Major: This is April 12, 2007. I’m Jean Major, and I’m talking with James Babcock about the history of the Virginia Symphony. When did your involvement with the Virginia Symphony begin?
Babcock: I came down here in 1977. I moved to this area to run the First Virginia Bank, and, being a bank president, I was automatically invited to join a number of community boards, including that of the Virginia Symphony. In fact, just as a little side anecdote, before I came down here, I was working in northern Virginia, and I received a phone call, and this voice said, “Hello, my name is Edie Harrison. I run the Virginia Opera, and I understand you’re coming down in a month to take over the bank, and I want you to be on my board.” So, as usual Edie was ahead of the curve on many things and …when I came as president, when my chairman, who was Senator Edward Breeden, a very important state legislator, heard about that, he said, “Oh, you have to be on the symphony board.” [Laughter] So, he nominated me for that, and that was in 1977, that I started on the symphony board.
Major: I know you’re still involved with the symphony, but are you still on the board? Babcock: No, I’m not. I left the board some years ago, and I’m involved in the sense that as a former president, they keep me on their list of emeritus board members. But a few years ago when people stopped answering my telephone calls, I decided it was time to stop trying to raise money, and so I don’t do that anymore. But, and I also don’t go to many concerts anymore because I’ve become progressively more deaf, so I don’t enjoy them as much as I used to, but I still buy tickets, and I still make a contribution.
Major: Sure. During the time when you were on the board, what were the various roles that you played?
Babcock: Well, first I was board member . . . I was put in charge of the search committee after the merger of the three symphonies in 1979, which was handled incidentally, by Robert Sutton who deserves a lot of credit in this history. Bob was—if I might elaborate on that a little—Bob was the managing partner here of Peat Marwick Mitchell, a CPA firm, and he was one of the early regionalists in this area. For example, he went on to create the merger of the five Southside Chambers of Commerce—to create the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce, a very big step ahead for the region. And he—I don’t know whether he was the
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one that had the vision of merging the Norfolk Symphony, the Peninsula Symphony, and the Virginia Beach Pops. I don’t know whether that was his idea, but he certainly was the one who led the negotiation of it all, I believe, and the practical planning of how to do it. And so, after that, we had three symphonies in the so-called Virginia Orchestra Group, and we had three conductors. And so, part of the early history was reshuffling the artistic leadership. The first thing was the gentleman who was the conductor of the Peninsula Symphony immediately stepped aside because he knew that he really didn’t have the credentials to lead an improved symphony. He’s a wonderful person, and he was very, very strongly in favor of the merger. I forget his name . . . but he was a delightful guy.
Major: Cary McMurran
Babcock: Yes, a wonderful person. So, that took care of that, and that left us with Russell Stanger to head the classical orchestra and Walter Noona to handle the pops, and that was fine. After a little while, I don’t know, a year or so, it was decided that Russell Stanger ought to retire. And so I had—getting back to your question—I was given the responsibility of the search committee for the new conductor. There were a number of people on the board who served on that. The upshot was, we hired Richard Williams, and Richard was an exciting step ahead. He was younger then; he was rather charismatic on the podium. I don’t think anybody would accuse Richard of being a world-class conductor, but he certainly was good. He was good for the orchestra; he challenged them, and part of the challenge was that it was clear to the musicians that we were going to try to improve the quality of the orchestra. And that led to some resistance on the part of some of the older musicians who felt their positions threatened. And that was really the source, then, of conflict because Richard then was accused of . . . doing favoritism with what musicians who were clearly the better ones, the section heads and so on, he seemed to kowtow to them somewhat anyway. So, there began to be this dissention. And, unfortunately, that and the rivalry between Richard and Walter Noona led to the need to invite Richard to leave the orchestra after a few years. So, that’s, that’s part of the difficulties and stresses and strains that were involved in putting this new organization together, but Richard made a fantastic contribution; there’s no doubt about it. His programming, for example, was just wonderful, and so on. At that time, too, we—Bob Sutton in the first year hired a gentleman, I forget his name, as the general manager. He failed because he lost control of the budget, and we ended up that first year, the Virginia Orchestra Group, we ended up with a $100,000 deficit, and so he had to be released. And at that time then we hired Jerry Haynie, and Jerry then did a magnificent job as general manager for some years. So, there were these stresses and strains in the early years, but we clearly got on the map; the public supported us; we survived; we began to have financial deficits, but one of the wonderful things about the symphony has been that, over the years in this bumpy road of moving ahead to major symphony status, we have had financial problems, but whenever that has happened the board meetings are always better attended. It’s been very clear that the board
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leadership in the region has supported this symphony, and that has been a wonderful thing to behold. And as far as our financial stresses are concerned, to me it’s like a growth company. You borrow money to grow, and that’s what we’ve done. Now, over the next few years we have to pay off that accumulated deficit. Anyway, that’s a long rambling story to answer your question but that’s—my role there was as an active board member, raising money, and then running that search committee that hired Richard Williams.
