Baton Inflation: American Conductor Salaries Hit a New High

“Every symphony orchestra in America has a financial problem,” the veteran classical artist manager R. Douglas Sheldon said in a recent interview.

To summarize the tried-and-true tale: Costs are up, while ticket sales and donations are down. It’s a fundamental structural problem.

Yet despite these troubles, the amount orchestras pay their conductors is increasing. Another marker has been passed as the average compensation for the music directors of 64 American ensembles analyzed in an annual report by arts consultant Drew McManus topped $600,000 for the first time.

“The most obvious and pronounced trend is that compensation for music directors has not just been increasing, but it’s been increasing at a sharper rate,” McManus said in a telephone interview after releasing the most up-to-date data on his blog, Adaptistration. “I have data back to the 1999-2000 season, and just on the chart, you can see it spiking up.”

At the top end, the numbers are well over the average. McManus’s analysis of the 2015-16 season, the most recent for which detailed financial information is publicly available, found that nine music directors made more than $1 million. (The numbers, drawn from tax filings, may over- or underestimate actual compensation because of the inclusion or exclusion of severance or deferred compensation payments, bonuses, and expenses and other perks.)

Riccardo Muti, the septuagenarian Italian eminence who leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, made just over $3 million that season. But he was outpaced for the No. 1 position by a less famous name: Jaap van Zweden, who was the music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at the time, and who will begin leading the New York Philharmonic this fall. Van Zweden made $3.6 million, part of a run of blockbuster payouts for him buoyed by bonuses earmarked by an anonymous donor. (A spokeswoman for the Dallas Symphony said that part of that bonus accounted for $1 million of his 2015-16 compensation.)

“I’m thrilled that music directors are making what they’re making,” Gerard Schwarz, who led the Seattle Symphony from 1985 to 2011, said in an interview. “But the numbers are bizarre, aren’t they?”

Some of them are, indeed, a little bizarre. Still, no one disputes that being the artistic leader of an American orchestra is a difficult job. Not only are you charting an ensemble’s musical direction and, well, waving a baton through rehearsals, concerts and tours, but you’re also taking part in fundraising, marketing, public relations, hiring, firing.

“When you look at how much work is involved in being a music director, it’s considerable, and a big responsibility,” Nicholas Mathias, an artist manager who represented van Zweden until November, said in an interview. “Yes, they’re paid very well, but I think that they earn it. From my point of view, I don’t honestly think it’s out of kilter when you consider what certain people in television or sports are earning.”

Television and sports, though, are generally for-profit enterprises, while orchestras are not. And the trouble isn’t, or isn’t only, that conductors are paid so much — particularly relative to the size of organizations far smaller than most TV networks or sports teams. It’s that there often isn’t a good definition of what that pay is based on. The responsibilities defined in a music director’s employment agreement are often nebulous. They include selecting repertory, auditioning new players and reviewing musicians when they’re thought to be failing.

“Beyond that,” McManus said, “is a great big giant question mark. Some say there are fundraising responsibilities; they often aren’t defined. There aren’t revenue goals. The most I’ve seen is the number of fundraising events a music director must participate in. It’s certainly not standard to define the minimum number of those, but there are groups who do.”

Maestro worship rushes to fill the void left by that big question mark. The centrality given to conductors — symbolized by their sometimes, yes, bizarrely large paychecks — is a symptom of a struggling classical field, clinging to the last gasps of a dying system of almost entirely male stars.

So even if van Zweden’s compensation in Dallas, which will continue over the next few years as he takes the title conductor laureate there, was artificially inflated by his unusual bonus, it might have an impact on a tiny field in which the participants are keenly aware of one another’s moves.

“I’m very concerned with how that’s going to have a ripple effect with the ego quotient,” McManus said, adding that another conductor could very well ask himself, “If Jaap’s worth that money, why am I not worth that?” The New York Philharmonic declined to provide information about what van Zweden’s compensation would be there. Mathias spoke only generally: “Just because someone may be very successful in raising a lot of money somewhere, doesn’t mean that automatically that can be transferred somewhere else.”

Van Zweden’s current manager, Sheldon, characterized the New York contract as “comparable” to and “not less” than Dallas, saying he “would be surprised if it were more.”

“I think Dallas was totally unique,” he added. “They saw him as someone who could transform that orchestra, and they invested in that.”

But the vagueness of van Zweden’s arrangement in Dallas — for one thing, why would a bonus that seems intended to retain a valued artist not be withdrawn once he decided to leave? — is part and parcel of a system that thrives on opacity.

“Compensation policy in the performing arts nonprofit sector is a few decades behind where it really should be,” McManus said, adding, “Without that degree of transparency and empirical analysis, you begin creating an environment that begs for obfuscation and hidden deals and backroom handshake agreements.”

He supports orchestras reporting their music directors’ compensation more transparently — by, for example, separating out in tax forms the amount an artist is being paid for the managerial aspects of the job and for his time on the podium. The Seattle Symphony did that for Schwarz, and continued the practice for its current music director, Ludovic Morlot. “My theory about it was that the administrative part of being a music director is different from the conducting part,” Schwarz said.

Some ensembles wrap music directors’ compensations into a lump payment to their managers, sometimes bundled with payments to soloists represented by the same person. McManus said he’d like that practice to end, as well as for orchestras to include in their filings, beyond boilerplate, the process they’ve used to quantify a music director’s value.

National debates about chief executive compensation have included sobering discussions about how much that pay has skyrocketed compared with an average worker’s salary. Perhaps orchestras should consider anchoring their music directors’ packages to a sane multiple of their players’ base pay. “Ten times what the musicians make,” Schwarz said. “That to me sounds reasonable.” (Some ensembles currently approximate that standard; many don’t.)

It may be just a matter of time. As the classical field, long propped up by a desire for marketable stars above all, indeed shifts, and as more orchestras pull back from full-year programming, the steady rise in music director compensation may finally slow — or even reverse. But McManus was skeptical that it would be easy for administrators and boards to get off the ascending ride anytime soon.

“Until there’s enough public pressure, from patrons and others, to expect a higher degree of conduct with regard to compensation policy,” he said, “I don’t expect the trends we’re seeing to change.”