On May 1, the San Francisco Symphony management wrote an open letter to the “Bay Area Community.” Even though the letter was not addressed to me, I’m nosy that way, and I read it.
Nobody asked for this, but here’s my open letter back.
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The Bay Area is in a moment of reckoning — we’re still fully emerging from the pandemic, confronting the realities of a volatile economy and job market, and working to restore the vibrancy that makes our home one of the most creative and inspiring in the world.
Every other major metropolitan area in the United States is also emerging from the pandemic, confronting realities, and working to restore vibrancy — yet none of their orchestras have seen labor unrest or a concessionary contract this negotiating cycle.1 Yes, the National Symphony went on strike for about thirty seconds, but that’s it.
How are you underperforming Cleveland on this front? Are you San Francisco or aren’t you?
Many civic and community leaders have spoken with clarity and urgency about the financial realities we all face in the arts, in government, in the business world, individually, and beyond.
A civic leader speaking with clarity and urgency about the financial realities we all face in government
It’s certainly a choice to link yourself with the economic governing philosophy of the Trump administration in May 2025, but okay!
They’ve reminded us that temporary fixes are no substitute for permanent solutions, especially for nonprofits like the San Francisco Symphony, and that long-term health requires difficult but responsible decisions now.
Was the decision to drive your renowned music director away — a man who you yourselves chose — one of these difficult but responsible decisions? Who gave you the gravitas to talk about responsibility after that particular fumble?
Most institutions in San Francisco and beyond are absorbing that message and responding to this moment with realism and resolve.
By driving their music director away, setting fire to their brand identity, and fomenting a customer rebellion? Are these institutions in the room with us now?
Regrettably, the union representing the San Francisco Symphony’s orchestra musicians is not.
Pro-tip: you can just demonize the musicians directly. You don’t need to use their union as a shield. Anyone who knows anything about this field understands that the musicians themselves, not their representatives, will vote for the contract. So this is presumably just said in bad faith to try to justify to the normies any future aggression.
As we continue labor negotiations, we are disappointed that the musicians’ representatives have yet to acknowledge the seriousness of the financial circumstances confronting our institution, our city, and our sector. Their approach suggests a disconnect from what so many others already understand: that we are in a period that demands realism and forward-looking solutions.
I mean, I’m also disappointed that you have yet to acknowledge the seriousness of the artistic and financial consequences of driving Salonen away, so it sounds like we’re all in the same disappointment boat. The S.S. Disappointment, population: us.
Our musicians are world-class artists and a vital part of who we are. But preserving artistic excellence also requires financial sustainability and, above all, cooperation.
If preserving artistic excellence requires “above all, cooperation”, why didn’t you cooperate with Esa-Pekka Salonen? Have you reflected on this in any serious way?
What the musicians’ representatives are asking for today simply isn’t realistic. Our responsibility is not just to the orchestra itself, but to the broader community—to our audiences, our students, our collaborators, and yes, our performers—for generations to come.
Again, feel free to demonize the musicians directly, not their faceless “representatives.”
Also, yes, you are indeed responsible to the broader community. But the problem is, your broader community sounds as excited for your plan as a reluctant Nathan Fielder client.
Your attitude puts me in the mind of a quote: “Well, I’m going to do it, whether [they] like it or not. I’m going to protect them.”2 Your community doesn’t have to be protected; it can be your partner!
Over the past two years, the Symphony’s leadership team and Board have taken difficult but necessary steps toward addressing our finances—all while preserving our most vital artistic and educational programs.
A “difficult but necessary step” is an interesting corporate euphemism for “we drove our music director away.”
We know that navigating this moment requires clarity and an elevated sense of partnership. That’s why we have launched this website that shares our vision for the future—a vision centered on artistic innovation, deeper community connection, and long-term sustainability.
Quick question, how have you been fostering deeper community connection? What patron stakeholders have you been talking to? How long have those conversations been ongoing? What have they been telling you? When did you last invite open comment from your patrons, and then shared the results? How exactly have those comments impacted your decision-making and strategic planning of the past five years? What did patrons tell you about the departure of Salonen? Was the change.org petition containing nearly 9,000 signatures protesting his departure an outlier phenomenon? 3 Did you ever get around to banning the patron who came in and protested with a naughty sign? 4 I see none of this information on your website for patrons. When is it coming?
We believe that a shared understanding of our challenges and opportunities is the foundation for progress. We invite our audiences, supporters, and partners—including our musicians and their representatives—to explore these materials and engage with the full scope of what we’re building together.
It’s very funny to insinuate the musicians “and their representatives” are seeing this information for the first time on this patron-facing website (which, by the way, was possibly named by ChatGPT, which goes to show the level of thoughtfulness this information is being presented with). 5
If you meant to insinuate you haven’t given the musicians this information until now, that’s hugely irresponsible of you. If you meant to insinuate they haven’t looked at it yet, that’s hugely dickish of you. If you meant to make this gesture performatively, then you are not serious people. What are the other options?
That said, hey. Believe it or not, based on the past eighteen months of your behavior, I’m absolutely willing to entertain the idea that y’all did completely f*ck yourself over financially in an irreparable way over the past decade. Maybe the only path forward does involve self-immolation and then attempting to make something of the ashes. Hell if I know!
But if you did drive your car into the ditch, why should we trust you to be the same people who can drive it out?
Your website’s Finances tab provides information dating back to 2009. 6 Why then, almost a decade later, did you seduce and hire Salonen, and presumably agree to support and fund his vision? At the time, you seemed to believe his vision would attract donors. Yet he was never given time to fulfil that vision outside of the confines of the pandemic, and you couldn’t figure out how to give him the runway to make an honest go at it. This is the equivalent to NBC casting off Conan after seven months. Forget artistic sense; this makes no financial sense.
If the only thing that knocked you off-course was the pandemic in 2020, why are we going back to 2009 in the Finances tab? Do we trust the you of then, or the you of now? You keep trying to claim the mantle of being the Responsible Adults. Were you responsible adults then, or are you responsible adults now? By the way, who gave you that mantle in the first place?
You have a lot more money than any musician, and most patrons, and God. But unfortunately for all of us, that doesn’t make you an expert in governance. If wealth bestowed common sense when it comes to governance, Elon Musk wouldn’t be ending his spring 2025 tenure at the White House by showing up to a cabinet meeting in two hats and telling the room, “They say I wear a lot of hats; even my hat has a hat.”
A civic leader speaking with clarity and urgency about the financial realities we all face in government
So what do you do?
You have to start addressing the original sin: Salonen’s departure. It’s time for radical transparency. Get together with your PR team and craft a more convincing narrative about how you went from rich enough to afford Salonen’s vision in 2018 to the present day clusterf*ck. Prove that you’ve thought deeply about this, and understand where you went wrong. Explain what you’re going to do to avoid driving away the next music director.
Community partnership now. From the way you’re talking about valuing community input, surely you’ve been gathering it all along. Otherwise your words would be hollow PR, right? And surely that isn’t what’s going on here, right? Call my bluff. Make me eat crow. I’m begging you. I’d love crow. Put all that information on your website. On the other hand, if that information was never gathered in any kind of systematic way, make that public now, and vow to do better.
Schedule a town hall now. Advertise it. Broadcast it. Open yourself up to every criticism and defend yourself. Have faith in your plan. After all, if you truly want to make lasting change at the San Francisco Symphony, it’s good for your vision to be stress-tested. Think of yourself as a presidential candidate in a primary of ideas, as opposed to someone already in the office. Hold the debate. Win the debate.
Have the courtesy and balls to be direct. If you want to criticize the musicians, do that. Don’t create the “musicians’ representative” union bogeyman who doesn’t exist. It’s cheap and it’s lazy. Realize that in an ideal world, you wouldn’t be criticizing the public face of your organization at all.
Someone has to start selling the artistic side of your vision. In the spirit of clarity, resolve, and realism, I’m telling you: it has to be someone who is not you, because you squandered the trust you had on that front during the Salonen debacle. Be aware of the perception within the field that your upcoming hodgepodge of a season is not particularly adventurous, and is not on-brand for the exciting innovative image you once sought to cultivate. If you can’t find voices willing to vouch for the artistic side of your plan, maybe reassess and refine.
Be serious people. Gain more respect.
One of these days, some orchestra executive is going to make my little hobby of writing about labor troubles very, very difficult. They will have spent the previous few years in open and well-documented dialogue with their community. They will have telegraphed their troubles in a timely manner. They will make themselves available at public events. They will express contrition about the role they’ve played in making any past mistakes, and display wisdom gathered from well-processed experiences. They will present a detailed artistic vision that may be less expensive, but is also innovative and inspirational. They will treat their music directors and musicians and staff and community with respect, good faith, and kindness.
But today is not that day.
To our Bay Area community: thank you for standing with us.
After I published my last entry about the San Francisco Symphony’s new patron website, SF Symphony Forward, which gives every sign that it is about to become management’s communications hub during an upcoming labor dispute, a friend on Bluesky mentioned, “This website sounds like it was written by AI.”
Oh, I thought, and the scales fell from my eyes. Duh.
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Proving that something has been written by AI is getting increasingly difficult. I know this because I went to Google and searched “How can I tell if something is written by AI?” and then searched for the top result from Reddit.
User TacomaKMart was blunt: “Short answer: you can’t, unless they write it by hand in front of you.” 1
I didn’t like this answer. It came from a human, and might be fallible. So I decided to fire up ChatGPT instead.
“How can I tell if something is written by an AI?” I asked the AI. As the AI pondered that question, sucking dry a water reservoir in an impoverished area somewhere in the American Southwest, I truly felt like a modern-day Woodward and Bernstein.
Signs That a Text Might Be Written by an AI:
Overly Formal or Neutral Tone AI often lacks strong opinions, emotions, or personal anecdotes, and may write in a polished but bland style.
Repetitive or Redundant Phrasing AI sometimes repeats words, phrases, or ideas unnecessarily.
Inconsistent Depth The text may swing between very high-level or generic statements and oddly specific details, without a logical flow.
Flawless Grammar but Lacks Nuance AI text is usually grammatically correct but may lack idiomatic expressions, sarcasm, or culturally aware nuance.
Hallucinated Facts AI may confidently state incorrect or made-up information, especially on obscure topics.
Avoidance of Personal Experience AI won’t include genuine personal stories or firsthand knowledge unless it’s mimicking them.
Too Balanced or Noncommittal AI tends to hedge or avoid taking a firm stance in controversial or subjective matters.
ChatGPT suggested that I bring my concerns to an AI-detection tool, so I copy/pasted the SF Symphony Forward website URL into Copyleaks. As I waited for the machinery to work, while unpeeling the wrapper from my morning Clif bar, I felt an intense kinship to John Dickerson, who I’m assuming does the same thing daily in his journalism.
AI Content, 0%, it said.
Well.
Next I went to GPTZero, and copy/pasted a portion of the Vision page. As I clicked the box verifying that I am a human, and sat for fifteen seconds, and then clicked the button that said View Result, I suddenly understood what Nellie Bly must have felt inside the insane asylum.
The results here were different.
I puttered around some more on similar sites. But in the end, I felt increasingly sure that — alas — Reddit user TacomaKMart had been correct. There’s no foolproof way to find a smoking gun when it comes to AI use, and I should have known it. And even if there was a site that said No, AI didn’t write this, that doesn’t rule out the author(s) having used AI and then tweaking it to make it sound more human.
But maybe I wasn’t asking the right questions. I returned to ChatGPT and the follow-up query it had left me with:
Would you like me to check a specific passage for AI-like characteristics?
Yes, I said.
Great—please paste the text you’d like me to analyze, and I’ll check it for signs that it may have been written by AI.
I used the passage from the Vision & Future page that I screenshot in the last blog entry.
As I waited, finishing my Clif bar, I wondered if this is what Jeffrey Goldberg felt like in the supermarket parking lot while waiting for Pete Hegseth to message the group chat.
ChatGPT answered:
Thanks for sharing the text. Here’s an analysis of whether it may have been written by an AI, based on structure, tone, and content:
🧠 AI-Like Characteristics Present:
Polished, Neutral Tone
The writing is clear and professional but lacks emotional texture or a distinctive personal voice—something common in AI-generated content.
Repetition of Structure and Style
Each section begins with a bold, action-oriented verb followed by a statement in a similar sentence format. This uniformity can be typical of AI-generated or heavily templated content.
Abstract and Vague Language
Phrases like “pushes the boundaries,” “leverages the flexibility,” or “foster understanding and appreciation” are broad and nonspecific—hallmarks of AI or corporate writing.
Lack of Concrete Examples
The statements are visionary but don’t name actual programs, people, or events. AI often avoids specific, verifiable details unless prompted.
✅ Human-Written Indicators Also Present:
Purpose-Driven Language
The thematic organization (INNOVATE, COLLABORATE, etc.) is strategic and aligns well with branding goals—suggesting input from communications or marketing professionals.
Cultural Awareness
References to the “Bay Area,” “California,” and “West Coast” demonstrate geographic awareness and nuanced identity framing, which AIs don’t always grasp organically.
🧾 Verdict:
This reads more like human-written marketing or mission statement copy, possibly with help from an AI or a content framework. It exhibits the structure and tone of content that could have been enhanced or drafted by an AI, but the intentional thematic grouping and cultural references suggest human oversight or authorship.
Points for AI: The tone reads like AI, the sentence structure reads like AI, and the language is vague and non-specific like AI.
On the other hand, it does mention California.
