The Lost Accord

The dislike is mutual. Balis calls them "sniveling musicians" and reacts to arguments on their behalf with a cool, "No more bleeding hearts I hope."

FIRST BASS. He particularly doesn’t respond well to the antagonism of bass-player Freel Batchelder. When they get together they clash like cymbals. As the orchestra members’ representative, he speaks for them, but he also speaks for the union, too. One can assume that statements issued over union president Lee Herman’s name were dictated by Batchelder.

He’s a man with a cause. An Association employee says, "He thinks he’s the Messiah to save symphony orchestras." Others, even in his own camp, think he might be a mite too rabid. He would be the first to admit he asked for more than he thought he could get from management, but that’s the mechanics of bargaining. He feels the orchestra is now harvesting the difficulties sown by the three-year contract that expired September 15th. This provided the first 52-week orchestra year in the country. To many musicians it seemed like the millennium. But not to Batchelder who led the fight against it in 1963. One disastrous result was that in order to afford to pay for the increase in salaries from a 40-week year to a 52-week year, management increased the number of concerts to what eventually seemed like a crushing load to the men.

"Negotiations stalled until the day we were to start the season," Batchelder recalls. "We decided not to strike and to go back to work and iron out the bugs later. It was a lot of soft soap. Management had no intention of ironing out anything."

One of the minor themes in the current dispute grew out of this earlier contract. It was the exclusivity clause that kept orchestra men from playing in outside groups larger than a sextet without the permission of management. Permission would not be unreasonably withheld, said the clause. From the men’s point of view, it was unreasonably withheld. By October the Association finally conceded the right for all members to play with any outside group, but as the labor battle dragged on, both sides continued to beat the dead arguments over and over. For management, this issue seemed to epitomize the illogicality of musicians who protest they are overworked and then insist on the right to work more. For the men it crystallized the lack of musical insight of a board which can’t understand that musicians need to play with smaller groups where they can fill a larger role — maybe even as soloists, that "it gives a man a chance to establish a musical identity he loses in the factory atmosphere we work in." Admittedly, some didn’t have such high-flown purposes. They wanted permission to moonlight with the Reading Symphony or other large orchestras to make extra money. But all wanted the right to decide what they did with their spare time, regardless of their object.