NY Phil New Executive Addendum

NYC Subway Stop

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

I expect that many readers of this blog are following Baltimore Symphony principal oboist Katherine Needleman on Facebook or her Substack. For a few years now, she has been a fearless public crusader about the sexism and abuse that's rife in the classical music world.

After the announcement about Matias Tarnopolsky, she was characteristically straightforward about a problem in his statements to the NY Times. Here's the bit she quoted, which is about the firings of Matthew Muckey and Liang Wang years after they allegedly raped Cara Kizer, who went to the police and was then denied tenure by the orchestra:

Tarnopolsky said he agreed to take the job partly because the misconduct case seemed to be resolved for the moment. (The two players are considering further legal challenges.)

“We begin with a clean slate,” he said. “And that’s really important.”

Her response:

My dear, dear hombre: you are not beginning with a clean slate. You may wish to be beginning with a clean slate, but you are not. Your dear partner, Gustavo Dudamel, may also wish for the same. But pretending you are beginning with a new slate sucks to women throughout the industry looking at your organization as a leading one. Maybe you don’t think any of us are running triple digit IQs and will fall for this line.

She is 100% correct. The culture of the NY Phil will take years, decades to repair.

She also wrote this:

The first issue is the way this upcoming partnership of Gustavo Dudamel and Tarnopolsky is described. It is as if this pair of men are the most important people in an orchestra. Music Director and President/CEO are the (usually, not always) white men who get up and make speeches, wear ties if they’re doing it right, shake hands, and raise money. (This is super important! Don’t misunderstand me.) They stand up, wave their arms, conduct 8-15 weeks out of about 42 per season, and come up with some idea of “sound” they will try to impose upon or develop with (if they are of the nicer ilk) the orchestra. They hire and fire people (kind of) and “oversee” programming, as if any one of them ever has employed some sort of true innovation. But I’ve sat in the same orchestra long enough—for almost a full generation now—to tell you that music directors and CEOs come and go. They are not the orchestra. They’re just not. Everyone is of course important—the janitors cleaning the hall, the people doing the significant organization and administration needed to run an orchestra, the teams of people raising money and writing grants, and the parking lot attendants and crossing guards. Everyone is important and necessary. But the people who are the orchestra are the people who have devoted their lives to it, who play there for their career, and watch multiple music directors and CEOs come and go like clouds passing in the sky.

She's correct in the above, as well. But it's also true that the wrong CEO and wrong music director can do damage to an orchestra. I'll list a few past and current situations where someone, usually the CEO and board, did lots of harm.

• Gerard Schwarz was mighty unpopular when he left the Seattle Symphony.
• Krishna Thiagarajan, the current chief executive at the Seattle Symphony, has apparently caused a huge amount of turnover and turmoil in the administration there.
• Michael Henson, the board, and administration of the Minnesota Orchestra locked the musicians out for more than a year.
• Matthew Spivey, Priscilla Geeslin, and the board of the San Francisco Symphony have managed to chase away one of the great conductors of our time, who is also one of the great composers of our time; they have failed to reach a fair agreement with the AGMA chorus members and are deep in talks with the orchestra.