British Orchestras & the Cuts

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Looking around the country, the distribution of substantial professional orchestras is rather like premiership football clubs. Lots in London, of course, 3 in Manchester (sorry - 2 in Manchester and 1 in Salford), 1 in Birmingham, 1 in Liverpool, 1 in Bournemouth, 2 in Glasgow, 1 in Gateshead, "kind of" 1 in Leeds, 1 in Cardiff. Otherwise, not much (BUT please forgive me if I've missed anyone. Much of the country rarely gets to see a professional orchestra, so its importance never even enters their radar, which is sad. Recorded music can be very good, but is never the same as the real McCoy.

[Cellini]

Two in Cardiff.

[perfect wagnerite]

just a few thoughts on an important subject.
One local funded youth group recently visited china. CHINA. i would be impressed if someone could justify this financially.AS far as I am aware, parents paid out most of the cost. Not clever in my view.

Part of my beef about what is happening to music making for young people is that if a sports club wanted to go to China, nobody would raise an eyebrow - indeed, there'd be tin-rattling and sponsored events all over town. I fear we live in a country where the death of youth music-making will go unnoticed in a nation already fixated on the absurd 2012 International Stratford Festival of Multilingual PE.

[DracoM]

perfect wagnerite

Two really excellent posts that absolutely says it for me on youth orchestras. They are so easy to disband and so impossible to re-form, and that's the real hidden disaster here.

Most kids have no problem getting into / starting their own rock etc bands, despite the fact that kit is expensive, but so much of the classical music reprtoire requires really decent levels of teaching, technique top-ups and bigger spaces to play in that cost money.

If independent schools had real incentives to take their community responsibilities seriously, of course, some would open their resources / rehearsal spaces / sectionals to good local young players, but I really can't see that happening on a regular basis. I do hope I'm wrong. Does anyone know of such an independent school who do this regularly?

[teamsaint]

Part of my beef about what is happening to music making for young people is that if a sports club wanted to go to China, nobody would raise an eyebrow - indeed, there'd be tin-rattling and sponsored events all over town. I fear we live in a country where the death of youth music-making will go unnoticed in a nation already fixated on the absurd 2012 International Stratford Festival of Multilingual PE.

The youth music scene is pretty healthy in my view....but still mostly as a required activity for middle class kids.
It will probably never change. I don't really think that ostentatious trips to places like China have a place in music, sport or anything else much.

My son's spanish exchange trip for GCSE was to PERU for goodness sake. We just couldn't afford it. I rather thought that they might go to Spain at a fraction of the cost.

The fixation with "having" to get our youth ready to win a bucketload of medals in sports that nobody is really interested in is also nonsense.

[DracoM]

Off topic, But I agree about your bafflement about Peru trip.

IME, the Spanish in Peru and South America generally is rather obviously not the same as in the mother country as it were.

What was the justification for taking them to Peru, FGS?

[RobertLeDiable]

I would think that Leeds & Sheffield will be better protected than other cities as they only facilitate the booking of a variety of orchestras and pay a fee, which if ticket prices and sales are achieved, the outgoings to the authority will be minimal. If the leisure budgets are cut at Leeds, they could scale back the number of concerts from 22 per season to fit in with the new budgets

Scaling back long established concert series in major cities is part of the worry. I would be quite surprised if a series like the Leeds one isn't quite heavily subsidised by the city council. If it can run the series largely on box office returns, that would be pretty amazing, but in any case there's always an element of risk, and if the council is no longer willing to guarantee the series, it will be in trouble.

Also, following the dire example of Scottish Opera, I would be concerned about all the regional opera companies, including WNO and Opera North. Isn't ENO, like the ROH, funded as a national company and therefore not subject to the main ACE cuts? I'm not sure, but I don't think the London organisations are going to be hit half as badly as those outside the metropolis. For one thing, they have access to levels of commercial sponsorship that regional organisations can only dream of.

