Last week the New York Times reported on labor unrest among the musicians at the New York Philharmonic, America’s oldest orchestra. Currently paid $153,504 annually, the players were agitating for a raise.
The desire for more money has become particularly pressing as members of the Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles orchestras recently secured annual salary raises to the $200,000 range. Equal pay and all that.
Readers can decide for themselves the merits or lack thereof behind the pay demands, but whatever your opinion, please stop and marvel at what a great story this is. Orchestra musicians presently threatening strike unless six figure salaries are pushed higher? What a powerful signal of economic progress.
If you find yourself doubtful, consider the wage demands in light of the late Blair Tindall’s 2005 memoir (later turned into a great Amazon Prime show) Mozart In the Jungle. Tindall, born in 1960, was old enough (or realistically young enough) to remember when orchestra players had to have “real jobs” to pay the bills so that they could volunteer to be in orchestras.
As written about in my 2018 book The End of Work, for the longest time orchestra musicians worked so that they could animate musical passions when not working, but increasingly they’re paid to pursue and perfect their passion. Again, what a story.
It raises a question about what’s driving the progress. The bet here is that most intuitively know the answer. It’s all about wealth creation. The more wealth created, the more dollars directed by its creators to, among other things, cultural pursuits meant to make the sights and sounds around us prettier than they already are.
No doubt Tindall leaned left, but she didn’t hide from this truth. She was arguably in her musical prime during the late 1990s-2001 stock-market boom, one that showered orchestras across the U.S. with abundant funds. Put another way, as “Wall Street” got rich, lots of people not on Wall Street got raises.
When it comes to the arts, patron of the arts quickly follows. Rich people give culture essential oxygen and life. There’s your salary increases for orchestra musicians. About these raises, Tindall similarly didn’t hide from the fact that orchestras weren’t self-sustaining. They faced obsolescence in her time, but for the wealth creators so eager to keep orchestra music and the creators of it alive and well.
What’s interesting about it is that humans are nowhere near a non-existent “frontier” when it comes to their ability to create ever more wealth. Particularly in an age of soaring automation of both human action and thought, abundance of all kinds is set to soar. Surging wealth will be evidence of the previous truth.
From these enormous leaps, gargantuan sums of money will find their way to all manner of cultural, musical, academic, and scientific pursuits that in the past went without on the funding front. In other words, jobs and work formerly done by people when they were not working will increasingly be paid pursuits.
It raises exciting questions about what’s next? That is so because there will be a next as formerly part-time, unpaid passions morph into full-time, well-paid jobs. The New York Philharmonic players just secured raises of the $205,000/year variety, and the New York Times reported on the development.
Much more exciting will be what it reports on in the future. For now, we can all read easy knowing that the jobs of tomorrow will look very different from the jobs of today as work increasingly reflects activities that for the longest time were not work.
