a low C, I stopped and took a deep breath. I had to blow harder to make this terrible reed respond. Behind me, I sensed Carl flinching. Beginning again, the phrase came out just as I’d practiced, my tone soaring across the cavernous hall. Good. On to the excerpts.
I could tongue unusually fast, but today my reed wasn’t cooperating. My articulation sputtered in Rossini’s Overture to La Scala di Seta. I missed another low C in Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. The intervals in the Don Juan were woefully out of tune.
No orchestra hires more than four regular oboists, who at the top orchestras will then usually stay until retirement. I’d been preparing for these fifteen minutes for ten years now, and there wouldn’t be another opening for ages.
Concentrate. Breathe. Show this stupid reed who’s boss.
Next, Samuel Barber’s dark, brooding First Symphony. My low B woofed, bouncing around the live hall with the memory of every imperfect note I’d played here. I couldn’t control my vibrato with this reed, either. On the way offstage, Carl patted my back. He knew. And I knew that not only would I not get the job but that I had just plummeted to the bottom of the Philharmonic’s sub list.
I treated myself to a taxi home and arrived just as Sydney was leaving the Allendale to play her Saturday matinee on Broadway. She had been hired a couple of years ago for a musical that promised to run for a decade or more. Sydney consoled me, mentioning that she hadn’t taken an audition in ages herself. She had done well with orchestra tryouts in the past, almost always advancing to the final round. I was surprised that she’d taken the Broadway show job, since most successful classical music freelancers like Sydney thought musical theater wasn’t serious art.
“It’s so awful,” Sydney said, when I asked how her show was going. She explained she was playing all eight shows this week, and not calling a substitute to fill in for her at all, since she didn’t have any other gigs. Classical freelance work had really fallen off lately, she said. She checked her watch and headed to the subway. I went upstairs.
I unlocked my apartment door and started to play my answering machine messages, feeling at loose ends. After spending ten years fantasizing about winni
ng the Philharmonic job, and more recently devoting my days to preparing for it, I didn’t know what to do next. Automatically, I went over to the reed desk, but I couldn’t bring myself to sit there. I took the audition music off my music stand to put it away. The stand looked strange with nothing on it.
Suddenly there was a crash in the bathroom. I ran to see if the shelving I’d tried to install myself had fallen, but instead there was a two-foot hole in the ceiling where the brown stain used to be. Wet plaster was everywhere, and water gushed into the tub and onto the floor. Turning off the water in the apartment had no effect, since the water was coming from upstairs, so I put a pail under the leak and went to find Angelo.
When I returned with the superintendent a few minutes later, the pail had overflowed onto the floor and water continued to pour from the ceiling. Angelo didn’t look alarmed. “Don’t worry, that’s not a leak,” he said. I looked at him incredulously, and he promised to return and fix the problem once he found some duct tape to patch it up.
In the days following my Philharmonic audition, I was paralyzed by a musical form of postpartum depression. Now that it was over, I had no direction. Although I loved classical music, I had never honestly been interested enough in the field to make it my career. I simply got hooked as a teenager because it earned me attention. Knowing I’d have to make the best of it, I felt stuck in a life that was wrong for me.
Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music Page 18