Major: Okay, okay. I don’t remember, were you ever president of the board?
Babcock: Yes, a few years later I became president. I forget the exact year. But that’s, I’m sure, on some program. The information is somewhere.
Major: We can find that information. It sounds to me from the things I’ve read and other people I’ve talked to that a great deal was handled by the executive committee, and the people who were not on the executive committee often were somewhat removed from hard decisions or from a lot of things. Can you tell me anything more about the executive committee? Am I right, that the executive committee handled a great deal?
Babcock: Well, yes, and that, of course, is very typical of most organizations where particularly there may be a need to have a rather large board of directors. And that is certainly the case with a regional community organization like the symphony where you need, in order to represent all the communities and so forth, you need to have people from all over the region. So, it was a large board, and of course a large board cannot effectively manage the day-to-day operations. The executive committee itself, as I recall, was fairly large although I don’t know the number. But that’s true that . . . some board members were not as plugged in to everyday affairs as others were. But again, that’s very typical of large organizations where there is always, in a community organization, one of the functions of leadership is to find out who are the members of the board who are willing to really do some work and who are the ones who simply want to sit around, and that’s normal.
Major: It is, I agree. So, how hands-on was this board?
Babcock: Well, that’s a good point, very much so. When we go back to those early years, we have to remember the orchestra was a so-called per service organization. It was not a full-time, salaried organization. And one of the things we discussed for a number of years was how were we going to move ahead to put some of the musicians on salary, which is called creating a core orchestra, where you pick out maybe 30 of the 60 or 70 musicians. You pick out 30 to put on salary because, say, as string players they’re going to always be involved, or as key section heads of the reeds and the winds and so on, they are going to be at every concert. So, those are the ones you want to create a core orchestra out of. So, it was a per service orchestra. We have never had, not even today, we
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do not have a staff—numbers of people on the staff comparable to most symphonies of our size. We have always been shorthanded in the office. This is very Virginia, this is very Hampton Roads. It’s just the way we tend to operate; it’s very efficient. So, back in those days initially some board members did a lot of work. I recall particularly people like Minette Cooper and Clay Barr—Clay Hofheimer Barr, were the kind of people who would pitch in when we would have a shortage of staff, and of course the board—certain core board members were very, very active in the fund raising, which was our key function -- policy and fund raising. So it was very much of a volunteer run organization. And the interesting part of the story is all the challenges involved in moving from that kind of administration and that kind of leadership and that kind of orchestra to where we are today, where we have a major symphony orchestra with a much larger staff, a huge budget, and much more professional artistic leadership, and much more professional management leadership. So, the involvement today of the average board member is in the nitty-gritty—you know stuffing envelopes and answering phones and doing all that sort of stuff -- is much less than it was in those days.
Major: There are people who have been on that board for many years; can you explain that pattern?