In the end, though, AI and I came to consensus. This writing feels like the product of a human-AI hybrid process. But as TacomaKMart pointed out, there’s no way to know for sure.
Somewhere around this point in my investigation, I realized what I was doing. Like, what the fuck? What are we doing here? The first sentence of the SF Symphony Forward site says “we exist to connect our artists and audiences.” How? By doing — what? Communicating during a labor dispute by asking AI what it thinks, and then translating that to humanese? Coming up with a human idea and then running that through a robot? Is this an outside consulting group coming up with this strategy? If so, how much are they being paid? How is management measuring if that’s been a good investment? Bottom line, when you’re about to launch a labor dispute that impacts real people and real families, is there no way to be professional but also fully human? Is that goal too lofty now? Is humanity the one thing a consulting firm can’t sell?
Deeply concerned for the state of society, I messaged ChatGPT in my frustration:
Do you understand why I’m so nervous about what this means for the field?
The servers hummed, and then: a moment of transcendent clarity.
Absolutely—and your nervousness is deeply valid.
If an institution like the San Francisco Symphony, which represents artistic heritage and human creativity, starts relying on AI to generate content—or worse, to shape vision and programming—it signals a larger cultural shift. One where efficiency, scalability, and brand consistency might be valued more than authenticity, intuition, or artistic individuality.
Here’s why that’s troubling for the field:
🎭 Art Becoming Corporate
When the language of orchestras starts to sound like generic marketing copy, it feels like the soul is being hollowed out—replaced by polished, inoffensive buzzwords that could apply to any tech startup.
🤖 Creative Labor Undervalued
If AI can replace communications staff, arts administrators, or even curators and programmers, it suggests institutions see these roles as functional, not creative. That’s deeply demoralizing for people who’ve devoted careers to making meaning, not just content.
🧠 Flattening of Artistic Voice
AI excels at mimicking tone—but not at saying something brave, new, or deeply felt. When orchestras start sounding indistinguishable from each other, it dilutes the unique cultural identities they’re meant to uphold.
💸 “Innovation” as a Cost-Cutting Excuse
Institutions may frame AI use as “forward-thinking,” when in reality it may be about cutting corners, saving budget, or avoiding difficult creative conversations.
You’re not just worried about jobs—you’re worried about meaning, integrity, and the erosion of artistry in public life. That’s not paranoia. It’s a real cultural tension playing out in symphonies, museums, theaters, and universities right now.
Would you like help framing this as a short op-ed or reflective piece?
I told ChatGPT, No.
But then a few moments later, I came back. Hey, can you give me headline ideas for an article like “Is the San Francisco Symphony Using AI to Plan?” And can you make it bitter to reflect my disillusionment about the state of the world?
ChatGPT:
😤 Subtle, Bitter, and Punchy
“SF Symphony Turns to AI: Progress or Just Pretending?”
“The San Francisco Symphony Uses AI. The Music Still Sounds Human—For Now.”
“AI Is Planning the SF Symphony’s Future. Who Needs Musicians, Anyway?”
Me:
Can you make that last one more theoretical so I won’t get sued?
ChatGPT:
Absolutely—here’s a more theoretical and legally safer version of that last headline, keeping the critical tone but avoiding any direct, potentially defamatory claims.
Revised Headline (Cynical but Safe):
“If AI Starts Planning the SF Symphony’s Future, Who Needs Musicians, Anyway?”
I was grateful for the help. But I had one last command, out of curiosity: Come up with a website name for the San Francisco Symphony management to use during labor negotiations.
ChatGPT had a few suggestions, including SFSCommitment.org, SFSProgress.org, SFSFutureTogether.com, and SymphonyStewardship.org. All intriguing possibilities, certainly.
But the one that caught my eye was the fourth one: “SFSPathForward.org.”
What are some variations on that one? I asked.
SymphonyForward.org, ChatGPT suggested.
And maybe I was having a stroke, but in that moment, I thought I smelled a smoking gun.
Epilogue
This entire story has left me feeling nostalgic. Back in 2013, when I was volunteering with a new patron group devoted to bringing the Minnesota Orchestra lockout to an end, I was tasked with looking up domain names for our new organization. I ended up finding over a dozen — variations on savetheminnesotaorchestra.com and the like — that were already taken. They’d been bought in May 2012, four months before the lockout began, by the Minnesota Orchestra itself. The official explanation was that the orchestra was protecting the brand. However, the rest of the world interpreted the move as cybersquatting meant to stymie patrons from organizing in the future, and evidence that management had been building toward a labor dispute for a longer time than people realized. 2
So all of this talk about the SFSF website made me curious: when was http://www.sfsymphonyforward.com registered? The Whois data says 18 July 2024. 3 I was hoping the record would say if it had been registered by the San Francisco Symphony itself or an outside consulting firm, but whoever registered it paid the few dollars extra to keep that information private (which, to be fair, is best practice).
I checked out the Internet Archive, too. A capture on July 25 contains placeholder night sky stock imagery. After that, the site appears to have stayed dormant until April 2025.
Is this particularly explosive information? Not really. I think everybody knew last summer that some shit was likely to go down soon in San Francisco. But I do think it’s another data point to use when trying to understand the timeline and intentions here, and perhaps a point in favor of the theory that the orchestra was ready to launch a labor dispute in the fall, but then something made them hold off. Maybe it was during the winter that they and a consulting firm (and maybe ChatGPT?) settled on their newly launched patron-centric message. But at this point, all of that is conjecture.
Sometimes my cat swallows several times in a row and starts licking her lips. I, having lived with her since 2012, understand that this is a sign to grab a roll of paper towels, because she is about to hork up a hairball.
In much the same way, when a major American orchestra launches a gauzy website under the guise of informing the public about a labor negotiation, I, having followed this industry since 2012, understand that this is a sign to grab a roll of paper towels, because said orchestra is about to hork up a hairball.
The SF Symphony Forward Site
Over the past year or so, the management of the San Francisco Symphony has been attempting to negotiate a new contract with its musicians. This process has not gone smoothly.
We can guess that matters are about to come to a head because the organization recently launched a new website called SF Symphony Forward, which you can see here.
I’m not sure how the acronym for this website is meant to be pronounced, but I am calling it “sfsf”, which is an approximation of the vocalization I make while cleaning up after my cat.
I find the SFSF website fascinating. I could write multiple theses about it. (Unfortunately for everyone, if time permits, I may.)
The reason I’m so obsessed? It’s a management-run site about orchestra negotiations that seeks to center patrons. Its very first sentence reads:
Our goal is for the San Francisco Symphony to be a thriving nonprofit organization that exudes creativity, performs at the highest level, and has a broad and passionate patron base.
My italics.
And look at the background image. It’s the audience in the hall.
Wait, isn’t centering patrons good?
Yes, centering patrons is good. Collaborative is good.
The problem is, the San Francisco Symphony management team has spent a year being anything but collaborative.
They want to sound like they’ve centered patrons, but they’ve never actually centered patrons in the past, or explained how they’ll center patrons in the future.
If you’re new, here’s a brief summary of the backstory so far. Note the distinct lack of patron-centering throughout.
In December 2018, the San Francisco Symphony signed star conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to serve as music director, beginning in the 2020-21 season. 1 By all accounts, most patrons were thrilled by the choice, as was the board, which expressed eagerness to support him and his ideas.
Unfortunately, around the time of the pandemic, Salonen and the board appear to have had some kind of falling-out. In short, management hired him for his ideas, then came to loggerheads with him over the realization of his ideas.
A house divided against itself cannot stand, and in March 2024, Salonen issued a shocking statement: “I have decided not to continue as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, because I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does.” This is not the way these kinds of things are traditionally handled. It was announced that Salonen would serve out the remainder of his contract through June 2025, then depart. 2
The symphony’s leadership team didn’t treat this loss of talent as an institutional emergency, or express any remorse, which rubbed many patrons the wrong way. If anything, leadership seemed to be relieved that he was leaving.
After driving away Salonen, the leadership team began telegraphing an organizational change, giving a number of interviews about their new strategy in the summer of 2024. In a bid to save money, they floated playing fewer concerts, investing less in new music, pausing touring, etc. (That said, a $100 million hall renovation was still being actively discussed.3)
The leadership team didn’t win over many folks in the court of public opinion. Lots of patrons felt sad, angry, or confused about what was happening. It didn’t help that the leadership team was routinely coming across badly in their interviews.
At the end of a June 2024 profile, during which the board chair and CEO appeared particularly hapless, business writer Adam Lashinsky went so far as to muse: “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.”4
Patrons got increasingly angry.
In June, one showed up to a Salonen concert and flashed a sign that said “F*** the board” in Finnish. She was told by the orchestra that if she ever did such a thing again, she might be banned from the hall. She told the press she was contacting the ACLU to explore her options. 5
In September, the leadership team pursued something that felt an awful lot like a dry run for an orchestral labor dispute with the singers of the San Francisco Chorus. 6
The orchestra’s first Salonen-less 2025/26 season was released last month. It has been roundly panned for its lack of cohesion and artistic vision. There is a sense that something important about the identity of the ensemble disappeared with Salonen. Critic Joshua Kosman wrote an article for the San Francisco Chronicle titled “S.F. Symphony’s next season has a gaping hole — and it underscores the institution’s crisis.” 7
To sum, the current leadership team at the San Francisco Symphony became the first American orchestra to fumble its negotiations so badly that the public started revolting against them before a work stoppage even began.
Now, after six months of relative silence, enter the SFSF website, which has carefully honed its message to appeal to…patrons.
Wow! So does this new SFSF site meaningfully address any of the concerns that made patrons rebel in the first place?
No.
Is it normal for orchestra managements to create these kinds of sites during labor troubles?
Yes. If negotiations go well, they will be conducted privately. If things get a little spicy, a quote or two might be released to the press. After the negotiation is finished, a press release hailing the achievement will be posted on the orchestra website’s press room page. Then everyone will move on with their lives. This is how the contract negotiations at other large American orchestras played out this past season.
On the other hand, if shit is about to hit the fan, and a labor dispute seems possible, a management team will hire a PR firm, buy a new domain name, and build a new website there to frame the story on their terms.
These management-built sites invariably employ certain dog whistle phrases. They will read innocently to normies just tuning in, but freaks like me know they come from the comms playbook of crises of yore.
“Average compensation”
During adversarial negotiations, orchestra managements like to use the term “average compensation.”
“Average compensation” is a figure that the public has to accept in good faith. Obviously we don’t have access to all the figures used to calculate it, so we have to trust that management is doing so correctly.
This figure will also paint a skewed picture. A handful of principal players can negotiate a much higher salary than their colleagues, due to their increased responsibilities. It’s not an especially enlightening practice to lump them all together, but it does have the benefit of making many musicians look like they’re being paid more than they are.
On the other hand, musicians in a labor dispute tend to prefer using “base salary” as a measurement. Obviously, this is a lower number, which makes the musicians look more sympathetic. But it also has the advantage of being a more concrete number to work with, and it doesn’t rely on management math like “average compensation” does. It also makes comparisons with peer orchestras easier.
“Ten weeks of paid vacation”
Ten weeks of paid vacation? What are we, Norway or another civilized country?
We are not. Here’s the truth. Orchestral musicians in America working at this level, playing this amount of repertoire, don’t get many vacations. They are athletes of their art. They play for multiple hours a day at home every day, even when they’re not rehearsing as an ensemble or performing onstage. Therefore, this is less “ten weeks of paid vacation” and more “ten weeks of working at home.”
As you can imagine, in the past, this framing has been used to paint musicians as lazy and entitled. It has been critiqued for over a decade in patron advocate circles. A blogger friend of mine named Scott Chamberlain wrote an entry about this phenomenon here after the National Symphony Orchestra management team briefly tried a similar tactic in 2024, and that was a rewrite of a blog entry that he’d originally written during the 2012-14 Minnesota Orchestra lockout. There is nothing new under the sun, etc.
“A dedicated administrative staff”
Immediately after discussing musician compensation, the SFSF Finances page veers into a discussion of administrative staff compensation.
Obviously the orchestra won’t come out and say “our greedy musicians are keeping us from paying our administrative staff more.” But it’s also unclear what other conclusion a reader is supposed to take away from the juxtaposition.
Is the staff at the San Franscisco Symphony underpaid? Almost certainly yes, with a possible exception for the guy at the top. “You will know them by their fruits” is solid advice whether you’re religious or not, and I think that the field could have an interesting conversation about the particular fruits we’ve watched CEO Matthew Spivey bear during his tenure so far.
That said, low pay for administrative staff is a major industry-wide problem. It is also a loaded and complicated one, given that the applicant pool for an administrative staff position at a major American orchestra will be very different from the applicant pool for a musician position at the same American orchestra, and obviously the various qualifications for various types of jobs are very different.
Another problem the administrative staff faces is crippling work stress. Now, I don’t claim to know exactly what life is like right now for the SFS’s administrative staff. But I can take an educated guess that it isn’t great. Why? Generally speaking, most people don’t enjoy working inside an organization where stakeholders aren’t working well together. Again, I watched the Minnesota Orchestra’s lockout last from 2012 to 2014. I heard the stories from musicians and administrative staff alike.
If an institution has genuine concern for the well-being of their administrative staff, and can’t afford to pay them what they’re likely worth, the most valuable thing that a leadership team can do is to get everybody rowing in the same direction. It speaks poorly of their captaining ability if they start pitting one oar against the other.
