GLOATING

posted by James Reel

    If I sound a little tired today, it’s because I stayed up past my bedtime last night attending one of the three board meetings we directors of the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music hold every year. After coming away from those meetings, I’m always a little elated and wonder why everybody else is whining about the sorry state of classical music in America.
    We’re about to begin our 58th season. We present a combination of major ensembles and emerging artists, usually to near-capacity houses (there’s a long waiting list for season tickets to our main series). We present strictly classical music, not jazz or world music or the other genres that organizations like the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival feel are necessary to draw a more diverse audience. Besides the standard Beethoven and Brahms, we have something unusual, preferably recent, on almost every concert, and indeed we commission one to three substantial new works every season. The audience is more than willing to give these new pieces a try, and premieres are often met with standing ovations. In the past 15 years we have added two series to our offerings, including an ambitious week-long festival in March featuring A-list musicians. We also organize outreach programs for kids.
    We do all this with a balanced budget, and a cash reserve to cover unexpected expenses and the rare shortfall, like the season after 9/11 when our investment portfolio lost $150,000 and we spent $30,000 more than we brought in. We covered that easily with our savings, and we have since built the funds back almost to where they had been. During the first nine months of this year we also raised contributions and pledges totalling $500,000 for an endowment fund.
    And this is all done by rank amateurs. We pay a pittance to one person for part-time work handling the box office, mailings and billings, and we have a professional musician—cellist Peter Rejto—serving as artistic director of the one-week festival. We also paid a consultant to tell us how to operate the endowment campaign. Otherwise, every detail—artistic, administrative, logistic—is handled by our board of physicians, accountants, professors, scientists, financial planners, social workers, travel agents and whatever I count as. (And despite the prevalance of white collars, we are not scions of high society.)
    So if we amateurs, in a weak economy, can maintain a strong audience for a financially stable organization specializing in a not particularly popular subcategory (chamber) of a not particularly popular genre of music (classical), what’s wrong with the orchestras and opera companies that are run by professionals with degrees in arts administration and who carry the seal of approval of groups like the American Symphony Orchestra League? Why are organizations that present music with theoretically greater audience appeal than ours losing subscribers, hemorrhaging money, seeing their public credibility evaporate, clamoring for government bailouts and, too often, going belly-up?
    Is it because they waste tens of thousands of dollars on studies that tell them things they ought to be able to figure out for themselves? Is it because their administrative staffs are bloated and their non-artistic expenses are out of control? Is it because their managers have taken refuge in the non-profit sector because they’re too incompetent to survive in the real world?