Ormandy’s Orchestra
Further complicating the books are what one local management consultant describes as "the cigar box method" of fiscal management: The Orchestra’s wholly owned subsidiary, the Academy of Music Corporation, which operates the Academy, regularly charges the Orchestra $975 for hall rental for each concert plus $150 for stage hands and riggers. Then at year’s end the subsidiary company returns $150,000 to its parent as income from rental of the hall.
The Association has achieved some sort of cultural landmark — combining good art with good business. Board chairman Orvil1e Bullitt and prexy C. Wanton Balis deserve much of the credit. (Interestingly — sharing the credit for the Orchestra’s success are three directors — R. Sturgis Ingersoll, Henry McIlhenny and Mrs. Herbert Morris — who also serve on the board of the Art Museum which is having financially rough sledding.)
BIG 52. But the economics of music operates not only in the matter of the Orchestra’s income — but in the individual incomes of the 105 players who, working together produce the "sound" which has made it and its last two conductors a by-word. Until this year, when management and musicians sat down together to form another "Philadelphia First" — the only 52-week working agreement ever put together by a symphony orchestra in the country, economic deprivation was a part of the life of at least fledgling Orchestra members.
Earlier seasons had run only some 30-odd weeks for the musicians. When Association negotiators used to hammer out new contracts with the union they listed unemployment compensation for the period when the Academy was shuttered as a fringe benefit.
Until the new contract was signed, salaries started at around $7500-$8000; the musicians could add to this another $1500 if they played the seven-week season at Robin Hood Dell. After that, it was either unemployment checks or whatever teaching, pit jobs and summer tent shows they could scrape up. On the face of it, these sums do not look bad — especially when compared with the average income of the 5400 other musicians in the area covered by Local 77, American Federation of Musicians. In terms of the Orchestra members’ professionalism, however — of their 20 years average experience and training — and of the fact that they represent the absolute peak of their chosen calling, the sum wasn’t exactly bringing up roses. Economist Michael Harrington, in a Classic work on the "hidden poverty" in the U.S., "The Other America," uses $4000 as the cut-off point for functional poverty for a single man; he estimates the rock-bottom figure needed by a man with three children for a break-even existence at $7500. This sum, his charts indicate, would allow the man’s wife to buy one coat every four years, afford a bottle of beer on Saturday night and allow the children two pairs of shoes a year.
