Well I am very happy to report that not one, but two orchestras in the great Northwest are performing my "Phantom of the Orchestra" this season– Bremerton and Helena. Bremerton had a very good experience with it and Helena will be performing it, I believe, on March 27, 2009.
"Phantom of the Orchestra" tends to run a little along due to various elements that have been added to it over the years, so some orchestras have to cut parts of it in order to keep the program under 60 minutes. There are many orchestras who cannot do my pieces at all, because local union scale mandates that family concerts not run over 45 minutes without invoking overtime, and you simply cannot do my shows with less than 60 minutes.
The previous paragraph may not seem like much, but if you think about it, it’s a major "DUH" moment. For all the talk about the need for more arts education, when push comes to shove, in actual daily practice all over this land, your average local musicians’ union places a limit on how much time can be devoted to an oh so rare opportunity for a child to come hear an orchestra for the first time.
I realize that the average children’s/family/educational concert is torture to have to play (oh boy, am I telling tales out of school!), so I can understand a union committee agreeing to put a limitation on how much of this kind of aggravation their members should be put through, two times on Saturday. But this is just a reaction to negative experiences, rather than being philosophical or visionary.
Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that someone came up with a magical orchestral concert program that turned every fifth-grader into a lifelong symphony subscriber. If this program ran 70 minutes, would the players' committee or the union allow that extra time, without requiring an overtime payment?
I have said this before, but it bears repeating: while many union policies and practices make sense at first glance, there are many unintended consequences in terms of denying access to classical music to kids. Educational concerts, especially televised versions of same, need to be viewed as "loss leaders," not as profit centers. The net result of union orchestra TV fees are that kids do not see orchestras on television, and so orchestras are not part of their musical culture. Family concerts are an investment in the future of every professional orchestral musician, and should be subsidized whenever possible, yes, even by the players themselves, as the players have more to gain from them than anyone else.
© Justin Locke
