10 ms·

The Board of Directors Announces the Dissolution of the San Antonio Symphony

WalterGR 4y ago
Seems to be some background here: https://sanantonioreport.org/san-antonio-symphony-2021-2022-season-lost/ https://sanantonioreport.org/san-antonio-symphony-2021-2022-...
- evouga 4y ago
  Honestly from this article nobody comes off looking great: there are musicians refusing to accept fiscal reality on one side, and management acting in bad faith and firing the conductor out of spite on the other. Pity.
  - bsder 4y ago
    > there are musicians refusing to accept fiscal reality on one side In what way? The article specifically cites Lubbock (a significantly smaller city) as managing to handle paying their musicians and being fiscally solvent. This doesn't seem to be an unsolvable problem yet the current Board of Directors can't seem to pull it off. Let it go bankrupt. Surely someone will want to put a symphony together and they can avoid all the baggage. Or not. And that will say something as well, no?
  - hulitu 4y ago
    > there are musicians refusing to accept fiscal reality on one side Maybe the "fiscal reality" is that they can use this time to do better things which maybe are also paid better.
    - dorchadas 4y ago
      What constitutes a "better thing"? Anything that pays better? Is working in ad tech somehow "better" than being a musician? I think it shows the priorities of our society, and I think that's part of the problem (if you can't make money, you don't deserve to exist)
  - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    I don't think the musicians come off looking bad. They were skilled employees at a business. The business decided to substantially cut half the employees' salaries from $36,000 to $24,000 and demote the other half to part time workers making only about $10k per year. The employees did not accept this. Nothing about that speaks ill of the employees.
  - wiz21c 4y ago
    > refusing to accept fiscal reality How far will you accept fiscal reality ?
  - Veen 4y ago
    The musicians are keenly aware of fiscal reality, namely their ability to pay rent and bills if they had accepted the offer.
josephcsible 4y ago
If the musicians weren't unionized, wouldn't they all be better off right now since they'd still be employed?
- Fatnino 4y ago
  No, they'd be stuck working for not enough money instead of looking for actual livable jobs like they are now and likely have been doing for the duration of the strike.
  - natch 4y ago
    Stuck?
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    Can't you look for a new job equally well whether you quit on your own or your union boss ordered you not to work?
- throw457 4y ago
  It was their choice to kill their exploitative employer. :)
- Barrin92 4y ago
  short term maybe, long term no. They still have their instruments, people still like music, bankruptcy hurts the owners more than anyone else. Giving your collective bargaining power up for something like this doesn't strike me as smart.
- tyrfing 4y ago
  Seems like the base full time wage would have been 24k, with many of the positions changed to part time at 11k/year with no benefits. So, maybe? McDonald's will likely have better compensation. https://www.afm.org/2021/09/san-antonio-symphony-musicians-declare-strike/ https://www.afm.org/2021/09/san-antonio-symphony-musicians-d...
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > If the musicians weren't unionized, wouldn't they all be better off right now since they'd still be employed? Who says they aren't? The people I've known working in the arts very often have multiple jobs, even if one of them is notionally “full time”, usually at least one of the jobs is a personal business. Performers very often are tutors/teachers of the same kind of performance.
oldstrangers 4y ago
Playing music shouldn't be this complicated. This is bordering on absurdist comedy.
lsy 4y ago
It's important to remember that this is a statement made by one party to a dispute, not a neutral statement of facts. It's unclear whether any of the claims made in the statement are true, or whether this is an intentionally destructive response to hard bargaining by the musicians.
- azinman2 4y ago
  Either way, they’re shutting down. That’s not really a bargaining tactic. It’s failure mode.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    No it’s a bargaining tactic. We won’t work for a dismal wage. It makes a statement. This failure is worth a lot.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      They filed chapter 7. It’s gone. Many symphonies around the US are struggling with money. If your income can’t pay the bills, you can’t operate. This isn’t the first one to shut down and it won’t be the last. Patronage is declining.
      - bergenty 4y ago
        It will take a few of these to make the point and that’s okay. If the free market isn’t willing to pay a reasonable wage (which was already dismal at $36,000), then we just won’t have symphonies for now.
        kube-system 4y ago
        The vast majority of symphonies in the US aren't full time, like most performing artist jobs in the US. There are well more than 1,000 symphonies in the US and only something like a couple dozen that are full time; San Antonio was notable in that it was. The free market supports many symphonies that pay 4 digit "salaries" (often they're paid per-service) per year. But they're only working a few days per month. San Antonio was trying to cut back, but negotiation didn't work out. This wasn't a free market decision to disappear, it was a labor negotiations decision.
