By Joel Thurtell
Detroit Symphony Orchestra management wants to play hard rock.
They want to keep their $400,000-a-year CEO and their pricey music director, but they want musicians to take a giant pay cut.
Now, having had their cheapskate contract offer rejected by musicians, the DSO board is threatening to replace the musicians.
Until management provoked the strike, the DSO was one of what is known as “first-tier” orchestras in the United States.
Not now. Already, fine musicians whose artistry make the DSO world-class have decamped for jobs, sometimes at lesser orchestras.
Replacing musicians means disbanding the current orchestra.
Management certainly can try.
Hard to imagine top-flight musicians crossing the picket line and forever wearing the brand of scab.
Reminds me of the Great Newspaper Strike in Detroit, when The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press replaced strikers — one of them me — and proceeded to alienate thousands of former subscribers.
No doubt the DSO can scrape up scabs willing to stab the orchestra’s striking musicians in the back.
But what kind musicians would they be?
And what kind of orchestra would it be?
What kind of audience will they attract?
I cashed in my season tickets as soon as I learned of the strike.
I won’t be going back to Orchestra Hall until its current musicians get a fair contract.
It looks like that may be never.
News and Free Press bosses don’t like to admit it, but the cavity in their circulation numbers, ongoing for years, was dramatically deepened during the strike that began in 1995. There are people in metro Detroit still who refuse to look at the Detroit papers because of the way they screwed their workers. Those readers will never come back.
The DSO runs the risk of alienating large numbers of potential customers forever if it pursues this brazen and pigheaded course of replacing its musicians.
I don’t know about anybody else, but I for one do not intend to attend any concerts played by “scab” musicians. We have one of the very best orchestras in the country and management is treating the DSO musicians like Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage.
Management should remember when they go home to their selfishly secure lives, that what goes around comes around. I hope they think of that when fate pulls the world out from under their feet — as it certainly will eventually. For The Bible says that a laborer is worthy of his hire — as ye sow, so shall ye reap . . . and God is not mocked.
Someday, our grandchildren will hear their parents and grandparents speak wistfully of the days when Detroit had a world-class orchestra — in the days before its management tore down their own house around all our heads. Should one of the most acoustically perfect symphony halls in the world be sentenced to a second-rate orchestra?
I hope someone will correct me if I am wrong, but I haven’t heard Leonard Slatkin speak up on behalf of the musicians. It would seem that he must have sufficient clout to talk to management like a Dutch uncle. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t deserve a good orchestra.
If management goes through with their threats, they may as well commission a composer to write an Elegy for a Dead Orchestra — but who will play it? “Scab” musicians? And who will hear it? Lovers of good music will go to Chicago or Toronto or New York or even across the river to Windsor rather than put one cent into the coffers of such a blindly stubborn management. Just as newspapers continue to lose money from having cut their staffs and cut their payrolls and lost readership, so too will the DSO lose patrons and audiences.
How can members of the management board call themselves music lovers? True music lovers are sick at heart over management’s recalcitrance.
For shame!
Hey Joel,
Isn’t Mitch Albom in a band? He’s been a scab once, I’m sure he’d do it again for free. Well, as long as he got enough publicity for it.
Cheers from Calgary.