Avoiding The Music Police
Every orchestra has these musicians and if you're lucky, you'll never have to encounter them throughout your career as an orchestra manager. Unfortunately, luck isn't something you can rely on all of the time and at some point, certain managers are going to stare a potential Music Police quagmire square in the face. The good news is that quagmire can be avoided at almost every turn…
Who Are The Music Police?
The Music Police are orchestra musicians who, for a whole host of diverse reasons, believe they have an innate authority to determine what qualifies as acceptable musical standards within their respective ensemble. These musicians act alone or sometimes form one of the numerous cliques found in the vast majority of professional orchestras. It is important to point out that there's nothing inherently wrong with one musician having an opinion about a colleague's musical abilities (you're more likely to find Waldo than a musician who doesn't); however, when one or more musician decide to impose their musical standards on fellow musicians in a way that involves a manager is when the silent alarms should start going off through the office.
Over the past few years there has been a marked increase in my conversations with managers who relate some sort of horror story about how they got caught up in the middle of a musical standards turf war among the musicians. In most cases the managers could have avoided the quagmire by identifying some of the warning signs and exercising extreme prudence.
Like most quagmires, these situations usually present themselves with good intentions and most members of the Music Police play on a manager's natural sense of protecting the organization.
What To Do When The Music Police Come Knocking
Fortunately, the saving grace of every manager in the business is that the overwhelming majority of professional orchestras has some sort of language in their collective bargaining agreement (CBA) which dictates how artistic/peer review is initiated and implemented. The key word here is "initiated" and I have yet to run across a CBA which grants individual musicians or a musician committee the authority to initiate an artistic/peer review procedure against another musician. Instead, this authority is granted to the individual who serves as the artistic head of the organization: the music director.
Although each CBA has different language dictating how the artistic/peer review process works, the language is there nonetheless. A good manager will make sure that his/her music director is familiar with this language even if it means sitting down with them and reading it aloud word for word. Walk the music director through a hypothetical process and make sure he/she is asking questions. Let the music director know in no uncertain terms that the organization expects them to abide by these procedures and if they have any questions or need to discuss issues related to artistic/peer review, then approach the appropriate manager before taking any action. Failure to do so will likely result in the process being improperly implemented, therefore providing ample opportunity for any musician in question to avoid related action as dictated by the CBA.
If your organization has measures in place to encourage musical professional development make sure the music director, not to mention the musicians, is aware of them. Ultimately, the best way to avoid a problem in musical standards is to marginalize it from becoming an issue in the first place and this is an issue that will be examined in greater detail in a separate article.
If you've done your job by making certain that the music director is thoroughly briefed on artistic/peer review procedures and is fairly implementing those duties in a responsible and professional fashion, then Music Police outbreaks will be marginal. The worst case scenario a manager can end up in is to have a music director who refuses to abide by the artistic/peer review procedures or has strong passive aggressive tendencies (another issue best left for closer examination at a later date).
Now that you have your administrative house in order, here are two of the primary contact points Music Police use to ensnare managers.
Contact Point #1: One-On-One
In this case, a musician (or small group of musicians) will approach a manager requesting to talk to them in private about an issue in the ensemble that is causing problems. Typically, the managerial targets include operations personnel that have the most frequent contact with musicians and/or senior executives who have the authority to dispense disciplinary action (executive directors, personnel managers, general managers, etc.).
This is where the quagmire is most vulnerable and you can put it down before it starts to creep up your leg. Make sure you know what the musician want to talk to you about and don't be shy about asking if it is a matter of musical standards. Some managers, such as personnel managers, usually have a good idea of which musicians belong to what clique and if they've noticed a Music Police clique forming, they should always ask that question if a member of that clique won't say why they want a private meeting.
The more wily members of the Music Police might get through your first line of defense by creating an artificial issue and once they are sitting across from you without their colleagues around, you'll get an earful. The less tactful members of the Music Police will be blunt enough to say something like "Here's a list of all the musicians I think you should fire because they simply aren't good enough to be in this ensemble anymore." The more diplomatic might breech the subject by talking about the musical level of musicians hired in the past decade and then segue into Music Police issues.
Either way the polite, and proper, thing to do is adopt a diplomatic tone of voice and remind the musician about the established artistic/peer review policies currently in place and your meeting violates the terms of the CBA and is therefore, not permitted. If there is nothing else they wish to discuss, make sure the musician has a copy of the current CBA (odds are, they probably haven't read the related language), sincerely compliment them on something from their most recent performance, and conclude the meeting.
Contact Point #2: The Committee Approach
This tactic is sometimes more difficult to notice and can sneak up on even the most experienced manager. Let's say that the Music Police in your ensemble are aware of artistic/peer review procedures stipulated in your CBA but they still wish to interject their musical standards on one or more colleagues. The most likely route is for those musicians to begin forming majority voting blocks in any one of their elected committees; a common target is some sort of artistic committee. However, there have certainly been cases where members of the Music Police have been a bit more proactive and will commandeer what is usually one of the most influential elected committees, an orchestra committee.
These instances are a bit more difficult to deal with because the Music Police will effectively circumvent your fist line of defense by presenting Music Police issues under the guise of legitimate committee business. Nevertheless, the same procedures above apply to the committee approach. The only difference is an even higher degree of diplomacy is involved because the last thing you want to see happen is for genuine committee business to be negatively impacted by rebuffing Music Police business on committee time.
Keep in mind, the last thing you want to say to any of the Music Police is "If you don't like how the CBA deals with artistic/peer review then change it." That will only encourage them to gain majority (or worse: entire) control of a negotiating committee. In this case, there is nothing preventing the Music Police from using the negotiating forum to address their issues of musical standards. In a case such as this where you have to start off neck-deep in the quagmire, your best resource is your own personal resolve.
Simply put, don't accept a proposal that provides any ensemble musician, or group of musicians, the ability to initiate artistic/peer review. The only upside here is that the traditional forum of collective bargaining works in your favor. If the negotiating committee dominated by Music Police thinks you are being unreasonable for rebuffing their attempts to acquire musical standards they can personally enforce, let them go back and tell all of their colleagues about it. Odds are they won't go that far because they are acting on their own in the first place and if they do, their colleagues will probably solve your problem for you.
Final Thoughts
In all likelihood, the Music Police won't respond well to being referred to contractually defined procedures but too bad; remember, the CBA applies to managers and musicians equally and you should expect the musicians to follow its terms just as much as they expect you. At the same time, a good manager will keep an eye on the situation to make sure none of the musicians involved end up creating phony non-musical issues to serve as a surrogate for their Music Police tendencies.
In the end, managers need to work toward creating an environment where all musicians can grow musically and feed off of each other's musical strengths in a healthy way. At the same time, there may be musicians who aren't content with that process but so long as you keep up your guard and don't let them pull you into a musical standards quagmire, you – and your organization – will be better off.
Postscript: There's another side to this issue that deserves to be examined in a future article. In particular, managers who take overt action to become involved with the Music Police. That issue will make a worthwhile topic in conjunction with how to deal with a passive aggressive music director who refuses to do their job with regard to artistic/peer review.
In the meantime, I've received a number of requests to address this topic so I'm interested in reading what sort of feedback it generates. Please feel free to post a comment below or send in a private email.
What do you make of a musical director who tells the Board of Trustees that there are only a dozen or slightly more, members of his orchestra who could get a job playing in other orchestras?
What does that say about his leadership?
What would be his remedy, if the statement were true? Fire all the rest? How could he justify it?
What steps would he have to take? How would he deal with the union?
Posted by: margaret koscielny | Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 12:57 PM