Michael Hovnanian, of the erstwhile CSO Bass Blog (now just the Bass Blog due to some flap over whether he can use the CSO name in a blog), has just published a great post on the habitual nature of the orchestral musician and the troubles it can cause.
In most orchestras, the way you see the orchestra on stage is the way they play every day, every week, every year. Year in and year out, until a new music director comes along to change the set up. In the Oregon Symphony under James DePreist we used to sit like this:
When Carlos Kalmar came we changed our configuration to this:
And we had one guest conductor (I don’t remember who) who came before we hired Carlos who had us set up in the manner that Michael Hovnanian talks about in his post:
I remember the page turning thing being a bit strange, just as Michael relates. I think that we might have adopted the seating system that those on the left (audience) side of the stage use, in which the principal player sits on the right (as opposed to on the right side, where the principal sits on the left side of the desk). I think shortly after this arrangement, there became a policy that the orchestra retains its layout in music director format no matter who is on the podium.
That’s how most seemingly idiotic or arbitrary work rules come about: something is done without consulting the orchestra or giving them enough warning (we are habitual personalities, after all) and then a rule is put in place which prohibits whatever caused the fuss in the first place. Common sense doesn’t really play a part in this stuff (if it did, our contract would be one page long).