Babcock: Sure, it’s . . . you can say it’s a bad habit because they don’t have anything better to do with their time, but I’d more likely consider it as simply a fact that, whether they have musical skills or not, almost all of them out of their childhood had some sort of experience which oriented them to orchestral music, classical or pops. And they’re lovers of the art form. They understand the need for a community to have its own resident orchestra, not only to do concerts on the regular season but to do festivals and to provide music teachers and so on. So, there has been among that core leadership, a very profound understanding of the role of a community orchestra regardless of, of its caliber, whether it’s community or metropolitan or whatever the different levels up to major symphony. It is one of the—in the United States and in Europe, it is one of the key cultural organizations in a community just like the libraries and the universities and so forth. And so, people have understood that and . . . had great joy in coming together to work on the practical problems of supporting an orchestra.
Major: You’ve mentioned some of the things that these people have brought to the situation. Are there other things that made some of these long term members particularly effective? Babcock: Well, one of the things that the symphony was always careful to do was to have a board that had not only people with musical knowledge, and knowledge of orchestras as such, teachers, so on, but also they recruited business people. People with organizational skills, accounting skills, financial skills, and I’d put myself in that category, although I’m a recovering violinist and played in symphony orchestras when I was a young person. In fact, I was
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concertmaster of the Princeton University Orchestra when I was in college, and so on. I . . . my particular role, I think, on the board was helping with the organizational side of things, and there are several things I’m very proud of that I did when I was president, whatever that period of time was.
Major: Such as…. Babcock: For example, we did the first long range planning for the symphony. This would be in the early eighties some time, would be my guess, or mid-eighties, along in there somewhere. We did a long range plan and that resulted in certain things. For example, while the idea of a core orchestra as being our next step ahead, putting some of the members on some kind of salary, and I would say a partial salary because all the musicians core or per service, had to continue with outside work to support themselves. That idea was in the long range plan, I think, probably with Jerry Haynie, someone like that who brought that to our attention, but I was very proud that we implemented that during my tenure . . . so that was the second big thing. The other thing was that there had been talk for many years of about how we really ought to have a foundation with an endowment. So, one of the things I went ahead and got done was I got with one of the attorneys who had been a previous president of the Norfolk Symphony, and we drafted articles of incorporation, by-laws for the Virginia Symphony Foundation. So we created that, and then I worked with development consultants to create the first big capital campaign for the symphony in order to fund the endowment, and that was a five million dollar campaign that we did. It was an outstanding campaign. Henry Clay Hofheimer agreed to be the nominal chairman of the campaign, and so forth; that helped a lot to bring major contributions. And that was a huge success except for one thing was that we had raised about three million dollars, and then the musicians decided that because we were raising all this money that it might be a good idea for them to go on strike so they could get their salaries up, and of course that simply killed the fund raising campaign. But another thing about the campaign that was very, very interesting was that we went to the state and asked for a contribution to the endowment, capital funds for the endowment, and the fellows in the state government said, “Well you know we —in the legislature—they said, “Well, you know we really don’t do that sort of thing.” But, wonderful, ole Clancy Holland, who had been the mayor of Virginia Beach and was a state senator at that time, Clancy came up with a wonderful idea. He said, “We have a scheme in the universities where we provide matching funds for the universities to hire eminent professors.” So, he borrowed that concept, and the law that he got passed said that any performing arts organization in Virginia that creates an endowment can have from the state subject to annual appropriation, and the funds had not been appropriated every year but they have been from time to time, can receive through the Virginia Arts Commission an annual grant that matches the income of the foundation on its endowment. Now that’s equivalent to doubling the principle of the foundation. So, without actually contributing the money, they stand ready to double the income of any performing arts foundation. That law is
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still on the books . . . I know that the Barter Theatre has made use of it. I know the Virginia Symphony has benefited from it over a number of years though not every year. In stringent times, of course, it’s normally not funded, but there it is, and that was a wonderful achievement which is entirely credited to Senator Holland. So those were some of the things, those were big things that we did—was creating the foundation, raising the money for the endowment, starting the core orchestra, and then dealing with the strike, which I did not have much to do with . . . Patsy . . .
