Here we are paying $100 for 50 top notch world class musicians playing for 3 hours.
There were maybe 500 people in the concert hall, so at an average ticket price of $50 each musician (split evenly) would have gotten max 500 bucks.
Signed, a lowly but enthusiastic shitposter
There's room to disagree about that. Especially with orchestral music, the reality is that so much of the audience is simply there out of habit and not "real aficionados" as you say. Which means they're not really grokking any of the music and do not really care about anything besides the old "workhorse" pieces. The widely-acknowledged outcome is that, far from being actively preserved, much of the potential repertoire simply languishes in obscurity.
There are of course forces pushing against this unwanted dynamic, such as a renewed appreciation for solo and small-ensemble/chamber music (which can at least be easier to understand for the novice listener), as well as recreational engagement with the artform outside the concert hall. In many ways, this is a reaffirmation of the "natural" environment for this sort of music where recorded music was either non-existent or uncommon, and actively playing music was an increasingly accessible, everyday activity.
Just an aside: There's especially the fun in-between. I had the amazing fortune of getting to see a cross-section of the TSO perform all of the music to Home Alone live while they displayed the movie on a screen above stage. It was fantastic. What a treat.
All this spoken as someone who spent a good portion of his 20's playing 'small-ensemble' and solo around cheap clubs in Toronto. (And continue to nurture those delusions happily into my 30's, and I'll never stop)
(Just another fun aside: my brother in law happens to be a player in the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and I'm pretty sure we're both jealous of each other to some extent)
Of course, I agree about that wrt. music in general. My cautionary comments about appreciation being both hard and not seriously engaged in, as a matter of fact, by many listeners were specifically about commonly-performed orchestral music. (Some people might even consider that alone "real music", while excluding that status for movie soundtracks and the like. Of course, this is self-defeating if you actually care about "real music" being more broadly appreciated: lighter works are a necessary stepping stone to that lofty goal.)
(Just open up your favorite music publishing platform and see how common it is to market just about any piece of orchestral music as something purposely bland and good for "relaxation". Needless to say, this is not what real appreciation looks like. It's not even a "shallow" level of engagement with the music itself.)
People who show up to listen to an orchestra—it doesn't matter on what level they're enjoying it, it serves to enrich lives regardless and on many planes.
I think your beef might not be with music appreciation, and the modern role of an orchestral performance and more with the commoditization of music. That's more of one of the cancers of marketing (hashtag notallmarketing). That kind of marketing only aims to make everything cheap to supply and as profitable as possible to the 'sticky' middlemen. I would agree with you there.
1. Benefactors who give money to the orchestra, rent boxes, etc. 2. Popular (non classical) concerts which have a possibly larger crowd and varied material. Harry Potter with orchestral accompaniment? Tenacious D with orchestral accompaniment? The musicians hate it, it pays the bills. 3. A mostly part time staff. Most orchestral musicians will play in many orchestras, teach, etc.
They made a loss on your concert. But they knew they would.
To me, if felt more like a Michelin chef having a go at a burger. You wouldn't do that all the time, but it could be a fun distraction once in a while. If anything, it feels like you would need quite a bit of creativity to adapt a piece that was not meant for a classical orchestra.
It is not true at less prestigious orchestras, where salaries are much lower. For example, the San Antonio Symphony tried to lower its base salary from just under $36k to just under $18k this past year[2], which resulted in a prolonged strike (still unresolved 6 months later).
There are many more less-prestigious orchestras than top-level orchestras, so most orchestral musicians don't get paid salaries comparable to other similarly high skilled professions.
Professional music is not unlike professional sports in this regard.
[1] https://nonprofitquarterly.org/new-york-philharmonic-players...
[2] https://www.sacurrent.com/sanantonio/san-antonio-symphony-mu...
And it's not like they have a 3 hour workday either, before that performance is going to be hours and hours of practice, years of training, and on the day itself X amount of traveling (more if they're international / on tour), getting dressed up, setting up, settling in, etc.
I do not know how they are paid, but if they are on a salary then their job is similar to mine and others (from a general workload/pay perspective)
They don't. And this is the problem with classical music.
This kind of thing is almost all about getting money from "benefactors"--and do NOT ever offend them. And those benefactors have normally pretty narrow musical taste in classical music.
>When a piece of harrison Birtwhistle was performed a few years ago in Paris by Boulez with his ensemble intercontemporain, i remarked to Boulez that i had never heard a work by that admirable composer sound so convincing and effective. “We had thirty-five rehearsals,” Boulez replied. This may seem excessive and it is beyond the means of most musical organizations today, but when Beethoven’s symphony no. 9 was undertaken during the late 1820s at the Paris Conservatoire, the first rehearsal was so terrible that it was rehearsed every day for a year. Berlioz reported that the result was a triumph, although it was conducted by habeneck, who was his deadly enemy.
>The music world has not changed as much as one might think. radically unfamiliar works require much more rehearsal than is practical when they first appear, before they can work their way into general musical consciousness: the first performance of elliott Carter’s double Concerto for harpsichord, Piano, and two small orchestras needed ten days of rehearsal; several years later, with a different orchestra that had never played the work, it needed only two days—the idiom had gradually permeated the musicians’ world. When hans rosbaud directed schoenberg’s Moses und Aron at the Zürich opera in 1957, he spent almost the entire budget of the year on rehearsals of this one work.
And how many (unpaid) hours, across how many years, did it take to "hone their craft" to such a degree?
Young musicians and professionals often practice in excess of eight hours per day if/until they win an audition for a group that has enough salary to sustain them.
Most professional orchestras rehearse 3-4 times for what's usually called a "Masterworks" ie the usual subscription concerts. Only something like a pops or light classics concert will be one rehearsal and a show.