Despite the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s recently-acquired talents for sowing consternation, at least they’re doing right by Canada’s leading avant-garde trickster, R. Murray Schafer, on the occasion of his 75th birthday—all week long, Radio 2’s evening program The Signal is running tributes. The party kicked off yesterday night with a live recording of my favorite Schafer opus, the inimitably mischievous “…No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes”—you can listen to the entire Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra birthday concert online. The program also includes the string-quartet-and-string adventure “Four Forty,” not to mention Schafer’s own idiosyncratic contribution to the concerto repertoire—”North White,” for snowmobile and orchestra.

Gould was by now going to no less than four Toronto doctors…. And the doctors kept prescribing drugs. Aldomet for the high blood pressure, Nembutal for sleep, tetracycline and chloromycetin for his constant colds and infections. And Serpasil and Largostil and Stelazine and Resteclin and Librax and Clonidine and Fiorinal and Inderal and Inocid and Aristocort cream and Neocortef and Zyloprim and Butazolidin and Bactra and Septra and phenylbutazone and methyldopa and allopurinol and hydrochlorothiazide. And always, in addition to everything else, lots and lots of Valium.

—Otto Friedrich, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations

The nurses’ log books for February 1969 make depressing reading, except that Stravinsky’s fighting spirit shows through on every page. Here, for example, is the beginning of an entry for February 5: “6:00 A.M. Threw his pillow at me but later calmed down.” The reasons for the calm may be attributed in part to the following medications:

10 A.M. 11 A.M. 12:30 A.M. 3 P.M. 4 P.M. 6:30 P.M. 9 P.M. 9:50 P.M. 12:25 A.M. 2 A.M. 3:45 A.M. 3:50 A.M. 6:15 A.M.

1 Pronestyl 100 Mg. Heparin 1 teaspoonful Butisol ½ Comp. Tylenol 1 Comp. Pronestyl 1 teaspoonful Butisol Myloran tablet. Darvon tablet. Pronestyl capsule. Placidyl capsule (500 mg) Placidyl 200 Mg. p.o. Placidyl 200 Mg. p.o. Placidyl 200 Mg. p.o. Pronestyl 250 Mg. p.o. Tylenol tablet p.o.

—Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft,
Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents

If you ascribe to Wolf’s Law, then it will come as no surprise that one of the finalists at this year’s Pillsbury Bake-Off^® was pianist/composer Sherry Klinedinst, who made it to Dallas with her Creamy Smoked Salmon Cups. Klinedinst tours around Indiana on a regular basis (or you can just watch videos); her music is cheerfully all over the map—described on her website as “Yanni, John Williams, Jim Brickman, Aaron Copland and George Gershwin all rolled up into one.” My tastes bat .600 from that list, but sound clips reveal her latest to be better than the average jazzed-up hymn album, with “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me” reimagined à la “Minnie the Moocher,” and a “Holy Manna” laced with nice instrumental touches that call to mind Smile-era Brian Wilson.

Critic-at-large Moe and I did our journalistic duty this morning and whipped up a batch of salmon cups.


The verdict? I could eat these all day long.

I finally had time over the weekend to catch up with Robert Flanagan’s report on orchestra finances, commissioned by the Mellon Foundation. It’s a comic masterpiece—a hilarious parody of those diagnoses of dire orchestral health that appear like 17-year cicadas….

No, actually, it’s supposed to be serious. But the report is a bit of a familiar mess. I’m beginning to think that when economists take a look at the performing arts, especially economists who don’t have any experience in that sector, on some level, it fries their brain. Remember, the fundamental activity of economics isn’t analysis, it’s the construction of predictive models. And the default assumptions behind those models are usually based on the idea that people will always act in their own financial self-interest. Confronted with an orchestra—an organization pretty much guaranteed to lose money—economists used to for-profit assumptions often seem in danger of self-destructing, like a sentient robot confronted with a clever Captain Kirk paradox. (Robert Levine summed up the difference nicely: “Businesses make things, or provide a service, in order to make money. Orchestras make money in order to provide a service.”)

Professor Flanagan retreats into his biases, which appear to be pro-management and pro-market. The first one is so transparent, it’s almost ridiculous. Not only—as ICSOM’s Brian Rood has pointed out—does Flanagan rely uncritically on management-supplied, non-audited financial data, he changes his methodology depending on the point he wants to make. Revenue streams, for example, are reported in real terms, in inflation-adjusted dollars. Musician salaries, on the other hand, are presented in relative terms:

Between the 1987 and 2003 seasons, the weekly salaries of symphony orchestra musicians also increased more rapidly than the average wages and salaries of other unionized workers in the United States, of nonunion workers, and of other professional service workers. (pp. 52-54)

Flanagan doesn’t bother comparing that salary increase to highly-skilled workers, which is the more pertinent analogy; nor does he consider the possibility that musicians’ salaries in 1987 lagged sufficiently behind those of other highly-skilled workers such that a more rapid relative increase was necessary to bring them back into line. Flanagan is also conspicuously silent on administrative salaries, even though his own graph (p. 20) shows that while artistic costs have declined as a percentage of overall expenses, general administrative costs have increased. Flanagan is quoted on the report’s home page (linked above):

“Some [orchestra managers] say it doesn’t surprise them because many symphonies have a bias towards revenue growth strategies and a bias against cost-cutting strategies,” Flanagan said, adding that nonprofit board members often shy away from conflict. “It’s not clear that they’re willing to be as tough minded about costs as directors in the private sector.”

