San Antonio, DEI, and Mail from an Orchestra Board Member

Does DEI really help struggling orchestras?

Amid this week’s political tumult, there’s one piece of news that’s sending shockwaves around the orchestra world. Last week, the board of the San Antonio Symphony, seeing no way forward amid a longstanding labor dispute with its musicians, voted to dissolve the orchestra. The SASO wasn’t a “major” orchestra (its annual budget was around $6-8 million, compared with Dallas’ or Houston’s budgets of around $30 million), but it was an 80-year fixture both in the city of San Antonio and in the regional orchestra scene. Its players were consistently excellent and its conductors included some of the best in America, notably Larry Rachleff, who served as music director in the early 2000s.

The demise of San Antonio is a stark reminder that many of America’s orchestras live on a razor’s edge. San Antonio’s was a slow bleed, a mismatch of revenues and expenses revealed over many years, but its story is not uncommon. The same problem afflicts small orchestras (the Akron Symphony, noted for its fabulously enlightened programming, has run deficits on its $2 million budget five of the last nine years, and six-figure deficits three of those years). It afflicts mid-size orchestras (the Phoenix Symphony was running deficits of over a tenth of revenue in the early 2010s and was a “week away from bankruptcy”). And it afflicts major orchestras too. The Minnesota Orchestra had a year-long musician lockout in 2012 and 2013 and avoided bankruptcy only when its musicians accepted a pay cut. The Baltimore Symphony is similarly cash-starved right now, and is relying on seven-figure bailout payments from the State of Maryland.

The point is: orchestras are extremely expensive to run, their budget problems are not new, and the risk of losing some of our greatest cultural institutions is always with us. Of the orchestras I just listed, Phoenix and Minnesota have bounced back for now, but both could easily have died. Baltimore may be headed in that direction right now.

Knowing that many of our orchestras are only a few bad years from extinction, lovers of orchestral music should always be asking what we can do to genuinely engage (and retain) new audiences. We should be asking this in a spirit of creativity, but also in a spirit that respects the huge body of great music that has already inspired audiences for hundreds of years and continues to do so today.

It is my view that the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) measures that orchestras are currently employing (and that the League of American Orchestras is promoting), represent an expensive and dangerous detour from that mission, not a step towards realizing it. And I’m far from the only orchestra insider to hold that view. In an email to me this week, one reader, who happens to be a board member at a large American orchestra, put it most succinctly:

Dear Don,

Today’s article about San Antonio is a reminder: orchestras are skating on thin ice.

One would not know that reading the League magazine, which I did last night, until I could read no further.

Diversity, equity, inclusion.

Does any of this bring people into concert halls?

Does any of this make people leave concert halls happier than when they went in?

Prediction: at least one of the twenty largest American orchestras will declare bankruptcy in the next decade.

This reader is asking the right questions. Multiple top-20 American orchestras have cheated death over the previous decade. Nearly every one of those top 20, and most of the rest, are now investing heavily in new Vice Presidents for Equity (or “Talent and Equity,” in business school speak), overhauling their programming, and creating new diversity fellowship programs. The expense of these overhauls ranges from significant to extraordinary. Take a look, for instance, at the diversity plan of Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society (pp. 24-27 of the linked document), a huge financial leap for a $7 million organization and a huge strategic detour for an ensemble dedicated to baroque and classical period music.

The League is pushing these initiatives on orchestras and providing incentives to implement them, with no discernible data to back them up. Check out, for instance, this League “Making the Case for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” report released last year, which pushes initiatives like those I just listed, citing only consulting firm thinkpieces and a few data points from non-arts industries.

When orchestras across America are struggling, the League should be providing evidence-based suggestions for audience development. If they believe that orchestras hiring new six-figure diversity czars will bring new audiences into the concert hall, that playing more Florence Price will get them to become long-term subscribers, and that creating a new fellowship for underrepresented artistic administrators will bring in more corporate and individual donations, they should be expected to prove it with data.

Until they do, our assumption should be that they can’t, and that the real objective of these initiatives is guilt expungement, not orchestra support. If feeling good is the League’s real objective, then it is pursuing exactly the right course—that of the student at Rutgers University who yelled at black libertarian guest speaker Kmele Foster that “I don’t need no facts!” Unfortunately, America’s orchestras do.