“Business model”
When leadership teams are seeking to shrink a symphony orchestra, they like to refer to the orchestral “business model.” People are generally more receptive to cuts to a business than to cuts to a non-profit.
I once heard Kevin Smith, the beloved CEO who oversaw the post-lockout recovery of the Minnesota Orchestra, say something along the lines of, it’s an orchestra’s job to lose money. The function that an orchestra serves in society is to convert dollars into intangible benefits for a community that are otherwise very difficult or outright impossible to access or assign a dollar value to. A major orchestra is a kind of magical currency converter.
Of course orchestras can’t be wasteful. But there are better terms than “business model” that more accurately describe this process.
“The union representing the members of our orchestra”
Managements seeking concessionary contracts love to insinuate that musicians are dumbass dreamers being screwed over by their union. It’s easier to blame an outside force for any intransigence, rather than the faces that patrons see onstage every weekend.
The reality, however, is that an outside force will not be dictating the terms of this negotiation. The orchestra members themselves, not some faceless shadowy orgiastic cabal, will be voting on whether to ratify their next contract.
“Sustainable”
Orchestra-shrinking enthusiasts love the word sustainable. Sustainability is a kind of spiritual experience for them. They go absolutely nuts for it.
Unfortunately, this kind of for-profit terminology also creates a permission structure for an organization to self-harm, if creative and collaborative people are not firmly ensconced at the top. After all, what’s more sustainable: a symphony orchestra or a quartet? If sustainability is your primary goal, what is the backstop to keep you from shrinking yourself out of existence? And how strong is that backstop — especially when there’s no music director on staff to stand up for the art?
Many orchestras over the past fifteen years have faced cuts made by people obsessed with the word sustainability, to the point where the word has become a joke in the patron advocacy world. It comes with multiple decades of baggage. It’s shorthand for chainsaw. And if the folks in San Francisco using it here don’t know the history of the movement, they aren’t in a great place to advocate for the interests of passionate patrons.
There’s so much more
There’s so much more to dig into here, but alas, I don’t pay my electricity bill with writing about the labor travails of symphony orchestras.
But even if I never get another word out about this situation, I wanted to point out why every patron should approach this site with caution.
They’re talking about centering patrons, but they’re also employing the same language that we’ve seen in past labor disputes, when patrons were decidedly not centered. Beware.
The first has to do with whatever financial hole this orchestra is in.
The second has to do with a lack of vision, ambition, and galvanizing leadership, especially in the wake of Salonen’s departure.
The SFSF site talks a lot about the former, but it has yet to address the latter in any kind of useful way.
There’s this chart, I guess, under the VISION tab, but it’s non-specific and uber-corporate. Is this the plan for the San Francisco Symphony, or the mission statement for the Choreography and Merriment Department from Severance?
“GROW.” – Seth Milchick (Severance, 2025)
The paragraphs attempting to elucidate the chart don’t help, either. In fact, this is a whole other blog entry right here. What the fuck does any of this really mean?
…?
*
Here are some potential ideas for patrons to pursue, to gently but firmly push the leadership in a genuinely collaborative, pro-passionate-patron direction.
Don’t lose sight of the two problems: the financial side and the leadership side. Don’t let concerns about finances eclipse concerns about leadership. They’re connected.
Push for a town hall with CEO Matthew Spivey and board chair Priscilla Geeslin. Communicate your thoughts to them if you believe that the past year’s shenanigans have damaged the institution’s reputation. Have them explain what they learned from the Salonen meltdown, and what they did wrong. Ask that they clarify what they’re doing to both attract and retain a first-rate music director in future. Make them work hard to justify altering the heart of this orchestra. Remember, they aren’t there to serve the musicians, and the musicians aren’t there to serve them; everyone in that organization is there to serve you. Without the people who buy tickets, this entire project has no point.
If they say that nobody does town halls, or if they’re too skittish to mount one, you can tell them that Minnesota Orchestra CEO Kevin Smith did it ten years ago after their lockout, and the fact he was the kind of person who did, helped to rebuild community trust more than the shiny SFSF website ever will. 8
Follow the musicians on social media, and never take anything you can’t verify yourself as gospel, from either side.
Are you a non-profit professional good with numbers? Good. This is your moment. Dig into everything. Post information online. Share what you find with friends.
Keep your guard up even when things sound good on the surface. Make this organization walk the walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to centering patrons.
Talk about this. Push your way into the conversation.
In short, if you’re not happy about what transpires next, keep being loud. Obviously there’s never going to be any proof, but it sure feels like the orchestra has spent time and money over the last six months retooling their PR strategy to better appeal to patrons. If true, that’s fascinating. I don’t remember that ever happening before.
In the end, if you can push them just a little bit further, from name-checking you in their PR, to actually employing your input to build something sturdy and new, that every stakeholder can be excited about… Well, that might be the aversion of disaster. That might actually center the patron. That might be the start of something real.
The best composers are American, because America is the greatest nation on earth in the history of mankind, which it always has been, and always will be, if we can come together to make it great again.
The success of the Great Re-Greatening will take all of us working together in tandem: funders, donors, philanthropists, sponsors, contributors, backers, supporters, corporations, administrators, as well as artists.
One of the ways these many stakeholders can work together is by recontextualizing the biographies of composers, which have so often been hijacked by activist leftists.
Over the last few years, many classical music organizations fell into the trap of promoting DEI programming. DEI (an abbreviation for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) has unfairly prioritized the work of women, racial minorities, and homosexuals, at the expense of beloved classics like Schubert’s Ave Maria.
This is wrong. However, some composers have been unfairly painted as DEI and “woke.” It is time that we see them through another, more objective lens: the lens of America First.
Yes, thanks to recent political and cultural developments, we now have the freedom to appreciate the work of various American heroes in a new, “common sense” way.
There are countless composers we can reclaim from the far left. However, here are three greats who warrant a closer look by performing arts center board chairs as they program concerts celebrating America’s 250th birthday.
Amy Beach
Amy Cheney Beach, despite her unfortunate maiden name, was a true American hero. She was born in 1867 in New Hampshire, one of the original thirteen colonies, famous for its state motto “Live Free or Die.”
Even in her early years, she embraced rural life. At four, she composed piano pieces in her mind while visiting her grandparents’ farm.
She grew up to become such a talented pianist that in her teen years, various people urged her parents to send her to Europe to train.
However, in true America First spirit, the Cheneys decided to keep her at home, an outcome for which she was always grateful.
When she was eighteen, she entered into a happy marital union with Dr. H. H. A. Beach, who, being in his middle age, was well-established in his medical career, and could provide financially for her.
Amy Beach emphasized and embraced her femininity and identity as a married woman by frequently performing under the name Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.
During her marriage, Mrs. Beach turned her attention to composing. Pulling herself up by her bootstraps, she taught herself orchestration out of books, steering clear of university indoctrination. The result of her study was 1894’s Gaelic Symphony.
Listeners have noticed striking similarities between the Gaelic Symphony and Antonín Dvořák’s 1893 New World Symphony. However, despite its name, the Gaelic Symphony is inarguably the more American of the two works, and should be the more popular one by far. Antonín Dvořák’s symphony was written by a small European man who was enthusiastic about trains, and he employed melodies from racial communities that would later unfairly benefit from far-left Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Mrs. Beach’s work, however, is all-American through-and-through, making this symphony a wonderful option for schedulers to consider programming.
Florence Price
Florence Price was born in 1887 in the Bible Belt in Little Rock, Arkansas, a ruby red state that President Trump won by 30.6% in the 2024 election.
Her initial education was at a Catholic convent, where she learned about the faith professed by our vice-president JD Vance. She continued her studies at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she earned a double major in piano teaching and organ, a specialty that would come in useful in religious settings.
It’s important to note that Florence Price was never shy about her love for Jesus, penning and publishing a variety of songs based on spirituals. Perhaps her work could be programmed at the Kennedy Center, given that Ric Grenell, the head of that organization, is planning “a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas” there in December 2025.
In 1912 Florence married a lawyer and had two daughters with him, making him a proud “girl dad.”
Price relocated to Chicago in the 1920s. Despite the crime and corruption rampant in the city, she became a well-respected musician and composer.
She showed true competitive entrepreneurial grit in 1933, when her first symphony won a $500 award from the Wanamaker Foundation.
It’s unclear why her work has been sidelined for so many years. Fortunately, we now have the freedom to stop litigating the past, and we can look forward to the future: one full of classical music programs prominently featuring girlboss American composer Florence Price!
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein was born in Massachusetts in 1918, a few months before the United States demonstrated its military prowess by routing the Central Powers in World War I.
His father was a brilliant businessman who operated the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company. Samuel initially discouraged his son’s interest in becoming a professional musician, understanding the difficulty that musicians face in becoming productive members of society, but he eventually relented.
Bernstein attended Harvard. Although most Ivy Leaguers live in an ivory tower, certain iconoclastic America First heroes like Elise Stefanik, Jared Kushner, Pete Hegseth, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., can and do emerge from Harvard as citizens of the people. Bernstein would embrace their America First agenda, becoming the first American-born conductor of a major American orchestra.
Bernstein was a devoted family man. In 1951, he married beautiful actress Felicia Montealegre, with whom he would have three children. Their marriage was extremely happy.
Bernstein enjoyed a close friendship with fellow American composer Aaron Copland, another America First composer. Together Bernstein and Copland took great pleasure in discussing various aspects of masculinity.
The 1961 film version of Bernstein’s musical West Side Story earned a box office of $44.1 million on a budget of $6.75 million, representing a 653% profit.
A patriotic song by Bernstein about America
Leonard Bernstein understood the value of using art to unite, rather than divide, as so many leftists would use it today. He famously said after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy:
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
There will always be those who use art to push their own poisonous social and cultural agendas, especially in times of metaphorical or literal violence. It has always been so. But now more than ever, we must take Bernstein’s words to heart. In the Trump 2.0 administration, we must ensure that the music continues more devotedly than ever before.
I hesitate to set down words about this because in the coming hours some new petal of insanity will unfurl itself. And I am not the New York Times; I am not being paid to monitor and report on this ever-evolving cluster. But in the end, it was the Times that broke me. Today’s story on the purge – “Trump Names Loyalist Interim Leader of Kennedy Center as He Strengthens His Grip”1 – consists of little else besides regurgitation of posts from the President and reportage on website changes. A truly breathtaking number of leads are left unfollowed. There’s no meaningful analysis about what any of it means, what the consequences will be, or what the fucking laws are.
(However, they did employ the vocabulary word apparatchiks, so kudos.)
Look. The mainstream media has been absurdly slow to break this thing down. It may well turn into the final boss of non-profit governance apocalypses. And nobody’s treating it as such. So let’s start.
The Cursed Origins of the Purge
On 7 February 2025, the President of the United States truthed out on Truth Social his intention to name himself chairman of the Kennedy Center board and to terminate multiple board members.2
He did not explain under what authority he was doing this, aside from implying the well-known legal precedent “because I said so.”
I am not a lawyer. I cannot answer every question about what this means. I am also not the New York Times. I am not being paid to call up attorneys and ask their opinions. They wouldn’t return my calls if I did.
So let’s look at what the President is trying to accomplish here, what specific norms or portions of the US Code he might be flouting, the space for potential legal blowback, and the numerous downstream consequences of the Kennedy Center purge.
Let’s start with the makeup of the board.
The Makeup of the Kennedy Center Board
There are two types of trustees at the Kennedy Center. I’ll call them Group A and Group B.
Group A consists of 23 people hired for their positions or titles (i.e., they’re members of the cabinet, Senate, House, etc.).
Group B consists of 36 trustees appointed by the president, serving in staggered six-year terms.
Right now Group B may (?) include trustees appointed by both Trump and Biden.
I say “may (?)” because as of 10 February, nineteen of the 36 trustees have been scrubbed from the Kennedy Center website, per the New York Times. 3
However, as of tonight, it’s unclear if this is just a website change, or if every single purge-ee has indeed sought legal counsel and accepted their fate.
There is nothing in the Code about the protocol for trustee dismissal if they don’t resign before the end of their term. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t established protocol about what to do in such a situation in D.C. (again, I’m not a lawyer!), but it’s not discussed in this part of the Code.
Here is a list of the makeup of Group B before the purge.
In the arts world, this is known as a “nightmare blunt rotation.”
And here’s the list after:
And here’s my marked-up version of who got purged:
The Advisory Committee on the Arts
There’s also another group at the Kennedy Center: the Advisory Committee on the Arts.
According to the Code, this committee is “composed of such members as the President of the United States may designate, to serve at the pleasure of the President.”
(Seeming to suggest, of course, that Groups A and B are not serving at the pleasure of the President.)
What role does the Advisory Committee play?
They “shall advise and consult with the Board and make recommendations to the Board regarding existing and prospective cultural activities to be carried out by the [Kennedy Center].” They’re also there to help with fundraising.
So! The President does have authority to appoint people to the Advisory Committee. But the Committee’s role is supportive and…well, advisory. It does not supercede the power of the board proper. And the President has not named anyone to it yet, anyway.
To me, its main relevance appears to be the language surrounding its establishment implying that Group A and Group B were not meant to serve at the pleasure of the president.
It also demonstrates how serious the President is about wanting to control programming completely. If his aim was solely to attempt to influence programming, he could have done that by following the Code and naming a whole crew of MAGA faithful to the Advisory Committee. He chose the nuclear option instead.
The Kennedy Center Statement
A few hours after the President truthed out the truth above, the Kennedy Center issued a delicate statement in response.