I was wondering when the hallowed tough-minded capitalist was going to put in an appearance. Based on his report, Flanagan’s idea of a hard-nosed manager is one who cuts everybody’s pay except his own.

But it’s the free-market bias that’s more interesting. Flanagan’s main focus is the “performance income gap,” the discrepancy between ticket revenues and overall expenses. Given that ticket revenues haven’t covered orchestral expenses since the days when people seriously imagined flying blimps to the moon, one might think that orchestras had some awareness of this particular issue. But Flanagan pounds it home—and for a supposed “fact-finding study” (p. v), he uses some revealingly loaded language:

The resulting performance income gap has worsened over time and will worsen in the future. (p. v)

Even this group of comparatively healthy orchestras has encountered significant economic challenges, including a worsening of the performance income gap (p. vi)

The continuation of the historical worsening in the performance income gap (p. 22)

The difference in the cyclical sensitivity of revenues and expenses results in a worsening of the performance income gap (p. 27)

the industry confronts a worse performance income gap (p. 27)

In short, the majority of orchestras have continued to experience a long-term worsening of the performance income gap (p.28)

…and so on. (Italics mine, except for that last one.) The factual statement is this: the so-called “performance income gap” is widening. Worsening? That’s a value judgment. That “gap” has been an economic fact of life for the better part of a century, and a recognized fact of life since Baumol and Bowen analyzed it in the 1960s. Flanagan, of course, knows about the cost-disease, and, to give deserved credit, summarizes it a lot more concisely than I did:

Variously referenced as “Baumol’s curse” or “Bowen’s disease,” the crucial facts are that labor productivity advances more rapidly in the goods-producing sector than in the performing arts (and in many other service industries), but broadly speaking, both sectors compete in the same labor markets. (p. 2)

But the customary way for getting around the cost-disease—philanthropic support—involves what are, for all practical purposes, investments with no possibility of financial return, and that flies in the face of economic assumptions about self-interest. (There is a self-interest factor, of course, but one that’s nowhere near as eminently quantifiable as money.) Flanagan can’t shake the feeling that, if an organization isn’t covering its costs with the direct revenue from its output, it’s somehow cheating.

Concert performance is the central objective of symphony orchestras. Addressing the relentless deficits—performance income gaps—that accompany this central activity requires attention to enhancing performance revenues and controlling performance costs. (p. 50)

Note that if you rewrite that second sentence:

Concert performance is the central objective of symphony orchestras. Addressing the relentless deficits—performance income gaps—that accompany this central activity requires attention to enhancing philanthropic revenues and controlling administrative costs

…it makes just as much economic sense as Flanagan’s prescription.

We can open up a whole can of economic worms by looking at one of Flanagan’s other assumptions, one he makes almost in passing. In discussing the NEA’s 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, he notes that the percentage of respondents who attend classical music or opera performances has remained pretty much the same since 1982. Good news, right? Wrong.

It is therefore puzzling that the proportion of the population attending symphony concerts has been so stable during a period in which both real income and the proportion of the population with at least a college education increased (p. 34)

—because historically, classical audiences have been rich and college-educated. Given the emphasis on regression analysis in the rest of the report, I waited for Flanagan to decouple those two factors, income and college education. He never does—because he hasn’t bothered to factor increasing income inequality into his analysis. Aggregate real income may have increased, but middle-class wages, for example, have remained largely stagnant, even as the middle class has become increasingly college-educated. Even if you accept that a college education makes one more likely to enjoy classical music (I’ve never been convinced of that causality, in either direction), there’s the very real possibility that the spirit is willing, but the pocketbook is weak. And rich people can only go to so many concerts.

