Great Falls Symphony cutting Chinook Winds quintet at season’s end
The Great Falls Symphony board decided to sunset the Chinook Winds, a five-member chamber ensemble, at the end of the season.
The board made the unanimous decision March 8 during its board retreat and Bob Norbie, board president, emailed the musicians on March 9.
The Cascade Quartet, a four-member chamber ensemble, remains unchanged.
The Chinook Winds musicians retain their positions as principal musicians with the main symphony and Hillary Shepherd, the symphony’s executive director, said she hopes they stay.
“This decision has not come easily nor has it been taken lightly. We know that this will directly affect the lives and livelihood of valued musicians who have given generously of their time, talent, and treasure to our organization and this community,” Norbie wrote to the musicians, several of whom shared over the weekend that they were frustrated to have the information delivered by email on a Saturday. “The Great Falls Symphony needs to refocus its resources in order to drive sustainable growth strategies for the organization while preserving the original core ensemble and our vision to make Great Falls a better place through music.”
The Chinook Winds musicians are employed with the symphony under a master agreement and nine principal musicians are paid for their work with the main symphony and a residency stipend to live in Great Falls, teach if they can, and perform with the chamber ensembles.
The Chinook Winds musicians who choose to stay for next season will receive a $300 bonus for each concert cycle performed, according to Norbie’s letter.
That’s in addition to their standard rate, bringing the total to $900 per concert cycle performed for the principal musicians, Shepherd said.
All five of the Chinook Winds members told The Electric that they do not intend to remain with the Great Falls Symphony next season, though Dorian Antipa, the principal bassoon player, said he and his wife will likely stay in Great Falls and he’ll transition to more instrument repair work.
“This is a sad development for us and for our audiences and students. We will all move on, find other work, and thrive. Great Falls is losing a pillar of its performing arts scene as well as highly trained and effective private teachers, and Montana is losing its only professional wind quintet. Such a devoted audience as the Chinook Winds deserve better from the GFSA. This didn’t need to happen and should not have happened. This is a failure of leadership. On a personal note, I am sad that I have just lost a dream job performing with a local orchestra and professional wind quintet for such a welcoming and appreciative community,” Antipa told The Electric.
City approves theater fee change to retain symphony
Madeleine Flockerts, principal horn and Chinook Winds member, said that she is “heartbroken over this” and has built a life in Great Falls, but without the income from the quintet, “I will not be able to sustain these activities here. While the board and administration may feel as if they are maintaining some semblance of the ‘core positions’ by attempting to keep us on as principal players and guaranteeing the full travel pay, the reality is that the position being currently offered is completely different from what we had previously.”
The symphony’s programs committee, which included musicians, met regularly for several months last fall and in December, the group adopted a plan with a $220,000 deficit, Shepherd told The Electric.
She said the musicians were part of those discussions and were aware of the deficit and this year, had three three-hour meetings with the principal musicians on key performance indicators going into their budget process and planning for future seasons.
“It’s really hard to change, it really is and I definitely feel a sense of loss for an artistic program that we’ve had for so many years,” Shepherd said. “This is a conversation we’ve had for months and we brought in musicians all along. They didn’t necessarily know before the final decision but didn’t have final decision until Friday.”
Symphony resuming live concerts; Black Tie + Blue Jeans postponed to 2022
Shepherd said the symphony has been struggling to generate enough revenue to cover costs, particularly since COVID, and ended the last season with about a $180,000 deficit.
They had some cash reserves to make the budget whole, “but we can’t continue to do that, so we had to find solutions and build capacity to support the organization adequately and position ourselves for new initiatives and growth,” she said.
In recent years, the symphony has made a number of changes, such as reducing the Broadway series and adjusting the agreement with the city to have direct management of symphony ticket sales to improve sales, marketing and ticketholder relationships.
Great Falls Symphony announces free 2020-2021 season
“The chamber and core musician residency program was the most concerning, with a net loss of approximately $150,000 per year. It was clear that program changes needed to be made for next season. There have been several
conversations with our musicians, including the members of the Chinook Winds, regarding the symphony’s inability to continue deficit spending, the last of which took place on Feb. 27. The members of the Winds were also aware for several months that the Chinook Winds program was of specific concern,” according to a symphony statement.
Norman Menzales, principal flute and Chinook Winds member, said they’d suggested the group calling donors and helping find grants, as well as starting a campaign to specifically fund the core musician program.
Grant Harville, the current conductor and music director, announced in January that he’s leaving the symphony after the next season and Shepherd said going into the search year for a new director, they want to provide that person space to implement a vision and potentially try new things.
Evan Tegley, principal oboe for the symphony and Chinook Winds members, said that he was part of the programs committee and represented his fellow quintet members.
He said the meetings included ideas on growing their audience, but there was little follow through and they mostly planned for the upcoming season. He said ideas developed during the committee meetings would likely have to be adjusted when the new music director is hired.
City approves new Mansfield business model
Tegley said that they were pushed to plan their concert season dates earlier in the hopes of better marketing, which was “extremely difficult and stressful, as predicting availability was hit or miss.”
He said the two core ensembles proposed their repertoire and themes for their next season and were told to cut their music costs by half, from $500 to $250, which they did.
Tegley said he took notes from the program committee meetings, shared them with his fellow Chinook Winds musicians and gathered their feedback, which was shared with the administration. He said those ideas didn’t result in anything in subsequent core meetings.
