This interview was conducted in the Old Dominion University Perry Library on June 7, 2007 with Dr. Jean Major, University Librarian Emeritus and Virginia Symphony League Archivist.

Louis Ryan

Interview with Louis Ryan

June 7, 2007
Perry Library, Old Dominion University

Interviewer: Dr. Jean Major

Listen to interview

Major:  This is June 7, 2007. This is Jean Major. I’m with Louis Ryan.  We’re going to talk about the history of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and its board.  Can you tell me how your involvement with the symphony began.

Ryan:  It began in the ‘70s, the second half of the ‘70s.  I was trying to remember who got me involved.  I think it was a fellow named of Riley Johnson, and I had previously been on the board of the Feldman Chamber Music Society. So that, I guess, established my bona fides as somebody who at least was interested in music, and I was asked to be on the board, by whom exactly I don’t know, although I think maybe Riley was behind it, but I don’t know that for a fact. Based on looking up that one piece of information today, that was 1977.

Major:  All right.  You started in ’77, and how long did you serve on the board?

Ryan:  Actually, it was ’79, and I served until ’80, based on an old copy. I misspoke when I said ’77, so it was ’79 to ’89.

Major:  All right.  During that ten-year period, what roles did you play on the board?

Ryan:  Well, my active period was from the beginning up through 1984.  I was the president, which was, then, the title given to the senior level, the senior-most volunteer person, as opposed to now. I think maybe the president is a staff person, as is the chairman of the board. I was the—if I remember correctly, the title leading up to being president was vice-president.  I don’t really remember how many years I had that title.  I was on the executive committee and the finance committee for some portions of that time, but I couldn’t tell you exactly when.

Major:  Okay.

Ryan:  After—after I was president, my-- you know, you’re always involved in fundraising and that sort of stuff, but as is befitting former presidents, they should go quietly into their retirement, and then the reason I got off the board in ’89 was because I went on to the allocations committee of the Business Consortium for Arts Support, and so continuing to be on the board of the symphony would have been viewed as a conflict, so—but just showing how silly conflict rules are, of course, my first love was still the symphony whether I was on the board or not.

Major:    Right. [Laughter]  Can you tell me something about how the board was organized or structured?

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Ryan:  It was a—I’m unable to remember the size of the board.  It was neither tiny nor gigantic.  It was probably in the 20-some, I would guess, and it grew during the time I was associated with the symphony.  I think really, just about the time I came on the board, it merged with the Virginia Beach Symphony and the Peninsula Symphony to form a camel with three humps, and one of the problematical aspects of that, and there were very many problematical aspects of all that, but one of them was that essentially the boards were just mooshed together.  So, you had representatives who had come from each of the three constituent organizations on the board, and to some degree it took many years for people to get away from the idea of which group they really represented and where their real affections were.  So, you could put them together in the same room, but they didn’t necessarily congeal into a homogeneous board of directors, so—and the whole idea of bringing together those three areas was as problematical as most things are around here when we talk about regional cooperation.  I always say everybody is in favor of regional cooperation unless, of couse, there is money or power involved, and then to hell with it. [Laughter]

Major:   Right.  So during that period, what was the role of the executive committee?

Ryan:  You know, I don’t remember much…I don’t remember it was—My recollection is that it was an organization where the executive committee always met in advance of the board meeting and kind of would help organize, structure the board meetings so that probably a little bit more of the decision making went on at the executive committee level and the ratification went on at the board level.  Though, I would say, the big challenge of the symphony in those days – I hope you laugh because of my emphasis on those days as if something has changed -- was trying to balance the budget.  [Laughter]

Major:    Right.

Ryan:  And trying to dig out of the hole that had been dug in prior years,of previous years of not having balanced budgets.

Major:  Really.

Ryan:  Yes, so optimism always ran ahead of reality, so particularly in the couple of years before I was president and during the years when Clay Barr was president, we really started getting serious about the idea of trying to balance budgets and eliminating accumulated deficits.  And during those years, we had some good, aggressive hard-nose folks on the finance committee, and to a fairly significant degree, the finance committee kind of was the actual source of power because the real issue was the money issue.

Major:  The finance committee managed the money and the budget.  The finance committee was not the fundraising committee.  Is that right?

Ryan:  No, that is correct, yes.

Major:  Okay.

