Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Do you remember a guy that’s been in such an early song?

Licht: I heard a rumor from Ground Control.

Moses und Aron: They got a message from the action man.

Der Freischütz:

Aennchen: I’m happy; hope you’re happy, too.

Don Giovanni: I’ve loved all I needed to love; sordid details following.

Elektra: The shrieking of nothing is killing.

Madama Butterfly: Just pictures of Jap girls in synthesis.

La Bohème: I ain’t got no money.

Samson et Dalila: I ain’t got no hair.

Götterdämmerung: I’m hoping to kick, but the planet—it’s glowing.

Thaïs:

Thaïs: Strung out in heaven’s high!
Athanaël: Hitting an all-time low.

Tannhäuser: Time and again I tell myself, “I’ll stay clean tonight.”

The Merry Widow: I’m stuck with a valuable friend.

The Midsummer Marriage: One flash of light, but no smoking pistol.

Mefistofele: I never done good things.

Albert Herring: I never done bad things.

Der fliegende Holländer: I never did anything out of the blue.

The Ice Break: Want an axe to break the ice.

Tosca: Want to come down right now.

Wozzeck: My mother said, to get things done, you better not mess with Major Tom.

Smoked meat (full-fat) at Schwartz’s.

This summer’s annual fall-off-the-blogging-bicycle was brought to you by Soho the Dog’s brief all-staff jaunt to Montreal and Québec. And also this week’s Boston Early Music Festival gauntlet. But mostly the trip north, during which we spoke French extremely badly but still ate extremely well. Très bien! The best restaurant music we heard was in Québec City, where, after hiking all day through St.-Roch, we wandered into the Cafe Abraham-Martin in the Complexe Méduse just as the owner put on David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust—the whole album. *pompe le poing* (The worst was also in Québec City, when an otherwise lovely lunch at Laurie Raphaël was accompanied by this—in a remix that Went. On. Forever.)

Anyway, one of the happenings I missed was the announcement that the board of directors of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra had re-signed president Anne Parsons for another three years. Parsons was the face of management during the orchestra’s six-month strike—in fact, the deal was agreed to back in March, before the strike had even ended.

This sort of thing, it turns out, is something of a minor DSO tradition. Back in 1919, the pianist and conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch gave the DSO an ultimatum: he would only sign on as music director if he got a new concert hall.

The directors of the Orchestral Association decided that they had no choice but to build a new hall. A hastily assembled building committee selected C. Howard Crane as the architect. Within two weeks the committee had purchased the site of old Wesminster Presbyterian Church and raised half a million dollars in building funds. Crane’s general contractor—prepared to work day and night to rush the building to completion—promised that it would be finished on schedule…. The contractor further showed his zeal by starting demolition of the church at a corner of the roof while a final wedding ceremony was still going on inside.

(Source.) Orchestra Hall—now part of the Max M. Fisher Music Center—is today one of the orchestra’s biggest financial headaches, the collateral on a $54 million balloon loan taken out in the face of what was revealed to be the financial bubble of the last decade. Decisions like that have not exactly reflected well on the prowess of the DSO board, and while the Music Center debacle predates Parsons, when that board expresses its confidence in her (“proven expertise in navigating challenging economic climates,” according to the board chair, who also runs a commercial real-estate company—hmmmm), it does create a bit of a with-friends-like-these situation. Hence the head of the orchestral committee calling Parsons’ contract extension “disappointing and puzzling.” (Definitely puzzling timing—was a change in management on the negotiating table? Outside supporters were calling for it, at least.)

A change of leadership would seem to be a common-sense move in Detroit, if only to clear the air of lingering bad feelings. But, then again, there are plenty of organizations—orchestras included—that are rife with bad feelings yet still hold up just fine. It might be a little more trenchant to say that a change of leadership is necessary based on a political-scientific analysis of European fiscal policy in reaction to the OPEC oil shocks of the 1970s. No, really! Well, maybe only kind of, but still fun to think about. Consider the work of Fritz W. Scharpf, emeritus director of the Max Planck Insititute for the Study of Societies. For a long time, Scharpf’s main research topic has been European integration and the difficulties and contradictions therein, but along the way, he’s come up with a nicely trenchant way of thinking about the relationship between varying approaches to economic policy and political legitimacy.

