Today we’re going to be looking at an editorial in The San Francisco Standard.
It has quite the extraordinary title: Hear that? It’s the sound of the San Francisco Symphony setting itself on fire.
First things first, please go read the piece. As unforgivably long as this entry is, there’s so much more in the editorial that does not appear here.
Plus, I want reporting on the San Francisco Symphony to get views. Everyone, especially the San Francisco Symphony, should want that.
So go, read it, take your time, pump up those analytics, and report back.
Here are my takeaways:
Writer Adam Lashinsky is a serious person
Let’s start with the background of the author of this piece.
He is a professional writer on the roster of Chartwell Speakers, and his biography appears in full on their website. 1
This (slightly outdated) biography states:
- “He has written about Silicon Valley and Wall Street since 2001.”
- “He is a weekly panelist on the Fox News Channel’s ‘Cavuto on Business’ program on Saturday mornings.”
- “His first book, Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works, was published in 2012 and was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.”
- “His second book Wild Ride: Inside Uber’s Quest for World Domination released in May 2017 has been nominated for the Financial Times and Mckinsey Business Book of the Year.”
Clearly, this is not some impractical artiste with his head in the clouds.
(This is also not some thirty-something lady blogger who cosplays as a journalist some weekends, has a reputation as a hysteric, and chose an 1890 painting of a girl playing a violin as her website’s header image.)
No, this is someone with real credentials. Lashinsky has written about the intersection of finance and power for decades. McKinsey (!) wanted to award his book a prize. Heck, he has shaken Neil Cavuto’s hand, presumably regularly. And he is a man. He is clearly a serious person.
This is not someone who can be brushed off easily.
Keep an eye open for Cynthia Hersey
Lashinsky opens his editorial with a description of a high-dollar donors’ gathering held this past February at the home of Board of Governors chair, Priscilla Geeslin.
Apparently it turned awkward quickly. While there, music director Esa-Pekka Salonen opened up about his belief that planned cuts were going to hurt the reputation and quality of the orchestra.
Donor Cynthia Hersey compared Salonen’s comments to a bomb dropping, and went on the record to say, “It let me know he was not a happy man. And it reflected his knowledge of the cuts that were coming.”
This is not the first time that Hersey has pulled the fire alarm. On May 11th, she, like Lashinsky, wrote a San Francisco Standard editorial about the situation. 2 It sounds like she understands the stakes, and has a theory of the case: “This isn’t just about losing a brilliant music director; it’s a wake-up call highlighting deeper issues within the symphony’s leadership and governance.”
Keep an eye on what Hersey says, writes, and does. During similar orchestral labor disputes of the past fifteen years in Detroit, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Baltimore, and other cities, audience advocate groups (most of them employing variations on the name “Save Our Symphony”) introduced new dynamics and new wrinkles to the traditional musician/management conflict. I don’t know Ms. Hersey or anything about her, but she seems like a prime candidate to ascend to a leadership position in a hypothetical Save Our San Francisco Symphony organization. I’m looking forward to hearing more from her.
CEO Matthew Spivey and board chair Priscilla Geeslin had a really difficult interview with Lashinsky.
Back to Lashinsky:
“The bottom line is that we’re both very optimistic about the future of the San Francisco Symphony,” CEO Matthew Spivey told me recently in a joint interview with Geeslin in his office at Davies Symphony Hall. “At the same time, we have to be honest with ourselves about where we stand. We’re facing some very real financial challenges.”
It’s not entirely clear, though, how dire those challenges are…
It looks like they lost Lashinsky within the course of one meeting.
(Also, as a side note, it’s interesting that they’re appearing together as a united front during these interviews, and continuing to leave Salonen out of them.)
The SFS leadership team is deeply worried about deficits and nabbing big dollar donations.
Spivey says the symphony had an $11 million operating deficit in its most recent fiscal year. But that’s only true if you leave out an “extraordinary” $15.1 million donation from the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation following an auction of its art collection in 2022. “That was a very, very special gift,” Spivey says. “It is not something that you would expect to be repeated.”
