1,000 Orchestras

The U.S., so often called culturally arid, had ten symphony orchestras in 1900; today it has more than 1,000. More than 100 of them sprouted in the past two years alone. Most are community or college orchestras whose budgets are less than $125,000 a year and whose players earn their livings outside the ranks. The orchestras grew out of a deep and often overlooked cultural need in their communities.

But they are also business organizations, merchandising music, and they must make ends meet or go out of existence.

Making ends meet in managing a symphony means knowing not only how to put a program together but how to hire a hall and scale seat prices, how to find a first cellist and how to wangle newspaper space. Helping small-town symphonies with such chores is the task of the 13-year-old American Symphony Orchestra League, Inc. (headquarters: Charleston, W. Va.). The league has been taking a hard look at the music business and in the process, it has uncovered a mass of hitherto uncharted specifics. Item: community orchestras lose about 35% of their subscribers a year, hence must continually make new contacts. Item: it takes an average of 20 contacts to sell one new season ticket.

Through Error. For community orchestra managers--often amateurs who had to learn their business by trial and error --the league now runs annual training sessions. Included in the curriculum: how to select guest artists and evaluate their fees; how and where to get music and musicians; how to achieve proper balance of power between manager, conductor, board of directors and musicians--and generally, how to keep a whole town happily working for its orchestra.

Much of the managerial lore was learned the hard way by League Executive Secretary Helen M. Thompson, 47, an amateur violinist who from 1942 to 1950 was manager of the symphony in Charleston (pop. 73,500). "I made all the usual mistakes in succession," she says cheerfully, "some of them twice." Among her mistakes:

P:Making overoptimistic estimates of income and expenses, resulting in embarrassing need to raise more money in midseason. The league now sends out specimens of good and bad budgeting. P:Assuming that almost any amount of money can be raised if enough people work hard enough. The league has concluded that a definite relationship usually exists between the size of a community and its orchestra's budget. Theoretical safe maximum: 50-c- per capita. Big-city orchestras, with different financing problems, vary widely from the norm, from 13-c- per capita in New York City to $1.88 in Boston.

P:Selling 7,000 tickets for half as many seats. The league now teaches a sound system of controls and checks on sales.

The effect of the managerial courses is immediate; in the first year, budgets in some towns rose by as much as 300% and their deficits disappeared. Today, the league cannot fill all the requests it gets for graduate managers.

From Within. Working with a $6,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the league is also studying orchestra constitutions and bylaws, considers many "inadequate, outmoded and impractical." Some of its findings: managers and conductors, who are usually best informed about the orchestra's life, are rarely members of the board; many women's committees, which sell most tickets and often raise most money, are not allowed to vote on policy; governing boards assume wide powers for control of their orchestras, but few of them are legally obliged to look after the orchestra's welfare.

Out of the league's concern for the members' musical welfare came another project. Says Secretary Thompson: "You have to have a license to run a beauty parlor, but there is nobody around to say what credentials one should ask for in a conductor. A bad one can ruin a town's musical taste for 25 years." So the league made it possible for 125 community-orchestra conductors to test their batons on the exacting Philadelphia, Cleveland and Los Angeles symphonies. The conductors refreshed their ears on what constitutes fine orchestral sound, learned more concise baton technique, and some were surprised to find that, when faced with an orchestra that could obey their slightest wish, they knew the score inadequately. Results: five left the conducting field, eight are taking advanced study, ten got better jobs.

Said one of the league's advisers: "Communities can either continue to build only smokestacks or they can build both smokestacks and a cultural life. The latter you cannot have by buying one-night stands of art events. You have to develop the arts from within your own people."

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