by Justin Davidson
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These days, when depressives can get their fix of morbid news more efficiently from the business section of the paper than from the obituary pages, an analysis of the economic health of American symphony orchestras gets a little lost in the general clamor of gnashing teeth. The latest report, commissioned by the Mellon Foundation and written by Stanford economics professor Robert J. Flanagan, makes it clear that running a symphony orchestra requires a high tolerance for paradox and fiscal frustration. You could raise ticket revenue by adding concerts, but that only means more empty seats. You could try to fill the seats by doing more marketing, but Flanagan shows that once you’ve covered the basics, new advertising initiatives are often not worth the investment. Neither are gala benefits, in many cases: the largest orchestras would actually save money by fundraising less. Vanishing subscribers are being replaced by single-ticket buyers, who are by definition harder to please, more expensive to reach, and less likely to return. It's also costing organizations more to earn less, because they have to keep paying those pipers. The one segment of the classical music world whose fortunes are improving is orchestra musicians whose income has “increased more rapidly than the pay of most other groups of workers.”
This doesn't mean that the symphony orchestras are no longer viable, or that they're about to be extinct, only that they have to do everything right. As Flanagan reports, “most orchestras cannot achieve economic stability by selling out their concert halls, or by ever-increasing marketing expenditures, or by drawing prudent amounts from their endowments, or by relying on direct government support.” (Nor, presumably, does it help to follow the opposite strategy: play less and less music and tell fewer and fewer people about them, until you’re performing a couple of encores in a darkened hall.) To stay financially stable, orchestras have to be deft and also lucky enough to inhabit the right community. A shuttered factory, a spate of crime, a surge in traffic, a beloved conductor’s departure – any of these can undercut an orchestra’s efforts at staying in the black.
Of course, Flanagan limited his analysis to financial reports, which means he couldn’t evaluate the fiscal impact of musical quality or imaginative programming. That may be the secret–or at least unstudied–weapon in the fight for solvency. After all, orchestras make money in order to make music, not the other way around.
