Why do orchestra managers earn six times as much as players?

The annual wages survey across US orchestras that Drew McManus compiles in Adaptrisation shows no great change in the thick of recession.

Across the board, executive directors pay themselves, in general, six times as much as the average orchestral wage. At the Boston Symphony, for instance, Mark Volpe pulled down $606, 725, while the player average was $128,180.

There were notable exceptions. In Cleveland and Chicago, the ratio was 1:4, while at the philharmonic orchestras of Los Angeles and New York the chief executive earned exactly ten times as much as the players.

New Mexico, which went bust, paid its boss fourfold. Syracuse, also bankrupt, less than three times as much.

What, I wonder, justifies the correlation? The gap, at any rate, is much narrower in Europe.

Here’s Drew’s full chart. It makes fascinating reading.