The Career Experience of the Symphony Musician

T HE situation of the symphony musician in the United States today is reflective of the somewhat tenuous economic status of symphonic music as an art form offering meaningful aesthetic experience to a limited public. The symphony musician is caught between the potent forces of general public apathy, a management dominated labor market, and a union that in some ways works against his best interests. To these may be added the effects of a recording industry over which he has little control and which offers him only short-term rewards while extracting long-term profits. From the disjunction of his social position as a dependent craftsman and his idealized self-image as a gifted and highly skilled artist emerge problems of reconciliation of his social and aesthetic expectations with the realities of his occupational life. Strong commitments to the values of art and of his chosen profession, essential to fine performance, are often undermined by unhappy experiences centering about unmet demands for material and status rewards, and the felt instability of his position. Sensing that others pull the strings that may ultimately affect his destiny, many a symphony musician experiences a chronic anxiety concerning his life chances: he feels such a situation is inconsistent with the image of the musician as the bearer of the highest kind of aesthetic value which he offers for the enrichment of the community. The purpose of this paper is to describe the career aspirations and career experience of a selected group of symphony musicians (those comprising one major symphony orchestra) in the context of the organization of symphonic music in the United States. The material discussed here is drawn from a larger study centering on the orchestra as a work group. The study was conceived as broadly exploratory in design, and the material presented below will be cast in an interpretive mode.' The perspectives gained in this effort will be utilized in the formulation of a study of considerably broader scope, encompassing a number of representative orchestras. Since no comparative materials on other orchestras were gathered in this study many of the formulations to follow must be regarded as provisional and suggestive rather than as pronouncements of finality. It was originally intended to interview the entire membership of the orchestra, but before this could be accomplished the organization left its resident city on an extended trip. For this reason 16 of the members were never interviewed. Fortunately, just such an eventuality had been anticipated and all the members of the smaller sections (brass, woodwinds, percussion) had been interviewed, and the larger sections (strings) "sampled" in roughly equal proportions. The initial 6 weeks of the study were spent entirely in mutual familiarization. It was felt that such a period was necessary in view of the nature of the organization. Symphony musicians are an occupational group exhibiting considerable anxiety over their jobs on a number of dimensions, most prominently performance and security. This is especially true in their relations with the conductor, who has relatively unrestricted formal power and dominates the work situation to the extent that he is typically perceived as an imposing threat to artistic integrity and occupational security.2 Gaining the confidence of the musicians *The author wishes to express his gratitude to Howard J. Ehrlich of the Columbus Psychiatric Institute and Hospital and Norbert F. Wiley of Michigan State University for their conscientious reading of the manuscript and cogent editorial and substantive suggestions, and to James R. Dove, of the Indianapolis Health and Welfare Council, for his careful reading of the final manuscript. It is regrettable that others to whom he owes a lasting debt for their assistance and criticism of the study on which this paper is based must remain unnamed due to professional obligations to personnel of the orchestra, since disclosure of their names would jeopardize the anonymity of the organization. I The data on which this paper is based were gathered by the author in 70 formal interviews with the members of the orchestra, in the winter of 1956-57. 2 In this paper very little will be said about the conductor. This is not an oversight. The role of the con-