Major: Blackwell Babcock: Patsy Blackwell, she was then Patsy somebody else, she later married Bill Blackwell, but she and Bill—one or the other of them were officers, and they dealt with the union people. And one of the big things they did then was to bring musicians onto the board of directors in order to underscore the fact that in fact the board and the musicians have the same objectives. The objective of the board always was to move the salaries of the musicians ahead because that’s the way that you can hire good musicians. If you want a major symphony orchestra, that’s what you have to do. When we did the long-range plan, we talked about the possibility of becoming a major symphony orchestra, and we did not commit to that in the plan at that time. It was a five-year plan, and we said, “That’s too ambitious.” But that discussion helped everybody raise their sights. It also had, again, the unfavorable result that, in having that discussion, it made some of the older musicians nervous, and so they began to make trouble, and again, I think that was one of the motives for the strike; the general kind of dissatisfaction--nervousness among the musicians. Their skepticism about this—the usual community leaders, they really don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re talking big stuff here about a major symphony, and, boy, we’ve got a long way to go, and besides I don’t want to lose my job as third oboist in this organization. So, the financial strain was always there; the musicians were always after us to raise more money, and so there were struggles.
Major: Sure. Can I ask just one question about starting the foundation? We now, several weeks ago, had a fascinating afternoon with Guil Ware one day, and he talked about starting the foundation. Babcock: Yes.
Major: Was he the person you worked with? Babcock: Guil was the attorney, yes, that I worked with.
Major: Okay, okay. Babcock: Yes, absolutely, and I’m sure he perhaps has mentioned it to you that both he and I set out with very strong goal, which was to insulate the endowment
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from the operating problems of the symphony. Many symphonies in the United States have failed because they get into the habit of covering the annual operating deficits by drawing down funds from their endowment. We said, we’re not going to get into that because that’s, that’s a bad game of some symphonies. That was the negotiation every year with the union was, well we can’t increase your salaries but, well okay we’ll do it by dipping into the endowment. This was very bad business, and we said, “We’re not going to have that,” and so we wrote into the charter that the funds of the endowment were not to be used to cover operating deficits of the symphony. Now, in our mind that meant that in no way, shape, or form were the funds of the endowment to be involved in dealing with operating problems of the symphony. But, of course we had to put in weasel words that said unless the donors, not the board or the endowment but the donors, agree that it’s necessary to do this. Our concept was if you’re going to raise all this money and people are going to give you capital funds like that, that part of being—having these funds in trust for the community is the notion that you would support a symphony but not necessarily this bunch of people, you know, if they couldn’t run it properly. Well, the upshot is over the years that, that—those provisions have actually been a lifesaver because—although we got into periods where the endowment was used to help keep the symphony in business, loans were made rather than grants; the assets were pledged to support loans from banks. So, it was kind of used to support operations, but the actual money was never granted.
Major: Right, right. Babcock: And then subsequent campaigns were held to raise money to pay back those loans to the foundation.
Major: The last thing I’ve been wondering about the foundation, who manages it? Is it in the Norfolk Foundation or what? Babcock: The foundation is managed by a board of directors. The directors are drawn partly from the symphony board and partly from the community at large, and specifically are not to be members of the symphony board. And in fact, Guil Ware and I originally proposed there should be more community directors than symphony directors. That was not acceptable to the board of the symphony. The result of that is that, in accounting terms, the principle of the endowment because it is controlled by the symphony board, has to be carried on the statements of the Virginia Symphony, which sort of gives it the appearance of having capital which is actually not supposed to be a capital fund. So, those are some of the wrinkles that are involved with the thing. So that board manages it. The actual investment management is handled indeed by the Norfolk Foundation.
Major: Okay. Who were the executive directors that you worked with? You mentioned Jerry Haynie.
[8] Babcock: Yes.