[Dave2002]

This issue of the bankers and people like them drives me mad! Even the poor ones who merely got a £70k bonus are getting more than many "ordinary" people whose basic salary (plus of course any overtime, tips, and other payments - however earned) is still under that figure. In the meantime I am aware of a large number of people doing what I hope is considered worthwhile work for very small sums. I know personally of one who is well qualified and working in a school for autistic children. Her salary doesn't even take her into the realms where she would have to pay back her student loan. Work like that is very intensive, and may require one-one attention. If young people are to be put off from jobs like that because (a) it's very difficult and (b) the salary isn't really enough to live on, yet at the same time some rich people are not contributing to anything like the same extent, then what does that say about our society? Obviously selfish interests, or even in the longer term simply pragmatic ones would drive many to better paid jobs which are perhaps much less socially valuable, and could be done by many.

Another argument which has been put forward in some countries is "trickle down" - the idea that rich people make their pile, and then try to give it away for good purposes. There are undoubtedly some who do, and they are to be applauded, but there are probably many more in the UK who don't.

[Not sure how to use this MB fully yet. Unlike the Beeb boards it doesn't seem to have the "This post is a reply to xxx" feature - or I've not found it yet. This was meant to be a response to the longish post by Philidor on taxation, and BBM's earlier post on bankers.]

[Dave2002]

Daft I realised after thought as most musicians woulds rather busk onCharing Cross Station that join a rival band. Hornspieler said, if I remember correctly, thatthe regional orchestras were in a better position. Any further comments welcome. I'm sorry for all, prof and amateurs but the profs have more to lose, surely

salymap

Is it really the case that string players would rather have their bowing arm cut off than play in a rival band? Not quite sure what a similar analogy would be for wind and other players, but you get my point. Sounds like gang culture to me!

I thought that most musicians were supposed to be co-operative (up to a point, Lord Copper) and pragmatic. Having a job in a reasonably decent orchestra has to be a better option than busking under the arches surely, even if it's not the same as the one you started in. Now jazz bands, dance bands and pop groups - .... mmmm?

Bws - Dave

[salymap]

Morning Dave [and others] My experience of talking to orchestral players and their librarians is about 30-40 years old. Maybe things have changed but the London orchestras had a very strong sense of their identity in those days. Apart from moaning about their managers, conductors etc they had a strong sense of rivalry.


bws salymap

[teamsaint]

Off topic, But I agree about your bafflement about Peru trip.

IME, the Spanish in Peru and South America generally is rather obviously not the same as in the mother country as it were.

What was the justification for taking them to Peru, FGS?

don't remember the school feeling that they had to justify it... they just did it, like it or don't.
as I said, I felt its connected to the youth music thing. the cost of youth ensemble work isn't really that high....its the cost of individual tuition that is the problem..and I don't see where that will change.

Also off topic, I was told yesterday that individual tuition on University courses could turn into a big problem.This particular admissions tutor said that provision of individual tuition for performance modules could no longer be guaranteed within the basic fees regime, and that any dept which didn't admit this was either very rich, or being perhaps less than honest.

Anuone else heard this?

[MrGongGong]

salymap

Is it really the case that string players would rather have their bowing arm cut off than play in a rival band?

Bws - Dave

I think its worth noting that most (with some obvious exceptions !) Orchestral players are freelance , so that even in the well known and big ensembles they are only paid for what they do. So the concept of "having a job" is not the same as it is for most folk. Also many players (more often wind, brass and percussion ) play in several ensembles even sometimes having "principal" positions in more than one.

and every orchestral player in London is in the **O

[ahinton]

Good question. I was amazed to discover that for much of the 20th century both the US and UK super-rich were taxed at c. 80-90%. Look at the stats:

...

It was Reagan and Thatcher who dropped the super-rich tax rates, to c. 35% in the States and c. 50% in Britain. Result? High pay exploded. If you're being taxed at 90% there's little point in having big pay rises. It's all eaten up by the Exchequer. But at 30-50% there's a real incentive to inflate the wages of the wealthy.

We're fed this nonsense by the Daily Mail that a 90% personal tax rate for the wealthy is some sort of gross, class based assault on decent North London types dreamed up by beastly Labour governments in the 1970s.

When, in fact, in both Britain and America, an 80-90% tax rate for the rich was standard practice for much of the 20th century. Just look at the fourth column from the left. That's how the US built their great infrastructure projects: dams, interstate highways, putting a man on the moon. They taxed the rich until their pips squeaked. Britain did the same.

Is there any good reason why City of London bankers shouldn't be taxed at 90% now?

Of course, it would need to be co-ordinated across the developed world so the unpatriotic bu*gers didn't all scarper to a tax haven. But is that so difficult? That's what the G20's for.

