Orchestras and their 'comfort level'

'It's the music, stupid!'
(A lesson from Alan Halpern)

DAN ROTTENBERG

In his recent discussion of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s great Christoph Eschenbach departure mystery, Robert Zaller remarks, “Modern orchestras like to achieve a comfort level with a conductor before they accept him, as if there were no more important qualification.” Meanwhile, in his review of Blair Tindall’s classical music exposé Mozart in the Jungle, Beeri Moalem notes Tindall’s “glaring lack of any deep description about what makes music so great.”

Methinks these fellows are on to something. Most employers instinctively hire people they feel comfortable with— people who will work well as a team. Most employees seek high pay, good working conditions and job security. One notable exception in my own experience was Philadelphia Magazine during its golden age under editor Alan Halpern (1951-80). Halpern didn’t hire staff writers for their comfort level or teamwork. He hired them because they were good writers. He recognized that good writers, by their nature, are individualistic, egotistical, insecure and neurotic, but he was willing to surround himself with such people in order to get the best possible writing in his pages.

The result was a staff that functioned like a dysfunctional family but also produced a stimulating product. We writers and editors survived largely by avoiding each other and focusing on our writing. When mutual contact was unavoidable— at the monthly staff meeting, for example— you could almost feel the room vibrating with all the petty jealousies and recriminations.

After one such gathering, Alan concluded the meeting by sighing, “Well, back to work.” To which one of our senior editors, Chuck MacNamara, replied, “Alan— you call this fun?”

Creative tension at the Welcomat

I found it a most uncomfortable place to work when I was there in the early ’70s— but I did some of my best writing there. When I edited the Welcomat (now Philadelphia Weekly) in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, my publisher Susan Seiderman and I spent a lot of time shouting at each other— and the resulting tension spilled onto the pages in a product that readers either loved or hated but rarely ignored.

By contrast, Seven Arts magazine, where I worked in the early ’90s, consisted of uniformly kind, caring, considerate people— and yet it was an oppressive environment, because everyone there was too nice to tackle the nasty problems that the organization confronted.

Alan Halpern’s de facto mantra was: “It’s the writing, stupid.” Zaller and Moalem imply that the Orchestra should hang a similar sign in its office: “It’s the music, stupid.”

When musicians looked like stevedores

I can testify— again, from personal (albeit secondhand) experience— that this was once the case at the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the summer of 1936 my father, 20 years old and freshly graduated from Penn, wangled a job as business manager for the Orchestra’s summer concerts at Robin Hood Dell.

In those days the summer season was operated not by the Orchestra Association per se but by the musicians themselves, functioning more or less as a co-op in order to earn extra income. The effects of the Great Depression were still very evident, and even these virtuoso musicians were struggling to make ends meet. When they showed up for rehearsals in their slouch hats, baggy trousers and scruffy windbreakers, my father recalled, “You’d think they were stevedores who’d just come off the docks.” Then, Dad added, “They’d pull out their instruments and make the most beautiful music I’d ever heard.”

It’s nice to have comfortable and contented musicians and administrators. But that’s not the ultimate goal.



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