Major: And what other executive directors did you work with? Babcock: There were two others. There was, in the first year of the Virginia Orchestra group, that gentleman whose name I can’t remember, who was our first hire and the one that ran the budget into the red. I forget his name, but he was a nice chap but turned out not to have the necessary management control. The next one, I forget his name. I shouldn’t forget his name because the experience was unforgettable. I led the search committee that hired him. He wrote a very interesting letter. He said, “You probably can’t afford me.” And we went through all these letters from different people, most of whom were managers of symphonies and so on. This chap, I believe had been the marketing officer for the Met—something like that—I mean he had some interesting credentials. I forget his name, but it will turn up in your research. You know who I’m talking about. Well, he came and interviewed. He made a fine impression, and everybody got excited about him, and we hired him. The man was a consummate salesman. There’s no doubt about it; he did a fantastic marketing job for the symphony. He built up the subscriptions which was what—the reason that we’d hired him. He also, however, did that by overspending the budget. Finally, one of the things that he did in his second or third year was that some of the monies that came in that were contributed to be in the endowment, because those contributions did come through the symphony office, he diverted them into the operating fund in order to cover the excessive spending that he was doing.
Major: Oh, good night. Babcock: And as a result of that, we lost the support of some major donors in the community who said, “We will never give money to the symphony again.” So, that was a very unfortunate result. Nevertheless, he deserves credit for having built up the audiences, which is what we wanted.
Major: Sure. Babcock: But he had to be let go, of course, and he went on to other scrapes elsewhere. So, whatever his name was. Then, gosh who came after him? There was another very good man who came, very sort of colorless kind of fellow but who did a fine job. About that time after he was in there, in the nineties . . . I retired from the board. So, those were the people I worked with. Of all of them, the one for whom I have the highest regard was Jerry Haynie. Jerry was a prince, and he moved on after the musicians went on strike. They, in their stresses and strains, they made complaints against Jerry which were really unjustified, but very human. And so he decided it was time—that he was not as
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effective as he should be, and he decided to move on to another development position up in Richmond, but we miss Jerry very much. He was a fine, fine guy.
Major: You came here, came to this symphony board at the end of the Russell Stanger period. Can you characterize the Stanger period? Babcock: Well, Russell was music director of the symphony, of the Norfolk Symphony Orchestra for many years. And . . . he did an excellent job, I believe. I worked with him only a few years, during the last years of the Norfolk Symphony and the first years of the Virginia Orchestra Group. Russell was a delightful person. He was a little less organized, I think some people would say he was a little less organized about some things than other people, but the man was all soul. I mean he simply had this beautiful personality as an individual. And after he left the symphony, I was delighted to see that he found conducting engagements very much in Japan, and he wrote music and continued to have really a fine career after working with us. But the feeling, I think, was that while Russell had been here many years, we had this sense in the early years of the Virginia Orchestra Group that we want to go up the road, want to do a better job, we need a better conductor. I never found anything to criticize in his conducting; I don’t know enough about it. But that was the sense was that we needed to move on and hire someone else, which is what we did; we hired Richard Williams.
Major: You’ve talked about Richard Williams, about his musicianship and so on. Is there anything more to add about the Richard Williams period or about his departure? Babcock: I don’t think so, I think that . . . just those—because we were in this growth mode, and there was this talk of improving the quality of the orchestra and in some respects Richard’s own behavior was not—he would have had to be, you know, a saint to have avoided any sort of qualitative remarks about any of the musicians, but as the conductor responsible for upgrading the orchestra and making decisions about which musicians could move ahead with the orchestra and which ones could not, it would have been simply inhuman and amazing if he had not made remarks about some of them, which were not well received by some of their friends. And so, there grew up within the board an anti-Richard movement because some of the board members had very long-standing relationships with some of those musicians. Just one particular instance—is … again I’m so old I can’t remember names but the gentleman who, who was the timpanist and who later on . . .