drewcoo 4y ago
The reactions here so far are ridiculous. These are professional musicians with real skills, each of them with many years of training. They walked because the best case scenario was their already meagre salaries being cut. They weren't making dev salaries after a few months of a boot camp. After years of dedicated study, the average salary for a symphony musician is about $70,000.[1] The San Antonio musicians already only made about half that to begin with[2] and then management cut that in half - base pay of a little over $17,000 a year. And for the people claiming this was bargaining failure, no, this ended the failures. The bargaining failures happened over many years. Many years of accepting wage and benefit cuts over and over without making management offer something in return. They didn't bargain in the past. They just rolled over and showed their bellies. [1] First link that popped out at me, but similar numbers in other places: https://work.chron.com/pay-scale-average-member-orchestra-5246.html https://work.chron.com/pay-scale-average-member-orchestra-52... [2] https://www.expressnews.com/entertainment/arts-culture/article/San-Antonio-Symphony-musicians-face-50-percent-cut-16455439.php https://www.expressnews.com/entertainment/arts-culture/artic...
- kube-system 4y ago
  $70,000 is a full time salary at a relatively successful symphony in a large city. It’s the symphonic musician’s equivalent of making it into the big leagues. Many more are part time and pay far far less. I have a family member who has played in a couple different mid sized city professional orchestras. If you consider preparation and rehearsal time, the pay for either of them equates to less than minimum wage.
  - gremlinsinc 4y ago
    Did you miss the part where op, said that's average not what they were getting in San Antonio. They were getting half that and then were cut down to 17k per year. You can make more busking on the street probably.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      I’m saying 70k is not an average orchestra job. It is an average salary at a major full-time orchestra.
pSYoniK 4y ago
I fully agree with drewcoo's comment. I cannot believe the discussions occurring here surrounding professional musicians, people who have trained for years to hone their skills. I cannot believe that the attitude towards a union -"wouldn't they all be better now since they'd still be employed"? These are statements made by someone who never had to face the reality of the fact that sometimes a job offers so little money that you are BETTER off not working. The reality in many poor countries is that you could work for 5-10$ a day, but people choose not to work jobs but rather to engage in subsistence farming as that offers them at least food to survive, whereas the 5-10$ a day wouldn't. I cannot believe the narrow mindedness of such statements... I found it offensive that I used to make more than someone playing in a symphony as someone working in retail. I found it offensive that I made more money in a week than they did in a month and all I did was peddle more garbage for people to buy to make themselves feel better about their empty pointless and gluttonous lives... I feel sad that at this point this is where art is headed. Its shocking to see that art is potentially returning to the same dynamic that we saw in the Middle Ages - where some wealthy benefactor is needed to allow artists to continue their activity. Each time something like this happens we lose big chunks of what and who we are as a species. We're normalizing the death of art, of imagination and of beauty and assume that everything needs to have a monetary value attached to it, that everything needs to yield ROI. It's repulsive...
- sjtindell 4y ago
  I don’t see this at all. They didn’t make less than you because of some moral failing by society at large. They made less because there is such a glut of artists that the bottom pay rate is literally less than zero, hence “do it for the exposure”. There is more art created every day today than ever before. The old school art forms you think are so crucial just aren’t.
  - vimax 4y ago
    Nothing shows this like walking in Austin and seeing homeless musicians on every corner just as good as the live band you paid to go see.
Animats 4y ago
Here's management's final offer:[1] The Symphony Society, which governs the local symphony through a board of trustees and management, made a “Last, Best and Final” offer on September 13. That offer would: - Cut the number of full-time symphony musicians from 72 to 42. - Reduce the symphony season length from 31 weeks to 26 weeks. - Slash the salaries of full-time musicians from roughly $36,000 a year to $24,000. - Hire some musicians part-time with an $11,000 salary. The proposed pay cuts follow two years of little-to-no income for many of the musicians who were furloughed in 2020 during the pandemic and returned in January of 2021 with reduced salaries and fewer performances due to safety protocols that limited the number of performers who could be on stage. The changes meant some musicians made just 20% of their typical symphony salary. The union, represented by a select group of symphony musicians and representatives of the American Federation of Musicians Local 23, did not accept the Symphony Society’s offer. [1] https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2022/03/28/why-is-the-san-antonio-symphony-on-strike-ksat-explains https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2022/03/28/why-is-the-san-an...
- bell-cot 4y ago
