PSO Strike: My Letters and Comments from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Letter to the Editor: “The PSO musicians should be well paid”
Christine Rupp’s defense of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra management (“PSO Musicians Should Face the Reality at Hand,” Oct. 4 letters) is misguided. The musicians’ salaries are indeed two or three times that of the average Pittsburgher. But salary for the average sports star here is about 15 times higher, corporate executives make about 10 times more and doctors about eight times more. The musicians work in a nonprofit, but so do well-paid professors and executives of the PSO. Which among these groups of elite professionals brings worldwide acclaim to Pittsburgh? None but the PSO musicians. They need our support.
The problem isn’t with salaries but why local corporations are not giving more to the PSO.
The author also claims that PSO ticket prices are among the highest in the city. However, seats at the PSO average about $45, lower than “The Fantasticks” ($60), “La Traviata” ($100) and Alan Cumming’s show ($56), none of which rivals the world-class caliber of the Pittsburgh Symphony.
Finally, Ms. Rupp’s advocacy of the PSO management’s hardline stance is unsupportable. The management initially asked the musicians for a 25 percent pay cut, a punch in the nose to the city’s cultural life. Now it is refusing to negotiate. How is stonewalling in the best interest of the PSO? How does it reflect good faith? The musicians are not the problem.
ROBERT FALLON
Squirrel Hill
The writer is a musicologist at Duquesne University.
Comments on the letter above:
Someone replied: “Why should local corporations give money to the PSO? They should contribute to charities that help the needy or build up our community, not to supplement a specific form of entertainment that a small minority of people enjoy. Folks who enjoy the symphony should support it, just like folks who enjoy rock or rap support those styles of music.”
I responded: One reason local corporations should give to the PSO is that it reflects local tradition and local pride. The PSO's origins lie in generous grants from Carnegie, Frick, and others. Carnegie's book "Triumphant Democracy" (1886) argues that the creation of cultural gems does not necessarily depend on the patronage of a wealthy class of monarchs and aristocrats, as it was in Britain, but can be matched in a democracy by the patronage of wealthy industrialists. There is a reason classical music is referred to as a "fine art" and rock or rap is "popular" music: the former is indeed elite and the latter indeed commercial. Classical music has never been particularly commercially viable; it always needs large and small donations, just like the dozens of dance, theater, and art groups and their presenters in town, not to mention environmental groups, literary journals, childrens' programs, and the gamut of non-profits that together raise the quality of life here and make Pittsburgh such a wonderful place to live. We need the deep pockets in town to help keep up this quality and we always have.
Someone replied: “Listen Bob, I don't know of any other music group that gets taxpayer money. I don't see local bands complaining about their salaries even though it is not guaranteed like the PSO. I say this to the local sports teams also, please don't ask taxpayers to pay for your jobs or place of business. Taxpayers in 6 counties voted down paying for stadiums but we were blindsided by a midnight vote in Harrisburg that raised our sales tax by 16%. Don't complain if you can't handle the money you are getting now to pay bloated salaries for a dying business.”
I responded: Jerry, are you reading what I wrote? I never advocated here for taxpayer money to go to the PSO, so please don't put words in my mouth. I wrote only about donations from deep pockets, meaning corporations, foundations, and wealthy individuals. Not taxes.
I commented: What I wrote in response to Kevin Morris's good question is only half the story. It may be true, as I argue, that corporations should support the arts, but stopping there neglects how the arts support the corporations. They create the culture in which business thrives; they are nitrogen in the soil that enables a tree to grow. But the tree decomposes and gives back the nitrogen to the soil. There is an ecology of culture here, a mutual back-scratching where business and the arts are necessary for one another. The entities that created the Downtown Cultural District understand this: they have supported the arts in large measure so that businesses would be attracted to Pittsburgh--and it's working, if you see Google and Uber as welcome newcomers to town. They locate themselves here because they believe they can draw their workforce from the area and keep them here, thanks to the good quality of life. And their workforce is often drawn from former Pitt and CMU and Duquesne students, who study here (often with PSO faculty) because of the quality of the education and the quality of the city. Remove the good musicians, the good faculty, the good culture, and eventually you deteriorate the good workforce and the good business, just as when you remove the good business, you remove the donations that keep the arts alive. Attending only to the bottom line is, in the long term, self-destructive. It's in the interest of the corporations to support the PSO generously.