So basically, “The President can’t name himself chair, but mayyybe he can create a board that will, but we also hope that he doesn’t, because nobody’s ever done that before, and we desperately long to be non-partisan.”
Obviously this statement is leaving a lot unsaid, but I sketched out these initial takeaways in my notes app a couple of nights ago.
The statement starts by underlining the collaborative non-partisan nature of the Kennedy Center’s work with past administrations. Of course, on its own, this observation would be anodyne. But set against the context of the President’s Truth Social post, which asserts that a single government representative (i.e., “an amazing chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!”) can dictate programming, it’s striking.
The statement emphasizes the sources of the Kennedy Center’s funding. The Kennedy Center is an idiosyncratic institution. It is its own creature: a public-private partnership unique unto itself, and itself only. As the statement notes, the federal government pays for building upkeep and maintenance, but its actual programming is meant to be funded by private sources. This is important.
Why include this particular information in this statement?
Quiet pushback to the idea that the government has influenced “woke” programming in the past?
A discreet reminder that the donor classes’ interests also have to be accounted for in future?
A plea meant to blunt attacks on the organization in an era when all government institutions are under fire by a collection of douchebags and DOGE bros?
All of the above?
The statement reiterates what the Code says: the chair is appointed by the board. They confirm that the President cannot name himself chairman. They are not abandoning the governance structure as set forth in the USC (yet, anyway).
However, they do admit a potential workaround: changing the voting members of the board to get the preordained election result the President wants. (Sounds familiar!)
The Kennedy Center board could still find the votes, if Mike Pence has the courage.
Was this statement the Kennedy Center leadership immediately rolling over…or was it a tactical maneuver? Maybe they thought the best way to get POTUS to follow the law was to lay low and hope he forgot about them? If that was the play, it backfired. On the other hand, if the plan was always to roll over, that went marvelously.
My main question coming out of the statement was:
“There’s nothing that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members”…but what specifically allows an administration to fire them?
Maybe this will be answered by additional reporting, but I haven’t seen anyone address this question in detail yet. In a sane world, such reporting might be done by a large institution such as the New York Times.
If said reporting does materialize in the coming days, I’d prioritize the response of lawyers or reporters familiar with the Kennedy Center specifically, because of its aforementioned unique structure.
The statement ends with “[Replacing board members to affect a vote for chairman] would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board.” This appeal to The Norms has a real air of tragedy about it, especially as it echoes the theme of the statement’s opening sentence. Alas, this is the Finnegans Wake of sad PR statements: its ending is its beginning.
Inside the shrieking cesspool colloquially known as X, some folks have brought up the case Spicer v. Biden, an epic legal battle that you can look up on your own time. But to sum, it was a tussle between noted Dancing With the Stars alumnus Sean Spicer and the Biden administration, occurring after the latter attempted to remove the former from a position on the Board of Visitors for the Naval Academy. The courts ultimately decided that President Biden did indeed have the authority to dismiss Spicer.
Some conservatives have claimed that Spicer v. Biden is precedent for the Kennedy Center situation. A Kennedy Center spokesperson even cited the case to the Washington Post on 8 February. 4 But I’m not convinced yet that these situations are totally analogous. I’d like to hear more from lawyers who are well-versed in the structure of the Kennedy Center specifically to know the answer, or confirmation that the spokesperson had consulted a lawyer. This would be a line of questioning that I’d pursue if I worked at a large institution, such as, say, the New York Times.
This statement is walking on eggshells on a tightrope in high heels. It makes me think of an American Truck Simulator player trying to back up into a loading dock. They’ve got a decapitated board on one side, and shrieking major donors and powerful politicians on the other, and patrons and pundits tweeting that the blue sky is falling, and a huge clock ticking, and a circus tent across the street, and oh, also, there’s a mad king in the rearview mirror, and he’s screaming bloody murder about STARS! while jerking his arms in suggestive fashion to YMCA.
And amidst all that, here’s the Kennedy Center, seemingly just trying to back the damn truck up without damaging the cargo.
Oh, and Also, That Kennedy Center Statement Has Been Deleted
Yeah. That thing that I just spent a few hundred words dissecting? As of the evening of February tenth, it’s no longer on the website.
Even though the situation within the organization has been unnervingly opaque for the past 48 hours, this mysterious vanishing statement certainly implies some friction between the Trump administration and the Kennedy Center leadership: a battle that the leadership appears to be losing.
Cringily Quoting Ezra Klein At Length
One additional observation: Reporters are excited about apocalyptic Trumpian power grabs. Look at the headlines about this story from 7 February.
Now. As of the evening of 10 February, we can see that the Kennedy Center website has been altered, and certainly the President has truthed many things.
However. It’s still being reported out as “he did this,” without confirmation that he did actually do this. He didn’t install himself; he declared himself, and I think there’s a difference.
“I DECLARE CHAIRMANSHIPPPPPP!”
Does that mean the Kennedy Center purge won’t ultimately happen? No. Every passing day that we don’t hear about pushback, I think it’s more likely that the insanity is actualizing. But it’s always worth noting that what he says isn’t necessarily what is.
Ezra Klein said something on a podcast this week that reminded me of this situation. 5 (Yeah, yeah, I know. Throw tomatoes at me for keeping too many podcasts on in the background while I work.) But it felt applicable.
[Argument one] is about an orientation of opposition… I was watching many Democrats simply accept and treat as settled fact that he could do the things he was doing, instead of treating the things he was doing as somewhere between a power grab and a crime…
Don’t treat that as done. Treat that as provisional. Treat that as an effort he is making to change the settled order. So that’s one piece of it…
Any political system is in some ways a coordination and information game. And one thing authoritarians do — that is maybe the most important thing — is they get people to coordinate as if they are the authoritarian.
And so if Donald Trump can walk in, and upend the whole thing, and we just report on it as, “well, he did this and he did this and he did this and he did this,” as opposed to approaching it as “he is trying to do X, but that is going to be a fight; a contest; that’s going to go to the courts; that’s going to be a fight over government shutdown; that’s going to be a fight over a debt ceiling; that’s going to be a fight in the midterms,” etc. You want to keep this provisional, right?
If everybody begins saying well it’s done, he’s got all these powers…I think that is actually a kind of submission.
So Does This Matter? (Does Anything Matter?)
I’m seeing a lot of jokes about how we as a nation get to look forward to a Kennedy Center Honors ceremony featuring Kid Rock, Lee Greenwood, and Kanye West. And we may.
Obviously those kinds of jokes multiply after the President truths out something like this, which he did the other day.
My man is having AI-fueled hallucinations of following in the footsteps of Stokowski, Mitropolous, and Boulez and conducting without a baton. When you have a black sense of humor, this is among the most hilarious things you’ve ever seen.
But it’s also more than blackly hilarious. The power grab is legitimately consequential. Most people do not seem to grasp that the Kennedy Center and the organizations affiliated with it do so much more than mount an annual Honors ceremony.
The Kennedy Center is a massive organization! According their 990s, it boasts over $630 million in assets.6 The Center houses the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, and it hosts over two thousand performances a year.
There will be so many consequences here. Here’s just one, and I haven’t seen it reported out yet: contracts are going to have to be broken if programming is going to be dictated. These major performing arts centers plan out for a long, long time. Who’s going to be addressing the fallout from that? And remember, programming at the Kennedy Center is paid for by donors, not the government. People have donated to the Kennedy Center assuming they’d get a return on their investment in the programming, and it’s unclear whether they’ll swallow the changes the President has in mind.
Interlude: Ric Grenell Just Was Named Interim Executive Director, And Nothing May Ever Make Sense Again
While I’ve been writing this, the President just truthed out on Truth Social that Ric Grenell is now the “interim executive director” of the Kennedy Center. 7
One problem: there is no such position, as the Washington Post notes tonight: 8
The announcement added to the confusion that has engulfed the Kennedy Center since Friday. The institution does not have a position with the title executive director. Deborah Rutter is the center’s president. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Trump was replacing Rutter or creating a new position for Grenell.
Neither the White House nor the Kennedy Center responded to questions to clarify the role and responsibilities.
And yes, when I say Ric Grenell, I mean that Ric Grenell, the former ambassador to Germany who faced criticism for aligning himself with the far-right in that country, as well as the former Acting Director of National Intelligence, because I think we can all agree, it’s great for performing arts center board chairs to have once overseen the CIA without ever having been confirmed by the Senate.9
I don’t know why he was plucked out of Trumpworld for this job. I don’t think anyone does. The President said tonight in the Oval Office that “Ric has some experience in that world.”10 What is that “experience”? What is “that world”? Homosexual encounters? The theatre? I don’t know.
Anyway, this man was floated as a Secretary of State candidate a few months ago. Now he’s being welcomed to show business in all-caps. That’s life on the Trump train, baby.
Welcome home, Ric!
Okay. Anyway. As I was saying…
But Orchestras Aren’t Involved In This, Right? (…Right?)
In 1986, the National Symphony Orchestra became an artistic affiliate of the Kennedy Center, where it had been playing concerts since 1971.
The National Symphony Orchestra ratified its latest contract with musicians in September 2024. 11 A four-year contract with a total raise of thirteen percent had been tossed around, but the two sides ultimately agreed to a two-season contract, with a four percent raise in the 2024-25 season and another four percent raise in the 2025-26 season.
In its statement announcing the deal, the Kennedy Center wrote, “This 18-month contract will provide all parties time to come together to settle a longer-term agreement that demonstrates our respect for their artistic contributions and maintains the orchestra’s competitiveness in the field.” Negotiations for the next contract are set “to commence in early 2026.” 12
That means that whoever is in charge of the Kennedy Center is going to be involved in the National Symphony’s next set of negotiations, and those are going to start soon.
Well, you might say. They’ll just sidestep Ric Grenell or POTUS and negotiate with whoever negotiated that last contract! She is presumably sane, since the musicians were able to come to an agreement with her six months ago!
There’s only one problem: Deborah Rutter is the CEO, and she will be leaving the Kennedy Center “at the end of the year.” 1314
She has said, at least publicly, that this wasn’t due to the election results. In late January, she told the Post about her departure:
“This is not related to the politics of who’s in the White House. The Kennedy Center is truly nonpartisan… Frankly, for the last six years, I’ve had almost all Trump appointees as my board members. And we’ve had a fantastic era with them.”
Yes. We certainly have.
As the Washington Post notes tonight, it’s possible that Ric Grenell is meant to replace Rutter, because POTUS doesn’t understand the structure of the Kennedy Center, or that the board chair and the Kennedy Center president are two separate roles, but all of that is TBD.
However, assuming that they get the roles ironed out and Grenell leads the board and Rutter stays in place as president until the end of the year, who hires her replacement? Who’s the one who’s in charge when the NSO negotiations start? The board.
You see where this is going. Suddenly the makeup of the Kennedy Center board becomes intensely relevant to the entire orchestra world. If POTUS ultimately succeeds in turning the board MAGA, they will have the votes not only for a board chair, but for the next Kennedy Center president, too. Or maybe they will vote to reorganize entirely, and name Donald Trump their lifetime god king. Who knows? The possibilities are endless.
What qualified independent-minded potential Kennedy Center president would want to yeet themselves face-first into this mess? Here’s my prediction. Whoever comes after Rutter will not be a top-tier candidate. That person will be a pathetic, likely self-loathing sycophant, and someone who smiles when they cash big checks.
But My Orchestra Won’t Be Involved, Right? (…Right?)
The National Symphony Orchestra is one of the wealthiest orchestras in the country, and other big orchestras look to it for cues.
If Trump-led negotiations go south in early 2026 and the musicians are forced to swallow cuts, that could, theoretically, embolden other ensembles to go down similar paths. The NSO’s salary being slashed wouldn’t pull the entire industry’s ceiling down on its own, but it certainly won’t help.
We may also start seeing MAGA-friendly donors noticing what is going on at the Kennedy Center and deciding they have a prerogative to copy from its budgetary playbook in their own communities.
We saw a version of this dynamic after the Detroit Symphony’s six-month musician strike in 2010. The Minnesota Orchestra board and management watched the goings-on in Detroit closely and gleaned lessons from it, which they then attempted (with varying levels of success) to apply during the sixteen-month musician lockout they imposed between 2012-14.
In addition, donors may well take note of Trump’s power over programming in D.C., and come back to their own boards and ask, why don’t we have that power here?
Unless there is a strong organizational culture truly committed to things like diverse programming, be prepared for the atmosphere to change. That Florence Price you’ve been enjoying these past few years? If someone richer than you doesn’t like it, too bad. Performances by historical women composers generally? What backstop is there if the board chair thinks that unfamiliar music by women is woke, and that we’ve been straying too far from Beethoven? You can easily imagine snippets of conversation over cheese and crackers at donor receptions in green rooms: By the way, have you seen what they’ve been doing at the Kennedy Center? A bold approach, no?They were a little brutal about it all, but audiences never really cared that much for DEI, anyway...
The Performing Arts Needs Artists
I grew up assuming that orchestras exist because people love music and they want to make something bigger than themselves. In small towns, I think that’s the primary reason they survive. But in big cities, it’s just one reason among many. The major American orchestras exist not only to create music, but to create value for very wealthy people: cultural value, social value, and economic value. They also exist to demonstrate power, provide opportunities for philanthropists to socialize, and make the area more attractive to business and potential employees. We may be entering an era – if we haven’t entered it already – where the latter kind of considerations outweigh the former, in ways that will be a struggle to counteract.