Just for fun, let’s bring in, as befits any discussion that touches on class, the one and only Karl Marx. It struck me not long ago that the mechanism of Baumol and Bowen’s cost-disease is awfully reminiscent of Marx’s labor theory of value. Marx was looking to explain how capitalists made money, and he famously proposed that they do so by cashing in the surplus value created by workers, that is, the amount of labor they perform above and beyond what’s necessary for their subsistence. In Marx’s theory, the price of a product was the sum of three factors: constant capital (factories and machines), variable capital (labor-power sufficient for the worker’s subsistence), and that surplus value. That’s at least how he put it in Volume I of Capital; by Volume III, there were some difficulties to deal with, mainly the fact that most products are made from raw materials that have their own set of values, and that one couldn’t necessarily assume that the price-value equality would remain constant throughout the chain of production. Marx shifted the equality to the macroeconomic level, saying that, as long as profit rates remained constant across the economy, prices and values would equal out in the aggregate, even if they were unequal within a given industry. The economist Meghnad Desai explains:

Marx’s solution was to say that money rates of profit are equalized by some commodities’ prices being above value, while others would be below. Commodities which had a high organic composition of capital (ratio of constant capital to total capital) will have price/value ratio larger than one. For those with a low organic composition of capital, the price/value ratio is smaller than one.

Another way of putting Marx’s solution is to say that while living labour generates surplus-value, there is a compensation for those companies (capitals) which use more machines to labour than the average because their price/value ratio is larger than one. Labour-intensive goods cede surplus-value to machine-intensive goods via this imbalance in the pricing process.

If that imbalance is directional over time, you’ve got yourself a cost-disease.

Well, you might say, that’s all very fascinating, but we were talking about the Flanagan report, remember? Bear with me—we’re getting there. Desai’s explanation of Marx’s theory is one of the more intelligible I’ve ever read, unlike Marx’s own explanation (part of the sheaf of notes and incomplete drafts that Engels fashioned into the second two volumes of Capital), which is impenetrable even by Marx’s standards. The murkiness of Marx’s writing led to all sorts of refutations and counter-refutations (though recent research has at least demonstrated the empirical plausibility of Marx’s theory). But take a look at an early mathematical approach, by Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz. In 1907, Bortkiewicz realized that the fuzzy heart of Marx’s theory—the “transformation problem,” how to correlate values and prices—had an elegant solution under a set of certain simplifying conditions. Bortkiewicz divided all commodities into three categories: (1) means of production, (2) workers’ consumption goods, and (3) capitalists’ consumption goods—luxury goods, in other words. And then he related their constant capital (c), variable capital (v), and surplus value (s) like this:

c₁+v₁+s₁=c₁+c₂+c₃
c₂+v₂+s₂=v₁+v₂+v₃
c₃+v₃+s₃=s₁+s₂+s₃

Three equations, three variables—that means there’s a solution. Caveats: Bortkiewicz’s approach is, again, wildly simplified (later on, the transformation problem would be tackled in the general case with linear and matrix algebra), and by no means uncontroversial (even some Marxists consider it far too distorted a caricature)—and the whole idea of trying to equate value and price leaves some profoundly unconvinced (both the Marxist Joan Robinson and the anti-Marxist Paul Samuelson found the transformation problem ultimately pointless). But remember what Marx was doing: trying to see capitalism in the big picture. And take another look at that last equation: the total value of luxury goods is equal to (or at least proportional to) the total surplus value created in the entire economy. And then consider that music is, after all, a luxury good—and that classical music is hardly the only genre feeling the pinch these days.

If you buy Marx’s analysis (and I think he was on to something), then Bortkiewicz’s simple model hints at how the available capital for luxury goods would be squeezed as income inequality increases—if wages remain stagnant, i.e., don’t keep pace with inflation, then more labor is required to reach subsistence levels, leaving less available for surplus value. And here’s where Flanagan (see, I told you we’d make it back) doesn’t take a wide enough view. The point of the report is to separate cyclical factors (economic factors that orchestras have no control over) from structural trends (economic factors brought upon orchestras themselves by their own policies). Flanagan clearly regards the flat attendance among affluent-and-educated potential concertgoers as a structural trend—a failure of programming and marketing. But by failing to separate out education from income (come on—any graduate music student can anecdotally confirm a very weak correlation) he misses the possibility that such data is cyclical, the result of external economic conditions, in which case the proper prescription would quite possibly be an increased focus on fundraising and development—go after the only sector with sufficient surplus—the opposite of what the report recommends.

This may seem like a minor, if long-winded, point. I don’t think so—I think it gets at the heart of what’s wrong with the report (and many like it). Marx’s guest appearance may seem either oblique or jarring—especially if you’re rabidly laissez-faire or prone to confuse Marx with “Marxism”—but I like having him here because his holistic intellectual cast, trying to analyze the entirety of society, is exactly what the report needs more of. Flanagan expends much effort in trying to isolate possible factors—but never considers how those factors might interact. (And when he can’t isolate factors—as with unemployment rates and stock prices—he sort of just throws up his hands.) Most importantly—and this is getting downright endemic among analyses of The State Of Classical Music—there’s paltry indication of anything beyond the largest organizations. String quartets, entrepreneurial chamber ensembles, new-music groups, community choirs, we’ll-try-anything festivals: perhaps the presence and efforts of all those musicians might have some salutary effect on the viability of orchestras? (Sure, that might not be reflected in the orchestras’ own data, but that didn’t stop Flanagan from, for example, pulling in the NEA study.)