Back in the 1970s, the decision by OPEC to pump up oil prices put a severe strain on the then-prevalent Keynesian model of macroeconomic management—government spending and tax cuts to stimulate demand, spending cuts and tax increases to keep demand (and inflation) from overheating. As Scharpf explains:

Under these conditions, governments committed to Keynesian demand management were confronted with a dilemma: If they chose to fight unemployment with monetary and fiscal demand reflation, they would generate escalating rates of inflation; but if they would instead fight inflation with restrictive fiscal and monetary policies, the result would be mass unemployment.

What’s more—

In Germany and Switzerland, by contrast, governments were unable to reflate the economy because monetary policy was determined by an independent central bank that was unconditionally committed to the defense of price stability—in which case the bank’s tight-money policy would neutralize expansionary fiscal impulses…. Under these conditions, major job losses were unavoidable. They could only be softened if real wages were quickly adjusted downwards, which was true in Germany and Switzerland but not in the other hard-currency countries practicing an imported (and perhaps less clearly understood) version of the Bundesbank’s monetarism.

The Bundesbank—Germany’s central bank—was long marked (pun—ha) by its devotion to monetarist policies: basically, focusing on maintaining price stability via control of the money supply rather than aiming for full employment by stimulating demand. It’s supply-side, rather than demand-side policy, the kind of thing that can lead to massive deficits (e.g., Reagan-era US) or massive unemployment (e.g., Thatcher-era UK). In Germany, though, it worked pretty well for a lot of the 1970s and 80s. How come? In a talk he gave at the London School of Economics last month, Scharpf sums up:

[The Bundesbank] took great pains to explain, to the government, the unions and the public, how coordination by monetary policy would not only ensure price stability but also produce economically superior and politically justifiable macroeconomic outcomes. Once rampant inflation was brought under control, it would precisely monitor the state of the German economy and pre-announce annual monetary targets by reference to the current “output gap”. Maximum non-inflationary growth would then be achieved if fiscal policy would merely allow the “automatic stabilizers” to rise and fall over the business cycle, and if wages would rise with labor productivity…. In other words, responsibility for the management of the economy would be assumed by the “non-political” monetary policy of the independent Bank, whereas non-inflationary fiscal and wage policies could be conducted with a low political profile.

In Scharpf’s analysis, Keynesian policies have high political salience—because they directly involve taxes and government services, they tend to produce strong and immediate political reactions. Monetarist policies have low political salience—they’re pretty technical and behind-the-scenes, so there’s some insulation from the churn of the political surface. But monetarist policies require that such low salience be maintained—which is why the Bundesbank did so much legwork getting everybody on board, ensuring low salience down the line. (Compare with the period of German reunification, when the Bundesbank was pulled into more highly politically salient waters against Chancellor Helmut Kohl, with resulting damage to the Bundesbank’s reputation.)

And now for the question that explicitly or implicitly comes along in at least 75% of posts in this space: So where exactly is this going? Well, it’s hardly an exact analogue, but orchestras respond to fiscal crises with policies that are more or less monetarist. While it might be fun to see what would happen if an orchestra tried to spend its way out of a crisis in the Keynesian manner, it can’t really happen because orchestras can’t issue debt. Instead, they cut—they cut costs, they cut wages, they cut performances, &c. But, as in Germany, that only works in an atmosphere of low political salience—the exact opposite of what the DSO has managed to achieve. Even if you happen to think that managerial brinkmanship was the DSO’s best plan, if we borrow Scharpf’s ideas, it fairly guarantees that there’s no way to get back to a low-salience situation without either a change of management or a change of orchestra—severely curtailing the possibility of any further monetarist solutions to any subsequent crises. (Again, perhaps not an exact analytical fit, but pointing in an interesting direction.)

High political salience really brings out a lot of the more curious organizational aspects of orchestras—for instance, the way the players are not just employees, but also the product, and a crucial political constituency. It also points up that boards and, by extension, management, are not always terribly accountable—high political salience demands such accountability in governmental situations, but boards are largely self-governing. This is not to say that all boards are untenable; some boards, at least, appreciate the value of low salience. This is, again, a pretty fancy justification for what would seem to be common sense. But it does hint at how, if this kind of non-profit doesn’t happen to have either an institutional history or a managerial interest in maintaining deep, representative, competent governance, it can be pretty hard to get that to change, even when the need is obvious.

