ENO office worker earns twice as much as orchestral players
OperaThe latest job vacancy at English National Opera – head of a team of Executive Assistants – is to be paid £50-55,000 p.a. with plenty of extras and expenses.
There are string players in the ENO orchestra who earns less than half that amount.
Apply here.
good thing I re-trained
If you’re suggesting that string players in the orchestra are working *full-time* in London for £25,000, then said musicians are fools for working for that amount.
Unless you know the market and are involved in it yourself, it’s not wise to say such a thing. The alternative is to become unemployed and homeless.
You’d be homeless on £25k Maria.
“A team of Executive Assistants”? EAs to whom?
The scent of bureaucracy is potent.
Is anyone surprised? Really?
The Executive Assistant position is full-time, isn’t it? And aren’t ENO’s orchestra musicians contracted per performance, or at least per production?
No they aren’t. Until recently they were also employed full-time. But after a “fire and rehire” carried out by the management, they are now only contracted for a fraction of the year.
Not true. All the information is on line. A tutti contract for 7 months (about 100 days of work) is worth over £28k, and leaves the player able to find other employment. Extras are also payable by ENO and expenses refundable.
A senior PA – £50k is the market rate – is a full-time gig. Expenses are not extras. They are refunds of necessary costs incurred.
Yes, you have a good measure of the corporate world, which is about right.
A glance at any ENO programme will enlighten visitors as to the value of some of its staff. As part of its Executive Office it employs a Director of People, a People Business Partner, a People Administrator and a People Assistant. Whatever happened to plain and simple HR?
HR has developed extensively and has become more niche.
What, no Diversity Officer?
Shocking, isn’t it?
Now now, Herbie. Your prejudice and antiquated views are showing
HR? It was called Personnel back in my day.
Yes, Personnel, and then became Human Remains!
Human Resources is what started the whole dehumanization.
Now it is “Employee Branding, Acquisition and Retention” or “People and Culture” where by “Culture” they mean “anything but…”
Crazy. Priorities are totally wrong.
‘Twas ever thus and always will be. Music is a profession which seems on the one hand to be held in a certain amount of awe by other people, but also one which they just can’t seem to understand. We all know how long it takes to learn to play to a reasonable professional standard and then maintain said standard, to say nothing of the expense of tuition, instrument purchase and so on.
How though does one put a value on it without being priced out of a competitive market? It never ceased to amaze me that people are willing to come to a concert because they admire those skills and probably could never rise to that standard themselves. Those same folk would blanch in horror if I quoted them a price to play in a concert or give lessons.
And yet, because I couldn’t do it myself, I didn’t blink at the fee charged to fix my washing machine. It was something I didn’t feel competent to do so I paid a specialist. His fee for an hour’s work was about £60 less than I would expect for a freelance engagement with an afternoon rehearsal and an evening concert.
Hmmmm….
Et voilà. It’s up to us to proselytise. I don’t give an inch.
Then become a plumber. They’re your life choices Sir!
Yes, and you never get to meet a poor plumber!
This is a populist, rightwing comment.
It’s honestly better to study and work with something that actually matters and pays well, such as law or medicine. You can then play the instrument on your free time to you hearts content, never having to worry about money, so you probably play better and are way more happy than the ”real” musicians
And how well do you think you will play your instrument if you’ve been spending all day practicing law or medicine? Sorry you think music doesn’t “actually matter”.
I know many who do just that, and are very successful at both.
Check out New Orchestra Tokyo, supposedly one of the best amateur orchestras from Japan – their Bruckner 8 recording I found genuinely impressive
https://youtu.be/JAA0T5nbV88?si=mqpRKh4l70pT7E9o&t=2674
You can check rates of pay on the Musicians Union website. I think you’ll find that across the industry the “artist” is payed a very handsome package and the office staff often get a very poor rate by comparison. From experience, the artistic lead for a project was on £10K more than me, the equivalent level project manager also leading the project. Pitting staff against eachother does nothing to ease the tensions in these organisations. Something needs to be done across the sector.
As anyone who works with one knows, a great EA is worth every penny. A rank and file violinist with ENO is just that. With the greatest of respect, today it’s hardly on a par with the Royal Opera and Ballet, Berlin or Vienna Operas is it?
When were you last there, Simon?
Shut them down. They’re a mockery.
Stop pitting admin and artists against each other. Funnily enough the admin teams work in the arts because they believe in it and want to support it. Let’s not forget this role in a commercial setting would be more.
The comparison is totally false, this is a full time position, not a part time position. It’s also quite a senior position within an organisation with a lot of responsibility around governance, a key issue to be getting right at ENO.
I work for a regional theatre that employs about 250 staff outside of London and our CEO EA earns £40k. So, with London weighting and the larger responsibilities of this post it’s about right, if not comparatively under.
To defend this hire is not the same as deeply disagreeing with the direction ENO has taken and their treatment of musicians. One does not have to be pitted against another.
A lot of very, very angry middle-aged men out there ranting about an arts management job in London paying £50k – a job I have absolutely no doubt they would NOT be able to do.
If you’re still in your 50s and you are that angry about someone else earning £50K perhaps you should’ve been a better musician or made a different life choices.
Quite right, I made those difficult and different life choices.
I am white, male, in my 50s – I deeply wanted to be a musician but realised early on that I just was never going to reach the level I considered would be acceptable before a paying public. So I became a music critic, have enjoyed free seats for years and passed judgement on the efforts of others. Everyone’s happy – well, most of the time.
Because of modern bureaucracy – result of developments of modern society – it often happens that staff of musical institutions are more extensive than the performers, and sometimes staff becomes more important, so that roles are inverted: it is then not staff serving the art form, but the art form serving staff, to provide jobs, salaries, status etc. Fact is that with opera companies and orchestras, what audiences get to hear and see, is being decided by staff, not by players, conductors, singers. Given that staff members are not musicians themselves, the result is that power in music life is in the hands of people without musical talents. That does not mean they are incompetent, but that there is a hughe gap in functioning between the people who are needed to make musical events happen, and the people who actually are doing the real job. It is like access to dentistry or surgeoncy being decided by a layer of officials without medical knowledge, who first check your complaints before forwarding you to the required professional.
Now, let that sink in.
And indeed, when the government mandates more paperwork from every business, more staff is needed to comply. When was the last time the government mandated that there be more musicians hired?
Douglas Adams was a man ahead of his time. In the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, the planet of Golgafrincham put all its middle management on a spaceship, telling them that their planet was doomed and they needed the middle management types to go ahead to prepare the new planet for colonisation. Maybe Branson and Musk could help with this. Just a thought…