Nashville Symphony fires four VPs
OrchestrasWe hear the Nashville Symphony is in trouble.
Insiders tell us that four vice presidents – Development, Human Resources, Communications and Concert Operations & Production – along with six junior staff members have been laid off in order to cover an immediate payroll crisis.
COO Tonya Robles resigned last December. The board has been meeting this week to approve a 5% pay rise for the musicians, which insiders say the organisation cannot afford.
That seems like a very good idea. How many vice-presidents are left?
Good God…the US only needs ONE vice president. This is g..d… Nashville with a budget south of $17 million (not for nothin’, the musicians receive salary as well).
…more classical music cleansing…yikes
Nashville thrives on another form of music.
Unfortunate. The orchestra plays well, and they have a beautiful hall with great sound, similar to the Musikverein. A bastion of culture in the middle of a miserable state.
“miserable state”
And then we wonder why Trump-like politicians keep popping up. And Tennessee is not a miserable state, if you know what to look for.
Agree with everything but “miserable state.” Tennessee is quite beautiful and Knoxville is another quite wonderful city in the state.
Easy, Ben, maybe tn isn’t to your liking but that doesn’t make it a miserable state.
Unless you’re a stuck up Yankee and require your blue state corruption and blight – in which case take the newest Chattanooga and Nashville transplants with you.
Sounds like there’s likely more to be said on this subject, and I hope they have a game plan for righting the financial ship. The Nashville Symphony is wonderful, easily the top regional symphony in the southeast U.S.
The Atlanta Symphony would like a word with you.
One notices that they have 5 staff members in the artistic administration department. Surely that is more than is necessary. The New York Philharmonic has 4.
It never ceases to amaze me — even after 40 years of arts management experience — how many times an organization says: “We need to save money so let’s fire the development director.” Yikes!
NY Phil has 5 artistic administration staff — a Vice President of Artistic Planning accounted for under Administration.
With development guru Valentine in the house, “V.P. of Development” sounds like a redundancy, although I hate for anyone to lose their job.
The same thing happened with the wonderful Brooklyn Philharmonic—-too many people in the front office! The orchestra went down the tubes………
5% pay raise over how many years?
Mismanagement in music city! Disgraceful!
I see the C-suite is intact… Alan Valentine is running the organization into the ground. Maybe instead of firing the lower echelon, they start at the top and get some fresh blood in.
Having worked for a similar budget sized orchestra and activity in the artistic department – I can tell you; that these departments NEED a beefier artistic/ops staff size. I have a lot of bad memories of many many 80 hour work weeks; less than 50K/year job; thankless jobs really — all for the love of the art. So, PLEASE don’t be knocking these artistic and operations departments sizes. They need enough folks to rotate that “artistic/ops” concert duty so that they can also see their kids/family/have lives.
Paging Taylor Swift …
The Schermerhorn Symphony Center is indeed a spendid concert venue. And the Nashville Orchestra has made quite a number of widely acclaimed recordings, especially for Naxos America. These have resulted in a very impressive 26 Grammy nominations and 14 Awards. Many were for their contribution of contemporary compositions for the label’s American Classics series. That the orchestra may be suffering financial difficulties is indeed sad. Hopefully the recordings will continue.