Detroit’s Orchestra Hall and the bit of land it sits on—the corner of Woodward Avenue and Parsons Street—has some interesting accountability karma. Woodward Avenue runs along the original Saginaw Trail. The plot was originally one of the so-called Park Lots, created in 1806 when the U.S. Congress authorized the “Governor and Judges’ Plan,” an appropriation of land that was previously a common. The lots were supposed to be distributed to settlers who had been displaced by the massive fire of 1805, with the remainder to be sold to raise money for a courthouse and jail. Instead, officials repeatedly dragged the process out, in order to squeeze out the original inhabitants, buy up lots for themselves, and fuel a speculative real-estate boom. Silas Farmer, Detroit’s 19th-century city historiographer, was rather elegantly sarcastic about it in his History of Detroit and Wayne County:

The Governor and Judges, first in charge, undoubtedly assumed unlawful power in giving away lots to various churches and societies, and exceeded their authority in many particulars. None of these powers were included in the Act creating the Land Board. The ease with which their sessions changed from land-board to legislative, and from legislative to judicial, as the exigencies of the case seemed to them to demand, was something marvellous even for that time of transition.

Only twenty years after its 1919 construction, the DSO vacated Orchestra Hall, the financial pressures of the Depression being too much to handle. The city seized the hall in 1941 for non-payment of taxes, then sold it to Ben and Lou Cohen, who already owned a chain of theatres; the Cohen brothers re-opened the Hall as the Paradise, which played host to some of the biggest jazz acts of the time. When, in 1970, the structure faced demolition at the hands of the fast-food hamburger chain Gino’s, a concerned-citizens committee was able to buy it and begin restorations.

The Orchestra moved back in 1989—which means that Orchestra Hall has only housed an orchestra for well less than half of its existence. On the one hand, the Hall is a tribute to the DSO’s perseverance; on the other hand, it is a fount of cautionary tales. But the board seems disinterested in learning from the past, once again throwing a wedding while knocking down the church.

My original copy went missing in a move sometime during the Clinton administration, but I am happy to report that the single greatest photograph of the Cold War is once again in the library at Soho the Dog HQ:


In honor of such an auspicious reacquisition, some random, politically-angled links.

Curtis Hughes‘ Say It Ain’t So, Joe, an opera starring Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, is looking for Kickstarter money for a planned recording. Selling point for disillusioned cynics: none of the money will actually go to any candidates!

After 22 years on the 4th floor of City Hall (just longer than his father), Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley spent his last day in office taking in a concert.

A primer on Russia’s emerging political pop underground.

Ah, Jersey.

The 2nd District Court of Appeals ruled that week that a Florida state law making it illegal to play your car stereo too loud was unconstitutional. (In possibly related news: Luther Campbell, mayoral candidate.)

A Newt Gingrich scholarship for music students? A Newt Gingrich scholarship for music students.

I was so busy last week that I missed the cost-disease Internetically rearing its head yet again. Greg Sandow brought it up as Exhibit no. 74-D (or so) in the ongoing hand-wringing over orchestral finances (see Louisville, Honolulu, Detroit, Syracuse, Philadelphia). Alex over at Wellsung took exception, on the eminently reasonable grounds that reports of the impending death of orchestras have been around for an awfully long time, and have invariably proved to be exaggerated.

I love the cost-disease—I love thinking about it, I love doing thought-experiments to test it, I love reading the academic respiration of confirmation and refutation it has inspired for the past 50 years. It’s catnip for ruminators: a simple idea that gets less and less simple the more you poke at it. The idea is this: you can divide industries into those in which technology enables a lowering of labor costs over time, and those in which it doesn’t. The performing arts tend to fall into the latter category, the standard illustration being that you can’t use technology to get the required performers for a string quartet below four. Over time, the argument goes, industries afflicted with the cost-disease are increasingly disadvantaged in comparison with those that aren’t.

I wrote a thing about the cost-disease back in 2007—good Lord, that’s four years ago now. There are probably orchestras who have formed, had their Golden Age, and run aground on the shoals of a dithering board in that time! I was kind of afraid to read it again, but I think it holds up reasonably well; for all my customary dystopian glee, I did approach both the severity of the cost-disease and its rebuttals with some degree of skepticism.

