Can we still afford to pay live musicians?
OrchestrasFrom a brilliant FT column by mathematician Tim Harford:
Mozart and Haydn were composing string quartets a quarter of a millennium ago, when the industrial revolution was in its infancy. Since then, the scale of the world economy has increased at least a hundredfold and material living standards in western Europe have grown 20 times over, perhaps more. Our ability to travel, build, calculate, communicate or simply produce food has been transformed beyond recognition. And yet the productivity of a live recital of Haydn’s Emperor quartet hasn’t budged: it still takes four musicians between 25 and 30 minutes to play.
This is the essence of what has become known as “the Baumol effect” or, more dishearteningly, “Baumol’s cost disease”. The basic problem was laid out by economists William Baumol and William Bowen in Performing Arts, the Economic Dilemma in 1966, amid much hand-wringing about the perception that the performing arts were ridden with waste and mismanagement. Whether or not that was true, Baumol and Bowen argued, “The basic difficulty arises, not from any of these sources, but from the basic structure of live performance.”
The Baumol effect describes the challenge that arises when some sections of the economy are rapidly advancing while others are standing still. If you would like to listen to people play Haydn live, you will probably need to pay them a competitive wage. And in a flourishing economy, what counts as a competitive wage is always increasing. If the productivity of musicians doesn’t change, but their wages keep growing to keep pace with the rest of the economy, then paying people to perform Haydn is going to feel more and more like an expensive luxury….
Read the full article here. So where do we go from here?
The economic problem isn’t productivity.
The economic problem is:
1) The supply has changed, and the demand has changed.
Compared to the time of Haydn, there are a lot more string quartets, and unemployed string players, and conservatories and every dinky university music department keep churning out more and more excess supply every year.
Meanwhile, demand has diminished. People don’t want classical music, and string quartets in particular.
2) The economy of scale has changed. If a string quartet can fill Carnegie Hall, they can survive.
But see #1 above. No string quartet can fill Carnegie Hall. And even one could, two couldn’t.
What was the last string quartet to play Carnegie Hall (the main stage)? They certainly did not play Haydn either.
The other issue is that virtually all orchestras strive to have 90 to 100 tenured musicians even though 75 percent of what they play, the 19th century romantic repertoire, was written for ~50 or fewer musicians. Let’s be real: you don’t need 90+ musicians on payroll, including four tenured percussion players, when the bulk of the season is Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, etc.
We do this because we not only like the bigger, lusher sound of a large orchestra, but as the article notes, labor was relatively cheaper in the past, making this cost feasible.
Just how imagine how much different orchestra budgets would be if they only played a Brahms symphony with 50 musicians and had 70 tenured musicians on payroll.
But now that the precedent was been set, it’s hard to go backwards.
It always has been an expensive luxury. Mozart and Haydn were sponsored by extremely wealthy individuals. Their string quartets were played for wealthy elites in palace/mansion rooms, thus the term chamber music.
Another factor is that as the economy has expanded, so have wages increased (not always in synchrony or in perfect proportion, admittedly) in general. Thus, the growing expense of performing art forms like chamber music does not represent a runaway increase in the percentage of salary that audience members must expend. There are times when the cost grows faster than the economy at large, and other times where it comparatively stagnates.
If you actually read the article, it’s apparent that the string quartet example is a deliberate fallacy which he goes on to rebut.
‘…we shouldn’t be too quick to accept the strictures of Baumol’s string quartet. By assumption, Baumol and Bowen ruled out the idea that musicians might record their performances or use amplification to reach larger audiences. They were focused only on traditional live performances and the cost of those performances. Fine. But it would be unwise simply to assume that nothing can be done to raise the productivity of doctors and teachers.’
It is a luxury. But some luxuries are beneficial and even necessary for a meaningful existence.
The premise of this argument is essentially flawed, as it assumes that the arts must enter the realm of economic productivity in order to make sense. They do not. In fact it is the opposite — we usually find ways for the arts to subsist, despite the fact that they rarely turn out to be lucrative, precisely because we find in them a value that cannot be measured in dollars and that few economists could even begin to fathom.
Is the author’s argument that a string quartet would keep up with the times by reducing its players to two and taking 10 minutes to play instead of 30, thus making more sense economically? That just sounds atrocious.
I shudder to think what a world completely defined by sheer productivity would look like and what kind of barbaric society it would eventually foster. Although sadly, I suspect we are already on our way towards it. Absolute productivity and reduction of everything to sheer utilitarianism. Although still, I suspect, a place for entertainment as sheer consumption — as the kind of “art” that is designed to be fully metabolized, thus leaving absolutely nothing in its wake, as opposed to great works of art, which stay within us, never revealing themselves fully and compelling us to reflect, often for a lifetime.
So if a string quartet by Mozart cannot be played with fewer than four musicians, it is deemed not productive? I don’t think this is how it works!
It still takes five people for a basket ball team, two people to play catch, and one woman to have baby.
And yet all of those continue to be done.
Equating the economics of a string quartet to a corn crop’s is a false equivalence.