OPEN, SAYS-A ME

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Previews galore from me in the latest Tucson Weekly. Not enough space for ’em all, alas, so first comes a two-in-one package. Or is it three-in-one?

    Two local theater producers are thinking big this weekend.
    Arizona Onstage Productions, which usually presents offbeat shows in small venues, is moving into the Temple of Music and Art this weekend and next for its most extravagant (and mainstream) production to date, The Full Monty. Meanwhile, Chamber Music Plus Southwest is cramming two different shows into a single weekend. One, with live classical music, has Sharon Gless (of Queer as Folk and Cagney & Lacey) narrating an imagined correspondence between poet Emily Dickinson and "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind; the other, with an original jazz score by Avery Sharpe, presents Jasmine Guy (A Different World, Dead Like Me, many Broadway shows) in Raisin' Cane: A Harlem Renaissance Odyssey.

    You can red more about it here. Then move on to an article about a local playwright who’s either brave enough or crazy enough to mount a production of his own work:

    Gavin Kayner's output as a writer includes six full-length plays, two one-acts, several shorter pieces and three screenplays. And that's just since he retired from teaching five years ago.
    As if he weren't busy enough, Kayner has formed a company--Piquant Plays Productions, or P³--expressly to mount his play Thumbs. Kayner describes it as "the story of a young man named Isaac who, stripped of an emotional and a spiritual context, loses a grip on his sanity. With the help of a psychiatrist facing his own dilemma, Isaac struggles to gain some grace by unraveling the knot of his past."
    Says Kayner, "It's an idea play, about the eternal and infernal questions we're all burdened with. I don't know the answers, and it's much more interesting to the audience if I don't. I'm trying to be entertaining and provocative, and give people something to talk about afterward--unlike The Odd Couple, which, once you've seen it, you've seen it."

    Find the rest of the story here.

TUCSON SYMPHONY SALARIES, PART 2

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Within an hour of my post linking to Drew McManus’ survey of orchestral executive director salaries, musicians from the Tucson Symphony picked up on it and started contacting me with their own story to tell, offering more information than Drew had to work with on his particular project. Before I move on to that, here’s a little chart I put together, using Drew’s figures, that compares the Tucson Symphony to its immediate neighbors in a similar budget category. (I use the word “Budget” as a shorthand for Drew’s “Total Ensemble Expenditures,” which is a more precise term.) I pulled the music-director salaries from Drew’s subsequent post on that subject.

ORCHESTRA	BUDGET	EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR SALARY	MUSIC DIRECTOR SALARY
Knoxville Symphony	$3,702,059	$57,275	$55,000
Rhode Island Philharmonic	$3,975,141	$158,686	$116,500
Tucson Symphony	$4,112,115	$96,440	$101,285
Richmond Symphony	$4,160,173	$87,500	$120,804
New Mexico Symphony	$4,215,334	$76,200	$102,000

