Monthly Archive for June, 2008

To My Readers

Published
by
dtclarinet
on June 30, 2008
in Behind the Scenes, Columbus Cultural Politics and columbus symphony orchestra
. 1 Comment

I will post again soon. I have been very busy getting three rooms in my house ready to rent out in order to make ends meet and keep my beautiful home and garden. I have had to pack up much of my life into boxes and cram my practice space into one small room. Doable, but chaotic.

I am also having to apply for Federal assistance to help pay the high price ($550/month) to continue the insurance plan which has now been dropped by the Symphony, even though several staff member’s salaries and benefits continue to be paid.

I am still sad beyond belief that those in the community who are members of organizations formed to support the Symphony have been convinced by the pseudo-logic of Buzz Trafford’s lawyerly manipulations to believe that there are no other options than what has already been done.

The truth is, the board did not have to withhold ticket sales for the Fall season in order to continue negotiations with the musicians. This simple fact betrays their innocence in handling the situation. They claim they cannot sell ticket because they don’t have a contract with the musicians. In fact, they have a contract, which they have broken. And their efforts to negotiate a fair contract for the current musicians has been anything but fair; it’s been unilateral and immobile. While the musician’s offered a sizeable cut to BEGIN negotiations, the board, led by Buzz Trafford, refused to budge from their original plan. This is not negotiation.

One supporter, who is one of the most circumspect and polite individuals I’ve ever met, spoke up at a recent meeting and stated that, after reviewing the events of the past few months, and as uncomfortable as it was for him to say; the Board intended to destroy the orchestra all along.

Motives are moot at this point. The fact is, our livelihoods and our valuable contribution to Columbus as music makers, teachers, neighbors, friends, is ending. And that end has come to pass solely on the backs of the decision makers on our current Board of Trustees. They are responsible for the destruction of the orchestra, not the failing economy, not the “lack of support” from corporate donors, not any reasons they give. It’s simply their original intention to destroy the Orchestra, masked behind a “financial crisis”. This is not to say there is not a financial crisis. Any musician would agree that there is. But the desired outcome to resolve that crisis is vastly different from the Board’s view than the musicians, or any other of the numerous, educated supporters of the Orchestra.

We need new leadership, plain and simple. Those on the board who are willing to take a fresh look at the situation and actually support the orchestra should remain. The others, who have either been involved in the plan to destroy the orchestra, or who have in complicit in their silence, should step aside.

I also want to mention to any of you reading my posts that you should be aware of any unusually long page loads, especially if the note at the bottom of the screen says “downloading from sum4count.net”, which is a Trojan malware script that piggy backed onto my blog. I have taken all the necessary steps to prevent any further infiltration, but just in case you saw that phrase, you also need to take steps to clean your computer of this virus. I apologize if this has caused any problems for anyone. I can assure you, it won’t happen again. (Luckily I have a Mac and it was relatively unscathed, but my laptop PC has been destroyed and must be completely rebuilt)

Who is the problem?

Published
by
dtclarinet
on June 21, 2008
in Behind the Scenes, Columbus Cultural Politics, Off the Record, columbus symphony orchestra, symphony board and symphony management
. 3 Comments

WHO IS THE PROBLEM?

Columbus is the fastest growing region in Ohio. It is also one of the richest.

Arts business produces over $330 million in economic activity in the Columbus area. That’s 11,000 jobs.

The musicians of the Columbus Symphony play at a world class level. Other orchestras at this level are paid much higher salaries.

Yet, Robert “Buzz” Trafford, president of the Columbus Symphony Board, and a lawyer with Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, thinks the musicians are overpaid and are causing the problem. He has hardly ever attended the Symphony. He also uses Google to figure out how to run a symphony orchestra. He’s not interested in the professional and experienced opinions of anyone, unless they agree with his.

Tony Beadle, Executive Director of the Columbus Symphony, and supposedly a leader of the arts, called the orchestra a “dinosaur”. He mocked a passionate grassroots support base which was formed to help with the current crisis. Since he came here, the Symphony has taken a nose dive. He is incapable of doing his job effectively.

Tony Beadle and management overspent their own budget by $6.5 million in the past 4 years. That’s over $1.6 million community dollars wasted each year. None of this went to pay the musicians.

The musician’s expenses in the budget went down by $0.9 million in the past 4 years. Yet, the musicians are willing to immediately take a 7% salary cut to save the orchestra.

Buzz Trafford said he would think about accepting a thrid party mediator 3 weeks ago. He still hasn’t accepted it. What’s he afraid of? He also insists that the musicians pay for half the mediator’s fee, something which is unheard of in any musician negotiation. Management pays the fee, because management stands to benefit from the advice of the mediator. The musicians continued to do their jobs of playing music at world class levels. Management needs professional advice to solve the problems they caused and they should pay for it.

Who do you think is the problem?