  Reading further down in the article you cite - talking about this as a labor vs. management battle pushes a lot of people's buttons, but that's just an emotional side-show. The Real Story: An organization had neither enough income to survive, nor good prospects of improving that situation. So it died.
  - mind-blight 4y ago
    Given the letter written by the board, I think it's fair to discuss. At the very least, the board is trying to save face by blaming the shutdown on "the union being unreasonable". That always makes me suspicious about the details being left out. The nuances around went it died are also important. Could it have been saved with a different managerial approach? That's especially relevant for a cultural institution.
    - bell-cot 4y ago
      Call me old and cynical...but my read of the letter was "We are financially dead & headed to the Chapter 7 chop shop". Followed by all the required-by-social-conventions things they're supposed to say, regardless of truth. From skimming a couple sources, it sounds like the Symphony had profound financial problems, going back decades. Prospective local donors & sponsors tend to have long memories of such things. A little local non-profit can't play corporate name games to escape from a bad reputation. Nor count on attracting the best of board members or managers. I agree that the nuances, details, "could it have been saved?", local cultural institutions, etc. are important. But unless some long-term insider from the SAS pops up here on HN, I don't think we've any chance to find out. :(
cperciva 4y ago
Some important context here: The AFM is quite militant, and in its bylaws stipulates that individual locals cannot ratify a collective agreement without the approval of the AFM. Eight years ago, when the Vancouver Musicians Association (AFM local 145) negotiated a contract the AFM didn't like, their response was to fire the VMA board, fine the the board members personally $50,000 each, and rip up the contract which the membership had ratified. It's entirely possibly that the musicians of the San Antonio Symphony are willing to negotiate a contract but the AFM won't let them.
lelag 4y ago
Classical music and symphonic orchestras have always been expensive endeavours requiring a healthy influx of money. Before the 20th century that support was coming almost exclusively from patronage. With the advent of the recording industry, a large influx of money from record sales allowed to develop a large industry around western classical music supporting many performers and orchestras. The subscription model that has replaced album purchase has now destroyed the revenue stream for the classical industry. To make matter worse, most recordings from the last 50 years were recorded with great qualities making it hard for new recordings to stand out: you are effectively competing with huge catalog of high quality music available for next to nothing on the mainstream streaming services. The end result is that orchestral formation are now back to be being dependant on donated money (individual donation, corporate patronage and public funds). Genre requiring a single or few performers will probably be fine, but orchestras are so expensive due to the number of people involved they have no chance to make enough money just performing. We should not be surprised to see more of lower tiers orchestra disappearing in the coming years.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  Obviously two years of lockdowns had nothing to do with it!
  - lelag 4y ago
    2 years hiatus of public performance would have been a non-event in the 20th century. You could just have used the time to release some new records. Yes, COVID has nothing to do with the classical music industry woes. Spotify and its terrible redistribution model is the main culprit. Of course, COVID might have been what pushed this particular formation over the edge but it is just the extra drop spilling over. Fees from public performance has never been enough to fund a full symphonic orchestra.
    - yakak 4y ago
      > You could just have used the time to release some new records. If you were a soloist you could have used the time. If you were a 5 piece you could use about half the time depending on region. Larger groups had a lot of problems given time delays in remote communication.
Khelavaster 4y ago
These salaries were not tenable at all. What about endowments or other longer-term sourced of funding? There must have been long-running mismanagement..
- fred_is_fred 4y ago
  It's San Antonio - not New York City.
todd8 4y ago
Years ago, I had a partner that was a highly trained symphony musician (studied musicology and performance at a major university, PhD etc). After all these years of training and having incredible skills, she was unable to support herself. The fundamental problem is that there are maybe 30 symphony jobs in North America for her instrument that pay enough, and there is a world of new players being churned out by Fine Arts departments all competing for the one or two spots where someone is retiring. The university departments know there are no good jobs for these students they produce, but like other university departments they compete for funds by enticing students to peruse almost useless degrees.
- fred_is_fred 4y ago
  I am always confused why people do this to themselves - a PhD no less! It would not have taken more than an hour of research to know that you'd be unable to get a decent paying job - whether it's fair or not.
mathattack 4y ago
If San Antonio can maintain a symphony a new one will emerge. If not, it won’t.
wtinasky 4y ago