Someone replied: “You mention sports stars and their salaries in your letter. Everything you say in your post may be true but my guess is that our sports teams are more valuable to businesses, and certainly to our citizens, than the PSO.”
I responded: “No doubt the teams have a greater impact on the local economy: they're bigger in every way! Larger teams and staff, larger venues, larger audiences, larger incomes. That's why when people talk against the PSO, it's frustrating, since the PSO is relatively small potatoes in dollar figures, but they represent a lot about the city nationally and internationally.”
My comment on the Oct. 21 article “PSO musicians, management to meet with mediators,” by Elizabeth Bloom: I agree that this is excellent news. My hope is for both sides to work toward their common goal of a healthy orchestra, to see one another as necessary allies rather than as opponents. One way to do this would be to recognize that their differences can be framed in wider circles that extend beyond the insularity of Heinz Hall and include different parts of the regional and national culture. How can local, non-performing talent contribute to the PSO? Why does it not reach out more to local music scholars, marketers, media, performance venues? Though the PSO has several programs that engage with the community, even better integrating into the local culture could pay off. I was in San Francisco when Michael Tilson Thomas was appointed music director of the SFSO and his face was everywhere; he was the city's rock star. The PSO could be more effective in cultivating a similar role for itself here. And as I've argued elsewhere, the main problem is financial, which is why regional corporations should be brought more vigorously into the PSO family. Could the Allegheny Conference, with its captains of industry, agree to commit more resources to the Symphony? Could Lemieux and the Rooneys put in a word for the Symphony? And why not tour nationally rather than internationally? It could be cheaper and more effective at raising the visibility of the PSO and the city. With outside-the-box thinking and the creation of common goals, the current contract dispute could be put into better perspective and a path forward found.
My comment on the Nov. 1 letter titled "The PSO's balancing act: classics vs. new music (for new audiences)": Motivating the Henrys' letter is the understanding that the PSO strike relates to financial problems that could be alleviated with better marketing. Certainly programming (the
selection of musical works and soloists) is one part of marketing. As someone whose profession is within the ecosystem of classical music, I find programming to be the main criterion I use when choosing to attend a PSO concert or to do something else. But too often I find myself choosing not to attend because the programming is so full of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and other overly familiar music by composers who are not terribly hip.
Hipper composers of the standard orchestral repertory include, I suggest, Zemlinsky, Szymanowsky, Lutoslawski, Sibelius, Nielsen, Lindberg, Saariaho, Pärt, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Bartók, Ligeti, Berg, Hartmann, Britten, Tippett, Ives, Copland, Reich, Adams, Tower, Zwilich, Villa-Lobos, Debussy, Messiaen, Dutilleux, Boulez, and Takemitsu.
I agree with the Henrys both that more contemporary music (along with cooler composers) would draw people like me to the PSO more often and that younger people are more likely to attend concerts that include contemporary music.
But there is much more to marketing than programming alone; the PSO should brand itself more overtly as being an indispensible part of Pittsburgh. I'd like to see more (and better) PSO ads on billboards and bus stops, more photos of Maestro Honneck at Pirates games (Seiji Ozawa was a rabid Red Sox fan and Boston loved him for it) and more photos of Roethlisberger at PSO concerts. Make a tradition of the PSO kicking off the Three Rivers Arts Festival--with fireworks, of course! Let's have the PSO Brass accompany the mayor's ribbon-cutting ceremonies that open new bridges and buildings. Put PSO posters and recordings in the Heinz History Center, Frick, and Carnegie Museum gift shops, along with gift shops of any touristic, cultural, and historical institution. Sell PSO ballcaps and used batons next to the baseballs at PNC Park. If a place or an event says "This is Pittsburgh," the PSO should be there.