Well, yeah. At the risk of being a condescending Captain Obvious, if you leave out your gifts, every orchestra is going to run a deficit.
The traditional rule of financing thumb for a major orchestra is: one-third of income should come from donations, one-third from the endowment, and one-third from earned income like ticket sales or venue rental. This can actually vary quite a bit from ensemble to ensemble, but donations – even, especially “extraordinary” ones – are always a big part of the puzzle. It’s the whole non-profit model.
As for deficits, different leaders in the orchestra world have different ideas about what they mean and how they should be attacked. Some of these leaders have impressive real-world track records. Some of them don’t.
One of the people who does have a track record is Deborah Borda, the closest thing that the orchestra administration world has to a rock star. She accomplished great things heading the Los Angeles Philharmonic and New York Philharmonic. She hates cutting budgets, preferring to grow and innovate out of a financial problem. If you’re thinking, “That sounds like an approach that Salonen would appreciate!”, you are correct; the two worked together in Los Angeles and apparently remain great friends to this day.
In April 2019, Borda appeared on the Business of Giving radio show in New York City. The host asked her, “What’s your approach to managing finances of an arts institution like the New York Philharmonic?” Her reply:
It’s pretty straightforward, but one of the places you have to start is that even if we sell out David Geffen Hall… or if you sold out Walt Disney Concert Hall, that covers only about half of the cost of putting on a concert…
So, we are genuinely a not for-profit organization. When we’re doing great, we’re losing money. So, you have to think of it first of all in that context and really educate your board to understand that, because the future of the orchestras will not be in earning more money. It will be in philanthropy.
She goes on to explain in more detail what she believes the solution should be:
But I think, in addition to that, the next step is to really build a vision that the institution shares and moves towards. And when people share a vision, they’re inspired by it. They move towards it. You can then put the kind of mechanics in place that can raise the money that you need.3
By the way, remember the name Deborah Borda. We’re coming back to her. (Multiple times.)
Borda isn’t the only one who thinks this who has also delivered tangible results.
Kevin Smith, the CEO who dragged the Minnesota Orchestra out of an agonizing musician lockout that lasted from 2012-2014, memorably told a skeptical local news outlet in the summer of 2015:
There is nothing you can do to establish in perpetuity the [complete] financial security of an arts organization.4
Does that mean that an orchestra’s financial stability isn’t important? Of course not. But financial stability can’t be the orchestra’s reason for being.
The SFS is giving fewer concerts, but expenses are rising
Back to Lashinsky:
The symphony has been spending heavily on its own fundraising and administrative costs in recent years. Between 2018 and 2023, for example, development costs jumped 31% while administrative expenses more than doubled. In other words, the symphony’s leadership is cutting programming–which led to the loss of its conductor–even as it is spending more to run the place.
Interestingly, before its 2012-2014 lockout, the Minnesota Orchestra leadership team did a somewhat similar thing.
In November 2013, audience advocacy group Save Our Symphony Minnesota presented an obsessively researched 82-slide Powerpoint about the orchestra’s finances, without the Minnesota Orchestra leadership team’s approval or assistance.5 (In our defense, it was winter, we need things to do, and when the orchestra isn’t playing…)
One of the many striking charts was this one, tracing the relationship between total earned revenue and number of classical subscription concerts.
Because so many employees at an orchestra are paid annual salaries rather than paid per event, past a certain point, reducing concerts arguably proved to be a drag on the organization’s productivity.
I’m not saying that the SFS situation is identical to the Minnesota one, but the parallel felt striking. Plus, I never pass up any opportunity to share that ten-year-old Powerpoint. The link to the entire presentation in video form is here. I want budding audience advocates to discover it and be inspired. History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it can rhyme.
The SFS put up a huge amount of financial information on its website – but claims it needs more context to answer basic questions
Again, back to Lashinsky:
(Those figures come from the symphony’s publicly disclosed audited financial reports. The symphony, however, says they lack context and don’t reflect changes in its accounting. It contends that such factors show a less than 1% increase in development costs and a 10% jump in administrative costs.)