Seems to be some background here: https://sanantonioreport.org/san-antonio-symphony-2021-2022-season-lost/ https://sanantonioreport.org/san-antonio-symphony-2021-2022-...

evouga 4y ago
Honestly from this article nobody comes off looking great: there are musicians refusing to accept fiscal reality on one side, and management acting in bad faith and firing the conductor out of spite on the other. Pity.
- bsder 4y ago
  > there are musicians refusing to accept fiscal reality on one side In what way? The article specifically cites Lubbock (a significantly smaller city) as managing to handle paying their musicians and being fiscally solvent. This doesn't seem to be an unsolvable problem yet the current Board of Directors can't seem to pull it off. Let it go bankrupt. Surely someone will want to put a symphony together and they can avoid all the baggage. Or not. And that will say something as well, no?
- hulitu 4y ago
  > there are musicians refusing to accept fiscal reality on one side Maybe the "fiscal reality" is that they can use this time to do better things which maybe are also paid better.
  - dorchadas 4y ago
    What constitutes a "better thing"? Anything that pays better? Is working in ad tech somehow "better" than being a musician? I think it shows the priorities of our society, and I think that's part of the problem (if you can't make money, you don't deserve to exist)
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  I don't think the musicians come off looking bad. They were skilled employees at a business. The business decided to substantially cut half the employees' salaries from $36,000 to $24,000 and demote the other half to part time workers making only about $10k per year. The employees did not accept this. Nothing about that speaks ill of the employees.
- wiz21c 4y ago
  > refusing to accept fiscal reality How far will you accept fiscal reality ?
- Veen 4y ago
  The musicians are keenly aware of fiscal reality, namely their ability to pay rent and bills if they had accepted the offer.

josephcsible 4y ago

If the musicians weren't unionized, wouldn't they all be better off right now since they'd still be employed?

Fatnino 4y ago
No, they'd be stuck working for not enough money instead of looking for actual livable jobs like they are now and likely have been doing for the duration of the strike.
- natch 4y ago
  Stuck?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Can't you look for a new job equally well whether you quit on your own or your union boss ordered you not to work?
throw457 4y ago
It was their choice to kill their exploitative employer. :)
Barrin92 4y ago
short term maybe, long term no. They still have their instruments, people still like music, bankruptcy hurts the owners more than anyone else. Giving your collective bargaining power up for something like this doesn't strike me as smart.
tyrfing 4y ago
Seems like the base full time wage would have been 24k, with many of the positions changed to part time at 11k/year with no benefits. So, maybe? McDonald's will likely have better compensation. https://www.afm.org/2021/09/san-antonio-symphony-musicians-declare-strike/ https://www.afm.org/2021/09/san-antonio-symphony-musicians-d...
dragonwriter 4y ago
> If the musicians weren't unionized, wouldn't they all be better off right now since they'd still be employed? Who says they aren't? The people I've known working in the arts very often have multiple jobs, even if one of them is notionally “full time”, usually at least one of the jobs is a personal business. Performers very often are tutors/teachers of the same kind of performance.

oldstrangers 4y ago

Playing music shouldn't be this complicated. This is bordering on absurdist comedy.

lsy 4y ago

It's important to remember that this is a statement made by one party to a dispute, not a neutral statement of facts. It's unclear whether any of the claims made in the statement are true, or whether this is an intentionally destructive response to hard bargaining by the musicians.

azinman2 4y ago
Either way, they’re shutting down. That’s not really a bargaining tactic. It’s failure mode.
- bergenty 4y ago
  No it’s a bargaining tactic. We won’t work for a dismal wage. It makes a statement. This failure is worth a lot.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    They filed chapter 7. It’s gone. Many symphonies around the US are struggling with money. If your income can’t pay the bills, you can’t operate. This isn’t the first one to shut down and it won’t be the last. Patronage is declining.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      It will take a few of these to make the point and that’s okay. If the free market isn’t willing to pay a reasonable wage (which was already dismal at $36,000), then we just won’t have symphonies for now.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        The vast majority of symphonies in the US aren't full time, like most performing artist jobs in the US. There are well more than 1,000 symphonies in the US and only something like a couple dozen that are full time; San Antonio was notable in that it was. The free market supports many symphonies that pay 4 digit "salaries" (often they're paid per-service) per year. But they're only working a few days per month. San Antonio was trying to cut back, but negotiation didn't work out. This wasn't a free market decision to disappear, it was a labor negotiations decision.