For example, I still think I was right to draw a line between the performance industry and the recording industry—as much as people like to point to recordings as a technological innovation that increases per-worker productivity for musicians, it struck me then as a fundamentally different business, as it strikes me now. Which is not to say that an organization can’t aid its own bottom line by selling recordings on the side, which has been an increasing trend—Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, London, BMOP: all those orchestras have started their own labels. Having spent two days at that Rethink Music conference hearing everybody say that recordings are the promotional giveaways of the future, I’ll be curious to see how long it lasts, but, like ticket prices, if you can get people to pay, good on ya. But it’s a parallel business, a complementary business, not the performance business itself. Now, streaming concerts, that’s more interesting—although, so far, most organizations who are streaming concerts online are doing so for free; whether that can be successfully monetized, to use everyone’s favorite vulgar term, is still something of an open question. I, for one, am skeptical that the success of the Met Opera high-def simulcasts is something that can be widely imitated, for instance. But if there’s a market there, I think, in a way, that does change the calculus of the cost-disease. (It doesn’t cure it, but it resets its progression to a more manageable level.)

But there’s some things I wish I had highlighted more—I just didn’t see them clearly enough at the time. And they all revolve around how easily the idea can slip into a pejorative, market-centric mindset. I mean, we’re calling it a disease, for gosh sakes. We could just as accurately say: there are prominent labor efficiencies in the performing arts that are non-scalable. That it makes it sound like what it is: a value-neutral structural trait of such organizations. The cost-disease is not a crisis—not “the killer part of the long-term rise in expenses,” as Sandow puts it—but a given feature of running an orchestra or similar institution. The fact that some orchestras have done a notably poor job at managing that feature should not disguise the fact that many other orchestras have managed it fairly well.

I think that pro-market bent is revealed in the persistent insinuation that the cost-disease has only really been an issue since orchestras went to full-year schedules in the 1960s—a time period apparently chosen to conveniently provide a union scapegoat. Here’s Tony Woodcock, the president of NEC, hmm-hmming that one on his blog:

Subsequent contract negotiations transformed the musicians’ jobs into positions governed by Collective Bargaining Agreements that converted compensation packages from a variable to a fixed cost. (The financial model of any orchestra in the country today will show the musicians as the biggest single cost.)

I am having a hard time imagining any orchestra anywhere at any time in history where the musicians weren’t the single biggest cost. (Then again, Woodcock was relying on the pro-management bias of the Flanagan report.) Sandow, too, got into this, relating that he “first heard about structural deficits years ago, at a private meeting, from people who ran major orchestras that weren’t Philadelphia.” Really? Because I could have first heard about structural deficits in, say, 1881, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra ran a structural deficit in its first season of existence, ran a deficit every season after that, and nevertheless still is around. Here’s Henry Lee Higginson’s original prospectus for the orchestra:

Such was the idea, and the cost presented itself thus: Sixty men at $1500 = $90,000 + $3,000 for conductor and + $7,000 for other men (solo players of orchestra, concert-master, i.e., first violin, etc., etc.) = $100,000. Of this sum, it seemed possible that one half should be earned, leaving a deficit of $50,000, for which $1,000,000 is needed as principal. (M. A. DeWolfe Howe, The Boston Symphony Orchestra 1881-1931, p. 16)

That’s still the model: pay the musicians, take in what you can from ticket sales, build up an endowment to cover the deficit. The BSO was lucky enough to have Higginson to make up those deficits himself, but just because the BSO, in its early days, had a development pool that made up for in robustness what it lacked in diversification should not take away from the realization that, even in that good old Gilded Age, the orchestra was relying on a development pool. This has been part of management’s job from the get-go: shake the trees to make up the difference. That’s not a challenge to the business model, it is the business model.