The San Francisco Symphony has posted roughly twelve years of 990s and audited financial statements on their website.6 This is an extremely unusual level of dedication to paperwork, and I applauded their transparency in my last entry.7
However.
I just opened each one up (because what else do people do on Friday nights? enjoy the warmth and companionship of other human beings? I don’t think so!), and my very rough rushed back-of-the-envelope calculation is that, between all of these 990s and audited financial statements, the San Francisco Symphony has made available 1,083 pages of context.
My copy of Don Quixote is 940 pages and the audiobook takes 39 hours and 37 minutes to read.
So I guess my question is, what went wrong with this orchestra’s comms strategy that a thousand-plus pages wasn’t enough context?
Negotiating the new musician contract hasn’t started yet, because…reasons…?
Another financial elephant in the room is that the symphony’s contract with its unionized musicians expires in late November, with a strike entirely possible. It certainly is in management’s interests to cite a cash crunch as a prelude to contentious bargaining. Spivey, who will head the negotiations, said talks have not begun.
A spokesperson for the musicians said they offered to begin talks over the summer to resolve the issue early, but the administration declined. A symphony spokesperson said that formal bargaining will begin in the fall: “We all agree that swift negotiations are the best path forward, and we are on the same page to build the groundwork for that.”
I’m sorry, what? What do you mean? What do you mean?
Let’s be clear: there is nothing holding these people back from starting negotiations now. They do not have to treat their negotiations in the same way that a high school writer would treat her physics assignments. (I failed physics.)
Even extremely damaged symphony orchestras have proven that negotiations can be completed successfully and early, if all stakeholders want it badly enough and there’s a baseline level of trust and goodwill.
After the six-month-long Detroit Symphony strike in 2010, musicians and management renewed their next contract eight months early. 8
That was impressive. But a few years later, the Minnesota Orchestra went even faster. Kevin Smith was hired as interim CEO in May 2014, a few months after the sixteen month lockout ended. He became adored by audiences as intensely as his lockout-happy predecessor had been loathed. In December 2014, Smith dropped the interim from his title, and by May 2015, Smith and the musicians had quietly negotiated a contract that extended out to the end of the 2019/2020 season. That contract renewal happened a stunning 21 months before expiration.
MinnPost reported:
The new contracts were negotiated privately among staff and musicians, with no press, attorneys or board members present. “I think it’s a great way to negotiate,” Smith said. “Small and informal and quiet.”
Zavadil agreed. “We came into this process very receptive to what Kevin was proposing: that it would be quiet, very collaborative and very open. That’s the way it went. As the process went along, we became more comfortable with each other. We were able to speak more and more freely, and that is what has enabled us to get here today.”9
So the question has to be asked:
If Kevin Smith pulled off that negotiation sixteen months out from the longest major orchestra lockout in American history, what’s keeping Spivey and company from doing the same?
Management isn’t looking for Salonen’s replacement, because…reasons…?
Spivey also said that neither he nor the board have begun searching for Salonen’s replacement, a process that at other symphonies has taken years.
This is insane. Salonen announced his departure three months ago, and it’s very clear that this relationship was on the rocks for a long time before that.
Let’s look closer at timelines.
According a December 2018 New York Times article, Salonen was approached about the San Francisco Symphony gig in August 2018 and signed the contract in December 2018, with his tenure set to begin in September 2020. 10
Now, in 2018, did we know that 2020 was going to end with John Oliver striding across an abandoned quarry and then spending a season’s worth of the Last Week Tonight budget to blast a giant stage in the shape of the numbers 2020 into fiery oblivion while uttering “f*ck you, 2020; get f***ed” and staring into viewers’ souls to the soaring strains of Holst and Strauss? No. No, we did not.
But you know what? Point still stands. You yourselves reached out to your potential music director in August 2018 and expected him to start two years later.