drewcoo 4y ago

The reactions here so far are ridiculous. These are professional musicians with real skills, each of them with many years of training. They walked because the best case scenario was their already meagre salaries being cut. They weren't making dev salaries after a few months of a boot camp. After years of dedicated study, the average salary for a symphony musician is about $70,000.[1] The San Antonio musicians already only made about half that to begin with[2] and then management cut that in half - base pay of a little over $17,000 a year. And for the people claiming this was bargaining failure, no, this ended the failures. The bargaining failures happened over many years. Many years of accepting wage and benefit cuts over and over without making management offer something in return. They didn't bargain in the past. They just rolled over and showed their bellies. [1] First link that popped out at me, but similar numbers in other places: https://work.chron.com/pay-scale-average-member-orchestra-5246.html https://work.chron.com/pay-scale-average-member-orchestra-52... [2] https://www.expressnews.com/entertainment/arts-culture/article/San-Antonio-Symphony-musicians-face-50-percent-cut-16455439.php https://www.expressnews.com/entertainment/arts-culture/artic...

kube-system 4y ago
$70,000 is a full time salary at a relatively successful symphony in a large city. It’s the symphonic musician’s equivalent of making it into the big leagues. Many more are part time and pay far far less. I have a family member who has played in a couple different mid sized city professional orchestras. If you consider preparation and rehearsal time, the pay for either of them equates to less than minimum wage.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  Did you miss the part where op, said that's average not what they were getting in San Antonio. They were getting half that and then were cut down to 17k per year. You can make more busking on the street probably.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    I’m saying 70k is not an average orchestra job. It is an average salary at a major full-time orchestra.

pSYoniK 4y ago

I fully agree with drewcoo's comment. I cannot believe the discussions occurring here surrounding professional musicians, people who have trained for years to hone their skills. I cannot believe that the attitude towards a union -"wouldn't they all be better now since they'd still be employed"? These are statements made by someone who never had to face the reality of the fact that sometimes a job offers so little money that you are BETTER off not working. The reality in many poor countries is that you could work for 5-10$ a day, but people choose not to work jobs but rather to engage in subsistence farming as that offers them at least food to survive, whereas the 5-10$ a day wouldn't. I cannot believe the narrow mindedness of such statements... I found it offensive that I used to make more than someone playing in a symphony as someone working in retail. I found it offensive that I made more money in a week than they did in a month and all I did was peddle more garbage for people to buy to make themselves feel better about their empty pointless and gluttonous lives... I feel sad that at this point this is where art is headed. Its shocking to see that art is potentially returning to the same dynamic that we saw in the Middle Ages - where some wealthy benefactor is needed to allow artists to continue their activity. Each time something like this happens we lose big chunks of what and who we are as a species. We're normalizing the death of art, of imagination and of beauty and assume that everything needs to have a monetary value attached to it, that everything needs to yield ROI. It's repulsive...

sjtindell 4y ago
I don’t see this at all. They didn’t make less than you because of some moral failing by society at large. They made less because there is such a glut of artists that the bottom pay rate is literally less than zero, hence “do it for the exposure”. There is more art created every day today than ever before. The old school art forms you think are so crucial just aren’t.
- vimax 4y ago
  Nothing shows this like walking in Austin and seeing homeless musicians on every corner just as good as the live band you paid to go see.

Animats 4y ago

Here's management's final offer:[1] The Symphony Society, which governs the local symphony through a board of trustees and management, made a “Last, Best and Final” offer on September 13. That offer would: - Cut the number of full-time symphony musicians from 72 to 42. - Reduce the symphony season length from 31 weeks to 26 weeks. - Slash the salaries of full-time musicians from roughly $36,000 a year to $24,000. - Hire some musicians part-time with an $11,000 salary. The proposed pay cuts follow two years of little-to-no income for many of the musicians who were furloughed in 2020 during the pandemic and returned in January of 2021 with reduced salaries and fewer performances due to safety protocols that limited the number of performers who could be on stage. The changes meant some musicians made just 20% of their typical symphony salary. The union, represented by a select group of symphony musicians and representatives of the American Federation of Musicians Local 23, did not accept the Symphony Society’s offer. [1] https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2022/03/28/why-is-the-san-antonio-symphony-on-strike-ksat-explains https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2022/03/28/why-is-the-san-an...

