THE NEW CONTRACT AND C-SUITE ROLE
Late in the day on August 25th BSO’s leadership and players announced a three-year contract giving musicians a 4% raise, a generous pension, and a “critically enhanced role" in choosing the next music director to replace Andris Nelsons and in hiring other titled conductors, as described by Player Committee Chair Todd Seeber. The orchestra will have 50% representation — 6 musicians to leadership’s 6 — on the search committee for the next MD, with a supermajority of each cohort required to make the decision. From here on out players must also be informed prior to the termination or non-renewal of a titled conductor.
A more substantive change in their favor is the formation of an Artistic Liaison Committee, which, as CEO Chad Smith wrote in an Op Ed for The Boston Globe, as reprinted on the music site Slipped Disc, “creates a historic partnership
between musicians and management in artistic planning year-round. Musicians will now have an expanded, formal role in the artistic direction of the BSO — including in the search for our next music director. This comes at a time when we at the BSO, and
the industry more broadly, are rethinking the role of a 21st-century orchestra.”
Norman Lebrecht at Slipped Disc framed the same news in more measured tones. “The ALC will, at the very least, know a whole lot about how the sausage gets made, and at best, have meaningful input in the process.”
These gains are likely concessions to the public relations fiasco that started with the March 6th announcement of Nelsons’ ouster and the subsequent creation of the BSO Patron Network, or Red Flower Campaign, which galvanized fans to call for the popular conductor’s reinstatement and the movement’s leaders to call for an open forum in which to ask leadership to explain how they and Nelsons had been misaligned on a vision for the orchestra’s future.
But despite the new contract and new opportunities for input, that central question remains, as does disappointment with Nelsons’ ouster. Just today, September 17, a few hours before the first concert of the Symphony Hall season, Red Flower organizers George Whiting and Quinn MacKenzie were featured on WBUR’s morning show as they prepared red flower pins to hand out in continued support of their maestro and BSO musicians.
Patrons like them are still waiting for Chad Smith to spell out his ideas about the role of a 21st century orchestra. What’s clear enough is that the spelling out process probably won’t be a collective effort. There’s going to be a new leadership position, and its creation seems to imply that the Artistic Liaison Committee will be helping to hire a Music Director who will be implementing someone else’s plan.
The role of “Chief Artistic Officer” (CAO) has been written into the BSO organizational chart, and its inclusion strongly suggests that the next music director will have diminished influence to steer the orchestra.
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