Posted on 03/27/2019 9:38:30 AM PDT by Borges
hh, what a soft and easy life the striking Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians lead!
They show up for a concert, play for a couple of hours, then go home and relax until the next one. For these few hours of work they’re paid handsomely – and just for doing something they love!
What’s wrong with these “prima donnas”?
I put that term in quotes because it’s drawn from one of many messages I’ve received – via email and in person – articulating the underinformed sentiments referenced above. Ever since the CSO musicians went on strike on March 10, some people have been complaining to me about the pampered, “privileged” CSO.
Whether you side with musicians or management, can we agree on at least one thing? These musicians’ “privileges” are hard won – every day, week, month and year of their professional lives (and long before and after).
As one correspondent astutely put it, the problem is that these great artists make their work look easy. This leaves the general public unaware of the vicissitudes of performing classical music.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
Pfft. Just because something is hard to do, doesn’t mean it is worth lots of money to do it. It’s all about value to the customer / employer - not your expectations of your standard of living. Supply /demand - it is a simple as that when it comes to income.
Are they getting taxpayer money or is all income from selling tickets to events?
If all money is private, they deserve every penny.
I believe it’s mostly private money. Ticket sales, sponsorships and donors.
Lots of people have misconceptions about how orchestras work. Most probably do think they just show up and play. The real “conducting” of an orchestra takes place during rehearsals. Even though the musicians have music in front of them, they still have to learn what the current conductor plans to do with the music. I am amazed that they can play what they play under so many different conductors. The CSO is easily one of the greatest orchestras in the world.
They are gummint subsidized, tho.
They went on strike to preserve defined benefit pensions, but it’s pretty much impossible to properly fund such a pension scheme without outside subsidy. At $160k minimum salaries, that plan is going to be particularly expensive.
Given that these people are basically totally unnecessary in the modern world and can be replaced in toto with an MP4 download, I wouldn’t expect them to win out in the end on an economically outrageous demand.
Decades ago there was a mousy secretary at my company who played violin for the Detroit symphony orchestra....
My son is a professional musician. On the one hand it’s a hard life, on the other hand, it’s one huge party.
99% of professional musicians have it tougher than any symphony member.
Do you understand the 10,000 hour Theory which is about 8 to 10 years. It takes 10,000 hours roughly to Master about anything. Compile that with the amount of money you spend on equipment or instruments or other gear the transportation that you need to get back and forth between cities or venues, and the fact that the great majority of musicians never recoup any amount of money that they put into their craft let alone the large chunks of time they have to devote to learning the instrument, not to mention performing pieces on the instrument.
Musicians might get paid handsomely after perhaps 20 years of not getting paid much at all. It’s the nature of the biz, and very very few make it. My uncle was a professional musician in a time when popular music in this country was in its Hayday for performing musicians. And that was in the 20s 30s and 40s into the war. In the fifties it was suddenly not that obtainable and that’s when he went into teaching and started up a Guitar Academy in San Leandro California which did fairly well actually, but it was hard hard work and lots of promotion and salesmanship to get students in. Luckily it coincided with a boom in electric guitars by Leo Fender and his Fender Guitar and Amplifier company. It was good timing and quite coincidental.
> You can say that about all live musical performance.
No you can’t because the imprecision of each individual live performance is key to the charm of live performances.
However, the author makes very clear that in this particular type of performance, imprecision is by definition a flaw in performance. By their own standards, a single precisely correct recording of any given piece can never be topped by any live performance. The logical end is that for the genre, one only needs one precisely correct recording for any given piece, and all other performance is superfluous and flawed.
This is an institutional mindset problem. Music with creative expression lobotomized out of it having a diminishing audience not able to support its practicioners’ financial ambitions is not exactly a huge surprise.
99% of professional musician have not achieved as high a level of musicianship as members of the world’s great orchestras.
CSO musicians have it easy
A great orchestra like this is malleable to what any conductor wants. One of the great things about Classical is that no two performances sound the same. Even when it’s the same orchestra playing.
Compared to who?
> One of the great things about Classical is that no two performances sound the same. Even when it’s the same orchestra playing.
That’s the exact opposite of what the article author says is ideal for classical performance. Read it, it’s quite explicit.
How much is it if we outsource those jobs for cheap foreign labor?
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