Major: Sidney Berg. Babcock: Sidney, good ole Sidney Berg, well Sidney, of course, was an absolute fixture in the community, in the region but particularly in the Norfolk school system. He had been the music director there. We had members on our board who had studied under Sidney in the Norfolk school system. He was a
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beloved fixture, in that sense, as a community contributor, and so on, and so on. Now, I don’t think anybody accused him of being the greatest timpanist in the world, but he certainly reached his acme when he later on created that wonderful band that he did; symphonic band. And that was his forte, and he conducted that, and he raised the money for it and provided tremendous energetic leadership. In any case, it was clear to anybody who was looking at the Virginia Symphony back in those days that we probably at some point were going to need a better timpanist. And well, Richard’s efforts, Richard Williams’ efforts to deal with that particular situation, that became one of the bones of contention within the board. And so, you know these things were not always on the surface and so on, but these sorts of stresses and strains were there underneath and eventually they boiled over to where the board, board members said, “You know Richard really is a disruptive element now among the musicians. He’s not in a position to provide the leadership anymore.” And so they gave me the unenviable task of going and telling him that we really needed for him to move on, which I found distressing, but of course I did that. That was an organizational decision.
Major: Sure. How about Winston Dan Vogel? Babcock: Winston was really interesting. Of course, he was hired by a search committee, a subsequent search committee that was chaired by Minette Cooper. Winston, of course, was an Israeli; he was a scholarly conductor. One of his most impressive behaviors was that he would spend hours in the Library of Congress researching old music. And he was among the conductors who competed for the position. He was clearly one of the exciting candidates. Winston, I think, improved the level of performance of the orchestra. He was a step ahead, but he was difficult because, not being an American, he had problems working with the musicians. One of his problems was that he would come late sometimes to rehearsals; this is not done in American orchestras. The conductor doesn’t come late to rehearsals, and then he would run them overtime. The standard in an American orchestra is, is if you are a per-service orchestra, which many of the musicians still were, the standard is, and it still is even with a salaried orchestra, is the service, a service is a 2 ½ hour chunk of time, and concerts are organized around that, and so are rehearsals. And when you get to the end of the 2 ½ hours in a rehearsal, the union guy speaks up and says, “Time!” And that’s it. They all pack up and go home. It doesn’t make any difference where you are in the rehearsal, if the conductor hasn’t used that 2 ½ hours completely, it’s over with. Well that was--Winston was always running over rehearsals. So—there were some stresses there but . . . that’s about all that I know about it, and I enjoyed his concerts. You know he was again, a step ahead , and I don’t—I can’t tell you anything really about why it became time for him to move on, but then the next search committee was run by Clay Barr, and she came up with JoAnn Falletta, who of course, has just made a marvelous career. Now it’s over ten years since JoAnn has been at the helm, and of course, she again has, has . . . established herself in the respect to the musicians, and this is most important in the leadership of an American symphony orchestra. And
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they—she is the first conductor, I think, that we’ve had, who truly had the complete respect of all the musicians as far as I know, and justifiably so, and of course she’s delightful on the podium and as a personality; she’s a very warm person individually with people. So, we’re very fortunate to have her, and that probably can’t go on forever. But she has been most important in stabilizing the artistic side of the organization over the past few years. We’ve continued to have money problems over the years, and we still have a large deficit, but our latest management, Carla Johnson, after, after, what’s his name, the WHRO . . .
Major: John Morrison. Babcock: John, John, yeah, of course, how can I forget his name? John came in as an interim manager. We were having a series of deficits under the then manager who did not have prior orchestra experience; he had been a management consultant. He was not doing a good job at all, and so finally he was let go, and John volunteered to come in and run the thing for a year or so, and he got it in the black. Then, Carla Johnson the past few years has kept it there, and so the thing now is financially on a much stronger basis.