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Ryan:  The trouble with the symphony in those days, and I have no idea whether it has changed or not, was that you would, you would budget in the spring of one year and really even earlier than that.  You would begin to get recommendations from the artistic committee, I think that was the right name, but basically there was a committee that spent its time thinking about what are the right guest artists and that sort of thing and guest conductors.  I guess they would sometimes make recommendations on specific programs, themes, or what have you.  It mostly had to do with guest artists and that would even happen around maybe December-January, and you needed to start booking those people out in advance.  So that the trouble was, you had already locked in the next fiscal year’s expenses nearly six months in advance, certainly four or five months in advance of even ending the preceding fiscal year, which meant you couldn’t even use as a basis you’re your budgeting your results, financial results for the current year, because you just didn’t have them.  You were still only part way through, and while ticket sales tended to be almost entirely subscription sales, you had a fair idea about that, you really didn’t know what your fundraising was going to turn out to be, and  until you got farther in—and of course with so many it probably is still the case, there’s always a last minute push and this and that, so the point of the story is you locked in things that became relatively unchangeable based on optimism, not based on results, and so what happens is that the finance committee, and this was certainly true when I was president—My motto was is if you haven’t done it before, you may not assume  you can do it again or do it in the future, unless you have an incredibly well thought-out plan for why it is you can do something better than you ever did it before.  So if you sold 60 per cent of the season tickets last year, don’t give me a budget that says we’ll going to sell 75 per cent.  Give me a budget with 60 per cent or give me a very good plan.  And it was that kind of thing, and let’s don’t have high-priced guest artists; let’s have low-priced guest artists because symphony orchestras, like ordinary citizens, can’t have what they can’t afford.  Sorry, that’s just the way life is.  So, that was kind of a big deal, so all of a sudden the money was kind of wagging everything, which is kind of what you have to do sometimes to get out of a ditch if you’re in one.

Major:  That is right.

Ryan:  And whereas, the trouble with people who are more artistically oriented is, is that they hear the call of the need to perform certain pieces and do certain things and reach certain levels so strongly that even though they know better, they can easily get into a ditch, and it’s easy for them to believe that lots of people are going to buy tickets because it’s so wonderful; why wouldn’t they?  And even though they didn’t last year, we can just tell them how good it is.  They’ll realize that it’s really that good, but the finance people didn’t go for all that stuff.

Major:  Yes, I’ve been the treasurer of an arts organization, too.  So everything you say is ringing true.  [Laughter]  Other than the executive committee and the finance committee, were there other committees that were particularly active or particularly influential in the way the symphony progressed.

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Ryan:  Yes, there was this artistic committee the exact name of which I don’t remember that made recommendations with respect to more musical matters.  They did not attempt to take over the role of the music director and justify every little tiny thing, but they were involved in kind of the big direction of, particularly maybe guest artists and that kind of thing, they were particularly interested in, but as I say, over time, you know, some of their role may have been a bit blunted by the cold reality of the economics.

Major:  During the time of the merger, you got all these three boards together. How was it decided that who, who served in each role?

Ryan:Well, in many ways there are two aspects of that question, I guess.  One is a professional role in terms of who were conductors and what were their roles within the organization, and we had Walter Noona, Cary McMurran, and Richard Williams was there, if not all of the time I was highly active a good part of it, certainly when I was president.  The largest amount of, the biggest set of problems and the largest amount of energy went into figuring out how to keep those three musical types happy rather than the volunteers and what happened is that the volunteers tended to line up behind the three music directors who became the figureheads for the old organizations to some extent.  My perception of what happened is that there really was not a whole lot of problem, Cary McMurran was an absolute gem of a person, I mean a great gentleman and very gracious, and there was never any issue really with him whatsoever.  Richard Williams, younger, more aggressive, had just really joined the orchestra about the time I got involved, and you know, he had certain ideas of what the role of the symphony conductor should be, as opposed to the Pops conductor, Walter Noona.  Walter Noona, on the other hand, seemed to have aspirations to move up the pecking order in terms of music and so moving from Pops director to maybe a little more symphonic, a little more serious, and so the biggest set of problems was between those two.  And then as they became unhappy—it wasn’t just—and so the old Virginia Beach Symphony Board and basically the old Norfolk Symphony Board would kind of line up behind those issues, and since my—although I didn’t have any prior history with either, with any of the boards;  I always felt that, you know, the Pops was a money-making adjunct of the serious symphony, and so it was the tail, not the dog.  And I only mention that because if anyone is ever looking at this mess, they should know what prejudice I have as I  describe all of this because what I’m now going to say is that the Virginia Beach people were the entire problem.  [Laughs]  And that Walter Noona was the entire problem, and I’m the guy who sat across the desk and fired Walter Noona, so I don’t have to worry about saying that because I’m sure that I would not be Walter Noona’s favorite guy anyway.  But the real difficulty was that Walter and the people that had come into the organization from the Beach were very much score-keepers.  Like, you had more concerts than I had, and yes, but Walter gets more per concert than Richard Williams.  Yes, but he doesn’t have as many concerts.  And it went to that kind of thing, and you’re spending more money on guest artists for the symphony then you are guest artists for the Pops or—and I’m saying all these things as representative examples.   I don’t honestly remember a