The Minnesota Orchestra’s Esa-Pekka Salonen is Osmo Vänskä, i.e, its own Finnish maestro who endured an excruciating professional crisis while caught in the malfunctioning gears of late-stage American capitalism. (The whole affair is worthwhile research for any San Francisco patrons.) After Vänskä announced he was leaving, the orchestra spent four years finding his successor Thomas Søndergård. 11 Yes, some of that search overlapped with the pandemic, but, again, point still stands.
Deborah Borda – remember her? – actually turned into a stalker to bag Gustavo Dudamel. I am not joking. Apparently he thought she was trying to seduce him. In the April 2019 interview I referenced earlier, she said:
It’s a funny story, I couldn’t get him to sign a contract to be Music Director. Every orchestra in the world was chasing after him actually – the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony. So, I followed him around the world. He, of course, tells the story much better than I do it. First he thought I was a stalker. He decided I was just a… I had a crush on him. I am old enough to be his mother but, he thought… maybe.12
These are the lengths that serious people from serious orchestras go to to secure and retain a serious music director. But the people at the top of the San Francisco Symphony are not serious people.
Salonen performs his last concerts as music director in a year. Just in case you need a reminder of how time works, a year is in a year.
Wait, if they aren’t negotiating with their musicians or a new music director, what is the leadership team doing right now?
Lashinsky didn’t ask this question, but I want to. I’m guessing the answer has to do with planning labor dispute war games? We know it’s not studying comms or PR.
With Salonen gone, the San Francisco Symphony is explicit about the fact it will have no artistic vision
Unfortunately, beyond cutting music-related costs, Spivey and Geeslin don’t seem to have a particularly clear picture of what they want the symphony to be. I asked them to articulate their vision, expecting to hear something ambitious, like being the best orchestra in the land or championing living composers over dead ones. Instead, I got talking points.
Spivey rattled off three goals: to bring in new audiences, increase the donor pipeline, and “live within the means that we have.” Geeslin praised the “incredible” orchestra and the team behind it while echoing Spivey’s desire to be “cautious” in its approach to finances.
This is only my second or third blog entry on this fiasco, but I am already so goddamn tired of hearing about this goddamn “pipeline.” Shut it down. Nobody is donating to an orchestra because they want to be part of a big pipeline. Your patrons are not petroleum. Again: goddamn.
Also, remember Deborah Borda’s 2019 words of wisdom?
But I think, in addition to that, the next step is to really build a vision that the institution shares and moves towards. And when people share a vision, they’re inspired by it. They move towards it. You can then put the kind of mechanics in place that can raise the money that you need.
So where is the vision? In your fantasy, everyone’s donating and new audiences are showing up for — what, exactly?
But wait: what if all of this is a real-life marriage story that reads like a rejected B-plot from Succession?
Strange rumors are also swirling. Chatter is emanating from musician groups that Geeslin—whose husband, financier Keith Geeslin, is a former president of the San Francisco Opera—is plotting to merge the two august organizations. It’s a suggestion that, on the one hand, is far-fetched—Spivey claims ignorance about these claims. But it is also conceivable, given that for decades, the city’s symphony and opera were, in fact, one organization.
I won’t speculate on this one, but I do have to admit, I hate that this makes a lot of things that don’t currently make sense, make more sense. To be clear, it’s a terrible idea, but it does sort of vaguely explain some motivations.
If it’s at all remotely true, I once again express my frustration that it is the curse of the orchestra-loving public to be forever held captive by the emotional, social, and psychological issues of the financier class. Sometimes it feels like patrons serve no purpose except to be the blurry background figures in their personal Shakespearean tragedies. To any multi-millionaires or billionaires reading, if your pasttimes include plotting to merge major American arts organizations with the help of your spouse, just — stop. There are other hobbies.
Deborah Borda really does not like these people!
Salonen, meanwhile, almost certainly isn’t changing his mind about leaving San Francisco when his contract expires. He declined through the symphony to comment. But his friend Deborah Borda, the former CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic, told me, “I have never seen him freer and more forward-focused.”
