It is said that Nature abhors a vacuum, and the same could be said of human nature as well. This is especially true in orchestras of any budget size or artistic merit. The one truism that I’ve come to dislike very intensely? That those who seek to gain power in the absence of strong leadership are to a one uniformly weak and cowardly. If they were otherwise, then they wouldn’t have to seek leadership in such craven ways.
Orchestral musicians are sensitive beasts. We face our own harsh criticisms every day in the privacy of our own practice rooms, and then we go to work and face the judgment of our colleagues and our boss, which can sometimes seem arbitrary and capricious. It’s easy to crack and start taking out our frustrations on our select colleagues, the governance systems of same, and the less-than-powerful music director. That’s the easy way out, however, and there is the more difficult route: professionalism.
I offer two versions of people doing their jobs that illustrate the difference between being unprofessional and maintaining the utmost professionalism.
The first job was featured on an episode of a show where CEO’s of major corporations went down to the entry level positions of their companies to do the work and see how life was at the bottom of the corporate food chain. In one episode, the CEO of Waste Management followed around a guy whose job it was to empty and sanitize port-a-potties. This guy had a smelly, difficult, and sometimes hazardous job, but he did it with a smile and a laugh, and was very good at what he did. He was unfailingly polite to the CEO (whom he did not know was the head of the company) and did a great job of showing him the ropes. The guy was a consummate professional in every sense of the word.
The second job was the guy who pumped gas at the Shell station a block from my house (Oregon is the other state besides New Jersey where you’re not allowed to pump your own gas). Every time a car would come up to his pumps, he’d shake his head and swear under his breath as if he were being asked to do the most difficult job imaginable. If more than one car were at the pumps, he’d get even more agitated, an start yelling at the pumps, and sometimes the customers. He seemed so angry and upset over nothing. He didn’t have the greatest job in the world, but he made his life harder than it had to be with all of his negativity. He was eventually let go. That man was really the epitome of unprofessional.
What does this have to do with orchestras and power vacuums? Well, first of all, most job satisfaction ratings of orchestral musicians are probably lower than the two jobs in my examples. Secondly, the unprofessional people, they’re the ones who make power grabs or become borderline insubordinate in orchestras. People who are well-respected by their colleagues usually are reticent to accept positions of power, and they often have to be coerced to serve on their player committees and the like. It is those who sit back and complain loudly about everything and anything, about how they could do it better, or the tempos are too fast, and the strings never listen to the winds, those people are usually shunned by most of the orchestra as far as being electable to a leadership position, so they are the ones who most often make power grabs when the moment seems right.
What often results is a spiral of apathy and anger that can result in a radicalized player base, eager to do damage to those who held power before them, and quick to lash out against management, whether fairly or not. It’s not a good place to be, and I know this from first-hand experience.