ARTISTS OR LABORERS? : At the Philharmonic, Music May Be Turning Into a Job

It is 7:55 on a Thursday evening. The members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic randomly stroll on stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, chatting with one another, checking the music on their stands, warming up with a few scales.

Ten minutes later, concertmaster Sidney Weiss enters. He gives the tune-up cue. A cacophony spreads across the stage--then silence. Maestro Andre Previn strides from the wings. He bows to the audience and mounts the podium. Turning to face L.A.’s tuxedoed finest, he raises his arms, locks eyes with his charges and braces for the upbeat.

At last, a flood of rapturous, carefully cultivated sound.

For the audience, this glamorous performance is exalting. But what about the 105 musicians? Are they serving an art or merely doing a job? Are they just cogs in a perpetually expanding music machine that pays them well but leaves little room for individual creativity? In short, are they playing more and enjoying it less?

“Playing in an orchestra is an ’87 job,” says T.K. Wang, a Philharmonic violinist for 23 years. “Every one of us can buy a new car. And if you’re not trying to squeeze out artistry, it’s pretty easy work--with enough time to build a house or sell piccolos on the side.”

Twenty years ago personal economics didn’t figure into the picture so prominently. A less ambitious orchestral animal flourished. It took up a mere five months of the calendar and had at its helm a single, all-embracing director. The musicians, having lots of free time, supplemented their incomes with teaching and free-lance work. They were hardly what one could call industrialized.

Few of them worried about a burgeoning concert agenda or the resultant workaday attitude that can accompany the heavy load.

But the new orchestral deal poses a dilemma. Now the average player finds himself wondering about his musical integrity, how he can maintain quality and step up quantity while management continues to pack the calendar with more engagements?

For Guido Lamell, a rank-and-file violinist, being buried in a 100-piece orchestra isn’t exactly the finale he envisioned to those endless practice hours, starting in childhood, hours that gave way to dreams of being the next Gidon Kremer.

“No one ever starts out with the idea of playing in an orchestra,” says Lamell, who began violin study at age 6. “Like my colleagues, I was a prodigy type. We were all-stars in school.

“But along the way we began to realize that only one-hundredth of a percent can become a Kremer. Once one discovers that he will not be among those 10 or 12 virtuosos with a solo career, there is a whole other reality to grapple with, a dangerous artistic reality, a reality that can turn what is miraculous into mundane mechanics.”

The problem, as he defines it, is keeping the miracle of music alive from a back stand, “where the world can look like a treadmill” and a violinist, confronting the sheer volume of performance, can think he’s “merely churning it out.

“What we do is emotional. But people can’t switch on their emotions every day for regular shifts. A physicist gets constant intellectual stimulation, so he can put in the time. Longer hours for us often means erosion of substance.”

However, it’s not just the sizable paycheck ($50,000 for a second-section player like himself, $100,000-plus for principal chairs) that compensates Lamell for what, “at worst, can be as boring and bleak as factory work.” Crucially, he says, it’s the chance to “feel the pride and nourishment in music-making that a (Kurt) Sanderling or (Esa-Pekka) Salonen can instill.

“When we stood at La Scala with (Carlo Maria) Giulini for a half-hour of wild bravos , all the humdrum concerts in memory were washed away. It’s worth the struggle to pursue that uplifting experience.”

Yet, landing a job in a big-league orchestra--a league that consists of the New York Philharmonic, Boston and Chicago symphonies, Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras, in addition to Los Angeles--is considered a feat. Every year, thousands of university and conservatory graduates swarm the market in search of the precious few and coveted openings. Being chosen from a pool of 90 auditioning candidates is, in itself, an honor.

Once he or she beats out the competition, however, the orchestral musician with high aspirations must battle the anonymity factor--a growing problem in the face of increased services (e.g., rehearsals, concerts, recording dates). In the current year, Philharmonic players put in 381 services or 1,800 hours including home practice time.

“The bottom line,” says violinist Wang, “is how the union will negotiate our salaries and working conditions for next year’s contract.” In the end, he fears that his fellow orchestra players will opt for increased salaries and no cut in their workload. “Artistry will lose out once again to the almighty dollar. Our mentality is closer to that of the IRS than the ivory tower.”

During the Music Center season, there can be as many as five subscription events in a given week, plus concerts in San Diego, Orange County and Santa Barbara, called “runouts.” In the summer, Hollywood Bowl requires four performances covering three different programs weekly for 2 1/2 months.

Still, Andre Previn considers this calendar “a holiday compared to the Siberian salt mines London orchestras brave or the opera-every-night schedule in Vienna.”

Mehli Mehta, director of the American Youth Symphony, says: “A musician is not a shoemaker. He cannot produce quality on the same time basis. He cannot make do with minimum rehearsals and bus home from runouts at 2 a.m. His playing will not remain superior with that kind of exhausting schedule.”