Borda knew exactly what she was doing with this quote: she’s embarrassing (humiliating?) Spivey and Geeslin. She’s painting them as stumbling amateurs who, in the words of one American songwriter, “lost the one real thing [they’ve] ever known.” She’s talking about them to the press like they’re Salonen’s controlling ex. I will go further: this is Deborah Borda singing Good Luck, Babe on Salonen’s behalf to the San Francisco Symphony management.
“You’re reading too much into this!” you may say. No! No, I’m not. Sometimes things are meant to be read into. Deborah Borda is the queen not just of orchestra management, but of image management. She is friends with Esa-Pekka Salonen; she worked with him in Los Angeles; Salonen was the man who introduced her to Dudamel. She was always going to be furious about any even perceived mistreatment or disrespect.
I do not know why you would want to piss off Deborah Borda, but also I’m not the one who dumped Salonen off a figurative San Francisco wharf.
Adam Lashinsky is out for blood, too
The last sentence of this editorial made me clutch my Midwestern pearls.
Now it will be up to San Francisco audiences to decide for themselves if the moves the current symphony leadership makes to replace Salonen are up to snuff–or if they need replacing themselves.
Let’s take a step back. Adam Lashinsky, who writes about finance for a living, was so unimpressed after talking to these people and researching what they’re doing that he was willing to write an editorial and finish it by just casually throwing out the idea of regime change. I mean, I won’t complain about it, but damn.
I think most people would agree that the modern era of orchestral labor disputes began in 2010 in Detroit. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve watched all of them in real time, commenting on some, just watching others. But I have never seen a public turn so hard on a leadership team before the negotiations between musicians and management even officially began.
I hope very much that I’m wrong, but it sure seems like this is going to be an absolutely wild debacle.
So what should patrons and donors do now?
What I would say to any patrons of the San Francisco Symphony who want to push back…
Organize. Bring your friends. (Make new ones!) Dive into those 990s. Recruit your writers, your bloggers, your artists, your social media mavens, your analysts, your donors. Raise money for your research and to support musicians. Click on all of the articles and spend time reading them so the fickle analytics gods are happy. Be annoying. Read up on past orchestral apocalypses; so many audiences have gone through similar travails before, and what seems intractable at first isn’t necessarily. Have hope. Be feisty.
Basically, get ready to fight for the idea that a small handful of people should not hold vetoes over the identities of our great American orchestras. Because if anyone is going to stop this fiery nonsense in San Francisco, it’s going to be you.
Sources
- https://www.chartwellspeakers.com/speaker/adam-lashinsky/ ↩︎
- https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/05/11/san-francisco-symphony-financial-crisis/ ↩︎
- https://denver-frederick.com/2019/04/30/9167/ ↩︎
- https://www.minnpost.com/twin-cities-business/2015/08/does-minnesota-orchestra-have-sustainable-labor-contracts/ ↩︎
- http://www.saveoursymphonymn.org/uploads/2/2/7/7/22773088/sosmn_presentation_the_moa_debacle_corrected_v2.pdf ↩︎
- https://www.sfsymphony.org/About-SFS/Impact-Financials ↩︎
- https://songofthelarkblog.com/2024/06/06/the-second-problem-of-the-san-francisco-symphony/ ↩︎
- https://songofthelarkblog.com/2017/09/27/following-up-on-leonard-slatkins-book-leading-tones/ ↩︎
- https://www.minnpost.com/artscape/2015/05/new-era-solidified-v-nsk-musicians-sign-multiyear-contracts-minnesota-orchestra/ ↩︎
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/arts/music/san-francisco-symphony-esa-pekka-salonen.html ↩︎
- https://www.minnesotaorchestra.org/press-room/press-releases/thomas-sondergard-debuts-as-minnesota-orchestra-music-director-designate-leading-the-right-of-spring/ ↩︎
- https://denver-frederick.com/2019/04/30/9167/ ↩︎
Song of the Lark 