When a baseball team is losing, who gets fired, the players or the manager?

Letter from Jennifer Parker-Harley

Published
by
dtclarinet
on June 14, 2008
in Behind the Scenes, Columbus Cultural Politics, columbus symphony orchestra, symphony board and symphony management
. 0 Comments

I am writing in response to the article about the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and the picture of me and my colleague, Mindy Ewing, that was printed on the front page of the Sunday (June 1) Metro section. It is important that members of the community know the backstory of the picture - not only was I moved to tears after what might have been the final concert of the Columbus Symphony, but because of the orchestra’s current situation, my family and I will be leaving town.

I came to Columbus in 2000 after winning an audition at which 99 other flutists from across the country were present. At that time, the CSO was considered a ‘destination’ orchestra - an excellent group of musicians with very little turnover in personnel (resulting in their musical cohesiveness), fair compensation, and based in a very livable city. It is as part of this orchestra that I learned the ropes -I played all the major repertoire, I played in Carnegie Hall, I played under world-class conductors, I was the soloist in the Mozart Flute Concerto in G with the orchestra in January, 2008. These were all formative, growing experiences for me and through them all I was supported by the warmth and cameraderie that characterize this group.

As a member of the community at large, I put down roots. I arrived here as a newlywed and went on to own a home and give birth to two children at St. Anne’s hospital. I began teaching at Otterbein College in 2003 and in my tenure there taught students that have gone on to teaching jobs in area public schools. I voted. I paid taxes. I built a life here.

This year, as the problems of the orchestra began to escalate, it became necessary to look elsewhere for employment. I am one of the six members of the orchestra who will be leaving Columbus, as I was recently appointed Assistant Professor of Flute at the University of South Carolina. My tears, as photographed after what may have been the CSO’s last concert, were for more than the caption indicated. Even though I was born and raised in SC, Columbus has become my home. I am saddened beyond words to leave such a great orchestra and so many fine colleagues.

Like me, members of the orchestra have come here from across the country and the world to make this city their home. Many of my colleagues have spent their entire careers here, contributing to the orchestra, but also to the community through teaching, raising children, voting, paying taxes, buying homes. If the board does not do what is necessary for musicians to survive, the city will continue to lose these highly educated, contributing citizens.

Most, if not all of us, began music lessons as very young children. We have devoted many years, much time and countless dollars to the pursuit of beauty and expression through music. Here, in this city, we have provided a world class model of orchestral playing that has had a ripple effect on the cultural life of the entire region. I urge the citizens of Columbus and the board to consider what the community will lose, as, like me, other musicians are forced to move away in order to pursue their life’s work.

Dr. Jennifer Parker-Harley
Second Flute, Columbus Symphony Orchestra/Assistant Professor of Music, University of South Carolina

Columbus Symphony Board, Guilty of Orchestracide

Published
by
dtclarinet
on June 12, 2008
in Behind the Scenes, Columbus Cultural Politics, columbus symphony orchestra, symphony board and symphony management
. 0 Comments

Here a paragraph from Abu Bratche’s post titled, What’s the opposite of accountability?, about the CSO board.

The single biggest weakness in the American non-profit sector is the complete absence of consequences for the people who really run non-profits. The board of the Columbus Symphony – no one else – is responsible for killing the enterprise which was entrusted to them. But they don’t lose their jobs, or have to find new careers, or get shunned at parties, or told by the local media that they’re selfish and unreasonable. They don’t even get thrown off the board. They just continue to be board members, except of course that now they don’t have to raise any money. And, unless their bylaws are written differently than those of most non-profits, they can continue to choke the life out of the institution long after it’s dead before anyone from outside can do anything about it.

Letters from Jan Ryan

Published
by
dtclarinet
on June 10, 2008
in Behind the Scenes, Columbus Cultural Politics and Our Supporters
. 1 Comment

My friend Jan Ryan keeps the heat on Robert “Buzz” Trafford. Her questions need to be asked, or perhaps demanded, of the entire Board of Trustees.

I’ve heard more people say to me, “How embarrassing for Columbus that this board couldn’t get their act together!”

To: Robert Trafford
Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur

Dear Mr. Trafford:

I have enclosed a letter I wrote to the president of National City Bank.

On several occasions you have been quoted as saying that the corporations of Columbus are tired of donating money to an organization that is not solvent.

I believe you have an onus to tell the public just which corporations you have contacted before the demise of the Symphony.

Anticipating your prompt reply,

Sincerely,
Jan Ryan

To: Peter Raskind
President National City Bank

Dear Mr. Raskind:

As a resident of Columbus, Ohio for over 40 years, I have been impressed with the many donations National City Bank has made to the Arts.

However, I am puzzled that you have not come forward, as far as I know, to assist the Columbus Symphony Orchestra at a time when its very survival is a stake.