The origins of the Minneapolis Symphony, precursor to the Minnesota Orchestra, speak to this point. In 1893, a twenty-something conductor and soprano named Anna Schoen-René emigrated to Minnesota. She soon began mounting massive classical music and operatic concerts for thousands of people. Unfortunately, she came into conflict with the Minneapolis Commercial Club, consisting of the local titans of industry, who wanted to create a concert series under their own control. The primary goal of their series wouldn’t be artistic; it would be economic. And the market wasn’t big enough for both Schoen-René and the Commercial Club to succeed. The two sides did expensive battle for several years. Schoen-René fared remarkably well before ultimately deciding she’d had enough and leaving Minnesota altogether. Emil Oberhoffer, a musician who cast his lot with the local industrialists, became the first music director of the Minneapolis Symphony in 1903. 15
In the end, it all worked out for Minnesota. But my God, it took the labor of generations of artists. A balance has to be struck between the artists and the affluent. The President is clearly incapable of striking it.
And you know what? I’m not even touching the consequences of the DEI-related executive orders, cuts to NEA grants, potential changes in the tax code, etc. Somebody smarter than me can take all that on. Maybe someone at the New York Times, someday.
Final Thoughts
I know that there is an ungodly amount of happenings happening right now.
I know that many people are hurting and afraid.
I know that against the background of constitutional apocalypse, the petty power struggles of billionaires in board rooms is awfully low on the priority list. And maybe it should be. I don’t know.
But I can’t help but wonder, if the President has no above-board way to be elected chairman of the Kennedy Center, but proceeds to do it anyway, and everyone within that organization and the country treats it as a settled matter…
What’s the next step?
How does he push the envelope beyond that? Because he’s always going to keep pushing the envelope. That’s all this man has ever done.
If he succeeds here, what will keep the President from declaring himself chair of other non-profits in the future?
What happens to the Smithsonian, by the way? Do they get a board coup, too, if the Kennedy Center ends up rolling over?
Would the Trumpian appetite for acquisition extend to other organizations outside of Washington? Will it extend to private organizations? Private companies? Or will the President’s thirst for conquest be quenched by a gala performance of non-woke Cats? How did I find myself in a world where I just typed that sentence?
I am more cynical than I have ever been in my life. But I still suffer from a failure of imagination when it comes to the President. So I think all of these questions are worth contemplating, even as there are so few answers.
Here’s one last question. What are Americans – and, specifically, the employees, donors, board members, and patrons at the Kennedy Center – going to do about any of this?
Last night, ABC7 News’s Lyanne Melendez ran a report about the ongoing governance imbroglio facing the San Francisco Symphony. You can watch and read a transcript here.
It was a treat to get a video interview with SFS CEO Matthew Spivey and board chair Priscilla Geeslin. More of this, please! It is beyond fascinating not only to listen to what they say, but to watch how they say it.
A few things jumped out that I wanted to point out, because it feels like things are really starting to accelerate here. Without a change in course, it’s pretty clear that the S.S. SFS is headed straight toward an iceberg.
When it comes to the SFS meltdown, the media seems to smell metaphorical blood in the bay.
I continue to be struck by the fact that the current leadership of the San Francisco Symphony really has no defenders in any press: local, national, or international. They are getting hammered by all quarters, by all media. And if they were hoping to win over ABC7, that clearly didn’t go well.
The ABC report introduces Spivey and Geeslin like so:
[Conductor Esa-Pekka] Salonen didn’t actually begin his tenure until 2020 and we all know what that infamous year meant for the world, COVID-19.
All concerts were canceled through June 2021.
By then, the two top people directly responsible for hiring Salonen had left. In their place, a new leadership was assembled, Matthew Spivey and Priscilla Geeslin.
Melendez starts off the interview with a brutal opening volley:
“You will perhaps be remembered as the folks who let, quote, ‘a bucket-list, brilliant conductor, go.’ So a simple question to both of you, what the hell happened?“
Geeslin takes a deep (irritated?) breath. Spivey is the one who answers. He uses the same talking points that they’ve been pushing since the summer, before this whole affair really started snowballing down Mount Doom. If those talking points weren’t equal to the moment then (and they weren’t), they absolutely aren’t equal to the moment now. And the interesting thing is… Spivey sort of seems to know it? Throughout the entire interview he has the uncertain, uncomfortable air of a panicked high school student giving his first presentation.
He also doesn’t really answer the “what the hell?” question, either:
“You know, I think this is a moment of change for every arts organization, certainly in San Francisco but really across the country. We are seeing as arts organizations emerge coming out of the pandemic they are thinking differently about who they are and how they connect and relate to the world around them.”
I will grant Spivey that this is a moment of change. (Although I also think there’s a solid argument to be made that every moment is a moment of change for every arts organization.) And I agree that arts organizations are “thinking differently about who they are” and their relationships to their communities post-pandemic.
But.
Do you know what’s not happening in the industry? Generationally talented music directors departing in dramatic fashion, and a serious audience rebellion brewing over issues of governance. Maybe that’s a you problem, my friend.
Reality check: Major American orchestras have not responded to the pandemic by instituting long-term cuts in musician compensation.
I think it’s important to remember that major orchestras “thinking differently about who they are” does not mean that they are also embracing austerity and systematic stakeholder alienation.
Here is how the SFS’s peer orchestras have responded to the post-pandemic world when it comes to musician compensation.
In June 2022, the New York Philharmonic ratified a contract that took steps to restore cuts made during the early days of the pandemic. According to the Times, the “decision to restore pay is a milestone in the Philharmonic’s recovery, and it offered some hope that the worst of the pandemic, which cost the orchestra more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue, had passed.” 1
In August 2023, the Boston Symphony Orchestra agreed to a three-year musician contract. The press release about it is coy as to exact figures, but it underlines that the contract includes “a ‘catch-up’ increase for the musicians following a three-year pandemic pause in their wages under the existing contract approved in 2020.” It also provides for greater scheduling flexibility for musicians. 2
In September 2023, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra agreed to a three-year musician contract that included 3% annual salary increase and increased benefits.3
In October 2023, the Cleveland Orchestra agreed to a three-year musician contract that included “annual increases in minimum weekly compensation of 4 percent, 3 percent, and 3 percent, respectively, over three years, in addition to a one-time, $5,000 agreement ratification bonus each.” 4
In October 2023, the Philadelphia Orchestra agreed to a three-year contract that included “increases in the agreement [of] 6% in the first year, 4.5% in the second and 4.5% in the third.” 5
And circling back to the first bullet point, today, on 19 September 2024, the New York Philharmonic (very inconveniently for the San Francisco Symphony) announced a new contract, under which musicians will see a raise of 30% over the next three years. 6
(Note: I’m leaving the Los Angeles Philharmonic out of this because their pay packages include compensation associated with housing and it’s harder to compare contracts using an apples-to-apples approach.)
Spivey is right about one thing: American orchestras have been re-thinking their identity and their missions post-pandemic.
But the facts are clear: this re-thinking doesn’t include imposing concessionary contracts.
To be such an outlier in a relatively stable negotiation cycle like this one, as the SFS will be, is a leading indicator of major institutional instability. You never want to be in this position in the best of times, but you especially don’t want to be in it when you’re searching for a world-class music director, after you very publicly dumped your last one.
It goes without saying, if the SFS genuinely has to make these cuts to survive, it owes the public a detailed explanation as to exactly why. How has the SFS so dramatically underperformed its peers?
SFS leadership clearly views executing a music director’s vision as a budgetary “extra.”
Geeslin then takes a swing at the PR pinata. She describes an orchestra’s budget like this, in the context of Salonen’s expensive artistic vision:
“‘You sit around a table as a family and you say we have this much money, this is what we can spend this year. Do we take a vacation, do we not take a vacation, do we go out to dinner more, do we do less. It’s saying that this is the money we have to spend and this is how we’re going to utilize it to make sure that by the end of the year we still have a reasonable amount of money to move forward,’ stated Priscilla Geeslin, the Board Chair of the symphony.”
First off, if the stakeholders at the SFS are family sitting around a table, then there aren’t enough seats at that table. The musicians have been trying to sit down at the table for months to start contract negotiations. 7 But for a long time, management refused to set the table: i.e., they put off negotiating, presumably to ratchet up the pressure for as long as possible before the contract expiration date. Meanwhile, dissatisfied audience members are raising hell by holding up signs in Finnish, and have been threatened with expulsion from the dining room entirely. 8
Second off, it’s striking that Geeslin regards the expense of executing a music director’s vision as being in the same category as a “vacation” or “eating out less.”
Because…no???
If we absolutely must use a tortured “family budgeting while gathered round the kitchen table” metaphor, here’s a more accurate description of what’s going on:
One parent divorced the other beloved parent and doesn’t want him at the table, and refuses to go to therapy about it. The beloved parent has gone mute in public. Everyone has to pretend this is normal.
The kids are being asked to choose between extras like vacations and eating out.
Meanwhile, the proposed budget the parent is passing around is calling for only paying for part of the electric bill and mortgage.
There is no credible plan to increase household income. The best the children hear is platitudes about how hopefully the next spouse will help to increase the size of the household income pipeline over the next few years.
There is a search committee that has just been formed to find a new spouse. Everyone has the sinking feeling that no one in their right mind will want to marry into this family.
By the way, the spurned spouse was supposed to help increase the household income back when he joined the family — then, just like what happened to Conan O’Brien and The Tonight Show in 2009, was given no time to actually do that.
The parent is talking about spending $100 million renovating the house. 9
The entire time this circus is going on, there’s an inebriated sibling pounding on the window bellowing “Family therapy! Family therapy!” (That’s the patrons and patron advocates.)
Audience advocates dropping in on the SFS’s meeting at the family table
I grudgingly admit that some orchestras can be likefamilies sometimes, but…let’s also be real. In the end, workplaces aren’t families. Hell, when money is at stake, most families stop being families.
In any case, I’d hope that serious people can recognize that workplaces are not families when the people on top are deciding how an $80 million dollar annual budget is going to be spent, and also have the power to lock out other members of their family.
We need a better metaphor.
“The best people in life are free” – Taylor Swift in “New Romantics” and also Matthew Spivey, apparently
Spivey then returns to yet another stale, months-old talking point:
“There is no question in my mind that the San Francisco Symphony is one of the most extraordinary ensembles in the world, period. And I think what defines that is not budget size. Some of the most impactful moments that we’ve made don’t necessarily cost much at all,” insisted Spivey.
What a mind-blowing paradigm shift. So you don’t actually get what you pay for? There’s no truth to that?
If budget size is so disconnected from outcomes, why is the San Francisco Symphony spending money on a CEO? Maybe artificial intelligence could perform this job for less, with better outcomes. How about we ChatGPT our way out of this thing? Some of the most impactful leadership suggestions don’t necessarily cost much at all.
Also, what exactly are these impactful moments that are happening for not “necessarily…much at all”? Share your tips, Mr. Spivey!
“And another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad” – dril (2014); also, SFS leadership (2024)
They both maintain there is no animosity between them and Salonen.
Oh, I’m sure. I imagine y’all are just super close. I bet you have picturesque picnics on Alamo Square every Saturday morning, and then you bicycle across the Golden Gate hand-in-hand, then you all go home and watch The Room eating popcorn giggling and pointing out all the local landmarks where you’ve spent time together. I’m sure.
Hilariously, the next paragraph is:
Salonen did not want to be interviewed for this story nor did he allow us to film any rehearsals or performances that include him.
And okay, so, yes, this is obviously funny because everyone living in reality can tell that the “no animosity” thing is a lie, or at the very least a desperately uncomfortable corporatization of human emotion.
But also. Take a step back. That lie says something, no? If they’re able to lie about something as obvious as this, what’s keeping them from lying about other things that aren’t so obvious?
The SFS leadership truly believes the problem is external, not internal
“We are committed to working with our musicians and I trust them, I really do. Our challenge is not an internal one, our challenge is an external one,” added Spivey.
Well, no. Reference the list of recently signed orchestra contracts above. I think it’s pretty clear the best case scenario here is that you have both internal and external challenges.
The symphony believes one way to attract audiences is to showcase what few cities have, a one-of-a-kind performing arts scene, which also includes the ballet, the opera, the SF Jazz Center, and the Conservatory.
“This is an incredible concentration of great art institutions and west of the Mississippi you don’t have a concentration like this,” explained Geeslin.
As soon as I read this, I saw a Drudge-Report-style siren gif flashing in my mind’s eye. This quote could easily be used as ammunition for the argument that that Geeslin, Spivey, and the board are chasing a pipe dream to merge the SFS with the San Francisco Opera.
It sounds nuts, but the two were once part of the same organization. And Patricia Geeslin’s husband, financier Keith Geeslin, is a former president of the San Francisco Opera.
Folks have been raising the possibility of this being a potential end game in places like the San Francisco Standard and on the site of SFS Patron Alliance, an audience advocate organization.
And look, I’m not taking sides about what’s real or what’s not regarding this rumor. But. Rightly or wrongly, the idea that the merger is a goal is in the public discourse, and this quote is not helping assuage folks’ fears.
To be clear, Spivey has gone on the record with the San Francisco Standard saying he “claims ignorance about these claims.” 10 But to skirt so close to a conspiracy theory by downplaying the symphony’s importance in the context of the city’s wider cultural identity is certainly…a choice.
At the very least, why do these people not understand optics 101?
The SFS leadership wants support without accountability
Melendez closes her interview with the question:
“What do you want viewers to get out of this interview?”