bell-cot 4y ago
Reading further down in the article you cite - talking about this as a labor vs. management battle pushes a lot of people's buttons, but that's just an emotional side-show. The Real Story: An organization had neither enough income to survive, nor good prospects of improving that situation. So it died.
- mind-blight 4y ago
  Given the letter written by the board, I think it's fair to discuss. At the very least, the board is trying to save face by blaming the shutdown on "the union being unreasonable". That always makes me suspicious about the details being left out. The nuances around went it died are also important. Could it have been saved with a different managerial approach? That's especially relevant for a cultural institution.
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    Call me old and cynical...but my read of the letter was "We are financially dead & headed to the Chapter 7 chop shop". Followed by all the required-by-social-conventions things they're supposed to say, regardless of truth. From skimming a couple sources, it sounds like the Symphony had profound financial problems, going back decades. Prospective local donors & sponsors tend to have long memories of such things. A little local non-profit can't play corporate name games to escape from a bad reputation. Nor count on attracting the best of board members or managers. I agree that the nuances, details, "could it have been saved?", local cultural institutions, etc. are important. But unless some long-term insider from the SAS pops up here on HN, I don't think we've any chance to find out. :(

cperciva 4y ago

Some important context here: The AFM is quite militant, and in its bylaws stipulates that individual locals cannot ratify a collective agreement without the approval of the AFM. Eight years ago, when the Vancouver Musicians Association (AFM local 145) negotiated a contract the AFM didn't like, their response was to fire the VMA board, fine the the board members personally $50,000 each, and rip up the contract which the membership had ratified. It's entirely possibly that the musicians of the San Antonio Symphony are willing to negotiate a contract but the AFM won't let them.

lelag 4y ago

Classical music and symphonic orchestras have always been expensive endeavours requiring a healthy influx of money. Before the 20th century that support was coming almost exclusively from patronage. With the advent of the recording industry, a large influx of money from record sales allowed to develop a large industry around western classical music supporting many performers and orchestras. The subscription model that has replaced album purchase has now destroyed the revenue stream for the classical industry. To make matter worse, most recordings from the last 50 years were recorded with great qualities making it hard for new recordings to stand out: you are effectively competing with huge catalog of high quality music available for next to nothing on the mainstream streaming services. The end result is that orchestral formation are now back to be being dependant on donated money (individual donation, corporate patronage and public funds). Genre requiring a single or few performers will probably be fine, but orchestras are so expensive due to the number of people involved they have no chance to make enough money just performing. We should not be surprised to see more of lower tiers orchestra disappearing in the coming years.

tinus_hn 4y ago
Obviously two years of lockdowns had nothing to do with it!
- lelag 4y ago
  2 years hiatus of public performance would have been a non-event in the 20th century. You could just have used the time to release some new records. Yes, COVID has nothing to do with the classical music industry woes. Spotify and its terrible redistribution model is the main culprit. Of course, COVID might have been what pushed this particular formation over the edge but it is just the extra drop spilling over. Fees from public performance has never been enough to fund a full symphonic orchestra.
  - yakak 4y ago
    > You could just have used the time to release some new records. If you were a soloist you could have used the time. If you were a 5 piece you could use about half the time depending on region. Larger groups had a lot of problems given time delays in remote communication.

Khelavaster 4y ago

These salaries were not tenable at all. What about endowments or other longer-term sourced of funding? There must have been long-running mismanagement..

fred_is_fred 4y ago
It's San Antonio - not New York City.

todd8 4y ago

Years ago, I had a partner that was a highly trained symphony musician (studied musicology and performance at a major university, PhD etc). After all these years of training and having incredible skills, she was unable to support herself. The fundamental problem is that there are maybe 30 symphony jobs in North America for her instrument that pay enough, and there is a world of new players being churned out by Fine Arts departments all competing for the one or two spots where someone is retiring. The university departments know there are no good jobs for these students they produce, but like other university departments they compete for funds by enticing students to peruse almost useless degrees.

fred_is_fred 4y ago
I am always confused why people do this to themselves - a PhD no less! It would not have taken more than an hour of research to know that you'd be unable to get a decent paying job - whether it's fair or not.

mathattack 4y ago

If San Antonio can maintain a symphony a new one will emerge. If not, it won’t.

wtinasky 4y ago