The musicians and the board are at odds over why the symphony is in this difficult position. The former have asked for a mediator but nothing has been forth coming from the board. The board has stated that all decisions will be made by June 16, 2008.

Any assistance you can give would be greatly appreciated.

Yours truly,
Jan Ryan
CC: Buzz Trafford

Wading through Columbus’ Arts Quagmire

Published
by
dtclarinet
on June 7, 2008
in Behind the Scenes, Columbus Cultural Politics and columbus symphony orchestra
. 1 Comment

Ron Spigelman of Sticks and Drones, a music culture blog written by two conductors, makes an admirable foray into the swamp of Columbus cultural politics with his analysis of the Dispatch’s article announcing the creation of a second arts panel.

The situation can be summed up with the following analogy, which also applies to board’s decision to, among other things, cancel the Summer season, withhold ticket sales for next year, and terminate its contract with the musicians.

A reasonably healthy patient is bleeding to death from wounds inflicted by her doctors to “improve” her health. The doctors responsible for her care have decided to withhold blood, water and nourishment, so as not to waste any, in case she dies. They also decide to call in a second panel of doctors to advise them on how they might save the patient. When asked if the decision to withhold life support might affect the patient’s health, the lead doctor replies, “Terminating life support will not have any affect on the patient’s health”.

It’s like something out of Monty Python! Except the patient is real and the doctor culpable.

Eerie Silence in Columbus

Published
by
dtclarinet
on June 5, 2008
in Behind the Scenes, Clarinet, Columbus Cultural Politics, Technique, columbus symphony orchestra, symphony board and symphony management
. 1 Comment

I feel like I’m in a bad dream, and that I’ll wake up tomorrow to make music for Columbus, as I and my colleagues have done for decades.

Minnesota Orchestra HallA friend just returned from an audition trip to Minneapolis, MN. She described the area around the Orchestra Hall as intensely marketed toward the symphony: a huge poster of their Music Director, Osmo Vänskä, Symphony Restaurants, Symphony Apartments. The whole area boasts of and features the symphony.

Here in Columbus, the silence is eerie from those who should know better: our Symphony Board, our Columbus City Council, our Mayor Coleman, our Greater Columbus Arts Council, our Governor Strickland, the Columbus Partnership, the Dispatch “Ohio’s Greatest Newspaper”, and those whose job it is to do what has been done in Minneapolis, make their orchestra everyone’s orchestra.

A comedy of musical omens

Published
by
dtclarinet
on June 4, 2008
in Clarinet, Equipment, Mastery, Musician's Life, Orchestra Auditions and The Music
. 3 Comments

This past Saturday and Monday I spent 7 hours recording a CD of 10 orchestral excerpts to be used as a preliminary round for a major US orchestra, the NY Philharmonic. The hours between were spent mostly practicing those excerpts.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Playing in an orchestra is to skating in the Ice Capades what auditioning for an orchestral position is to winning the Olympics.

Olympic athletes don’t have lives; they have only their goal, to win the Olympics. They sleep, eat, play, love and breathe that goal. Nothing else matters. Nothing else can matter, for every electron of their being must be pointed in one direction consistently for years in order to achieve that goal. Or attempt to achieve it. Many do not even gain a medal.

I hired a professional technician to help me with the task of recording and then editing the CD. I’m glad I did. After 7 hours of recording, there were 2 hours of takes from which the best 10 had to be selected to comprise the final 15 minute CD. This guy was top notch. He took detailed notes of my random playing order for each excerpt. (I often gave up perfecting one and tried another, or several others, before returning to the first.)

To be able to play those 10 excerpts with the highest quality, I had tested 50 or 60 reeds and rejected most of them (at $2 a shot) to get one or two which would let my music making shine through. I had practiced those excerpts with numerous reeds, and each reed had to be played slightly differently to make it work. Each excerpt also tended to demand a different kind of reed. Now I sought the one reed to rule them all!

Recording those 10 excerpts is like performing a decathlon, the height of athletic performance for any human. One has to be nimble to play Mendelssohn’s sprightly Scherzo, powerful to lift the heavy drama of Verdi’s Tosca or Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta, rich and somber for the opening of Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony, sensual and luring for Ravel’s Bolero, and some of all of the above for Brahms 3rd symphony.

I also had to play parts one of the most deceptively difficult of concertos; Mozart’s. Mozart demands both the purity of expression of a child and the technical mastery of a great artist.

I recorded right up to the deadline, allowing several hours for my engineer to edit the CD. With the finished product in my hands, I dared not listen to it, fearing only the flaws would reach my ears, nothing else.

I reread the very specific directions for sending it, which said to clearly label the jacket with my name. I took out an indelible marker and wrote my name on the CD, instead of the jacket. Since this was to be a “blind” preliminary audition, they couldn’t see my name on the CD. I had to copy the CD to a fresh disk and follow the directions this time, labeling the outside. Not a big deal, but time was running out.

