THE ART OF THE BOONDOGGLE

The most overpaid and under worked members of our society are symphony musicians. The entry-level salary for a musician at the Cleveland Orchestra is a cool $100620, and this will increase to $103610 by 2006. But this is meager when compared with the salaries of the other Big Five orchestras (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago); for example, the $113360 made annually by musicians of the New York Philharmonic. All this for a concert season which is shorter than a school year.

I expect that some will argue that professional athletes are far more overpaid, as they collect many times the emolument symphony musicians receive. But professional athletes draw crowds, while symphony orchestras play to rows of empty seats and people dozing off the effects of an expensive meal and bottle of wine. Symphony musicians may be superb masters of their instruments, but the average symphony audience is incapable of discerning the finer techniques of bowing or triple tonguing. As long as the symphony doesn't play any "sour notes," the average concertgoer would be satisfied with musicians of half the skill. In the case of music of the later twentieth century, they'd do just as well to hire people off the street and hand the instruments out at the door.

The ritual of the symphony concert is a relatively recent invention. In the time of Beethoven, municipal orchestras were nonexistent, and the role of the genius conductor (without whom Beethoven is obviously crap) did not arise until the latter half of the nineteenth century. I have gone on at length in other rants of this series about how this entire concert ceremony is a sham and designed to give the post-menopausal set a feeling of uplift at having witnessed a spectacle of great aht, but sooner or later, the rest of the public, the taxpayers, millwrights and carpenters, will tire of footing the bill for this grotesque ritual.

An expensive ritual it is. Using $100000 as an average salary for an average of 100 musicians for 100 orchestras, we see that taxpayers in the United States are paying a cool billion dollars a year for a ceremony that only a few matrons enjoy. Add to that total the amount paid to conductors whose job it is to do a sort of ballet which will magically educe a brilliant performance from mere music written by Beethoven. Many conductors have contracts which entitle them to one-million dollars or more a year. Some make more, many make less, but it all adds up. A conservative estimate of the aggregate amount paid to conductors annually would bring our total for the cost of maintaining local symphony orchestras to one billion, one-hundred thousand dollars. I say that it's time to do music a favor and pull the plug on this anachronism, then take that one billion, one-hundred thousand and put it to good use by teaching music in the public schools again. That amount of money could buy a lot of sheet music and a lot of instruments.

Once students learn the fundamentals of music, they will no longer be content at hearing three chords strummed over and over on an electric guitar, and they will develop an interest in classical music. Attending a symphony concert is boring enough, and for an adolescent it must be torture, but kids like doing things such as singing in the choir and playing in the band. That's the way to cultivate a taste for great music in our children, not forcing them to watch a bunch of old men sawing away on heirloom instruments.

Finland considers music to be an essential part of the school curriculum, and as a result, classical music is thriving there. It's amazing how this tiny (5.2 million population) nation seems to be producing the world's best conductors—e.g., Esa-Pekka Salonen is the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Jukka-Pekka Saraste headed the Toronto Symphony; Osmo Vänskä is the music director of the Minnesota Orchestra. If a billion dollars were dedicated for music education in the USA, would it have similar results? To be sure, the United States has a greater percentage of dullards than does Finland, but there are undoubtedly men of imagination and talent here who have never had much exposure to sophisticated music, and as a result instead applied their talent to marketing or crooked banking.

Another reason to abandon the ritual of the symphony concert is that the repertoire has become so limited as to include the same concert warhorses over and over. I find it difficult to imagine that anyone would want to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or the Fifth of Shostakovich ever again in this lifetime, but orchestras are reduced to playing them again and again. In such a situation, it's time to call it quits. It's the reason most mature classical aficionados come to prefer chamber music.

In chamber concerts, the level of performance is generally better, and the music is better as well. Brahms did not die a rich man because his four symphonies were occasionally performed by the few orchestras of the time capable of playing them, Brahms and his publishers made their money by providing sheet music for the enjoyment of the butcher and barrister and bookseller who would meet above the saloon to play chamber music. If you had walked through the streets of Vienna during the later nineteenth century, you would certainly have heard the Hungarian Dances of Brahms or a Strauss waltz coming from the cafés and taverns and from the schools and homes. Because chamber music was where the money was, composers such as Brahms put their best material into it. The opening theme of his Trio, Opus 8 is far more fetching than the big theme of his First Symphony.

The great music we admire today sprouted and blossomed in an environment in which people, rather than attending a ritual in which "geniuses" make music for them, made the music with their own hands. It's time for classical music to return to these roots and jettison the idea that only certified specialists are capable of understanding and interpreting Mozart. Toscanini and Reiner were geniuses only in the same way that Hitler and Mao were geniuses—and they often had the same demeanor. The mystique and glamor surrounding the maestros and artists is illusory, transitory and hence of no value, and the orthodontist who plays Chopin to forget about the mouths he is forced to wire gives a far greater performance than Rubinstein ever did.