It’s the intuitive resistance to viewing that model as “viable” that’s at the heart of what I’ve learned about the cost-disease since that 2007 primer. Alex rightly notes that “the cost disease idea and its predictions of inescapable economic annihilation for the performing arts seem just a bit too convenient for those who indulge in classical music pessimism.” I would also add that, in my experience and reading, an eagerness to rebut and dismiss the cost-disease is awfully prevalent among those who indulge in a libertarian or free-market-based worldview. I have a fondness for any idea that bothers triumphalists and pessimists alike, which gets at what I now think about the cost-disease: that it is, in a way, the boundary at which the postulates of capitalist society—all those free-market assumptions that, no matter how reasonable or widely held, are still assumptions—derail. The cost-disease is hardly fatal, not necessarily a source of crisis, but just a fact of life for certain types of endeavors; that we view it as something to be diagnosed and possibly cured just shows how big the disconnect is between the value of performance and the price the market puts on it. The two other industries cited as textbook examples of the cost-disease—education and health care—show the same disconnect, in terms of both underpricing and overpricing. Behind the cost-disease is a set of assumptions about efficiency and progress; but the cost-disease shows up right where those assumptions begin to fray.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra announced their 2011-12 season today. My colleague Jeremy Eichler gives the rundown over at the Boston Globe, along with some reading of the tea leaves as well as more leaves to read. If, like me, your default category is composers, here’s a handy list:

9 works: Beethoven

7 works: Mozart (this includes all five violin concerti, performed by Anne-Sophie Mutter over two concerts to start the season)

4 works: Ravel, Strauss (Richard), Stravinsky

3 works: Berlioz, Brahms, Debussy, Haydn, Harbison (finishing a two-season survey of his symphonies, including the Sixth, the BSO’s only world premiere this season), Mendelssohn (including Lobgesang, which the symphony is letting Riccardo Chailly take a crack at)

2 works: Bartók, Dvořák, Prokofiev, Weber (Weber? Weber)

1 work: Bach (J. S.), Barber, Britten, Carter (the Flute Concerto, also headed to San Francisco for a December tour), Dutilleux, Kodály, Lutosławski, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Salonen (the Violin Concerto, with the composer conducting), Schumann, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Turnage (From the Wreckage, a US premiere), Wagner

So, yeah, Beethoven is taking up nearly 13 percent of the schedule. And those first four groups: 35 percent of the composers control 66 percent of the programming wealth! Just for fun, I ran the BSO’s seasonal composer distribution through a calculator to come up with its Gini coefficient, the standard shorthand for income inequality—the higher the number, the more concentrated the wealth. The BSO’s coefficient—37.9—isn’t quite as bad as the United States’ (45, as of 2007), but nowhere near Sweden’s coefficient of 23. One can, with questionable statistical validity, find the closest match on this list and thus declare the BSO the East Timor of orchestras.

Ah, you might say, but not all of those works occupy equal space on each program—Lobgesang, for instance, takes up the whole evening. Well, I ran those numbers, too—if a piece was one of three on a program that received four performances, for instance, it was credited with four-thirds of a performance. By that measure, Beethoven is now taking up over 16 percent of the schedule—and the Gini coefficient balloons to 43.4, on par with, say, Guyana.

The BSO’s press release, incidentally, included this spin:

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, arguably the least-known and least-performed of the composer’s nine symphonies

That’s kind of like calling Ringo the least-known Beatle, but I give the BSO marketing department props for putting forth the effort.

Update (5/6): I ran one more set: the Cleveland Orchestra’s 2011-12 season. Coefficient for works-by-composer alone: 38.2. Weighted by number of performances: 41.8.

Update (5/6): OK, one more, to compare with a new-music-focused group. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project‘s 2010-11 orchestral season shows a by-composer coefficient of 9.7, and a weighted-by-performance coefficient of 11.2. Much lower, not surprisingly; all but two composers are represented by a single piece of music. Expand the data to include their chamber concerts, and the by-composer coefficient becomes 11.4—but the weighted-by-performance coefficient jumps all the way to 37.9. Why? BMOP does multiple performances of a small number of programs, but the majority of the programs only get one performance, so the weighting becomes seriously skewed. (Eliminate those repetitions of programs, and the coefficient falls back to 18.4.)

I spent a good portion of last week at the Rethink Music conference in Boston, and my oft-oblique impressions are now up at NewMusicBox:
Courts and Conquerors: Thinking and Rethinking the Rethink Music Conference.

