The Quiet Season

In a few days I'm flying from New York to Phoenix to spend an afternoon with that city's chamber music community. I've been trying to work out how that sounds. The Phoenix Symphony played its last concert on November 1 and let go of 66 musicians the next day. Many of them had moved there for the job.

CMA's regional gatherings are built on showing up where our members live, and I believe in that. I just didn't expect to be showing up in the same month the city's orchestra went quiet. I don't know the right thing to do with that discomfort, so I'm starting by saying it out loud.

I'm also reaching out to colleagues in the orchestra directly, because that conversation belongs with them before it belongs here. I'm not arriving with an agenda or an ask. I'm coming to listen, and to spend an afternoon with a community that keeps making music.

Phoenix is not the only one. In May, the Chicago Sinfonietta paused its programming until 2027 and laid off its staff. In September, the Nashville Symphony suspended its season and furloughed all 77 of its musicians, citing a $10 million deficit. Days later, Oracle announced a $10 million investment and the season was back on. The musicians' union representative called it a short-term band-aid. That is three orchestras in about six months, with three different outcomes. Each has its own story, and this isn't the place to tell them.

My instinct, and I suspect most of ours, is to treat each one as a rescue problem. Find the gift, find the merger, find a better board. Nashville found its gift, and I'm glad it did. But I keep coming back to a different question: does the path itself still hold weight? I mean the one that runs from a kid's first lesson to a conservatory to a job, and then to an audience that shows up and a donor who stays.

Look at the middle of that path. According to the AAUP, about 68 percent of faculty in American higher education held contingent appointments in fall 2023, and nearly half worked part time. In 1987, the contingent share was 47 percent. Those figures cover every field, not just music, but anyone who teaches in a conservatory or a college music department knows the shape of it. Stable positions that used to anchor a life in music are being replaced by contingent ones, many of them paid course by course. We keep training players into that world, and into orchestras like these, without much honest conversation about where they will land. I'm not exempt from that silence.

When I started at CMA, I thought my job was to revitalize the organization and bring the field along with it. I also assumed that every part of this field wanted change, and that once a change was good for them, they would embrace it. I was wrong about that. Change is hard, even when it serves you, and it is harder when you're already stretched thin. Presenters, ensembles, funders, and schools each needed to feel heard before they could trust that anything was going to move, and each needed to see a change that strengthened their own interests as well as the field's. I came in thinking people were waiting for change. Mostly, they were waiting to be asked what it would cost them.

I think the same is true of the path. A failing orchestra, a professor watching a full-time position with benefits turn into a string of adjunct courses, a presenter holding a season together on a thin margin: each is being asked to change something while also keeping the lights on. That's a hard moment to ask anyone for more. It's also why I don't believe in a single rescue, whether that's a gift, a merger, or a grant. Rebuilding the path means asking people to change while they're in the middle of surviving, and that can only be done with them, one part at a time, with every part in the room.

Orchestras have an organization that speaks for them. So does chamber music, and I work for it. Schools train the players, and presenters and funders keep the lights on. Nobody is responsible for the whole path, from a kid's first lesson to a seat in the audience. We keep treating this as a quiet season, something that passes and the music returns. What if it doesn't pass? Who is responsible for the path?