No One's Singing Hallelujah in Bellevue Philharmonic Labor Dispute
Categories: Classical Music
The Bellevue Philharmonic is tuning the strings and warming up their lips for the annual holiday Messiah concert this Friday. But it's not all peace on Earth and goodwill to all behind the scenes across Lake Washington--far from it.
The musicians, new Executive Director and Board of Trustees are locked in a labor fight over contracts. The players want management to negotiate future contracts with them as a union under the American Federation of Musicians. Executive Director Jennifer McCausland, finishing her first year at the helm, says it just isn't a good time.
The dispute goes back to last summer when the core group of musicians expected the normal round of contract renewals. Bassist Bryce Van Parys says for the last decade, season-long contracts were generally renewed for everyone still playing at the end of the previous season. The music director weeded out problem players throughout the year if problems persisted.
But this year saw major overhauls in the classical music ensemble. In a bid to make the group more competitive with other local groups (it doesn't seem a stretch to read that as the Seattle Symphony) the board of trustees hired Jennifer McCausland, a former Seattle Symphony board member and owner of Apollo Music Ventures, a company that puts on smaller chamber-style events. In a move that made most orchestra members furious, McCausland ignored the traditional way of renewing contracts. Last summer she sent notices to 13 string players that they needed to audition to renew their 2008-2009 season contract. None of those members were actually let go, says principal clarinet, Mary Kantor. But bucking tradition and making them play in open auditions for their spots--in some cases on short notice--seemed like pretty much the same thing, Kantor says. "I would call that firing."
McCausland says she had to start making musicians audition to bring the level of the group up. And if that meant pitting long-time members against the general public to hold onto their contracts, so be it. "That was the way that we were going to be able to determine the community standard for playing was," she says. McCausland adds that she expected a bad reaction to the move, but it was necessary "if we're ever going to move to a competitive position with the other professional orchestras in the area."
Van Parys says the orchestra members don't have a philosophical problem with the idea of weeding out weaker members to make the group higher caliber. "Nobody's really arguing that point," he says. The problem, he explains, is the way it was handled. Philharmonic management acted too abruptly, completely changing the accepted way of doing things for the previous decade, singling out the strings players and issuing the audition notices without much in the way of a head's up.
Van Parys and other players created a negotiating committee in September to bring the orchestra's concerns to McCausland. His committee agreed to look over a new potential contract governing full-season employment. And while some aspects--the pay scale and new uniforms--seemed fine, the document contained no means of earning tenure, putting contracts up for grabs every year. He says the committee went back to McCausland and asked that it be changed. Philharmonic management wouldn't consider it.
Without the money for legal council to fight, Van Parys says, the musicians decided to unionize. They approached the American Federation of Musicians. According to Motter Snell, President of the Seattle Musicians Association, the local federation branch, the union formally asked McCausland and the board to voluntarily recognize the union for purposes of contract negotiation.
Not only did the union get a big no in the form of a unanimous vote by the Board of Trustees, McCausland informed Van Parys he had been overlooked in the initial reauditioning round and would need to play for his seat. "We look at my being called out as retaliation," he says.
McCausland says Van Parys' reaudition notice had nothing to do with his union organizing activity. If anything, she says, she would like to see the musicians organized, but with so many things in the air, it's a bad time for major changes in the way musician contracts are done. On top of that, she says, the orchestra is still trying to raise its profile and she doesn't want to start offering tenure to players just because they've have a long history with the orchestra. "There is no way a part-time orchestra, a community orchestra on its way to becoming a professional orchestra, was in a position to offer life-time jobs," she says.
For now the whole thing is at a stalemate. Union organizers have successfully convinced potential new orchestra members to stay away from the auditions in solidarity and none have occurred so far. But McCausland shows no sign of bending on the tenure issue.
So will this year's Messiah be something worth a loud hallelujah? Yes, says interim music director and concert master John Kim. Kim is siding with McCausland in the dispute, but when he calls people together to rehearse Handel's masterpiece, the only thing that matters is the music, he says. "When it's time to play, everyone is very professional."
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