    The real blip on that chart is the Rhode Island Philharmonic, but I’ll let you make your own observations as we move along to the TSO musicians’ material. Please keep in mind that I’m just acting as an information conduit here, not as a reporter. I trust the source of these figures, but if any of my readers dispute them or have contrary interpretations, I’ll be happy to pass that along, too.
    A member of the orchestra sent me a great deal of information that’s a matter of public record, but the player wanted to remain nameless in order to duck any repercussions for speaking out. This particular player’s main point of contention is that the musicians’ income has been increasing at a much lower rate than that of music director George Hanson and especially executive director Susan Franano.
    By the way, if you look at more recent figures than Drew was using for his particular survey, you see that, for the latest available reporting period (which was actually for a fiscal year ending June 2005), when you include contributions to employee benefit plans and deferred compensation, Franano’s income is more like $107,422 and Hanson’s is $113,271.
    Now, on to what the musicians make. This is a tricky subject, because your income depends essentially on where you sit in the orchestra, and is tied in with how many services you are guaranteed in a season. (A service is a single rehearsal or concert.) If you’re in chairs 9 through 14 in the first violin section, in 2004-2005 you were guaranteed 90 services. If you were second trombone, you got 140 services. Also, keep in mind that the principal players in the TSO receive about 14 percent more per service than everybody else, and often get extra services through small-ensemble work, so a principal player can be getting paid for more than 200 services per season.
    Let’s take compensation for one of the string players as an example. From the 1999-2000 through the 2002-2003 seasons, the per-service rate for this player remained unchanged at $84.63. Meanwhile, in 2000 Franano joined the organization at a salary of $80,000 (nearly 11 percent higher than the parting salary of her predecessor, Clyde Kunz). In the succeeding years, counting additional contributions to benefit plans and deferred compensation, Franano’s income rose 6.5 percent in 2001, 7.6 percent in 2002, 5.1 percent in 2003 and 11.4 percent in 2004. Music director Hanson didn’t get a raise in 2001, but his compensation increased 6.25 percent in 2002, 3.6 percent in 2003 and 12 percent in 2004.
    Meanwhile, back in the rank and file, after a five-year salary freeze to help the orchestra get its budget more balanced, our string player received a 5 percent raise in the 2003-2004 season and a 2.25 percent raise the following year, but took a 5.5 percent cut in the 2005-2006 season. In 2006-2007 came a substantial 9.9 percent raise, but part of that was to make up for the cut the previous year. So right now this string player is making $94.36 per service.
    Remember that what this musician actually has in the bank at the end of the year also depends on the number of services. A player may be making more per service, but receiving fewer services. Or there could be a very big bump in annual income simply because the person is working a lot more.
    So, with all the variables, this particular string player may be ending up with $15,000 a year, while, say, the third trumpeter or somebody sitting in the back of the first violin section may not even reach the $10,000 level.
    My correspondent’s main point, though, is that on a per-service basis, TSO members like our string player are making only 11.5 percent more now than they were in 1999-2000. In contrast, Franano’s salary increased by more than 34 percent in a shorter period. Hanson enjoyed an only slightly lower increase than Franano, while actually spending less face time in front of the orchestra, according to my correspondent.
    I shared some of these figures with someone who has no affiliation with the Tucson Symphony and who remarked, “I was surprised at the spike in compensation in the past few years; it seems to me as though that is the same time the organization started to experience economic difficulties. I wonder what the board used to justify the increases in [executive director] compensation.”
    If anybody offers a justification or alternate analysis, I’ll be happy to pass it along.

CULTURE COMMODIFIED

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Yesterday, the Arizona Daily Star’s opinion section carried an article by Tucson Symphony Orchestra conductor and music director George Hanson, advocating a stronger arts presence in Rio Nuevo planning. George makes some good points (meaning I agree with them), and some points I don’t necessarily agree with but are worth serious, long-term debate. A couple of things, though, I’m ready to argue with right now.
    First, George makes an almost offhand reference to how nifty it would be if Rio Nuevo included “an 1,800 seat concert hall, easily converted into a ball- or showroom.” The Tucson Symphony has been making a small noise for a few years now about how inadequate the TCC Music Hall is, partly because of its somewhat excessive size, partly because it’s tricky to book, and partly because the acoustics are bad. All this is true, especially the point about acoustics; nearly every culture coffin built from the 1940s through the 1980s has dreadful sound, and the TCC Music Hall is no exception. But erecting a new concert hall, of whatever size, that can be “easily converted into a ball- or showroom” is an absolutely horrible idea. The more purposes a room is designed to suit, the less suitable it will be for any one thing, and the acoustics of such a convertible space are sure to be dreadful. Besides, the Tucson Convention Center already has a ballroom and lots of exhibition space; that’s about the last thing we need to add downtown, despite the pleas of convention boosters.
    My more serious dispute is with George’s longstanding argument that the arts can serve as an engine of economic development. I wrote an article about this in 2004 for the Tucson Weekly, and if you’re disinclined to follow the link, I’ll slap the story it in front of your face right here:

    It's not enough that the arts are, in some intangible way, good for us. The arts, according to the latest trendy argument, will create jobs, bolster the city budget, keep kids in school and restore a national economy betrayed by failed technology start-ups and ruinous wars.
    In other words, arts advocates are giving up on the notion that culture is intrinsically valuable. It can be sold to reluctant arts funders only as a tool to improve America's and Tucson's finances.
    This is a dangerous way to think about culture. It may increase funding over the next couple of fiscal years, but before long this argument will backfire, and cultural organizations will be worse off than before.
    Arts funding around the country has been especially tight in the past 2 1/2 years, and city and state cultural councils have been going hungry along with the traditionally starving artists. But the arts community is sly and adaptable. Noting that the nation and many of the states are run by people who are anti-elitist--and often anti-intellectual--the arts community now justifies its continued funding by arguing that the arts are good for the economy. Thus, cultural development programs are as essential as economic development plans.
    Only the fact that the argument is being sung by a swelling chorus of arts advocates is new; the concept itself isn't particularly fresh. For years, little studies have quietly suggested that Scottsdale-style clusters of art galleries are good for the tax base, and that the presence of a professional orchestra will give a quality-of-life advantage to a community trying to attract corporate expansion with the usual tax breaks and docile, low-paid workers.
    But now the argument for the arts as an economic development tool is loud and sustained. And if that's the best case we can make, then within a few years, this song of praise will become the death rattle of American culture.
    The concept of arts as economic engine was popularized by Richard Florida's 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida posits that some 30 percent of the U.S. workforce is made up of "creative" individuals, people in law, computer science, the arts and many other professions, who are paid to create technology, ideas or content.
    "The wealth generated by the creative sector is astounding," Florida writes in the preface to the paperback edition of his book. "It accounts for nearly half all wage and salary income in the United States, $1.7 trillion dollars, as much as the manufacturing and service sectors combined." Creative regions like San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego and Austin, according to Florida, generate more jobs, higher salaries, more innovations and more high-tech growth.
    Florida stresses, "Human creativity is the ultimate economic resource. The ability to come up with new ideas and better ways of doing things is ultimately what raises productivity and thus living standards."
    Obviously, not every member of the "creative class" is an artist, but the arts figure prominently in Florida's formulas for economic success. More recently, Florida has written that it's "obvious that arts, culture, and demographic diversity can help spur job creation and economic revitalization. Take the classic case of gentrification of inner city neighborhoods like New York's SoHo or San Francisco's SoMa: these neighborhoods initially lost blue-collar jobs as factories and warehouses moved out of outmoded facilities. Artists and culturally creative people then moved into the facilities, often reclaiming the properties from ruin by way of illegal conversions and their own sweat equity revitalization. Gays and singles came next. Only much later, once these initial, pioneering groups had increased real estate values, did families, professionals, yuppies, technology-based businesses, and retail shops follow."
    Florida is hardly the only person making these claims now. At a June 4 cultural planning forum and workshop sponsored mainly by the Tucson Pima Arts Council, consultant Bill Bulick of Creative Planning Associates in Portland, Ore., emphasized "cultural economic development opportunities" such as cultural tourism, and touted arts-economic impact studies as important tools in developing a city's cultural plan.
    Bulick also repeated points from the University of Pennsylvania's Social Impact of the Arts Project indicating that low-income neighborhoods with high levels of "cultural participation" were five times more likely to have very low levels of delinquency, and neighborhoods with higher cultural participation were more likely to experience an average decline in poverty without a loss of population.
    TPAC itself has articulated its core values in similar terms. Near the top of its "2003 Issue Papers on Arts and Culture" is the statement, "Arts and culture are an important industry sector that have a significant impact on the economy." And later: "Promotion of Tucson's arts and culture will increase tourism and result in more and longer stays, and more spending in the local economy by visitors."
    The document quotes a 2001 study conducted by the University of Arizona's Office of Economic Development that credits Tucson nonprofit arts organizations with generating, in 1999-2000, 3,554 jobs, $96.8 million annually in wages and sales and $5.8 million in total tax revenue--$2.9 million of that staying local. "The cultural community is one of Tucson's more significant industries," boasts TPAC. "Every dollar spent on the arts in Tucson generates $1.79 in tax revenues to the City. ... Providing for the needs of artists and art-related businesses is an investment with a return in tax revenues, property value increases and tax base expansion."
    But what happens when local politicians and bureaucrats--and voters--buy into this, and then the local economy enters another of its periodic slumps? Betrayed, they will cry, "The arts didn't save us after all!" And so culture, being proved useless, will be defunded to levels even lower than the current embarrassing local norm of less than $2 per capita (which is way behind not only Seattle and Sacramento, but even Flagstaff).
    The backfiring economic-development argument will kill arts funding faster than any right-wing crusade against obscenity in the art museum. This is not a profitable course to pursue.
    Besides, even touting creativity as an engine for building social capital and civic life, noble as that sounds, merely commodifies culture. Reducing juvenile delinquency and boosting the tax base aren't reasons to value culture. Arts and culture are important because they define us as a species.
    Most of us have at least a minimally developed aesthetic sense, even if it doesn't involve a love of fine art or classical music. Appreciating the lines of a vintage car, not being able to shake the latest Top 40 hit out of your head, getting your lower back tattooed or your belly button pierced--this is all evidence of, if not necessarily good taste, aesthetic judgment. It comes so naturally to us that we regard that rare person who admits to no interest in music--any kind of music--as a freak.
    An aesthetic sense is part of what makes us human. It's as basic to our nature as language and opposable thumbs. We can't survive as a society without arts and culture any more than we could survive individually without our vital organs.
    The message we need to send is not that a community without arts is a place with a slimmer wallet. A community without arts lacks a brain and heart.
    Such a message may not open the government coffers, but is that really what the arts are about?