Some of those ideas included: avoiding one-dimensional programming; exploring partnerships with local businesses/organizations to attract more audiences and increase visibility; looking into more grants to support outreach efforts, Tegley said.
The board includes some in the local business community and the Great Falls Public Schools art and music supervisor, who also plays with the symphony, as the orchestra representative.
At the end of the program committee meetings, Tegley said that Norbie, board president, told the group, that their initial projects showed a significant deficit for the upcoming season.
Tegley said that Norbie told the committee, “on top of deficit spending the past several years, this is cause for concern. This said, there are solutions, and I can assure you that the board of directors is and will do everything it possibly can do to protect and preserve our mission. Indeed, caring for the quality of our concert seasons, our musicians, and staff are of utmost importance.”
“It seems that the Chinook Winds were not considered of the utmost importance,” Tegley said.
Tegley said, “I was expecting maybe some sort of cut to everyone’s pay, but not the elimination of an entire group. This caught the entirety of the core by complete shock. Never did we think our entire jobs were in question.”
Julia Klien, principal clarinet and Chinook Winds member, said, “we were made well aware of the financial concerns, but were never explicitly told that our jobs were on the line this year.
Antipa said that he’d “been aware of the budget concerns for years and was made aware of the dire situation at the start of this season. Changes were clearly inevitable but there was no indication as to what they would be except for a somewhat cryptic comment from the board president, Bob Norbie, that the GFSA will not run a deficit next year under his watch and in order to solve the issue some people will not be happy.”
Broadway returning to Great Falls [2022]
Orchestras the size of the Great Falls Symphony, with a current $1.1 million budget, typically have a staff of five to eight, Shepherd said, but the Great Falls office operates with two full-time administrative staff, including Shepherd.
“We need to have infrastructure to have better community presence and connection to build relationships, so that’s another element of building capacity for the future is adding staff,” she said.
The symphony received a three-year capacity grant that funded a part-time development director position with the intention of growing that position into a full-time position, which was recently hired.
“It’s just time, we really need staff support,” she said.
Fee structure change proposed to help keep Broadway series in Great Falls [2021]
The programs committee referred their plan in December to the finance and executive committee, which began meeting weekly to go through line items and details, looking at the last seven years of performance indicators and finances to develop the new budget, Shepherd said.
When she started as the executive director in December 2015, the board was discussing sunsetting the Chinook Winds and she asked them to give her more time to try to make the group financially solvent “because they are such an asset.”
As a clarinet player herself, Shepherd said she appreciated the group and respected a program that was built by Gordon Johnson, former symphony conductor.
“I’ve done everything I could think of to make the program successful,” she said, including dedicating staff to the program, advertising and selling chamber tickets with the regular symphony, holding their concerts in different venues and utilizing a graphic designer to help their marketing.
After taking losses, Broadway in Great Falls series down to one show this season [2019]
Shepherd said they secured a season sponsor and concert sponsors for every concert series, but is still looking at a $80,000 net loss for the chamber music series programs that had about 55 unique paid ticket orders with about 60-80 attendees typically.
“It’s an extraordinarily expensive endeavor,” she said, and unique that the Great Falls Symphony continued the series.
She said many other symphonies don’t offer such a program since it doesn’t typically break even.
For the nine core musicians in the symphony, they’re paid $138,575 in salary for the season, and the residency stipend for living in Great Falls and playing in the chamber group is $134,700, Shepherd said.
That totaled $273,275 for the nine core musicians, compared to about $142,000 total paid to the other 55-60 musicians in the symphony, she said.
‘In every concert, there’s a lot of joy;” Great Falls Symphony season kicks off this weekend [2019]
Under their master agreements, Shepherd said the nine core musicians are asked to be available 90 days of the year for the Great Falls Symphony and that most of the principal musicians play with other symphonies or groups.
Shepherd said the symphony committed to paying the core musicians their full rates during COVID when the symphony was unable to perform, before they knew if they would receive COVID relief funds.
She said the board has approved her salary at the same rate for the last three seasons and that Harville took a 79 percent pay cut for the upcoming season that will be his last as conductor, to support the musicians and the symphony.
All of the symphony musicians are paid under the standard master agreement at a rate that is relatively competitive with other rates across the state for non-core musicians, but Shepherd said the amount paid to the core is “really unique, not just in the state but one of the only orchestras in the country that devotes that much resource to a core group of musicians.”
The Cascade Quartet, a four-member group, will remain in tact.
Shepherd said that group was created in 1979 by a symphony founder and its goal is to raise the quality of the orchestra and teach music in the community. She said over the decades, the group has accomplished those goals and has become sustainable within the budget.
The Cascade Quartet said in a statement on March 13 that, “although we knew that there needed to be cuts in the budget, we were shocked that this is the direction the Great Falls Symphony Board of Directors and administration chose. We were prepared for across-the-board salary cuts, including the administration, but not for this. We were never aware that this outcome, the Cascade Quartet being retained but not the Chinook Winds, was being considered. The situation on the ground with the Great Falls Symphony is incredibly complex. The Chinook Winds are paying a painful price for this budget crisis, which is not of their making. This organization will not be the same without them. Our hearts are heavy at the thought of going on and making music without the incredible artistry of our colleagues. We love this orchestra with our whole hearts, and are deeply affected by this decision. We are committed to our fellow musicians, our community, and to the mission of the Great Falls Symphony.”
