By now I'm guessing just about everyone has seen this dismal piece in today's New York Times. The gist of it is that, at least in the greater New York metropolitan area, freelance musicians are finding themselves suddenly without work or the future prospect thereof. New York City, the wildest melting pot of cultures this country (and maybe the world) has ever seen, can't find jobs for musicians. My friends, just what in the hell is going on here?
According to the article, as well as hearsay from my friends and colleagues, a large part of the issue in NYC is the fact that Broadway musicals, formerly the NY freelancer's biggest meal ticket, are by and large switching from having live orchestras in the pit to having nothing but synthesizers and recorded tracks accompanying the singers. Presumably, the theatre managers are doing this so they can save money and not have to worry about paying those pesky fiddlers and trumpeters.
Gentle Readers, I beg your pardon for my strong language today, but I as a musician find such practices to be nothing less than immoral. Obviously, worst of all is that it deprives musicians of work and can force them into desperate financial situations. But it also deprives the show's singers and actors the privilege of working with an orchestra of real live human beings and a real live conductor, where tempos, dynamics, colors etc can be adjusted "on the fly" if necessary, and where there can be an actual rapport between stage and pit, creating a more unified and organic performance. And it deprives the audience of the pleasure of hearing live music at the show they have paid good money to attend. NO ONE benefits here except the theatre managers who get to line their own pockets a bit more.
The other problem, as mentioned in the article, is that many part-time and community orchestras are simply ceasing to exist. The root of the evil is money, again--in these harsh economic times, these privately-funded orchestras are completely losing their cash inflow. Apparently no one cares much to support the fine arts.
I must wade into politics a bit here, for which I again beg your forgiveness, dear readers.
The United States of America spends over a trillion dollars a year on its military. The States accounts for nearly half of ALL military spending for the entire world. With this kind of money just sitting around to throw away for the purposes of killing people, is it really too much to ask that the state spare just a little, a handful of change, to keep the fine arts afloat in this country that is supposedly the world's lone superpower?
Whenever I bring up the subject of government support of the arts, my American friends and colleagues tend to get nervous. It will lead to censorship, many think, artists becoming paid mouthpieces of politicians and government interests. But plenty of countries in Europe have survived having their arts organizations well-funded by their governments without excessive ill effects. (The recent Dutch meltdown notwithstanding.)I don't know of any cases of government interfering in artistic pursuits since the fall of Communism. What I do know of are better-funded and more-secure orchestras, opera companies and conservatories, and (this may be just a cultural difference based on history, and may also be my own biased opinion) a greater society-wide appreciation of the place of fine arts and music in a person's life.
But again, for me it seems to be a question of morality as much as anything else. In my humble opinion, there is something very wrong with a country that spends extraordinarily huge sums of money building tanks, guns and bombs--funding the lowest and most base of all human pursuits, destruction--but thinks it somehow superfluous or inappropriate to spend more than a few token pennies to keep some of the greatest achievements of the human spirit and mind alive.