Geeslin answers:
I want them to come to the hall, I want them to come and support us. I want them to come and enjoy the music and our orchestra and to celebrate the San Francisco Symphony.
What’s left unspoken is that audience members who are upset about the organization’s direction have been profiled in the Chronicle. A woman who held up a sign with naughty Finnish words on it about the board was even threatened with being barred from the hall altogether. 11
So let’s be honest: Geeslin doesn’t want all viewers to come. She wants the viewers who agree with her to come to the hall. She wants viewers who support her governance choices to come to the hall. She wants viewers who are happy to see Salonen leave to come to the hall. (Of course the big problem there is that Salonen doesn’t seem to have a lot of anti-stans in San Francisco…)
If she thought otherwise, she’d engage in better faith with the people who disagree with her path forward. She’d express more remorse and humility for letting Salonen slip away. She’d have an actual plan, not just concepts of one.
Again and again, over the course of months, with plenty of opportunities to alter course or to moderate, both she and Spivey have demonstrated they don’t care about customers who disagree with their vision (such as it is).
After the 16-month-long Minnesota Orchestra lockout, that organization started making progress after 1) people at the top left, and 2) their replacements were game to do things like hold town hall meetings to listen to stakeholders’ concerns. That turnaround timing wasn’t coincidence.
I don’t know what else to say about these people. They aren’t serious. They aren’t participating in this desperately important conversation in good faith. They never have. They’ve decided on a destination, exact route TBD, and they are determined to stick with their plan, damn the torpedos. Meanwhile, their local media is skeptical of them, even aggressive toward them. Their patrons are pushing back. Their music director is embarking on a season-long cold war against them. Most urgently, their musicians are caught in an impossible situation, with their livings and careers potentially in the balance. It’s excruciating.
And that’s not even wading into the matter of the hardball that Spivey, Geeslin, and their associates are playing with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. According to AGMA, the SFS management is seeking to cut the chorus’s budget by 80%. 12 It is impossible to see this as anything but a shot across the bow directed not only to chorus members, but to the orchestra’s musicians and the pro-Salonen customer base generally. (As of 19 September, the chorus has voted to authorize a strike if necessary, meaning that opening night is in jeopardy. 13 )
Do you want to know who one of the most important local constituencies was when it came to rebuilding the shattered Minnesota Orchestra? Members of the Minnesota Chorale. Don’t mess with chorus people!
In the end, these people are not living in the real world with the rest of us. I don’t know why. Maybe because they don’t have to. They are metaphorically adrift in the San Francisco Bay, their only flotation device a set of arm floaties. Of course the inner workings of every major arts organization is different, and I don’t know who – if anyone – has the power to nudge the S.S. SFS in a new direction, one that might restore at least a modicum of seriousness, maturity, and credibility. But if that person or that group of people is waiting for a moment of crisis to step in, the time has come. The crisis is now.
There has been a seismic development in the ongoing San Francisco Symphony saga. A patron named Laura Leibowitz went to a concert this June and held up a sign during an applause break.
Amid growing public outrage over the Board of Governors’ failure to retain the acclaimed Finnish conductor [Esa-Pekka Salonen] beyond his five-year contract ending after the 2024-25 season, audience member Laura Leibowitz displayed a sign during the June 21 performance that read “F— the board” in Salonen’s native language. An image of her with the sign went viral on social media, increasing scrutiny of the organization’s direction and finances, prompting the organization to threaten a ban of Leibowitz in Davies Symphony Hall.
Fortunately, the orchestra’s senior director of operations immediately leapt into action, writing in a letter to Leibowitz, “Should this conduct occur again, you will be subject to further disciplinary action, up to and including removal from Davies Symphony Hall and/or suspension of privileges to enter and attend activities of the San Francisco Symphony.”
Leibowitz told the Chronicle that “a ban would be devastating, as she considers the local classical music community like family. She has reached out to the ACLU to consult her rights and is considering her next move.”
Leibowitz has been a regular concertgoer at the orchestra since 1991.
Obviously, there are many lessons to take away from this violent attack on our social and symphonic mores. I thought I’d break a few of them down.
Signs are the number one threat to an orchestra’s financial sustainability. Signs are widely recognized as a gateway drug to banners, which in turn is a gateway drug to organized applause-break chants. When one angry audience member sees another angry audience member indulging in the immoral behavior, the contagion spreads. And what happens if these loud lost souls move on to even harder drugs, such as the alcohol available in the lobby? This is a slippery slope. Every time an obscene Finnish sign is raised, the San Francisco Symphony’s accumulated deficit climbs by another million dollars. We are lucky that someone intervened when they did.
Women who have been attending the symphony since 1991 are the best demographic to alienate and antagonize. The more loyal the customer, the more urgent a matter it is to ban them from your business’s premises. All for-profit corporations know this, and it’s time we start running our non-profits more like for-profits. There is an old saying in the world of business: “The customer is always wrong.” Only the stupidest businessmen do not understand this.
The timeline of this particular audience rebellion is working in management’s favor. This was not Esa-Pekka Salonen’s final bow. He still has a year left to serve as music director. And the musicians’ contract doesn’t expire until November. So even if a multi-month strike or lockout happens and knocks out the back half of Salonen’s final season, this board versus patron conflict is going to keep escalating for four more months. Fortunately, during that time, audiences definitely won’t start connecting with each other, planning additional direct actions, brandishing dozens of signs at once, or reading and writing editorials and inflammatory blog entries. There is no precedent for that in American orchestral history.
It is totally normal for orchestra patrons to contact the ACLU about interactions they’ve had with an orchestra’s management. In fact, all responsibly-governed orchestras have an entire subset of patrons and subscribers who are constantly in talks with the ACLU. Truly, a long-time patron invoking the ACLU is a (and I hate to use this word, but…) sign that the orchestra is doing everything right. People in the industry know that every world-class orchestra’s tour to Carnegie Hall kicks off with a minimum of ten patrons complaining to the press that their civil liberties have been violated.
The San Francisco Symphony needs to keep writing threatening letters to patrons who will then immediately take those letters to the press, thereby publicizing them even more, giving other patrons ideas, and cementing the public press narrative of PR-Challenged Out-of-Touch Upper Management vs. Pissed Off Patrons. This is productive! It is a wise use of staff time and resources, and speaks well about the priorities within the organization. It will not make San Francisco Symphony employees’ working lives even more miserable than they already must be.
It is long past time for orchestras to start keeping a database of concertgoers (with mugshots). Fortunately for the San Francisco Symphony, it is located in Silicon Valley. So I think there could be a productive partnership to be struck here between the orchestra board and a tech company to create some kind of facial recognition database that could better track the identities and whereabouts of these sick sign perverts. Perhaps that database could even be monetized in some way, or the information scraped to train AI with. This could be an exciting cutting-edge partnership that will lure in future donors, thereby engorging the Silicon Valley donation pipeline, since (as we all remember) Salonen couldn’t get that particular job done in four years, two of which happened during a pandemic.
Fellow audience members should warn the orchestra administration if they witness — or even hear rumors about — other audience members partaking in crafts. Perhaps a hotline could be set up to report the subversives. Public service announcements discussing the dangers of permanent markers and cardstock could be made. To underline the gravity of the situation, letters in blue envelopes with the San Francisco Symphony’s seal on them could be sent to these people to let them know that they’re under investigation. Perhaps lie detectors have a role to play here. There are no bad ideas when you’re brainstorming.
Three words: cameras in bathrooms. Extreme? Perhaps. Necessary? Yes. Hall restrooms are prime spaces in which deviant activities (such as sign assemblage) can happen. The higher-ups must monitor the goings-on. (An auxiliary benefit to monitored bathrooms would be that upper management could see who has been using too much toilet paper, which will help push the San Francisco Symphony to both financial- and eco- sustainability. We in the orchestra industry call that a win-win!)
Moving forward, every San Francisco Symphony patron must undergo a full body search before entering the concert hall. Now, this may sound extreme, but remember: we live in a post-Signgate world. Paper is more insidious than a firearm, because paper cannot be found by metal detectors. Paper is a flat substance, and, terrifyingly, can be folded. Music lovers must demand safety. If elderly volunteer ushers have to strip search us so that we can hear Mahler 3 live, then that’s the price we must pay. Great art requires great sacrifice.
Orchestras would benefit from maintaining their own paramilitary forces. Think about it. What happens if Laura Leibowitz fails to obey authority, even after being warned in a sternly worded letter that she faces a San Francisco Symphony ban? If she dares to enter and raise a second obscene Finnish sign, what is stopping her from attending a third time for, say, Bruckner’s seventh symphony (besides Bruckner’s seventh symphony)? No, she must face consequences. Of course, there’s a big problem here: the orchestra as it exists today does not have the manpower to make good on their warnings. Who is going to take Liebowitz into custody if she doesn’t comply? If I may borrow an apocryphal quote from Andrew Jackson, “The San Francisco Symphony has made its decision. Now let it enforce it.” What better way to solve this issue besides maintaining a standing army of mercenary fighters headquartered in the box office (this area could also serve as a detainment facility)? I live in hope: I believe that law enforcement can be trained so that Ms. Leibowitz can be removed from the premises without distracting other concertgoers. Her removal could be planned to coincide with brass fanfares.
Fortunately, there is absolutely nothing else going on right now at the San Francisco Symphony that requires management’s attention. By my count, the only problems are a music director abandoning ship, a stalled search for a new music director, an ongoing audience mutiny, an expiring musicians’ contract, a rapidly worsening PR crisis, and crippling amounts of debt. The orchestra is extremely lucky to have time to give this truly terrifying incident the attention it deserves.
I’ve been writing about orchestras for about fifteen years now, and people from Wisconsin are great writers, so I took the liberty of tossing together a few sentences that the SFS management is welcome to use or adapt when they announce the new regulations.
The executive order that the orchestra president will sign will expand security investigations to all levels of balconies, facilitating the coordination of the efforts among various departments, including the Ushers Unit, the Toilet Paper Usage Investigation Committee, and the SFS Sign Deviants Unit. Those accused and investigated will be judged based on their trustworthiness and whether they are able to commit donations that would leave them susceptible to coercion. These are people the rest of us consider sad, sick, even pathetic. Note that an investigation about concealed signage may be commenced based on the accusation of a fellow audience member, even if the fellow audience member prefers to remain anonymous. One of my friends said the other day, why worry about those individuals? You don’t claim they’re all pro-Salonen, do you? The answer is obviously no. Some of them are very energetic, very loyal patrons. Some of them have that unusual affliction through no fault of their own. We’re not disturbed about them because of their morals. We’re disturbed about them because they are dangerous to this concert hall. Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the San Francisco Symphony.
*
Proposed orchestral soundtrack for the background music to the speech:
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.
Not sponsored by Audible!
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.
God, we were really going through it back then
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.
Yesterday the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article headlined “How will S.F. Symphony navigate through crisis? Its leaders discuss the future in first interview.”
The authors spoke with Chief Executive Matthew Spivey and Board President Priscilla Geeslin. Awkwardly, only the ghost of music director Esa-Pekka Salonen was present.
The San Francisco Symphony finds itself at a turning point. Along with the New York Philharmonic and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, they are in the middle of musician/management negotiations. San Francisco’s contract expires in late November. They also recently got word they’re losing their music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, who announced back in March (in his own separately released statement, no less) that he would not be renewing his contract due to fundamental disagreements with the orchestra’s board of directors. The official management response to the loss of one of the most sought-after music directors in the world has been a resounding “meh.” Patrons are crying about it. Now the orchestra is steaming full speed ahead toward triple icebergs: leadership loss, a potential work stoppage, and financial crisis.
Before we start, here’s my personal theory of the case:
The San Francisco Symphony is dealing with two separate problems. (The word “problem” is underselling it. They’re crises, really.) The two are entangled, but they’re fundamentally separate.
The First Problem is whatever happened to them financially between 2010 and 2024.
The Second Problem is, there’s a leadership problem. There’s a communications problem. There’s a values problem. There’s a respect problem.
Everything else I’ll ever have to say about this leadership team will be colored by that assumption: that there is a money problem, and then, apart from that, a vision problem.
With that out of the way, let’s dive in and read some tea leaves.
The San Francisco Symphony has experienced a tumultuous period since Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen announced his decision not to renew his five-year contract.
“I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does,” Salonen offered as the impetus for stepping down from the role after the 2024-25 season in a statement released on March 14.
Since then, it has come to light that the 113-year-old orchestra has struggled with budget deficits for more than a decade, with the 2022-23 season expenses at $78.6 million and revenue only at $67.4 million.
Okay. So. Temporarily bypassing the whole pushing-your-music-director-until-he-goes-overboard bit… Numbers. Budgets. Timelines. Deficits. These are facts. These are verifiable. These are the building blocks to creating a shared reality: the first step to solving the First Problem.
By the way, if you want to dig into the First Problem, you should! To entice you, here’s as brief a summary as I can muster, conveniently formatted in one long run-on paragraph so the normal people can skip it.
