The Lost Accord

To become a Friend of the Philadelphia Orchestra (ten Cate said last month there were 100), you are asked to write letters (and send copies to ten Cate) to Mayor Tate asking for City representation on the Orchestra Association board and that Convention Hall be made available for concerts free of charge; to City Council president Paul D’Ortona asking him to reinstate the City’s offer of funds for free concerts for children; to the board expressing displeasure at the way they’ve conducted the orchestra’s affairs; to the editors of the daily newspapers.

Basically what ten Cate is after is "the democratic use of the orchestra for the benefit of the whole community," and he will continue to press for it now that the strike is settled. "In order to accomplish this we must replace most of the present board. They are not acquainted with the men of the orchestra, they don’t attend concerts. They’ve failed to make the orchestra available to the public and have brought it to the present brink of disaster. The board represents a small self-perpetuating socially elite group who’ve excluded well-qualified people from participation.”

Now that the major actors in the drama have been introduced, it’s easier to raise the curtain on what were billed as the main issues. Actually, they may seem anti-climactic, but they do further illuminate the power struggle that’s really at the heart of the problem.

LONGEST WEEK? Work load, for example, is interesting not only because the men say they have too much of it and management says they don’t, but also because they don’t even agree on how much they do have.

Management says the orchestra works an average of 18 hours a week, labor says they work an average of 74 hours. The reason the orchestra’s figure is so much higher is they count 14 hours weekly home practice time, travel time and captive time on out-of-town engagements and between rehearsals and performances. What no one counts is extra time on Sundays spent making recordings, or the toll it takes to get home from a concert
in New York at 1 a.m. and then show up for rehearsal at 10 the next morning. It isn’t just the number of hours of work, either, it’s how they’re scheduled. Back to back run-outs (one day out-of-town concerts), for instance, take it out of a man’s hide and so does the kind of prolonged touring without breaks that would make a tourist blanch, let alone a performer who must always be at the top of his form when he walks out on the stage.

ON THE ROAD. As far as total number of concerts, this is a tricky figure, too, but both sides tried to use it for their own purpose. Tall, ashen-faced Boris Sokoloff, the orchestra’s manager, unctuously sympathizes with the men, but he insists the only way to tell whether the orchestra is overworked is to compare their schedule of concerts to that of other orchestras. He said that for the current year 198 performances had been planned for the Philadelphia Orchestra, 64 of them out-of-town. However, the orchestra’s own date book lists 189 concerts plus three weeks in Japan, (that would probably add about 15 more) or a total of 204. Of these, about 83 (including the summer Saratoga Festival in upstate New York and a hypothetical 15 for Japan) are out-of-town, not 64.