One important presentation that didn’t make it into the article was Jean Cook and Kristin Thomson’s overview of the Future of Music Coalition’s Artist Revenue Streams research project, an ambitious survey- and interview-based test of all those hypotheses about the positive effects of the Internet on musicians’ careers that everybody assumes but, it turns out, no one has ever actually looked into. They’re on the prowl for data; if you’re a musician of any genre interested in telling them something about your household income, they’d be very interested in you.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra is into the last two weeks of its season, under a pair of guest conductors who might also be reminders of the group’s post-James Levine conducting predicament: Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, often touted as a candidate for a caretaker BSO music director, and Charles Dutoit, currently filling a similar role at the crying-poor Philadelphia Orchestra. I am hardly an expert in classical-music criticism—as Globe readers rarely hesitate to remind me—but I do have a good trick for gauging the relationship between a professional orchestra and a guest conductor, a ridiculously simple one, but one that usually tells a great deal about the concert at hand: is the orchestra looking at the conductor? It’s not necessary, after all; I could probably get up in front of the Boston Symphony, give the downbeat for Brahms 2, and then walk away, and the orchestra would probably come up with a pretty decent Brahms 2 all on their own. There have been BSO concerts I’ve seen where the players spent more time stealing glances at the concertmaster than at the conductor. There have been a few that started out that way, but where, over the course of the concert, the conductor won them over, so that by the end, the players were hanging on every wave of the stick. And then there’s the ones where the podium is the natural focus of attention from beginning to end. It’s not foolproof, but, for the most part, that’s a corresponding progression in the quality of the concerts as well.

It’s a criterion that measures, among other things, a conductor’s charisma, which is something I was thinking about in the context of both the Boston and Philadelphia situations. Not so much charisma in the sort of vague, strong-personality everyday use of it, but in the somewhat more specific way that the great German sociologist Max Weber used it. Weber’s ideas about charisma come in a long lecture, Politik als Beruf (“Politics as a Vocation”), that he delivered late in his life, in the wake of World War I. (You can read “Politics as a Vocation” here; the translation, uncredited, is by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills.) Weber characterized three different kinds of political leadership:

To begin with, in principle, there are three inner justifications, hence basic legitimations of domination.

First, the authority of the ‘eternal yesterday,’ i.e. of the mores sanctified through the unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual orientation to conform. This is ‘traditional’ domination exercised by the patriarch and the patrimonial prince of yore.

There is the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, or other qualities of individual leadership. This is ‘charismatic’ domination, as exercised by the prophet or—in the field of politics—by the elected war lord, the plebiscitarian ruler, the great demagogue, or the political party leader.

Finally, there is domination by virtue of ‘legality,’ by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional ‘competence’ based on rationally created rules. In this case, obedience is expected in discharging statutory obligations. This is domination as exercised by the modern ‘servant of the state’ and by all those bearers of power who in this respect resemble him.

Weber’s definition of domination is specifically in the context of the state, the power of which Weber analyzes as derived from its claim on a monopoly on the use of violent force: “The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence”. The power wielded by a symphony orchestra is awfully garden-party by comparison. But one can, I think, find hints of Weber’s three legitimations in every orchestra. Certainly the orchestra’s artistic power is based, in large part, on the authority of an “eternal yesterday”; and some of the organizational power struggles could be traced to a conflict between that traditional authority and the rules-based legal authority of unions and corporate regulation.

But it’s Weber’s gift-of-grace (the literal translation of χαρισμα) that sets orchestras apart—they’re some of the very few organizations whose leaders are, necessarily, even by definition, charismatic leaders. We might think of such charisma as a de facto requirement in the political sphere as well; Weber, in 1919, was already at least hinting at its predominance:

To be sure, the pure types are rarely found in reality. But today we cannot deal with the highly complex variant, transitions, and combinations of these pure types, which problems belong to ‘political science.’ Here we are interested above all in the second of these types: domination by virtue of the devotion of those who obey the purely personal ‘charisma’ of the ‘leader.’ For this is the root of the idea of a calling in its highest expression.

But charisma is a democratic choice, not a requirement. Garry Wills’ polemic-disguised-as-a-meditation The Kennedy Imprisonment draws heavily on Weber’s categories to make that point, contrasting the low-key, legalistic, trust-the-hierarchy administration of Eisenhower with JFK’s explicitly charismatic brandishing—and appropriation—of presidential power. Since Kennedy, political success has, more often than not, been judged in charismatic terms. But political office is not inherently dependent on charisma—and such offices actually can resist charismatic leveraging. (As does the electorate—witness the pleasing-nobody limbo of Barack Obama, a charismatic figure but a temperamental legalist, trying to pivot from a Kennedy-esque campaign to a very Eisenhower-like style of governing.)