The San Francisco Symphony maintains an invaluable online archive of 990s and audited financial reports. For context, this is much more information than American orchestras traditionally provide to patrons on their websites. However, in this particular context, where we need to assemble a timeline of the past decade-plus to fact-check claims, it’s a double-edged sword: yes, it’s a lot of information, but also…it’s a lot of information. Many geological epochs ago, I wrote a lot about my hometown band, the Minnesota Orchestra; I return to their example a lot. They provide an annual year-in-review report that includes mission highlights and simplified financials. (Sample here.) By contrast, the SFS separates those two things in their reporting. They have a Season Review / Impact Report about their artistic accomplishments, but that document doesn’t include any financials, so you have to rely on 990s and financial reports for numbers. The SFS’s 990s and dense financial reports can be tough for a normal person to extract meaningful information from, but yesterday afternoon I tried my best. Check out the sixth page of the audited financial statement for what seemed to me to be the best overall summary of what’s going on. The 2023 financial report records “total revenues and releases” of $89,416,000 and “total expenses” of $83,179,000. Now obviously a non-profit orchestra is not making $6 million in profit annually. It just looks that way because of the comparatively complicated way that the SFS has chosen to summarize its finances for laypeople. Back in March, Janos Gareben at the San Francisco Classical Voice actually tried digging into this and even contacted the orchestra to get some clarification. A SFS spokesperson told him that “the $144.9 million shown on the [990 form for fiscal year 2022] includes ‘realized’ gains from investments but does not include ‘unrealized’ gains or losses.” Still, it appears that Gareben wasn’t able to completely untangle the numbers, either, as his ultimate conclusion about them was “Fiscal year 2021 showed revenues of $66 million against expenses of $53 million, and fiscal year 2020 had revenues of $65 million against expenses of $73 million.” To the best of my knowledge, no outsider has done a deep-dive on these numbers to explain to the layperson, so my understanding of how exactly the orchestra got from there to the deficits is mushy. To be clear, I’m not saying anyone cooked any books or anything like that. I’m just saying, there is so much information here, and the SFS is such a behemoth of an organization, it’s tough to find the story inside the numbers without an expert, given the veritable ocean of information we have right now.
Orchestra CEOs around the country will agree: I am not someone who should be interpreting 990s. I make my living writing about dead people. So until some independent outsider steps in to untangle all this – (dare I hope, a member of the press?) – I can’t offer much commentary about the San Francisco Symphony’s First Problem.
However, as a patron who has watched organizational implosions awfully similar to this one for years and years, I can offer commentary about the San Francisco Symphony’s Second Problem. That’s the ground I’m most comfortable on, anyway. So let’s move on to that.
Salonen has declined to speak publicly about the Symphony or his impending departure.
But in a joint interview with the Chronicle, CEO Matt Spivey and Board President Priscilla Geeslin addressed the organization’s challenges and future plans.
It is so striking to me how Salonen has ghosted these people. Either that, or he wasn’t invited to the interview in the first place. Which would be insane, because yes, he announced his departure in March, but he doesn’t actually leave until June 2025. I know this because the San Francisco Symphony press room announced his June 2025 departure as the “culmination” of his contract.
That’s one way to announce a breakup! “My husband announced our divorce as the culmination of our relationship following the completion of our marriage contract.”From this press release.
Lest we forget, the headline of this piece is: “How will S.F. Symphony navigate through crisis? Its leaders discuss the future in first interview.” Guys, you can like it or not, but Esa-Pekka Salonen is the San Francisco Symphony’s leader, and involved in navigating the crisis. He should be here.
I’m curious, did the reporters ask why he wasn’t? Did they leave an empty podium? An empty chair? Did they set a place setting for him at coffee? I’ve heard he’ll drink coffee without cream.
If you normally don’t follow orchestras, I cannot underline to you enough how weird it is for a music director to be absent from a high-profile article about the orchestra’s future. Sure, he’s a lame duck, but he’s the duck with the baton! And healthy orchestras respect their ducks, even when they’re lame! This metaphor is getting away from me.
“We as an organization have the opportunity to be a major part of the revitalization of this city and its incredible arts and culture ecosystem,” Spivey said at Davies Symphony Hall.
“Sometimes the most interesting and creative ideas have been born out of a limitation or a restriction in some way.”
I’m sorry, what?
I made this when I was a child and had no money for a real violin. Was this a new business model all along??
From this point on, the article turns into an search engine optimized Q&A because…sure. Why not?
What is the current financial situation at the San Francisco Symphony?
“Last season, we were facing what would have been roughly an $11 million deficit on a roughly $80 million budget,” Spivey said. But thanks to what he called “extraordinary, one-time contributions,” the organization has stayed afloat. Moving forward, the Symphony says it is planning within realistic financial resources and focusing on building a stronger philanthropic base.
“It’s important going forward as we expand the range of our programming, that we have the opportunity to connect to a broader audience,” Spivey said, highlighting the need to develop relationships with new potential donors.
Okay. Sounds like Spivey and Geeslin are looking for a music director who might want to rethink the funding model, rethink audience development, reanalyze outreach, etc.
Someone who (and I’m just spitballing here) might say something like, “I felt that orchestras, even before the pandemic, were facing a challenging time, especially in this country but also globally. The funding model needs to be rethought. The audience development needs to be rethought. The outreach needs to be reanalyzed.”
Are there projections for future deficits in the 2024-2025 season?
The budget for the 2024-2025 season is still under consideration.
My reaction to this:
“We’ve had a lot of conversation internally as we’ve been doing the planning for ’24-’25 and beyond,” Spivey explained, “to make sure we understand what level of resources we have and what we can expect in terms of ticket sales and the philanthropic pipeline going forward.”
This timing feels batsh*t.
Spivey just said they’re working with an $80 million annual budget. The San Francisco Symphony’s fiscal year starts on September first. That’s in eighty-seven days. Like…is he still considering minor budget adjustments or is he talking major ones? Are there questions about the level of resources he has? What’s all happening in that pipeline? What are the projections? What’s the plan? What do you mean?
In short, how much improv is happening within an eighty million dollar budget for a season that starts in eighty-seven days? The repertoire has been announced. The guest artists have been booked. We already know that. Again:
So I guess there are a few potential interpretations here. Either this is a lie, or a misquote or misunderstanding, or just bull…or there’s an unspoken insinuation that there’s a big ticket item that’s still being negotiated.
How will the financial situation affect the Symphony Gala on Sept. 25?
Oh, thank God someone asked.
Geeslin stated the “biggest departure” during the annual event is…
Me, timidly: Salonen?
Geeslin stated the “biggest departure” during the annual event is the scaling back of the pre-performance reception, and the elimination of the Symphony’s elaborately decorated tent for the dinner and after-party.
Oh. Well. Close.
This has the same energy as Ruth Bukater standing on the deck of the Titanic and calling “WILL THE LIFEBOATS BE SEATED ACCORDING TO CLASS?”
Any room for a gentleman, gentlemen?
But thank God we got the reporting on the elaborately decorated after-party dinner tent. We needed to know the fate of the elaborately decorated after-party dinner tent.
Are there efforts to attract new donors from the tech and venture capital sectors?
Yes, the Symphony is actively seeking to build relationships with new donors across the Bay Area. But Spivey noted that what’s “really important to understand is that the time it takes to build a relationship, when they arrive at a place where they’re deeply invested and feel inspired to give philanthropically, is long… it takes anywhere from seven to 14 years for donors to mature in that way.”
Butbutbutbutbut! You did – you – you already – you did the thing already! About this! You hired Salonen! A big part of the answer to attracting these new donors was supposed to be hiring Salonen! Who, by the way, you did not push to keep to give seven to fourteen years to. Am I crazy? Do we not live in the same reality? You’d been addressing this! Then you undid what you started doing to address this! Without acknowledging you ever undid what you started doing to address this!
Are there plans to expand the board and set minimum trustee-giving levels?
They said the Symphony is always looking to expand its board.
“Right now, our board sits at about 50 people, and we can go all the way up to 80,” Geeslin said.
All current board members give at the Maestro Circle level ($15,000 minimum).
“Some people think having a board minimum, you leave money on the table. I’m of the mind that we ask people to give at a certain level when they come in and then, of course, they will hopefully give more,” Spivey said.
Well, my first concern is obviously:
Will people even want to join without an elaborately decorated after-party dinner tent?
My second concern is… I know I’m just a writer, but, with effort, I can handle the calculation. Thirty more people, times a fifteen thousand minimum, equals… $450,000.
And that’s great. If we can find thirty more people with $15,000 a year to spare who also want to jump aboard a sinking ship with a reputation for organizational dysfunction, that’s a hypothetical whole entire $450,000. And that’s not nothing!
What are the plans for renovating Davies Symphony Hall?
Funding to evaluate potential changes to the Symphony’s home venue ahead of its 50th anniversary in 2030 has long been secured, but any plans for the renovation are in the preliminary stages.
The current goal is to get the entitlement from the city that would allow the possibility of renovation ahead of any historic landmark status for Davies that may restrict the process.
“We began working with the architect Mark Cavagnero to imagine what a potential renovation could look like,” said Spivey.
“There’s no obligation to rush into a renovation project,” added Spivey.
I’m glad to see that the savings from the elaborately decorated after-party dinner tent are going to be re-invested in the venue proper.
I think a lot of people who haven’t watched similar disputes play out over the years are really going to be stuck on this. The orchestra can find the money to spend multiple hundreds of millions of dollars on a building but not enough to close a budget deficit? And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but honestly? It’s possible.
Here’s a tough-to-swallow truth about big ticket donors and foundations. They love edifices. This is a whole documented phenomenon. You can look it up. It’s been nicknamed the “edifice complex.”
I’m generalizing, but in many communities, it’s common for donors to be more interested in funding buildings than day-to-day operations. Why? Operations are ephemeral. You can’t carve your name on them. They don’t offer the same professional or social cachet. A performance is here today, gone tomorrow. But a building is something concrete you can show your friends, your colleagues, your rivals, for decades to come. You can even throw corporate parties inside them! Plus, halls shape their built environment: an environment that is often, in the case of orchestras, in densely populated downtown locations. It’s like a miniature stadium. Those are attractive benefits to people who wield political or financial power.
Needless to say, over the years, many orchestras have had labor disputes coinciding with big capital campaigns for hall renovations. It’s a trope at this point.
To the symphony’s credit, it has stated publicly that “our priority is to stabilize the organization financially and support our artistic output.” But they’re also simultaneously ramping up for a capital campaign, so I mean… It’s clearly on the horizon.
There are ways that an organization might attempt to mitigate the more damaging side effects of a community’s tendency toward edifice complexes, and guide folks to supporting day-to-day operations. One might be hiring a beloved music director who is famous for innovative thinking and engaging, cutting-edge programs that are exciting to sponsor. Well, whoops.
By the way, the San Francisco Classical Voicearticle I mentioned earlier included an ominous detail…
Questions remain, especially about where the orchestra would perform during the construction — estimated at three years by the architect and two years by the SF Symphony administration. Davies would mostly be unavailable for rehearsals and performances, and the orchestra’s old home, the War Memorial Opera House, is fully booked by San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and others…
Unlike the New York Philharmonic’s three-year-long $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, during which the orchestra played in Carnegie Hall and elsewhere, the SF Symphony would have no such options locally.
In 2012, the Minnesota Orchestra left Orchestra Hall during a renovation. It was supposed to play concerts at the Minneapolis Convention Center auditorium a few blocks away. As it turned out, the Orchestra Hall renovations ended up being finished before the sixteen-month-long musician lockout was. Now, I’m not saying that history will repeat itself in the future. But I’m also not saying that it won’t.
Is the departure of Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen final?
Despite a petition from the Symphony musicians asking the board to find a way to keep Salonen, yes.
But Spivey said that while Salonen’s role as music director is ending, his relationship with the Symphony will continue.
“He will most certainly be a regular guest that comes back and works with the orchestra,” confirmed Spivey.
Is Salonen in the room with us right now? I know the phrase “is the [X] in the room with us right now?” is a meme, but I’m literally asking you, is he in the room with you right now? If not, why not? Where is he? Why are you talking about his future when he’s not there? He is alive. Esa-Pekka Salonen is alive!
Has the search for the next music director begun?
No, but the search will commence soon.
Folks, the classical music world plans its calendar out years in advance. The search should have started the day Salonen announced his departure. Heck, renowned orchestra CEO Deborah Borda has been quoted as saying that searches for future music directors are perpetually ongoing. Honestly, I wouldn’t even be mad if they lied about this one while awaiting the formation of an official search committee, just so it seems like they care. I genuinely can’t tell if they want a music director right now — I’m guessing they don’t until they finish their negotiations with the musicians — but at least pretend for the press, you know? If they’re bargaining in good faith, there’s no time to waste here. Why are they pretending there is?
“We will want to ensure that the person that we find not only is passionate about what they do on the stage, but they’re passionate about building this organization,” said Spivey, noting that the new music director will also need to be “a rallying force for continuing to build our audiences and that philanthropic support.”
Geeslin emphasized the collaborative arts environment in San Francisco, noting that the new director will join a vibrant leadership community.
Great. Conductors love…joining vibrant leadership communities and building philanthropic support. It’s the reason the best of them get into music. They love hobnobbing at gala balls with fellow leaders. Especially in tents.
Seriously, what are you doing to attract this hypothetical new director? Do you think this interview is helping? Who is this interview even for?
How does the Symphony plan to restore public trust?
Yes! Yes! This is a great question! Yes!
Spivey is optimistic. “There are a lot of positive drivers that will enable us to not only overcome those financial challenges but actually land in a very successful place down the road,” he said. “There’s an opportunity to build a philanthropic pipeline in the long term and ultimately, the opportunity to connect deeply to become a really vital part of the arts and culture scene and what makes San Francisco special.”
My follow-up: can you be more generic?
*
The interview ends there.
So. Hey. San Francisco Chronicle.
