Comment on Management Disarray and Blocked Contract Negotiations at San Antonio Symphony, by Mike Greenberg, IncidentLight.com, December 23, 2017

Posted on IncidentLight Facebook page:

 

It is bizarre that, so far as I can tell, the San Antonio Express-News has reported exactly nothing about the stalled contract talks between the musicians and management of the San Antonio Symphony. 

But there's an intriguing clue to the source of the problem in the newspaper's interview, published Dec 18, with J. Bruce Bugg Jr., chair of Symphonic Music for San Antonio, the new non-profit he established to take control of the orchestra from the Symphony Society of San Antonio, which apparently continues to exist.

In the interview, Bugg says: "We realized there were recurring financial difficulties at the San Antonio Symphony. So the Tobin Endowment, the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation, and Charles Butt and H-E-B, together with the city and the county, we’re really the largest funders. We were all frustrated. So I offered to start a new 501(c)(3) organization called Symphonic Music for San Antonio. The frustrating thing is the incumbent company is still struggling to discover how many liabilities they have. Until we can figure out the transition, the three organizations have taken it upon themselves to fund 100 percent of the expenses. The old company is getting 100 percent of all the revenues, and that’s not a sustainable business model." 

The takeaway: Bugg and his compadres at Symphonic Music for San Antonio – Dya Campos of H-E-B and Tullos Wells of the Kronkosky Foundation – failed to establish clear terms, in advance and in writing, for the transition of authority. It was an astonishing failure of due diligence. Had the three been looking for the ideal way to sabotage contract negotiations while evading responsibility and alienating much of the old donor base, they succeeded. 

I am not convinced that was their aim, however. (I might, of course, be wrong.) In his roles as chairman of the Tobin Endowment and founding chair of the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, Bugg deserves a lot of the credit for making sure that the new theater would have great acoustics for a symphony orchestra – and it is in fact one of the best new (or old) concert halls in the country. That's a rare and difficult achievement for a multipurpose hall. I don't think Bugg would have insisted on an acoustical strategy that favored symphonic music if he had intended to reduce the orchestra in size, pay or stature. 

But it's indisputable that the transition has been badly bungled. It was already indisputable weeks ago when it became obvious that ceding the symphony's marketing to the Tobin Center staff had resulted in shamefully low attendance. The withdrawal of both the old and new managing entities from contract talks, together with the confusion about who, if anyone, is in charge, makes the symphony front office look like the Trump White House. And that's on Bugg's head, too.