Major: How did the symphony become a nationally recognized orchestra? Babcock: Well, as I understand the story, and this is all hearsay from my point of view because I was not involved with it, but several years ago, and I don’t know how many years that is now, maybe it’s getting to be four or five years ago, John Lindberg, who is up there in the back with the percussion people, who’s been a fixture ever since I can remember, he was always with the orchestra. John went to the annual ICSOM Conference, International Conference of Symphony Orchestras and something or other, ICSOM, and that is the organization that certifies which symphonies are major symphony orchestras. They have certain criteria of quality and of budget. We were a little short on the budgetary end; we didn’t quite meet their budgetary requirement but John was able to persuade them at that meeting that we certainly were playing up to the quality of a major symphony orchestra, and I guess that simply in Virginia, since we always do things on the cheap, they ought to overlook the budgetary requirement and let us qualify. That designation is an official designation of ICSOM, and he had obtained it for us, and it is a credential that I think is exceedingly important for us all to publicize. You know, to explain to people in the community that we have a major symphony orchestra. We don’t have any major league sports teams, but we have a major symphony orchestra, and we have an outstanding opera, we have a great stage company, and we have great musical theatre and a ballet that’s coming along, and this is now the arts capital of Virginia. And this is an important part of the Virginia Symphony story that, starting with the creation of the Chrysler Museum back in the 1960s, this area began to acquire credentials in culture and arts that have been steadily built by this dedicated community of, of, of people who are interested in culture and the arts—the university people, the citizens like myself and others who have steadily
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supported this growth over the years, and truly now I think you can say that Hampton Roads is the arts capital of Virginia because of the quality of these organizations that have been put in place and supported financially.
Major: About the process for the merger, what, what was the process that led to the merger? Babcock: Jean, I have to tell you that I don’t have a strong recollection about that at all. There may be some other old hands who would remember that, but I don’t –particularly I know that Bob Sutton was very much involved with it. I really don’t—I can’t give you any detail that’s worth anything.
Major: Okay. One of the groups that this project has dealt with a good deal has been the Symphony League and its antecedents, the Women’s Auxiliary and so on. What can you tell us about the contributions of the Symphony League? What has the Symphony League contributed to the viability of the symphony? Babcock: Well, initially I think that the League tended to avoid any sort of fundraising role years ago, and so it was a social organization. It was almost completely composed of women, it was a sort of a traditional women’s auxiliary kind of thing growing out of habits of an older generation. And I would say its principle benefit back in those days was simply one of communicating, networking and so on throughout the community, recruiting on the female side new supporters for the symphony. They probably made efforts with respect to ticket sales, and that sort of thing. But as the symphony and the board of the symphony became interested in moving the organization forward, the League was persuaded to take on more significant responsibilities and in fundraising particularly. And . . . they did various things but the most important activity which was taken in hand and has continued to be in the hands of what’s her name, a wonderful horsewoman.
Major: Winnie Baldwin. Babcock: Winnie! Winnie Baldwin, yes. See, I’m so old, I’m terrible on names. Winnie, bless her heart, Winnie has stuck with the raffle, the Virginia Symphony Raffle, and they started in with that, and I must say I made a little contribution to the logic of how they do that. This is my banking experience. What I told them was, “Look,” I said, “You can’t sell these five and ten dollar raffle tickets and raise any money.” And the reason is your sales force is limited in number, the number of your women who are willing to go out there and talk to your friends and sell the tickets, and so you’re only going to be able to sell a number--certain number of tickets. I mean you’re not going to sell tickets to 100,000 people in the region even though you’ve over a million people living here. And so . . . instead of selling these five and ten dollar tickets, you should have a minimum ticket price that is more like what the people you are talking to can really afford if you lean on them, and that’s a hundred dollars. And so your pitch can be that we’re selling
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only a thousand tickets. They’re a hundred dollars, but think of your, your chances of winning this thing are much improved. It’s not like the Virginia Lottery where you’re buying a ticket, and there are millions of other tickets. There are only a thousand tickets; you have a wonderful chance of winning a substantial prize. So, that was my contribution to the logic of how the raffle should be operated, and they’ve stuck with that ever since. It’s a wonderful event, and it receives—it’s again, one of these things that leverages the image of the symphony with the community by reaching out.