Look. I don’t blame you. Your dearly beloved arts critic just retired. You had to bring in people who don’t know the field, who are experts in other things, who probably have ten thousand other plates spinning and are existentially nervous about keeping their jobs, because everyone who writes for a living nowadays is existentially nervous about keeping their jobs, and trust me, I feel you. I am counting down the days until Chat GPT starts spitting out mean long-winded gif-encrusted labor dispute essays. But how were they supposed to know what to ask? Without training or experience, how were they supposed to parse the 990s? Or the financial statements of an organization that is spending, raising, and investing hundreds of millions of dollars a year? Again, there are literally hundreds of pages of numbers to go through, and they’re dense. I don’t blame them for not having the bandwidth to dig in here.
No, right now I feel like the bigger problem is how weird the orchestra leadership is acting.
Don’t get me wrong. Running an orchestra is hard. Running an orchestra well is incredibly difficult. It gets especially impossible when there are money troubles.
But the thing that grinds my gears here is, the stuff I’m talking about isn’t about money. This is about governance. This is about communication. This is about respect for a great artist. Respect for a great artist is free. Good optics are free. Answering questions intelligently, with empathy? Free.
I’m going to make a prediction. In the eyes of the public, this leadership team’s original sin won’t have anything to do with the First Problem. It won’t have anything to do with money. Instead, it’s all going to trace back to the decision to push Salonen overboard without a lifejacket and then act like it was no big deal, like they wanted to ghost him all along. So before they can solve whatever financial issues are or aren’t lurking in their 990s, the San Francisco Symphony has to address their Second Problem first. And they have to do it once and for all.
On 4 October 2010, the day that the Detroit Symphony went on strike, Klaus Mäkelä was fourteen years old.12
He was sixteen when the Minnesota Orchestra lockout started. The week it ended, he had just turned eighteen. Four years later, he made his North American debut with them in a program of Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich.34
At the time I wrote, “I don’t know that Klaus Mäkelä has the strength of conception or technique to pull everything possible out of the Shostakovich…yet. (Yet.) But that’s a tall order to ask of a twenty-something…”5
Almost six years later to the day, on 2 April 2024, he was named the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.6
Archival footage of Mäkelä, taken in 2011, from Bruno Monsaingeon’s documentary“Towards the flame.”This footage was shot betweeen the dates of the Detroit and Minnesota work stoppages, just in case you want to feel old.
Mäkelä, like many conductors before him, has likened his relationships with orchestras to marriages.7 The metaphor strikes me as strained but plausible. After all, the network of major American orchestras is like a family: a messy, wealthy, royal one, with rivalries galore and decades of generational trauma propping the whole thing up.
How many of these dynamics does Mäkelä intimately understand? How many can he?
*
In 2024, a launch of a music director bears more than a passing resemblance to the launch of a presidential candidate. Before you can get anywhere near advocating twelve-point plans to a legislative body, first it’s necessary to craft an image.
Conceive the narrative. Package it for overworked, underpopulated newsrooms. Shoot the stylish photographs; print the glossy posters. Produce the video to upload (and keep it under three minutes for maximum engagement across platforms).
So. What will a Mäkelä music directorship in Chicago look like? He says some things in his introduction video.
“The Chicago Symphony has always served as an example of what is a great orchestra.”
“The Chicago Symphony has an attitude of perfecting the art. And this is what we need to give in today’s world as much as we need to give before, and forever, is to always try to aim for the best.”
“We need to experiment. We need to find sounds and colors, but still to keep this identity of the orchestra, which is so wonderfully distinct.”
The lighting is impeccable. The cinematography is masterful. But it all papers over a major problem.
Whether this perception is warranted or not, many commentators have noted that between this appointment, his other appointment to the Concertgebouw, and his two other orchestras in Paris and Oslo, Mäkelä’s career trajectory reads as professional box checking, a breathless race to the top sheerly for the sport of it.8910 This is the Pete Buttigieg-ification of the American music directorship.
Maybe that’s an unfair reading. Maybe the modern necessity of three-minute narrative building failed Mäkelä. Maybe he and the Chicago board have had substantial discussions about what he wants to accomplish artistically over the course of his tenure, and how to pay for it all. But if they did, not much on that subject found its way into the press materials.11 That said, wonky policy details are rarely found in the early days of a modern presidential campaign, either. And Buttigieg went from “mayor of South Bend” to “eligible to become the designated survivor”, so who am I to wring hands?
*
It’s partly due to recency bias, but I was struck by how different this announcement was from the Minnesota Orchestra’s three-minute introduction of Thomas Søndergård in 2022.
The orchestra president and principal bass speak before Søndergård says a word, and the footage is from a roomful of patrons. The mood is collaborative. There is not a single whiff of the dictatorial or the messianic. The lighting is very bright and even throughout.
Søndergård speaks about how he wants music to impact the lives of listeners. If he was a time traveler, Søndergård might be accused of taking a direct shot at the content of the Mäkelä announcement:
“The main purpose for an orchestra is of course to get better at what we do, which is play music. But we also have to know what we do with our music and why, making programs that make audiences think, and feel, and open their eyes to what can be done to solve issues around gender, race, prejudice. It gets more important every day.”
Complain all you’d like that Søndergård went woke!, but at least his packaging made it clear that he has spent decades thinking about what he’s doing and why. And that why goes way beyond preserving a sound world behind glass.
For the time being, thanks to its wealth and heritage and reputation, Chicago has the luxury of largely insulating itself from the real world. But the days of being a musician who can focus solely on sound and artistry are over. They are done; they are gone. Honestly, were they ever really here?
*
We live in an era populated by a glut of people who believe that making a lot of profit qualifies them to run non-profits. Sometimes these people come into power at orchestras.
During Mäkelä’s late teens, when the modern audience advocacy movement came into vogue during several orchestral work stoppages across America, it became clear that in times of crisis, stakeholders concerned about an ensemble’s quality, personnel, and yes, identity benefit from having a spokesperson with authority inside the organization. That someone has to have definite ideas about where he wants to go and what he wants to see, and why, not just musically, but culturally and organizationally.
Mäkelä’s compatriot (and, incidentally, fellow Jorma Panula student) Osmo Vänskä proved the usefulness of the bully pulpit in Minneapolis. Before Vänskä threw his lot in with the musicians toward the end of the 2012-14 lockout, music directors were renowned for retaining a kind of portentous neutrality during labor disputes. In fact, Detroit music director Leonard Slatkin, who had been director during the DSO’s six month strike, actually devoted an entire chapter of his 2017 book Leading Tones to the Minnesota Orchestra lockout, and a big chunk of that was spent tsk-tsking Vänskä’s choice to go public with his support for the musicians.12
In the end, it was only so much shouting into the sky on Slatkin’s part. In the years since, it’s become acceptable, even fashionable, for maestros to align themselves with their players during labor disputes. In 2019, Marin Alsop went so far as to conduct the locked out musicians of the Baltimore Symphony: a move that, back in 2013, Vänskä didn’t feel comfortable making until after he had actually resigned.*1314 In 2021, Yannick Nézet-Séguin wrote a letter on behalf of the Met Opera Orchestra musicians, advocating for their fair compensation (a letter that, of course, was immediately obtained by the New York Times, an outcome that Nézet-Séguin surely anticipated). Later, in August 2023, he wore a blue T-shirt to an open rehearsal, symbolizing his support of the Philadelphia Orchestra musicians during their negotiations. This act of sartorial solidarity made the Philadephia Inquirer.1516 The trend even hit Chicago in 2019, when Mäkelä’s predecessor Riccardo Muti spoke next to the Orchestra Hall picket line: “I am with the musicians.”17 Granted, he also said at the same event, “I am not participating in the picket line.” But. Still.
There are reasons why taking sides in organizational conflicts was a third rail for music directors for so many years. Obviously one of them is that funders don’t like it. And in times of crisis, music directors will feel pressure from all sides, especially if those sides are holding purse strings.
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American boards have a long history of turning on artists when they become inconvenient, which is a synonym for insubordinate or expensive.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, conductor and impresario Anna Schoen-René was pushed out of Minnesota and barred from pursuing a leadership role at the Minneapolis Symphony after she challenged the region’s wealthy industrialists.18 In 1950s New York, rumors about Dmitri Mitropolous’s sexuality were apparently one reason he was sidelined at the Philharmonic in favor of his protégé, Leonard Bernstein.19 Nowadays we can fully appreciate the irony of this, thanks to the beneficence of Bradley Cooper.
Maestro (2023), starring Bradley Cooper, written by Bradley Cooper, produced by Bradley Cooper, directed by Bradley Cooper
Unfortunately, as recent events attest, boards turning on their artists isn’t a thing of the past. Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is, along with Mäkelä and Vänskä, yet another student of Jorma Panula.20 He signed his contract with the San Francisco Symphony in December 2018.21 On paper, he was a miracle get: the exact kind of innovative thinker a modern orchestra needs, who after departing the Los Angeles Philharmonic, had been cagey about ever signing with another major American orchestra again. (For good reason, it turns out.)
Publicly at least, the board seemed excited to work with him. In the spring of 2021, board chair Priscilla B. Geeslin described her relationship with Salonen to the League of American Orchestras’ Symphony magazine:
“I’ll see him leading a rehearsal. We will share Zoom calls. We had an in-person meeting, which I felt terrible about, because I only had coffee at the house and I had to tell him I hoped he didn’t take cream. He is a delight, though. In talking about what he wants to do, I become more and more excited to see where all this is going, particularly for the digital side of it. He’s incredibly flexible.”22
Turns out, he was only so flexible. Last month, Salonen announced that he would not be renewing his contract, and he was blunt about why. “I have decided not to continue as music director of the San Francisco Symphony because I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does,” he wrote in a statement that was very deliberately published separately from the board’s.
The orchestra’s leadership was blasé about the catastrophe. CEO Matthew Spivey released the equivalent of an impotent shrug emoji: “Clearly these decisions [surrounding addressing financial pressures] are steering the organization in a somewhat different direction than when we could have anticipated in 2018. Given all of this, it’s understandable that Esa-Pekka would conclude his tenure as music director.” Meanwhile, bizarrely, Geeslin’s chosen descriptor for the split was “bittersweet.”23
Almost immediately, the musicians started a change.org petition to rehire Salonen.24 This will not get the job done, and they’re smart enough to know that. That said, what it does do is set the table for a narrative ahead of their contract expiring in November, casting them in the role of audience allies.25 It’s too early to know, but it’s possible that Salonen’s terse departure was the Finnish equivalent of Beyoncé in front of a fireball.
Now, I’m not saying that such an existential conflagration will come to pass in San Francisco or Chicago. We are ten years out from the Minnesota Orchestra lockout, and there still hasn’t been a worse one, despite what we feared at the time would transpire. But given the intertwined training and careers of these three Finns, two of whom have already been badly burned during their American tenures, I do wonder:
What might happen during an organizational crisis if the music director is young? What if he’s an ambitious man in his thirties, who, for the sake of his future American career, doesn’t want to alienate the types of people who populate boards? What if he happens to be out of town when important conversations are had, and he doesn’t get sent a Zoom link, or the board chair can’t offer him cream? What if he has not yet fully absorbed the subtleties of the hundreds of pre-existing relationships between musicians, management, and board, and what if knowledge of those relationships becomes necessary for his artistic survival? What happens if he doesn’t – or isn’t allowed to – ground his directorship in some kind of purpose beyond aesthetics and bold chiaroscuro lighting?
How should any music director be expected to react in a time of crisis? And most importantly of all, who will he choose to be an asset to?
I ask those questions like I know the answers, but I don’t. At the end of the day, here’s my concern: I don’t want audiences to lose an ally, if a day should come when they need one. I want this art form to endure, and to make people’s lives better. That’s literally all I want.
*
Remember: an American music director is only a conductor in his spare time.
First, he is a fundraiser, a psychologist, a detective, a scholar, a gladiator, a mediator, an inspiration, a party guest, a punching bag, a schmoozer, a showman, and a symbol. Oftentimes, what he does on the podium is of secondary (or, depending on the day, tertiary) importance.
He is someone whose photograph should get people to click on his face — who also has the savvy to never get shivved by the Shakespearean cast of characters who will inevitably gather around him.
In the end, the ascension of Klaus Mäkelä, and the cultural ecosystem that made it possible, is not about a single talented wunderkind storming the bastions of Michigan Avenue. Rather, it’s a chance to think about what we ought to expect from the field’s most exalted leaders in the most exalted jobs, what we don’t, and what we should.
Sources
Chucherdwatanasak, Naathinee. “Making Detroit Sound Great: The Detroit Symphony and Its Post-Strike Transformations.” Artivate, vol. 9, no. 1, Spring 2020, pp. 43–61. ↩︎
Emily E Hogstad [@song_of_lark]. “I Also Don’t Know That Klaus Mäkelä Has the Strength of Conception or Technique to Pull Everything Possible out of the Shostakovich…yet. (Yet.) But That’s a Tall Order to Ask of a Twenty-Something, and He Conducts It a Hell of a Lot Better than I Would, So…” Twitter, 21 Apr. 2018, https://twitter.com/song_of_lark/status/987532448782344192. ↩︎
Chambers, Eileen. CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA NAMES KLAUS MÄKELÄ AS NEXT MUSIC DIRECTOR. ↩︎
Vänskä conducted the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra in a Grammy celebration concert sponsored by third parties hoping to bring the sides together in February of 2013. He did not appear as conductor under the auspices of the musicians until after his resignation in October 2013. ↩︎
Song of the Lark 