PAYDAY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Adaptistration’s Drew McManus has belatedly released his 2006 report on compensation for executive directors of American orchestras. If you go here to look at his chart, you’ll see that Tucson Symphony executive director Susan Franano makes $96,440 in an organization whose total expenditures are about $4.1 million; meanwhile, the musicians’ base salary is $14,661. Read Drew’s introduction to learn how he got these figures, what they do and do not mean, and what their context is. Orchestras are listed alphabetically. I wish the figures could be resorted by total expenditures, so it would be easier to compare salaries among orchestras in similar budget categories, but that’s a minor complaint; Drew has done the really substantial work of sifting through public records to get the facts.

HOW NOT TO READ A BOOK

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    My little book club, which was founded before book clubs became fashionable, assembled yesterday to discuss Crime and Punishment. This was part of an unusually social weekend, during which, at a dinner party, I actually uttered the sentence “There’s no metaphysics of pragmatism.” I can’t decide whether this means I need new friends, or therapy. Anyway, reading Crime and Punishment reminded me that nearly a decade ago I wrote an essay triggered by another Great Unread Book tackled by my group, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Just so I won’t have to come up with an original post today, here's that essay, resurrected from a defunct Web site. (As it turns out, I’m the only member of the group who finished Ulysses, but everybody in the current group finished Crime and Punishment.)