It was now 8:15 PM. It had to be sent 9 PM to have it in the NY Phil office by the next morning. To be sure it copied correctly, I put the CD in my stereo and listened to a bit of each track. My heart sank. In the first 16 bars of the Mozart Concert, I noticed a few slightly out of tune notes.

Musicians are both blessed and cursed with astoundingly powerful and uncompromisingly sharp self-criticism. Those few out of tune notes would be nothing in a live performance, nothing at all. They would be of little consequence in a recording with orchestra, when the listener is taking in the big picture and the shape of the phrase. But when there are hundreds of applicants vying for one of only a few hundred jobs in the country, those first 16 bars are CRITICAL.

I pushed aside the gloomy mood which encroached. I was exhausted, having barely eaten the past two days, surviving on nervous energy. I headed for FedEx Kinkos to send it off. I flipped on the radio, which was playing a recording of Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. The music came to the part where Till is about to be executed, as the whole brass section plays the doomsday march to the scaffold. It was appropriate music for my current mood.

Till, played by the Eb clarinet in this section, screams out in fear and desperation at impending death. After squealing out an incredibly high note, the parts calls for a low one. In this performance, that low note was flat as all get out! I bellowed with frustrated laughter. Ah, the painful irony of it all.

After mailing off the tainted CD, I returned home to focus on finding the cause of the deathly smell which had permeated my house. After sniffing around a bit, I located the little corpse of a chipmunk under my piano, the room in which I had been recording. (undoubtedly brought in by my cats several days earlier) Another ominously ironic sign? Death inspired music making? No wonder it was out of tune!!

I decided I had to get out of the house. I phoned a friend to meet me at a restaurant for a bite to eat, my first real meal in two days. On the way I turned on the radio again. I immediately recognized the music which had pulsed through my veins since age 12; Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto.

I also noticed several out of tune notes.

The Last Stand

Published
by
dtclarinet
on June 1, 2008
in Behind the Scenes, Our Supporters, Performances, Personal and columbus symphony orchestra
. 3 Comments

Clarinet StandTonight, for the first time in 18 years, I brought my clarinet stand home from the Ohio Theater. After 18 years of being thrown around and used, it’s still solid and sturdy.

My grandfather made this double clarinet stand for me in the early 1980’s. He passed away in 1986. He loved making things in his retirement, having been an engineer and fine tool designer for much of his career.

He made things to last a lifetime. I also have several lamps around my house which were made by him. It seems that the knack for making things with that kind of quality has gotten lost, somehow, in the shuffle to make things cheap, and by extension, disposable.

Welsh Hymns and MelodesMy grandfather, William, also loved music. He was Welsh and sang in choirs all his life, though he didn’t read a musical note. He sang and harmonized by ear.

Up to the end of his life, he attended yearly gatherings of Welsh Gymanf Ganu, grand choirs of thousands who came together for a few days annually simply to sing hymns. Can you imagine being in a choir of thousands?

After bringing home the clarinet stand he made, I wondered what William would have to say about the attitude from “on high” in this city about the Columbus Symphony, about the surreal silence Columbus is experiencing from those who should know better about the importance of the Arts?

Tonight we played what may be that last concert as the Columbus Symphony. We couldn’t have had a better person to experience such a poignant and wistful event: Marvin Hamlisch.

Marvin not only put forth his usual wit, humor and beloved music making, but he took the time, he took lots of time, to put forth the argument for sustaining the arts in any city, and especially Columbus, a large and vigorous city which hardly knows it’s own potential.

Before the final number, he stalled and stalled, not wanting to end. He said, (and I paraphrase) “I wish we could stop the clock now, so we wouldn’t have to end; but I promise, I hope, this will not be the end, but only a hiatus.” He said, in the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger, “We’ll be back!” He said, “Sometimes, you have to lose, or almost lose, what you have to appreciate it.”

He also said, “If and when this crisis is over, I will come back and play a concert here as a fund raiser, and I’ll donate my services. There’s one condition, however; that I will get for my services a pint of Graeter’s black raspberry chip ice cream, with one spoon, not two, because that ice cream is a taste of heaven.”

Appropriately, the encore featured two esteemed senior members in the orchestra, Steve Secan and Randy Hester, who have been playing music with the CSO since the mid 1970’s. Also fitting was the song we played, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.

Our audience gave us a standing ovation several times, showing their appreciation for us as people and for the Columbus Symphony as a valuable asset to the city.

After the concert, there were teary goodbyes between colleagues who have worked and grown together as human beings.

I didn’t participate much in that ritual. I don’t like goodbyes. Call me superstitious. I believe the people I meet and part from will always be in my life.

I also believe “We’ll Be Back!” Like my grandfather’s clarinet stand, the Columbus Symphony was made to last.