Symphony Notes -The Nashville Musician – April-June 2024

BY MELINDA WHITLEY

Many orchestras have experienced great success in their recent negotiations and I hope we will join them.

By the time this article is published, The Musicians of the Nashville Symphony, along with Local 257 President Dave Pomeroy and our attorney Kevin Case, will be firmly into the formal negotiation process for a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). Our current CBA expires July 31, 2024. We have been busy preparing ourselves, and especially our newer musicians, as we enter into their first CBA negotiation process in a professional orchestra. Without going into too much detail, I thought it might be helpful to share a bit of my own perspective on our process.

I won a national audition for my current position in the NSO in 1999, after being the runner-up here in a national audition in 1994, and after winning a local audition for our sub-list a few years before that. From 1998-2000 the NSO enjoyed some significant growth and restoration through the contract negotiation process. Part of that growth included the purposeful addition of 16 tenure-track string players to the ensemble through our national audition process, planned for and accomplished, over the course of those two years. We were often referred to at the time as “The Sweet Sixteen.” I’m happy to say I was one of them, and I am not the only one of us who is still in the orchestra.

I joined the NSO just as the organization was on a very upward trajectory. We joined the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians and the AFM Strike Fund in 2000, the same year we went on tour to Carnegie Hall. Concurrently, our Time for Greatness campaign raised the funds to build our beautiful Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Recording in our new hall helped us to win our first and most meaningful Grammy Awards for Best Orchestral Performance and Best Classical Album for our Joan Tower Made in America recording in 2007. While none of those things were negotiated into a contract, it was our steady efforts to work together as an organization that allowed us to make such significant strides in our work. Our contracts negotiated in 2001 and 2007 included increases in the number of musicians on stage, better benefits, and refined work rules. We became more unified in both our workload and in our efforts to function as an organization. We could see where we had been, and began to imagine where we could go.

During the period between 2007-2012, the organization was able to overcome many challenges through collaborative negotiations. For example, the market crash of 2008 created a financial crisis and restructuring. In 2010, the flood came and created significant challenges, yet we kept working together to solve our problems and managed to win another meaningful Best Orchestral Performance Grammy Award in the same year! Our continued collaborations brought us other good things. In 2012, we returned to Carnegie Hall under Giancarlo Guerrero. We also achieved a milestone salary level that made me feel like I had won another job without having to win an audition in another city. While every solution to every problem was not ideal from everyone’s perspective, I started to relax and enjoy my musical life here. I stopped taking auditions for other orchestras and put down some serious roots in Nashville.

In 2013 we had another big crisis, a situation that we still work to improve today. Yet at the time, everyone made difficult decisions in our formal negotiation process that showed the strength of our commitment to the organization, and the result was a four-year agreement reached in 2014. It is

a hard reality to learn about the negotiation process - that we never get everything we want. It is a bit like buying a house. Both the seller and the buyer have goals and a wish list, and they negotiate with each other for an agreement they can each live with and use to build the future they want. Possibly because we maintained a positive attitude in tough times, our resulting negotiations in 2018 were relatively amicable and achieved a fair four-year contract that put us in a leadership role in several areas. Our most recent negotiations in 2021 were subjected to the realities of our 2020 pandemic world. That situation challenged everyone more than we could have imagined. Most importantly, we survived to negotiate another day.

Now we enter into negotiations again. I expect all parties have done their best to prepare for the task at hand. We know that we will not agree on everything. The nature of negotiations is inherently adversarial, but that does not mean the process is a bad thing. It is a well-used method to solve problems and prevent future conflicts. In this case: Two sides with a common purpose will come together around a table. They will each bring their own needs and interests, and do their best to advocate for their goals. That is a good thing. We can find common ground. We can creatively solve problems together. We can maintain good working relationships, even in the midst of feeling all the emotions that come with the process, because we understand the emotions mean we care.

Many orchestras have experienced great success in their recent negotiations and I hope we will join them soon. I am comforted by the fact that no matter what has transpired here, the one thing we have always done, is continue to talk to each other.