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fight over the guest artist thing, but I do remember the one about who has more services versus who has more total money versus what is your value per service and on and on and on.  Eventually that just became a kind of a cancer in the organization, and we tried for a long time to keep it together.  One of the problems was that the musicians would come to various board members and say that Walter’s musicianship was so terrible, and he was such a wretched conductor, that they just—it was—they considered it an insult to their professionalism that they had to be in his organization, and whether that’s true or not—I should mention that, once things all turned to crud, we fired Walter, and Walter then basically sort of like seceded, and his people kind of left the board and went off and reformed the Virginia Beach Pops.

Major:Oh, his people from the Virginia Beach Pops—supporters…

Ryan:  Yeah, I’m not saying every single one of them, but his strongest supporters basically left the Virginia Symphony Board and went off to reform the Virginia Pops as a competitive organization with Walter at its head.  Of course, they didn’t have enough money to have a full-time, sort of salaried—I don’t want to use full-time; it’s questionable what that means, but fulltime—I mean salaried orchestra so they hired musicians on a per-service basis, and many of the musicians who found it absolutely unacceptable to be forced to work with Walter Noona as the Pops conductor for the Virginia Symphony then went to work for him on a per-service basis because, I don’t know why.  Perhaps they were just full of beans when they were talking to us, and it wasn’t so bad at all, but they just didn’t quite like him, or perhaps money talks and BS walks; I don’t know.

Major:  They were extra gigs.

Ryan:  Yeah, they were extra gigs, but I guess the point of story is that somewhere along the line working for him for extra money seemed to be okay whereas working for him for their standard amount of money that they got wasn’t okay.  So, and I say that to temper—it’s quite true that they came to us with those complaints, but you have to wonder about it when, and I’m not saying that every single person that complained, all 100 per cent, but there were numerous people who—and of course, you know how rumors go; somebody comes and says, you know I can’t stand this guy.  They never put it that way; they all say, “I’m really the only one who’s speaking up here, but everybody feels this way.” I mean that’s just how humans say things so who knows where is the truth to all of that was.  But that was during the two big issues that were going on during the really active time when I was there were the early growing pains of trying to put together organizations when you mooshed them together, and they had relatively strong and loyal histories.  And of course, one of the further complications was that, since Richard was new, he didn’t have the same degree of personal loyalty even from the old Norfolk Symphony folks as Walter Noona had. Walter Noona getting a part and I don’t know enough to judge his musicianship one way or the other. I mean, I was at one concert at the museum where he was conducting where they all just had to stop because it fell apart, so I had some doubts about whether he was the best conductor, but maybe the musicians were no good.  You can’t tell;

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there’s a lot of moving parts up there.  [Laughter]  But in any event, there was at least that one ugly moment, but one of the things that Walter was absolutely magnificent was getting people to like him, to want to follow him, to want to support him and to just be total loyal supporters.  He was probably better at that than any other person I’ve ever met. He was just wonderful at it.  So I think, you know, Richard probably was a little frustrated by the fact that Walter had this cadre of total loyalists who would walk through, you know, a flaming building to help Walter out and, you know, Richard, while people were supportive, I don’t think people had time to gain that level of support, and given the atmosphere, it was kind of hard to support anybody if you didn’t have a preexisting loyalty, except for Cary McMurran who always remained above the fray.  He was always a great guy, and the Peninsula folks were, didn’t seem to have the same degree of single city-state chauvinism that the other people—There always these annoyances around here where you had too many meetings on the south side and not enough and, you know, how many concerts.  There was a little bit of it that goes on, but it was mostly sort of a Beach-Norfolk thing.  I didn’t grow up around here, so I had to learn all this after arriving in ’73.  It always struck me that the only thing that really united the region was the people’s annoyance at Norfolk.  [Laughter]  I never could quite understand why they were so annoyed about it, but somehow they, they—and then the only other thing that united the region was an inferiority complex about Richmond, but that has nothing to do with the symphony. [Laughter]

Major:  Except to the extent that, that they talk from time to time about merging with the Richmond Symphony.

Ryan:  Yeah, which I can’t see that there’s any advantage to that. There’s no economy of scale that I’m aware of.