Orchestras, though, are predicated on charismatic leadership—you need somebody the players are going to look at. Wills’ analysis, interestingly, suggests that such leadership is actually a chronic source of organizational instability. In the political sphere, charismatic leadership best flourishes in crisis situations—Wills points to the Kennedy administrations penchant for marathon, high-stakes convocations of decision-makers centered in the White House: “Since the charismatic leader’s special powers grow from special dangers, the two feed on each other,” Wills notes. “For some crises to be overcome, they must first be created.” For orchestras, such crises tend to be centered around changes in leadership—music directors rarely depart except under circumstances of crisis, which, cyclically, gives the succeeding music director the fuel to exert a new round of charismatic authority. But such lacunae are perilous, especially now that the peripatetic, scheduled-years-in-advance conductor is the norm. The charismatic basis of music directorships means that the organizations are comparatively impoverished in the vacuum left by their departures. Wills again: “Charisma, the uniquely personal power, delegitimates institutions. Rule by dazzlement cannot be succeeded by mere constitutional procedure.” He quotes Weber’s biographer, Reinhard Bendix:

Such a transformation from charismatic leadership to traditional domination occurs most frequently when the problem of succession must be solved. In a strict sense that problem is insoluble, for charisma is an inimitable quality that some higher power is believed to have bestowed upon one person. Consequently a successor cannot be chosen at all. Instead, the followers wait in hope that another leader will appear who will manifest his own charismatic qualification. [emphasis added]

In that sense, the timing of the Philadelphia Orchestra board’s decision to file for Chapter 11 is hardly coincidental, the weakness of the institution expressing itself in the absence of a permanent charismatic head. (Interim conductor Charles Dutoit, indeed, seemed surprised by the move.) As far as I know, the BSO is not in comparable financial distress (although, if Philadelphia gets away with their petition, I cynically would not be surprised to see every orchestra in the country try a similar maneuver the next time a contract re-negotiation is on the horizon). But they’re most likely looking at a couple seasons, at least, without an official music director. Given Levine’s history, one might chide them for not being more proactive in arranging for a successor, for letting the situation reach such a crisis point. Under Weber’s analysis, though, the crisis is the point, the crisis is necessary before the institution can make a move, because the crisis is what lends authority to the next leader.

It’s hard to imagine what a conductor who relied on Weber’s “legality” would look like—even those who philosophically defer to “the authority of the score” tend to make such deference part of their charismatic aura (and can be among the most charismatic of all—Riccardo Muti, for example). Maybe such statute-based power can only be found in those ensembles that abstemiously avoid permanent conductorial authority—St. Luke’s, Orpheus, A Far Cry, &c. For most traditionally-structured orchestras, though, charismatic leadership is par for the course—which means that, structurally speaking, so are regular doses of drama.

Update (4/25): Joshua Kosman thoughtfully looks on the bright side.

As of this morning, the International Music Score Library Project, the online repository of public domain music, is offline, due to a rather iffy (to say the least) DMCA takedown demand from the UK-based Music Publishers Association. The full tale is on the IMSLP forum; Tim Rutherford-Johnson has commentary and links.

The trigger for this latest skirmish is the IMSLP’s posting of the score to Rachmaninoff’s The Bells, a work that is not under copyright in the US, no matter what the MPA might claim. But is the use of that particular piece and that particular composer coincidental? Hmmmm.

To wit: off the top of my head, I can think of three rationales for the MPA’s attempted shutdown:

• The MPA is a somewhat clueless organization, hoping to protect some royalties via corporate bullying.
• The sheer questionability of the takedown notice is aimed at sparking a legal challenge that can then be appealed, a UK version of Golan v. Holder.
• The copyright maneuverings behind the Rachmaninoff legacy are more cloak-and-dagger than I thought.

History inclines my opinion towards the first option; the devil-making-work-for-idle-hands aspect of certain corners of the legal profession might incline me towards the second. But my inner conspiracy theorist loves the fact that Rachmaninoff is at the center of this, because Rachmaninoff plus copyright equals fertile ground for at least mild conspiracy.

