Symphony Players Shouldn’t Have To Go Begging

My nightmarish fantasy just will not go away: Dozens of scruffy-looking people with musical instruments crowd the sidewalk at a downtown stoplight. Their hand-lettered cardboard sign reads, “Veterans of major music conservatories. Will play for food.”

Behind the dirty beards and underneath the matted hair are the familiar faces of the players of the Spokane Symphony Orchestra.

Of course, it hasn’t come to that. Not yet, anyway.

The symphony is asking for money, though. The orchestra, Spokane’s largest arts organization, has just embarked on a campaign to raise $3.5 million to $4.5 million for its endowment fund, which now stands at $5 million. Interest on the current endowment fund furnishes about 15 percent of the orchestra’s $2.1 million operating budget. The budget’s other income components are, in order of magnitude: ticket sales and other earned income, grants and the annual fund contributions.

Ticket sales make up roughly half of the symphony’s budget. If ticket sales alone were to keep the orchestra players off that street corner, the range of prices would double from the $13 to $27 currently charged.

The prices to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra in Carnegie Hall this week ranged from $18 to $70, the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center from $15 to $65, Les Arts Florisants at the Brooklyn Academy from $30 to $110.

The Spokane Symphony’s endowment fund adds stability to the organization because only interest on the fund is used to contribute to the operating budget. The principal is untouched. A larger endowment fund would also allow expansion of educational programs.

Symphony orchestras in America are in trouble. Many of them - the 19th-century creations of the leisured, cultured rich - have fallen on financial hard times.

The cultured rich have become an endangered species. The foundations whose grants took their place are taking up other causes in areas of social and health services. Influential politicians seem determined to choke off government support by killing the already puny National Endowment for the Arts along with their state and local counterparts.

Orchestras in Kansas City, Denver and New Orleans have taken bankruptcy but bounced back. Others, such as those in San Diego and Sacramento, have not been so lucky.

British critic Norman Lebrecht recently published a book on the imperiled state of classical music, which was just released in the United States as “Who Killed Classical Music?”(Birch Lane Press). Lebrecht’s list of suspects is longer than any in an Agatha Christie thriller. He has detailed indictments ready for everybody from The Three Tenors to greedy record companies, manipulating musicians’ managers and avaricious unions.

James Oestreich, classical music editor of The New York Times, blames the music industry’s hot pursuit of the sensational, citing the hype surrounding “Shine” pianist David Helfgott. Oestreich, writing in the April 17 edition of the Times, also mentions cutbacks in music education for the young and high ticket prices for the troubles orchestras are enduring.

In a very odd conclusion to an otherwise well-reasoned article, Oestreich writes: “If, as seems likely, a regional orchestra were to die here and there, there might be a heightened demand for the great American orchestras to tour the United States rather than running off to play Beethoven in Japan year after year.”

I can hardly wait for our annual visit from the New York Philharmonic - with its New York-sized ticket prices.

Symphonic music happens to be a bargain in Spokane - the home of an excellent (and solvent) regional orchestra. There are ways symphonic music can remain a bargain in Spokane. It is pretty simple, really. Contribute to symphony’s fund raising. Go to concerts. Support music education.

It’s a three-step program to avoid having those symphony musicians begging at the stoplight.

, DataTimes