National Youth Orchestra is given half a million dollars

Anon says:

Perhaps the NYO can use some of this windfall to search for a new Executive Director. The NYO is a cultural treasure and a vital training resource to Canadian musicians. The orchestra is coached by excellent and experienced faculty and performs in top-notch concert halls. Many orchestra members go on to excellent careers. I’ve done NYO as a student more than once and I’m tremendously grateful for everything this program gave me as a musician. It’s a great organization and it deserves better leadership than it has now.

As ED, Barbara Smith has treated talented young musicians like livestock. She has failed to respond adequately when informed of serious staff misconduct against students, including an episode where one of her senior staff swore at, insulted and berated a group of student musicians for bringing a safety concern forward. She has made decisions that jeopardized the safety of musicians and their instruments, including booking the orchestra to play a rehearsal and concert outdoors on a 30+ degree (C) day, with a forecast of rain, without overhead cover of any kind. She has fostered a staff culture of contempt for the musicians in the orchestra to the point where reasonable, serious questions to staff members are as likely as not to receive insults and mockery in response instead of answers. She has commissioned works from respected Canadian composers and then trash-talked their finished work in front of the entire orchestra, as she did with Brian Current’s SOMA. She has said some very troubling things to individual members of the orchestra, particularly those in leadership positions, telling one principal that the NYO was spending too much money on them for them to look so tired (when NYO had arranged accomodations in a building where the air conditioning was either switched off or did not work at night).

All of the above are things I either witnessed firsthand or, in the case of the last anecdote, heard directly from a person involved. Many fellow alumni I’ve spoken to feel powerless to do anything about the situation. Barbara gives a speech at the beginning of each session to the effect that the music business is a small world, and people talk, and if young musicians don’t want trouble in their careers, they shouldn’t make trouble for the NYO.

Barbara has done a great job of balancing the budget, raising the ensemble’s public profile and courting donors. It would be best if NYO could find a role for her that would focus on these elements while keeping her as far as possible from managing the actual operations of the organization.