    THERE WE WERE, SIX AVID READERS with advanced degrees, confessing to one another our shared secret: Each household held a copy -- an unread copy -- of James Joyce's Ulysses. A sense of relief and embarrassed delight fluttered through our little group; until that moment, I, for one, had assumed that my copy was the only one that sat uncracked upon the shelf. But now I knew I was not the only person in the world who had faked his way through Joyce allusions all his adult life.
    It isn't as if we had been intellectually dishonest. We hadn't been buying book-spine facades, little literary Potemkin villages behind which we stashed such cultural humiliations as cheap booze and videos. No, we had purchased actual, tangible books (well, one of us had inherited his Ulysses from his father, who hadn't read the thing either). And I am certain that we each intended to read our books...eventually.
    Don't most of us gaze lovingly and longingly over our collections of great unread books? That sturdy Library of America volume featuring Moby Dick, that yellowed paperback copy of War and Peace that looks like it's seen more of the former than the latter? And don't we swear to ourselves that we will sit down someday and read those fine tomes, right after we finish those much-delayed household projects and look through the magazines that have been piling up?
    After all, we haven't bought these books to impress other people. We've bought them because other people have impressed their importance upon us. Our high school teachers, college professors, and friends all mention them with as much reverence as can be mustered in our cynical society. These old texts are continually reissued in new editions, or at least with fresh cover illustrations. They also provide fodder for Hollywood, and not just as material that saves somebody the trouble of writing original screenplays. Go to the latest Star Trek movie, and you'll hear Capt. Picard quote Melville. How could we not get the idea that these are works that we must, someday, read?
    We know exactly what they are, of course. The experts compile vast book lists for us to ponder. Every major retail book store displays several copies of Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren's How to Read a Book. This was first published in 1940, at the height of America's intellectual self-improvement craze, when much of the bourgeoisie launched itself out of mouth-breathing Babbittry into a new cultural category: the middle-brow. The ideal goal of the new bourgeois-gentilhomme was to develop broad taste and knowledge. The actual achievement, more often than not, was to purchase some ready-made library like Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World and store it prominently near the baby grand piano, which functioned less as a musical instrument than as a flat surface that could accommodate several half-finished martinis.
    How to Read a Book, once it's through the how-to part, offers a list of books to practice on. Not coincidentally, the list corresponds to the Great Books series, with a few important additions (but only one living author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). This list is where the trouble begins. I don't mean the tiresome controversy over canonical texts versus diverse voices, but the very existence of reading lists themselves. Over the years the Adler/Van Doren list and others of its ilk have been amplified, trimmed, answered, and counter-argued, and in every case we've wound up with yet another list of books we haven't read, but should.
    Twelve members of the English faculty at the university in my city have just issued a reading list for high school students preparing for college study. It's basically the Great Books lineup made a bit more relevant and inclusive --Nicomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to Arithmetic is out, Dereck Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain is in. But how many high school kids will slog through the nearly 200 titles here, brawny books ranging from John Dos Passos' USA (counts as one) to Shakespeare's major plays (counts as six), with the odd detour into the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Leslie Marmon Silko? How many adults will make it through each of these volumes? How many of the narrowly specialized members of the university English department have cried "Excelsior!" from atop this bookish butte? Can they really claim an intimate familiarity with both The Federalist Papers and the plays of Wole Soyinka?
    But admit it--you're sitting there right now jotting down "Silko" and, if you are truly sick, even "Nicomachus" in preparation for your next trip to the bookstore. You are drawn to book lists exactly as a pubic hair is drawn to the shower drain. If you could just read all these books, you would pull away from a mass of conformity and be swept along, spun around and sucked down into a realm that is dank, twisted, frightening, and excitingly unlike anything in your cramped, sour little existence.
    Knowledge is a gap in our vast ignorance, and that gap widens with each intellectually stimulating book we read. So we stockpile recommended books. True, we collect partly for the aesthetic pleasure of seeing the books on our shelves, partly for the smug satisfaction of possessing something that is quantitatively and qualitatively better than what the Joneses own, and partly so we'll have something to do with all that free time we anticipate at the end of the week, or at the end of our lives. But we stockpile mainly in good faith, with the real intention, however long deferred, of adding to ourselves as well as to our libraries.
    My friends and I have resolved to read Ulysses by June 16, the date in 1904 on which the novel's action takes place. It looks like a sturdy book, one that can pry those walls of ignorance a bit farther apart.

THREE PLAYS AND A CONCERT

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Welcome to the new, streamlined, hyper-efficient me as theater critic. In the latest Tucson Weekly, I cover three plays in the space of two reviews, accessible via a single link!

    Three highly recommendable plays currently on the Tucson boards happen to deal in quite different ways with the complexities of role-playing and peculiar perceptions of reality. If that sounds awfully intellectual, well, it is. But that doesn't mean it can't also be entertaining.
    Indeed, two of the plays--Souvenir at Arizona Theatre Company and The Woman in Black at Beowulf Alley--are almost frothy. But if we were talking about beer, that would just mean that they've got a good head on them.
    Of the three, the play surest to exercise the cerebral muscle is Jean Genet's The Maids, presented by The Rogue Theatre.

    Details at the aforementioned single link. Along with that, I have a short concert preview:

    Right now, the members of the Catalina Chamber Orchestra are no doubt quivering with excitement over their Jan. 28 engagement with Enrique Bátiz, Mexico's leading conductor and a figure familiar from dozens of recordings with European labels.
    Come Jan. 29, the day after the concert, will they still be quivering? Numb? Dazed? The music on the program is easy on the ear, but much of it is difficult to play. Bátiz is a demanding character, so the encounter will not exactly be a relaxing break for the orchestra. And if the program succeeds in its goal of drawing a significant Hispanic crowd, the experience could be even more energizing for the orchestra--and, beyond that, more draining--than usual.

    OK, it’s not that short. You can read the rest here.