And Giulini, too, who preceded Previn at the Philharmonic, insists that “music-making cannot be a routine like eating breakfast, without risking the fall from what is great to what is ordinary.”

But assistant principal bassist Barry Lieberman argues: “I never experience routine.” A Philharmonic member for 11 years, he feels there is no conflict between work and artistry. Indeed, he barely makes a distinction.

“Playing in the orchestra presupposes a certain physical labor, the same as brick-laying does. And you have to be there no matter if the music is by Philip Glass or Wagner. But I try to do my very best every time . . . whether it’s junk or a masterwork, whether the guy on the podium is a jerk or a genius.”

Clearly, Lieberman discounts the conductor’s importance--short of his being “a great historical figure like Giulini or the one Sanderling should be acclaimed as.” What’s more, he says that baton-wielders are vastly overpaid, while players deserve their “fantastic salaries.”

On the other hand, Lieberman took off from Bowl duty last summer, thus opting “to lose a lot of money” for a preferred activity: playing chamber music in the Northwest with such recognized musicians as Ida Kafavian, Fred Sherry and Walter Trampler.

“The (Philharmonic) management told me it would be my last such leave of absence,” he says, “but I would rather work in a dry cleaners than give this up. What it offers me is a chance to play music with unlimited rehearsals and without the tenured incompetents who are part of any large organization.

“The problem comes with the territory: Once players get an orchestra job, they stop practicing and lose sight of why they wanted it in the first place. The performers I play chamber music with look down their noses at orchestra people. Some of that attitude rubs off on me in the summer. I feel healthier for the contact with them.”

While Lieberman sees musicians as captains of their own fate, he also allows that a conductor can use his authority to improve standards.

Recalling a stern admonition handed out by Giulini during a rehearsal (“If you play this badly again for me or anyone else, I’ll take the next plane out,” he reportedly threatened), the bassist says that the scolding worked: “Afterwards, everyone took his part home and practiced. We played great that night.”

Music directors still wield a significant power and, depending on their inclination to do so, can help characterize the musician’s experience. But most eminent maestros are global practitioners today. They jet from one music capital to another, often maintaining several posts simultaneously and leaving their ensembles to be led by itinerant guests.

“The age of the great conductor is over, for the most part,” says Jan Hlinka, former principal violist who began with the Philharmonic in 1946 and retired three years ago. Looking back to what he regards as the halcyon days of orchestral music making, he says “that puts musicians at a terrific disadvantage. They don’t have a constant guardian. And they don’t have a real personality before them, say, a Klemperer or a Monteux or a Szell.”

Because most of today’s podium chiefs lack strength, in Hlinka’s view, and are frequently absent, orchestra politics fester like never before. As a result, he says, “Ernest Fleischmann (the Philharmonic’s executive director) controls everything, even the players’ personal lives.”

Fleischmann vehemently denies the charge, but concedes that he “had to take up the slack” between the time Zubin Mehta left in 1978 and throughout Giulini’s tenure until Previn arrived in 1985. However, he predicts “a trend away from the career conductor to one interested in furthering musical standards and staying with his primary orchestra.

“I do everything I can to minimize the musicians’ identity as hired hands. That’s why we have a chamber music series and a new-music group. We’re all very aware of the problem,” Fleischmann says.

Like any other bureaucratic organization, though, the orchestra is a class society. And that means privilege by fiat. Not only does principal cellist Ronald Leonard get paid more than double the salary of his less prestigious colleagues, but he has solo opportunities with other ensembles and teaches master classes at Aspen each summer.

“I came here knowing I would have these other avenues,” he says, “and that, as a consequence, it would not be just a job. Being a section leader also gives me a sense of motivation others can’t find so easily.”

Not every principal sits on top of the mountain, however. Trumpeter Thomas Stevens says his body “literally hurts from grinding out services that seem to pile up relentlessly. What you lose is the resilience, the chance to rebuild through extra practice.

“That’s not the real problem, though. Recovering from the physical trauma would come about naturally if we felt greater autonomy and less like hired hands. Look at the English orchestras. They work much harder but run their own affairs, like a co-op. And that’s the compensation. The Chicago Symphony, which also has that sense, does a lot of self-policing and therefore stands tall together.”

Whether today’s musician encounters plight or pleasure seems critically linked to his sense of achieving individual artistry. Previn, who regards himself as a colleague, thinks that “it is the height of delusion to expect everyone to be happy. . . . Shattered dreams and frustrated ambitions are built into the orchestra player’s situation.”

But he says he’s thought long and hard about the discrepancy between musicians’ real and perceived worth.

“Putting it in mathematical terms, there are 15 premium orchestras on this Earth. That translates to only 1,500 musicians. Very special people. If I could, I’d pay my Philharmonic players $10,000 a week. They deserve it.”