San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Will the orchestra survive? That's up to you guys




By Mike Greenberg

from the San Antonio Express News 4/26/98



Odds and ends about the travails of the San Antonio Symphony, whose musicians and staff are still waiting for the bulk of the wages they were owed pm April 15

• Don't blame City Council for the symphony's plight. Yes, this year's $80,000 cut in city support aggravated the orchestra's woes, but it did not create them.

The borderline-illegal closed-door meetings that produced the final budget were troubling to citizens who favor open and accountable government, but that's a separate issue.

Should the city give more to the symphony and the arts in general? That's a political question that demands a political answer. There is no "right" funding level in the abstract.

• Don't plead poverty to explain the paucity of local support for the orchestra.

Yes, San Antonio is largely a low-wage, working-class town, but this city also has some fabulous individual fortunes, and a good amount of corporate wealth.

A half-dozen San Antonio salesmen, industrialists and hot-sauce heirs could scrape together a few million dollars for the symphony from the change that falls between their sofa cushions on an average Tuesday night.

This city has enough private-sector money to support the symphony in style, and have enough left over to support professional theater, opera and ballet, without limiting other charitable endeavors.

If San Antonio's wealthy people aren't giving enough to keep the symphony solvent, it isn't because they can't afford it. It's because they don't want to.

• Or maybe because they aren't asking effectively enough.

You have to spend money to make money. Top-notch development directors and solicitation campaigns don't come cheap. The symphony has a decades-long tradition of inadequate investment in fund-raising.

• The primary responsibility for the symphony's health rests with the people who love symphonic music.

If those people don't buy more tickets, and recruit lots of other folks to do the same, the symphony will die. If they start filling the seats at the Majestic, the symphony will live.

Ticket sales account for less than half of nearly every orchestra's revenues, including the San Antonio Symphony's, but sales are still critically important.

Subscriptions provide operating revenue for the spring months, and filled seats tell potential donors that their gifts will do some good. People like to back winners.

• Artistically, this orchestra is a winner, one of perhaps a dozen American orchestras that matter. That wasn't the case a decade ago, but it is the case now.

Another local arts group has been talking excitedly about bringing in the New York Philharmonic next season. We are supposed to be impressed.

Big deal. Nobody takes the New York Philharmonic seriously these days. Its main value is to keep busloads of Iowa tourists off the Manhattan streets for a couple of hours.

In programming and artistic leadership, the San Antonio Symphony is a more important, more interesting orchestra, by a wide margin. In craft, most sections of the San Antonio Symphony could hold their own against the New Yorkers, and a few would be clear victors.

This orchestra is producing a first-class product. But it doesn't matter how well a product is made if it's a product that people don't want to buy.

The symphony and music director Christopher Wilkins are doing everything that conceivably could be done to retool their product for a new generation of listeners.

One can only hope the retooling hasn't come too late.



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