Gung Hei Fat Choy, Columbus…….

For those of you not up on your Mandarin that means “Happy New Year.” Today is the start of the Year of the Rat, and I figure that it’s as good a time as any to ask the question: “Whither Columbus?” (Remember – Chris was actually trying to find China on that voyage.) Teraquads of information have already been spilled on the conundrum that the Columbus Symphony faces. I don’t know if I’ll be able to give any insight but I shall give it my best shot.

I conducted the Columbus Symphony in recent memory (at least recent memory for a conductor), it being last year in March. The first thing I remember is that someone at NorthWest Airlines actually has a sense of humor – the flight from the Twin Cities to Columbus is #1492. The second memory might actually be more relevant to the current situation. A week before going to Columbus my wife asked me “have you ever conducted there?” I quickly said no and went to cook dinner. When I got to the hall in Columbus everyone I met said “It’s really good to see you again!” I was caught flat-footed. Of course I remembered the first time I had been in Columbus – Shostakovitch piano concerto, Harris Sym #3, etc. But why hadn’t it stood out in my memory?

One reason, and probably the main one, is that I’ve been busy over the past 5 years and we have two young kids. Anyone who has children knows that they cause great damage to one’s memory, both short and long. Shucks, just a couple of months prior to this I had been in Milwaukee, an orchestra that I had conducted several times and heard live another bunch, and when I walked onto the stage for the first rehearsal I had no memory at all of the hall. Very disconcerting. Another reason I hadn’t really locked onto Columbus has to do with Columbus itself. Honestly, what’s the first thing most of us midwestern folk think of when we talk about the city of Columbus? It’s Ohio State University. It is (if memory serves) the largest college campus in this hemisphere. Despite everything that goes on in this city it is by definition a college town. OSU dominates the city and that creates an environment that may not be conducive to the growth of other organizations.

There’s also the Ohio problem. Like Western New York and Pennsylvania, Ohio is part of the Rust Belt. On a cultural level the state is dominated by the twin poles of Cleveland and Cincinnati. It is difficult for outposts like Columbus, Toledo, Akron, to compete against these cultural behemoths. The combination of geography and economics makes life precarious. Of course it doesn’t help that outside of OSU the economy of Columbus is dominated by banks and related industries. Sub-Prime mortgage anyone? It is no fun trying to bail out a cultural organization when the surrounding economy is going south in a hurry.

But the Columbus Symphony has other problems. I do not mean to sound sarcastic but what the CSO faces remind me of my all time favorite short scene in cinematic history. The question is not “how did the CSO get here” but rather “why is anyone surprised by this?” The CSO has been running deficits which have recently reached $2.3 million dollars, on a budget of $12 million. This is a 19% deficit. Even that greatest of all profligates, Ronald Reagan, only managed to run up a 6% deficit in his worst year, and because he was running the Federal Government at least he could print his own money. Or more to the point he just put it on the future generations to worry about. The unfortunate thing is that the CSO cannot just print their own money, they have to earn it like every other non-profit organization. The worst thing – this had been going on in some way or another at the CSO for at least 4 years.

So the orchestra has been running huge deficits. It also has a physical problem – the hall. The hall is a beauty from the great era of silent films. These halls all deserve to be preserved as they are integral to the history of cities like Columbus (and my home town of Buffalo – Shea’s Buffalo is one of the great gems of this era). But for the CSO this is possibly the worst of all possible worlds. The hall is simply too large for the organization, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,800 seats. Back in the day when an orchestra was the only game in town this might have made sense, but for a city the size of Columbus today, with all that orchestras compete with, this is way too large. I also suspect (though I do not know this for sure) that the orchestra does not own the venue. I further suspect that acoustically the hall does not flatter the orchestra though that’s frequently hard to tell from the podium (usually the worst place to hear any orchestra!). This is not the fault of the orchestra of course – these great old venues were not designed for classical music and very, very few of them create a great live orchestra sound. Odds are, though, that it’s a “Landmark” and so doing any sort of change to the venue would be strictly verboten. Furthermore, the odds of the CSO having the money to up and build their own venue right now are similar to the odds of us finding WMDs in Iraq.

But worse than any of those problems is the psychological one. The morale of the orchestra must be at an all time low, how could it not be? The current proposal would effectively gut the organization. I have no idea if this would work fiscally, whether it would be effective in stabilizing the organization, but it cuts to the very heart of the organization – the well-being of the musicians. They now face the most uncertain of futures and this is not a situation in which to make great music or to help the organization out of the crisis it is in today. Even if this plan works for the bottom line the psychological effect on the orchestra will take years to overcome, if ever.

The CSO is in crisis and they need an angel to drop down upon them. Baring that they will all have to take very deep breaths and work like the devil to keep the organization on the straight and narrow. I do not envy them.

On a related note – here’s a crazy notion. There are some orchestras in this country that have endowments larger than the GNP of some 3rd world countries. Is it not in their interest to ensure that other orchestras continue to thrive, and is it not directly in the interest of the musicians of those organizations to ensure that their colleagues at the smaller orchestras make a decent living? Why don’t we take a page out of Major League Baseball? Despite the whole steroids thing perhaps MLB does have one thing to teach us: profit sharing. If all orchestras and musicians banded together and shared the rewards as well as the risks of the business then perhaps it would be easier for organizations such as Columbus to thrive. What form this would take I have no idea – not my pig, not my farm. But one can always speculate: a luxury tax? A mega-endowment covering all the orchestras in the whole country? A user fee to be paid by the mega-managing corporations that are the lampreys of the music world? The floor is open to suggestions.

Until then – let’s all hope that Columbus mnages to make it through this storm.