No more blue notes

Seven years ago, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra’s ship was headed toward the rocks.

It was spending more money than it was bringing in. Corporate giving, reflecting the recession, had sunk to an all-time low. Ticket sales were down. And the organization was still reeling from the news its financial officer had confessed to embezzling $160,000.

By 2009, the orchestra was more than $600,000 in the red.

A year later, the orchestra was sailing out of danger. A series of painful budget cuts included the musicians agreeing to, and then extending, significant pay cuts. Board members increased their annual contributions, which provided an incentive to recruit other donors and became a role model for those donors to give. Better and smarter marketing efforts, plus a charismatic new conductor, helped put more patrons into the seats at Robinson Center Music Hall, the orchestra’s home.

As it looked more likely the organization would be finally back in the black for the 2010-11 fiscal year, the board decided to give the musicians a bonus. They couldn’t fully restore the pay cuts, but the executive committee came up with about $10,000 and told the players they could do whatever they wanted with it.

“We thought they’d have a party; in fact, that’s what we suggested,” says board President Richard Wheeler. A morale-builder. Something like that.

Instead, the musicians commissioned a brand-new piece of music. In a move that may be unique, they dedicated it - to the board.

UNHEARD OF?

“In my experience, it’s unprecedented,” says Jesse Rosen, president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras. To slightly hedge his bets, he adds, “It’s not something we keep tabs on, but as far as I’m aware this is a first. The musicians have made an extraordinary sacrifice.”

It’s certainly a first for composer Christopher Theofanidis, whose The Wind and Petit Jean premieres in concerts at 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. April 13 as part of the symphony’s final Masterworks concerts at Robinson, which is heading into a two-year renovation.

“It’s one of the things that pulled me into the project,” he says, “the relations between players, [board] and administration in such an incredible way.”

Rosen says for musical organizations, it’s more common for musicians to work with, rather than fight with, boards and administrations, though recent high-profile reports have focused on financial troubles and/or labor issues causing breakdowns or outright failures.

For example, the Memphis Symphony and the San Diego Opera announced they will shut down at the end of the current season. The Minnesota Orchestra recently resolved a bitter contract dispute that had resulted in an 18-month musician lockout. The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Detroit Symphony recently declared bankruptcy, although both appear to be recovering; the Detroit band in particular, after a highly successful fundraising campaign, has become a symbol of rebirth for its troubled city.

In Little Rock, Rosen sees “clearly, an understanding of mutuality of interest,” a prime element of survival in choppy seas. “Navigating challenging times, it’s better off with all parties pulling in the same direction.”

“That’s what’s unique about this orchestra,” says David Renfro, principal French horn and the orchestra’s personnel and operations manager, a member of the five-musician committee that picked Theofanidis. “There’s a lot closer relationship between the board, the musicians and the administration than in other orchestras I’ve played in.”

Beth Wheeler, principal English horn, also a member of the commission committee and the wife of the board president, cites the “transparency, open communication and trust” that exist in the way the board and administration deal with the musicians.

FINANCIAL COMEBACK

In 2009, the orchestra was so strapped it was on the verge of having to borrow to meet staff payroll. Then-Music Director David Itkin had just announced that he was leaving at the end of the 2009-10 season.

Christina Littlejohn, former executive director of the Pensacola (Fla.) Symphony Orchestra, took over as ASO executive director that June. Her task: to make deep cuts in the $4 million budget, especially since “there was a big difference between what we were spending and what we brought in,” she says. “I was told to cut as much as I could that wouldn’t kill the organization.”

It was a sacrifice in which everybody shared. “The board could have just walked away,” she says. “Instead, they rolled up their sleeves and went to work.”

Board members tripled their annual giving and stepped up fundraising, in part to make up for the recession-related drop in corporate giving. The 2006 purchase of Alltel, which had been a major concert sponsor, by Verizon cost the orchestra more than funding - it also cost the orchestra subscribers. “It was maybe less the corporation and more the employees [who were laid off] - they were no longer able to buy subscriptions and donate,” Littlejohn says.

Littlejohn says she focused on fundamentals, including maintaining the orchestra’s educational mission and increasing its audience, without dipping into the orchestra’s endowment, which she never had to do. That’s something Rosen has endorsed as the principal difference between success and failure: Don’t concentrate so much on immediate issues, but work on, as Littlejohn puts it, “what it will take to make us great 10 years from now.”

She shed expensive, big name pops acts (previous concerts featured the Beach Boys and LeAnn Rimes) for less costly programs. The orchestra reduced its ticket prices and started letting kids in free on Sunday afternoons (via a program involving Entergy). Even with less money for marketing, they started marketing smarter. One of the bigger successes: the annual “Beethoven & Blue Jeans” concerts, with denim wear for orchestra and audience members. Ticket and subscription sales have picked up.

