Where Are the Tears for the Workers Who Make New York, New York City?

“I would trade almost anything to play the oboe.” Those are the words of Blaire Tindall in her book, Mozart In the Jungle. Some readers are familiar with the television show of the same name, and that is loosely based on Tindall’s book.

Notable is that Tindall got to play the oboe for a living. Think about that for a minute. Tindall got to do for a living something that doesn’t house, cloth or feed us, but that made and makes life much more enriching for the players and those who listen to them play.

The question is why? Why is it that Tindall was lucky enough to have a job that she “would trade almost anything” to do? The easy response to this question is economic growth. Plain and simple.

Important about Tindall’s work is that this kind wasn't always a given. Cultural pursuits and the individuals they employ have always been a consequence of wealth creation, and the generosity of the wealth creators. Tindall notes that Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and Joseph Pulitzer really got things moving when they donated $90,000 to the New York Philharmonic in 1908.

Basically the arts do well when the rich do well. And they suffer when the rich suffer. For instance, U.S.-based contributions to the arts amounted to $1.4 million in 1930. By 1933 the number shrank to $740,000. Thank goodness progress in the economic sense is one of those American constants thanks to the intense entrepreneurialism that defines the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, New York’s Lincoln Center was built for $185 million; $144 million of that coming private entities with names attached to them like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie.

Still, Tindall’s book is clear that even by the 1960s, and after impressive support from U.S. industrialists, symphony players continued to work “day jobs to survive, since their orchestras only played partial seasons.” The great news is that in 1966 the Ford Foundation gave away $80 million in matching grants to establish endowments for sixty-one orchestras. In Tindall’s words, “Seemingly overnight, classical musicians could view an orchestra job as full-time employment, complete with health and pension benefits and paid time off for illness and vacation.”

In 1995, and as an industrial revolution in Silicon Valley took shape, Tindall notes that “the average endowment increased among the nation’s fifty largest orchestras by 76%.” As the stock market and economy go, so go the arts. By 2003 Tindall reports that base pay for New York Philharmonic players was $103,000. Not bad for a pursuit that once helped give life to the notion of “starving artist.” Thanks to prosperity, and the extraordinary generosity of those who created the prosperity, more and more passionate people get to do what they'd give anything to do for money.

It rates prominent mention at the moment in consideration of the devastation presently falling on culture in New York City. As Robin Pogrebin and Michael Paulson report in the New York Times, the culture sector employs 400,000 workers there. The obvious problem now is that an essential driver of what makes New York New York City is all but shuttered. Scarier is what the future might hold.

The alarmist response to the new coronavirus has put New York’s cultural institutions in a very precarious position. How will they survive? Thinking about classical music alone, it’s the epitome of non-profit. Tindall didn’t hide from this truth in her book. The business of classical music is not a business. Per Tindall it “is clearly failing,” which means that New York’s great classical music eco-system is reliant on major wealth creation to survive.

But with the lockdowns continuing, there quite simply won’t be as much wealth around to direct toward the entities that are a consequence of it. The cultural institutions reliant on abundance born of entrepreneurialism know it. Pogrebin and Paulson write of “how worried, desperate and vulnerable cultural organizations have become since the virus hit.” Per the reporters, these institutions compete with each other not just for audiences and attention, but most important of all, for donors. And with the economy having been bludgeoned by an imposition of one-size-fits-all, there will be fewer donors in at least the near future with fewer dollars to distribute.

Thinking about the 400,000+ individuals who work in the arts, imagine what this bleak scenario means for them. So many “would trade anything” to do what they do, but they weren’t given the chance to. Rather than allow orchestras, playhouses and other artistic concepts to search for ways to continue to entertain perhaps smaller crowds, these entities were deemed “non-essential.” Ok, but “non-essential” to whom?

The answer from politicians and experts has all these weeks been that the very people who drive and animate progress are a lethal menace to one another. Supposedly our proximity to other human beings is a potential death sentence, but then for all too many artists, they would rather die than not be allowed to showcase their unique genius to others.

All of this has been forgotten by politicians as they arrogated to themselves the ability to enforce how we protect ourselves. In that case we’ll never know. We’ll never know how businesses that became businesses by expertly meeting the needs of customers with varying needs might have responded to the virus’s existence without shutting down. And if they hadn’t all been shut down, we’ll never know how much healthier the economy would be as a result; the economy’s health a direct driver of the health of cultural institutions that bring so much life to our existence.

Lastly, we’ll never know what New York’s hundreds of thousands of performers would have done in order to continue doing what brought them to New York in the first place. Instead, politicians gave them checks, as though money could replace the impossible-to-describe feeling that comes with doing something you would trade anything to do, very well.

Politicians have no idea how much they insulted millions of workers, along with a city that’s The Big Apple precisely because it’s populated by people for whom work is so much more than a paycheck. In New York City money is ultimately a consequence of people doing what it would kill all too many to not do. For them, doing nothing is a fate worse than death.