The majority of Rachmaninoff’s works are public domain in the US for the simple fact that the nascent Soviet Union couldn’t get their act together on copyright. Tsarist Russia had never signed on to the Berne Convention; Soviet attempts throughout the 1920s to create bilateral copyright treaties with various other countries were abortive. From 1917 until 1967 (when the USSR finally signed its first bilateral copyright treaty, with Hungary), the Soviets were not part of the international copyright system; works copyrighted in Europe or America, say, had no protection in the USSR, while works copyrighted in the USSR had no protection anywhere else. As soon as Rachmaninoff’s music was published in Soviet Russia—The Bells, for instance, came off the press in 1920—it was PD everywhere else.

Stravinsky was in the same boat, which is why there are multiple versions of many of his pre-Soviet-era greatest hits—The Rite of Spring, The Firebird, &c.: Stravinsky revised the scores in order to copyright at least some version of them in the US and Europe. It’s also a contributing factor, probably, to Stravinsky’s demonic productivity. Rachmaninoff, though, neither revised his earlier works nor composed all that much after leaving Russia (though the selection was choice: the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Third Symphony both post-date his emigration and, thus, remain snugly under copyright).

That hasn’t stopped Rachmaninoff’s descendents from trying to reassert some copyright control over the PD works. Some efforts have been relatively above board—the Rachmaninoff Critical Edition, for instance, done with the full cooperation and input of Alexander Rachmaninoff, the composer’s grandson, and duly copyrighted 2005—and some more curious: you might recall Alexander Rachmaninoff Wanamaker, Serge’s great-great-grandson, who wanted to do new arrangements of the Rachmaninoff catalog, just different enough to warrant fresh copyright. Wanamaker died in a fire in 2009, and the status of his efforts isn’t clear, although this refashioning of the Third Symphony into a “Fifth” Piano Concerto might be some indication of the trend.

Now, do I really think that shady Rachmaninoff-connected minions are somehow blackmailing MPA executives into pursuing this legal action? That’d be a great story, but, no, of course not. But the Rachmaninoff situation is exactly the sort of thing that’s being contested in the above-mentioned Golan v. Holder. A little background: the Berne Convention, which originally dates from 1886, has been the general international framework for intellectual property ever since. Which doesn’t mean that it’s been hewed to ever since: the US and Russia only got around to joining the Convention in 1988 and 1995, respectively, and when they did, they did so while specifically exempting themselves from the Convention’s stipulations for retroactivity—in other words, neither country wanted to try and sort out royalties on works that, in each country, had been public domain for the better part of the 20th century. However, subsequent treaties have muddied the water, both WIPO, from 1996 (and the basis for the DMCA law that provided cover for MPA’s cease-and-desist), and the so-called Uruguay Round, the 1994 trade agreements that also brought you the World Trade Organization. It’s the latter that is the basis for Golan v. Holder—the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, under which Congress ratified the agreement, amended the US Copyright Code, providing for “the automatic restoration of copyright in certain foreign works that are in the public domain in the United States but protected by copyright or neighboring rights in an eligible source country.” (According to the US Copyright Office.) That would be one heck of a precedent right there. But note that, even if the URAA were to stand up under judicial scrutiny, The Bells should have remained unaffected—its theoretical 75-year copyright term expired the day the URAA took effect, and, according to the Berne Convention, such natural-causes temporal expiration of copyright is immune to retroactivity.

Hence the prima facie ridiculousness of the MPA’s claim. But, given the US Supreme Court’s conservative majority’s combination of pro-corporate cheerleading and (except for Anthony Kennedy) anti-international skepticism, I, for one, am not quite sure what to expect from Golan v. Holder; as a legal stalking horse for a similar case in the EU (not to mention a mixed metaphor), The Bells might adequately toll. Or, again, maybe the MPA is just yet another hidebound entity, deciding to run down the Internet, but tying their legal shoelaces together. Either one is plausible, really. Far less plausible, but far more satisfying to my dark, mischievous soul, would be a cabal of Rachmaninoff intimates, making a solemn vow in 1943, fanning out across the Western world, insinuating themselves into the corridors of copyright power, biding their time until the trap was ready to be sprung. The Bells would actually be a pretty good soundtrack for that movie.

Update (4/21): The MPA backpedals, kind of.

Further update (4/21): IMSLP is back up.

Over at The Faster Times, some thoughts on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s bankruptcy filing.

Reviewing the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and Alisa Weilerstein.
Boston Globe, April 12, 2011.