Richard Wheeler says the musicians accepted the pay cuts - 10 percent for full-time players, 4 percent for those hired per concert - because “they realized that otherwise they might not have an orchestra to play in.” (The musicians belong to an orchestra-specific players’ association but not to the national American Federation of Musicians, which has no central Arkansas local.) The orchestra also reduced its three touring string quartets to two and trimmed the number of full-time musicians from 13 to 10. (Two of the defunct quartet’s members had taken other jobs, Littlejohn says, which cushioned the blow a little.)

The orchestra is about to wrap up its fifth consecutive year in the black.

“Well, we’re headed that way,” Littlejohn says. “We still have some money to raise.”

The budget now hovers around $3 million; for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2013, there was an operating surplus of just under $160,000.

The orchestra has restored the per-service pay cuts and is working to restore the salaries of the 10 remaining full-time musicians.

‘BIG TIME’ PAYBACK

In the summer of 2010, Richard Wheeler, then the board’s development chairman, says he recommended giving something back to the musicians because “we owed them big time.”

Board members “passed the hat”; the players’ association solicited suggestions on how to spend it. The musicians voted on the three top choices, none of which involved a party, and decided to use it to commission an original piece. And “It just made sense” to dedicate it to the board, Renfro says.

Over a year, says Beth Wheeler, she and a players’ committee that included Renfro, principal cellist David Gerstein, tuba player Ed Owen and Carl Anthony, the orchestra’s keyboard player, came up with a list of potential composers. Renfro says he sent out letters to 25 candidates, explaining the project and soliciting details on availability and fees.

“And almost everybody responded positively,” he adds; most of those who didn’t said they just wouldn’t be able to fit such a commission into their schedule. “The five of us then each took ownership of a subset” of the list, listened to recordings, “pitched composers to each other” and got feedback from the other orchestra musicians. “It was really hard,” Beth Wheeler says. “There were a lot of composers we all loved.”

Theofanidis “genuinely fell in love with the project and has taken ownership of it a very special way,” Renfro says.

More or less simultaneously with the commission, Music Director Philip Mann, who had been monitoring the process to make sure “it was in line with the orchestra’s mission,” Renfro says, agreed to also name Theofanidis the orchestra’s 2013-14 composer of the year.

The board’s initial gift wasn’t enough to cover the entire cost of the commission, so the board stepped up again and pitched in with the remainder, Richard Wheeler says. Renfro says the amount of the commission is confidential, but “it was not a haggling process - we gave the composer his requested fee.” AT A CROSSROADS

Beth Wheeler says the premiere of Theofanidis’ piece was deliberately timed for the orchestra’s final Masterworks concerts at Robinson. The orchestra will play its 2014-15 and 2015-16 Masterworks concerts at the Maumelle Performing Arts Center, 101 Victory Lane, Maumelle, and its pops concerts at west Little Rock’s Pulaski Academy.

The Maumelle venue, also the two-year home for Celebrity Attractions’ Broadway Series and Ballet Arkansas’ annual Nutcracker production, seats 1,200, roughly half of Robinson’s capacity. Littlejohn says the attendance for 2013-14 Masterworks concerts has averaged 1,126, though they’ve sold more than 1,200 tickets for four Saturday-night concerts.She says the orchestra is going to have to carefully weigh options, including opening up its dress rehearsals, if it becomes necessary to accommodate patron demand.

The orchestra will be paying about the same amount per concert pair as it has at Robinson - the rent is actually slightly higher, she says, but they’ll spend less on hiring union stagehands, so they’ll come out almost even or even save a little.

Meanwhile, the orchestra will be moving its offices and rehearsal space from Byrne Hall, on the grounds of St. John Catholic Center in Little Rock’s Pulaski Heights, to Main Street downtown.

ARTISTIC BENEFITS

Mann says the benefits of being in a new venue and spending two years out of Robinson actually outweigh the challenges. With the Maumelle facility’s intimacy and state-of-the-art acoustics, he says, “hearing us in Maumelle, you’ll think you’ve never heard this orchestra before. What I’m most excited about is that the musicians will be able to hear each other,” one of the biggest difficulties in the acoustically impaired Robinson concert hall.

Mann says the biggest “challenge” about the move is one of public perception: Patrons think they’ll have to travel farther to get there (although Maumelle may be closer than downtown for many who live in west Little Rock). The big trade-off will be easy and plentiful parking and not having to fight downtown traffic.

Starting the concerts at 7:30 p.m. instead of 8 could help, too, although Mann says that decision has actually been some time coming and is not directly related to the move. “We’ve been talking about that for a couple of years,” he says, noting that it came out of survey data from patrons and tallies with a national entertainment industry trend to move to earlier start times.

The move may even draw new audiences, given the proximity to west Little Rock, North Little Rock, Maumelle and Conway; Mann says there’s a good chance they’d follow the orchestra back to Robinson in 2016.

“It’ll be a new instrument, and it deserves to be heard at its best,” he says. “I hope that the new instrument will be a Stradivarius.”