Major: How serious was the investigation of a merger with the Richmond Symphony in the late eighties? Babcock: Well, from my point of view, not serious at all. I don’t--I was not directly involved with it, but to the extent I recall anything about it, at the time I counseled against it and would counsel against it under any circumstances. The question came up in another form a few years later whether should the. . . ballet here merge with the Richmond Ballet, and again the answer is no. The problem is, is one of logistics when you get into it. Well, suppose that you’re going to have a merger of so-called two orchestras, what’s the purpose of it? Well, the purpose of it has to be to create a single orchestra and save the money. Well, where are these people going to live? How—where are you going to hold rehearsals? You know, what will happen is it’s inevitably either going to be a Richmond orchestra when you get through, or it’s going to be a Hampton Roads orchestra when you get through, or in somebody’s wildest dreams, it’s going to be a Williamsburg orchestra in the middle, which is impractical. The logistical aspect of it simply would defeat it, in my opinion. Now, the Virginia Opera is a different case. The Virginia Opera is headquartered here; it’s always been run out of here. They have created support units in the other cities, and they take the thing, and they go up there, and they perform in northern Virginia and Richmond and so on. But that is—that is a trip. That is an organization that is run out of here that visits around and that’s a different kettle of fish, and there never was an opera elsewhere to merge with the one that’s here.
Major: After so many years, what led to the orchestra being put on a salary basis? Babcock: Well, the drive for quality. If you want good musicians, you have to pay . . . to pay a salary. This is an interesting question because we had to go through a transition period which inevitably created, during the period, created a stress for the musicians, how is that? Well, we were each year or at least each union negotiation, every few years, we were increasing the salaries; raising more money, increasing the salaries, and this was a goal of both the union and the board. You know, we would have these tough union negotiations, but the only issue was how much can we really afford to do this time. So what you had for a number of years was you had some musicians on salary, some still on the per service fee. Those on salary were not earning enough, even though gradually it was increased. They weren’t earning enough to make a complete livelihood out
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of it, so they had to do other gigs; they had to belong to other groups, they had to teach; they had to do other things. And their lives really were pretty complicated and a—I mean it’s—the life of a symphony musician is complicated enough with all the rehearsals and things and performances they had to do without those additional burdens, so it was very tough there for a period I’m sure of a decade or so where we were making this transition to finally a fully salaried orchestra where the primary source of income was the Virginia Symphony. I believe we have reached that; I believe we are sustaining that. Certainly the orchestra in recent years has, the quality of its performance reflects that, and we certainly have had reasonably good labor relations with the union, which suggests that we are meeting certain tests with respect to devoting an adequate percentage of the total budget to their compensation and things like that. So, there will always be pressure to increase those salaries, I mean that’s part of the dynamic of that kind of organization when you have a union. But the recognition that if we wanted to have a major symphony orchestra, we would have to pay for it has always been there, and that’s what we assiduously worked for year in and year out.
Major: Are there other things that you imagined that we would ask about or that you wanted to be sure to talk about in this interview? Babcock: Well, I think we really covered all the bases. The . . . you gave me--I thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to talk about what I consider my own achievements when I was in the leadership there, and I appreciate that. You know, there’s just no doubt—this is an interesting project, it’s worth doing because when you look at the structure of an arts community and a cultural community which has so much to do with the quality of life in any area, and that’s what I look at as someone who is a regionalist, as a banker, who’s done business throughout the region, who’s interested in seeing that our economy grows steadily, and that people’s incomes are improved and that life is worth living here so that maybe my own children will come back and live here. Having a symphony orchestra as part of the community, that is recognized as not some group of strangers but as people who live here and work here in the same way that we look on the Navy as part of our community, they are our neighbors, is simply—it is the most vital of the performing arts organizations. And of course, one of the wonderful milestones that we didn’t talk about yet was the point where we finally were able to persuade the Virginia Opera to put Virginia Symphony musicians in their pit. Now Peter Mark had always hired some the better ones, but he preferred to bring many musicians down from New York, but finally in his judgment our symphony reached the level of quality and his budget reached the level of constraint where it made sense for him to do a contract with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra to provide that service. And that’s a big example of how the symphony reaches beyond what it does in its own concerts series to providing services to the community. And the festival performances are very important, the educational work that the symphony does is very important and so on, so it is a primary institution in the performing arts in most communities, and that’s true here.
[15] Major: Thank you very much, a wonderful conversation.
Babcock: You’re welcome. I enjoyed it very much, thank you.
END OF INTERVIEW
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