FUN CONCERT ANNOUNCEMENT

posted by James Reel

    Here's an announcement that local singer and actress Molly Holleran circulated among her friends recently, and was forwarded to me. It's not a formal press release, but I wish more were written in this spirit:

    I would like to invite you to a voice recital, featuring me, on Sunday, February 25 at 3:00 p.m. Come thrill to gorgeous melodies from Bach's St. John Passion, revel in the beauty of songs by Berlioz, Mozart and Tchaikovsky - try not to cringe at my Russian pronunciation - and we'll top it off with some jolly fun: Gilbert and Sullivan.
    The dear members of the Northminster Chancel Choir will host us for one of their lovely and renowned receptions afterwards, which you will not want to miss.
    The recital will be at Northminster Presbyterian Church, at 2450 East Fort Lowell Road, which is the corner of Ft. Lowell and Tucson Blvd.
    I'd love to see you there!

REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ILYA GRINGOLTS/GEORGE HANSON

posted by James Reel

    An impassioned performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony more than redeemed last night’s Tucson Symphony concert under George Hanson, a concert whose first half was dissatisfying despite good playing.
    The trouble started right away, with a well-paced, crisply delivered performance of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain in its Rimsky-Korsakov orchestration for brass, percussion, flutes and first violins. At least that’s how it sounded, despite the visual evidence of a full orchestra hard at work. For at least the first third of the piece, the low strings lacked the heft to give the music its needed menace, and in tutti passages all you could hear from the woodwinds was a piccolo shrieking to be rescued from the sonic muck. Solos came across better, but when the orchestra played at full force, the sound turned to sludge.
    This has been a problem for the woodwinds for the past couple of seasons. Either Hanson needs to rethink his balances, or I need to abandon my balcony seat in what used to be the hall’s sweet spot.
    Aural congestion was much less of a problem as the concert progressed, mainly because of the different ways the composers themselves deployed the orchestra. Yet Ilya Gringolts’ performance with the orchestra of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 was also, if not unsatisfying, disquieting. There’s no faulting Gringolts' technique, and he is certainly a young soloist with ideas. His and Hanson’s approach to the concerto was compelling, if you don’t mind Prokofiev played in the style of Shostakovich. Gringolts’ expansive, searching treatment of the opening material set the tone for the work’s first two movements, a performance that conveyed the depressive brooding of Shostakovich rather than the contemplative mystery of Prokofiev; it’s a subtle but key stylistic difference. In the slow movement, Gringolts played one separate, dying phrase after another, surrendering to Prokofiev’s long-lined lyricism only when sent to a high tessitura. In the more upbeat final movement, Prokofiev’s mischief turned to frantic desperation. The approach was highly effective in its way, but not entirely relevant to the work at hand.
    After intermission, Hanson and the orchestra proved to understand Tchaikovsky’s Fourth through and through. On the way to the concert, my wife, unsure of the program, asked, “Are they playing the sad Tchaikovsky symphony?” I replied, “No, they’re doing the noisy one.” Many performances of this symphony merely ride on the adrenalin of the blaring fanfares that dominate the first and last movements; while Hanson and the TSO gave these passages their full due, they realized that there’s also a great deal of drama and development to be found elsewhere in the score.
    For example, the performance emphasized the swaying, sighing lyricism of much of the first movement’s material, and even in the development section’s most turbulent passages, phrasing remained highly attentive; nobody was going to be content just to blast away. Oh, the forces could muster power aplenty when necessary; at the very end, they delivered a blazing coda worthy of Yevgeny Mravinsky, and stayed together much better than Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic did some 45 years ago. Whatever reservations one might have about the concert’s first half, this performance of the Tchaikovsky symphony made it a rewarding evening.

TIN CUP

posted by James Reel

    Monday afternoon, I went down to Green Valley to read a scene from Othello for an adult Shakespeare class. The instructor declared that I was receiving no compensation for my appearance (he didn't mention that he'd bought me a sandwich and some tea for lunch), and proceeded to pass around KUAT pledge cards, hoping at least that the station might benefit from my reading. If things don't work out for me here at the radio station, maybe I can develop a career as an organ-grinder's monkey!

OPEN, SAYS-A ME

posted 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 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 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?