In other words, the report doesn’t put orchestras into a sufficiently community- or society-wide context such that an orchestra does make economic sense. Orchestras exist, after all, and persist even as report after report predicts their downfall. It’s like plugging values into the Drake equation that make even intelligent life on Earth improbable. The normal plea at this point would be for an economic analysis that focuses not on why orchestras will disappear, but why they continue to survive. But, honestly, I enjoy reading demonstrations of the impossibility of heavier-than-air flight or a sub-four-minute-mile. How long until the next one?

The national anthem at last week’s home opener at Fenway Park—performed by a Boston Pops contingent—included the now de rigueur obbligato of a military jet flyover. (I’m enough of a 12-year-old boy that I still think jets are pretty awesome, but come on, that’s a public-school teacher’s salary* for the whole year right there.) Anyway, this year’s flyover—F-16s, if you’re a connoisseur—had some problems. Not Arthur Hailey-level problems, but problems nonetheless.

An unexpected delay in the playing of the national anthem during the Boston Red Sox opener at Fenway Park on Tuesday contributed to the unorthodox maneuver by a Vermont Air National Guard pilot during a flyover moments later.

The resulting spectacle—one F-16 fighter jet looping over and then under the other three to find its place in the traditional V-formation—ended in the pilot’s grounding this week, which in turn prompted a flurry of media attention.

That’s according to a Burlington Free Press report (via) complete with video (not to mention priceless comments). The source of the delay? Government sources are pointing the finger at the percussionist.

“There was a false start, a ‘hack,’ caused by a drum roll before the anthem,” said Lt. Col. Lloyd Goodrow. “When the controller on the ground at Fenway realized that, we had to put the pilots back into a figure-eight holding pattern.”
…
A drum roll from the Boston Pops Orchestra, assembled in centerfield, followed, then was halted as [Red Sox public-address announcer Joe] Castiglione began speaking again, this time to salute members of the armed services and tell the crowd who was performing the anthem and doing the flyover.

The pilot “was going faster than the rest of the formation was going,” Goodrow went on. “Then, it seemed the tempo of the music slowed down, so the leader in the formation slowed down. By then, the pilot was approaching faster than he needed to.” It’s like high-school band, isn’t it? All it takes is for one person not to follow the conductor and it’s CHAOS! (Or a personal favorite: “If you come in early, I can’t help you.”)

This sounds like a conductor-announcer problem to me, but of course, it’s the performers who get the blame—and not just the drummer. “Goodrow said he did not know if the incident Tuesday would jeopardize the Air Guard’s chances to perform flyovers at future Boston-area events.” Is that the Air National Guard equivalent of being bumped down to fourth chair?

*Update (4/14): More like a few salaries.

Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan School of Public Health has been asking some rather personal questions of 475 U-M students, and the result is a paper in this month’s Evolutionary Psychology called “Young Adults Attempt Exchanges in Reproductively Relevant Currencies.” Does that vaguely euphemistic phrase mean what you think it means? From the abstract:

Adults in many species exhibit exchanges in reproductively relevant currencies, where males trade resources for sexual relations with females, and females have sex with males in exchange for provisioning…. The current study investigated whether young adults who are not in acute need of resources intentionally attempt reproductive currency exchanges outside of dating relationships or formal committed relationships such as marriage; and whether young adults have awareness of being the target of such attempts made by others.

The answer: yes and sometimes—not really all that surprising, given the college-student demographic sample, but Kruger’s trying to make the point that such behavior is an evolutionary holdover from societal situations where such exchanges were life-or-death transactions. Nevertheless, like a lot of academic study these days, the really important information has been relegated to the press release:

Overall, the strategy of attempting to exchange investment for sex is only successful about 25 percent of the time, the paper found. Some of the attempted trades included: tickets to the U-M versus Ohio State game; studying assistance; laundry washed; a Louis Vuitton bag; and voice lessons among other things.

Voice lessons? Apparently, I went to the wrong school. There’s no indication whether such instruction was bait or prize, although the discovery that voice teachers accepted anything other than legal tender would, I suppose, be scientifically significant on its own. (Accordion lessons? Pure catnip.)

The paper itself includes this deadpan gem:

The low success rate of exchange attempts may indicate that such explicit offers are not usually an effective strategy. On average respondents reported initiating more exchange attempts than receiving offers of exchanges. Although the sample does not represent a closed population, this finding suggests that respondents were less aware of others’ exchange attempts than they were aware of their own. It is also possible that females receive so many male solicitations on a continual basis that many incidents are easily forgettable. [emphasis added]

Hey, Scarpia—line forms to the right.