No, I'm afraid that this just won't work. The proportion of people paying the top rates of tax anywhere is vanishingly small and some of the general public complaint about the overpaid wealthy is down to the fact that we all know far more nowadays about who gets what. People will simply not work at what they do if they are going to pay around 90% of their earnings in taxes; they'll either (a) go elsewhere (which is easy, G20 or no G20) or (b) find ways to avoid paying much of their tax or (c) demand pay rises of thousands of percent in order to protect their net diosposable incomes or, if all else fails, (d) just give up their jobs; whichever of these things happens, governments' tax collection machinery will be no better off.

This, however, is not really the point here (although it is an interesting subject in itself). If we're talking about taxpayers' contributions towards the funding of orchestras / opera and ballet companies / concert venues and series, music education, libraries, arts administration organisations and all the other aspects of musical life, we have first, I think, to look not at the rates at which the tiny minority of super-rich pay taxes or how much tax they pay but at how governments decide to spend the tax revenues that they receive from every taxpayer from the one who pays a pound a year to the super-rich; this is where the "cuts" obsession (not only in arts funding) - irrespective of the damage that they might bring about - as a knee-jerk reaction to current economic woes is grossly disproportionate and, potentially, gravely damaging in the long term. There are many "cuts" that could help the situation without causing grief to anything like as many people as those now being proposed. The phasing out of state benefits, including state retirement pensions, to those who do not need them (by whom I mean, broadly speaking, those whose incomes excluding such benefits already put them into the higher rate tax bracket) would save a fair amount of money; dispensing with Trident and effecting other major cuts in defence spending would do quite a lot more (and, after all, is it not more important to invest in having a country worth defending than in impoverishing its citizens by trying to defend the increasingly indefensible?).

Taxing the rich until their pips squeak merely encourages people to avoid such tax liability by any one of the means mentioned above but, even if it didn't, the difference in revenue going to the Treasury would not be all that great because there are so few super-rich and so many who are not.

I would have said of certain City of London bankers not that they should be taxed at 90% (because this would be inequitable and unfair to them in comparison with those in other professions who receive similar amounts) but that they should be sacked for gross incompetence; in any case, what was the regulator doing about the damage that some of them were causing? - and what message does it send to people now when they read that FSA - which seems ever more hell-bent on getting its claws into the independent financial advisor sector despite most financial services complaints being against banks and insurers - has publicly exonerated from wrongdoing the organisation that the British taxpayer has been forced to subsidise to a greater extent than any other - RBS?

No - I fear that the way to salvation for orchestral and other musical life in Britain is not the (almost certainly vain) attempts to tax a few thousand super-rich but a wise and balanced allocation of tax revenues, sensible economies wherever possible (such as those that I've suggested above) and the recognition that the arts in general needs - and always will need - funding from every legal source that it can tap - state, corporate and private, although no one source should be allowed to take undue precedence over any other.

[RobertLeDiable]

I think its worth noting that most (with some obvious exceptions !) Orchestral players are freelance , so that even in the well known and big ensembles they are only paid for what they do. So the concept of "having a job" is not the same as it is for most folk. Also many players (more often wind, brass and percussion ) play in several ensembles even sometimes having "principal" positions in more than one.

That only applies to London-based symphony orchestras (with the exception of the two BBC orchestras in London). I think (though I'm not sure) that London's two opera orchestras are also on fulltime contracts. Outside London all the symphony orchestras are full time and salaried, and their players most certainly do "have a job" in the normal sense. Outside London it's not really possible for a player to hold down a job in more than one ensemble, though of course you will find players from, say, the Halle deputising occasionally in the BBC Phil if they happen to have a couple of free days. Because of the freelance system of employment in London, London orchestras are probably less vulnerable than regional ones. Outside London, freelance performing work for musicians is generally thinner on the ground, and it's likely to get much thinner. It was recently reported that 80% of the musicians in the Scottish Opera orchestra, whose fulltime contract is about to be changed to a parttime one, paying them for only about 28-30 weeks of the year, are now seeking employment elsewhere. Freelance work to make up the remainder of their pay will be hard to find. You can be sure that the best of them will leave.

[MrGongGong]

Indeed
I should have said "most orchestral players in London"