Major:  It didn’t seem to have any.

Ryan:  I mean, for years, of course, they shared the conductor with Richmond in the early days.

Major:  Right, right, right, yeah.

Ryan:  I used to go to the Richmond Symphony and heard him.  I never heard him—well, I guess I did hear him a little bit here in the early days, too.

Major:  In the time that you spent on the board, what were some of the high points of your period of active involvement?

Ryan:Well, without a question, the high point was finishing my year as president with the organization out of debt and in the black, a condition that only lasted for that moment.  [Laughter]  That one June 30th and then we went back in the ditch, but for that one moment, and just to be very clear, those kinds of things, turn-arounds, don’t happen overnight, and it really started under Clay Barr’s leadership.  And we worked very much as a team, but she was a great leader in that regard and really, in a sense, all I had to do on my watch was to not

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screw up the momentum that already built up, but still happening to be, you know, on the, at the helm on the year that happens is still a high point.

Major:  Yes, and the contributing factors were…

Ryan:  Expense control.

Major:Expense control.  How much did audience growth have to do with it or better fundraising?

Ryan:  I am sure we grew audience some, and I’m sure we grew fundraising some, but I think the biggest part of it was expense control.  Now, you know, this is just based on my memory, as you know.

Major:  Well, right.  Who were the executive directors you worked with?

Ryan:  Jerry Haynie was the main one that I worked with and really the only one that I can remember, although I know he wasn’t there at my earliest years, and so my memory is just crummy.  He was there for the majority of my active years.

Major:  What were the things that made him effective?

Ryan:  Well, he…I would say the same thing that makes most folks effective in what they do in that he was very committed to his, what he was trying to accomplish.  He was very committed to the symphony.  You know, my impression is that, you know, one of the things that’s helping the symphony now is an even better executive director, I mean well Carla Johnson, whatever her title is, but Jerry did a great job.  He worked hard, and you know there were a lot of frustrations when you’re trying to live on the economic edge, and you’ve got all of this internecine rivalry between the Beach and Norfolk, and the conductors squabbling with one another and stuff, you know, so it’s kind of like your worst nightmare.  I’d say the other thing that contributed to his success is that he didn’t say, “The hell with the whole thing.”  [Laughter]

Major:  Were there other staff that the board interacted with?

Ryan:  You know, the answer is there were, but my memory is such a fuzz ball that I only remember the peaks, not the—and of course I interacted with, in a fairly casual way with the musicians.  I probably spent more time going to concerts, to rehearsals and stuff, trying to keep them informed.  And I think that helped a little bit.

Major:  Really.

Ryan:I think they, over time, began to feel a little more like they were part of the organization, as opposed to just some folks who’ve been—you know, every organization has those issues where you try to make sure that everybody feels like they’re all on the same page, as opposed to talking about what they do.  It’s better when you talk about what we all do. [Laughs]

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Major:  Right.  You say you came to Norfolk in 1973, so the first conductor that you saw in action here was Russell Stanger, right?

Ryan:  Right, right.

Major:What can you tell me about the Russell Stanger period?

Ryan:  Nothing particular. I never knew Russell personally.  That’s not to say I never met him, but I never knew him at all.  You know, the orchestra wasn’t as good in those days as it’s now come to be, and it wasn’t as good in the immediate post-Russell era as it’s come to be.  You know, when I first got to town, you actually would sit in the seat at the concerts kind of hoping nothing, you know, like maybe a trumpet didn’t go off at the wrong time.  You know, I mean there was a certain kind of white-knuckle quality to the all thing.  [Laughter]  You didn’t know that, sometimes at the end of a piece, you wouldn’t know whether to applaud or just go phew! [Laughter]  And it really wasn’t all that bad.  I’m engaging in a little hyperbole, but it’s just gotten so much better, and so when I think back on those years, I don’t think of Russell as a bad conductor or lacking musicianship or anything negative about him, even in the slightest, but it just wasn’t the same outfit that it is today.

Major:  No, no. Do you know what caused the Russell Stanger era to end?

Ryan:I haven’t the slightest idea.

Major:  Okay, both Richard Williams and the next guy, Winston Dan Vogel, were short-timers.  Do you know why that was?

Ryan:  I should know with Richard.  You know, I’m going to give you an answer even though I don’t think there was any gigantic issue with Richard.  I think he wasn’t too happy, again the atmosphere was not wonderful here with all this backbiting, blah-de-blah, and I think with all of that in mind, there were times where, you know, you couldn’t help wonder was he maybe a little bit part of the problem, and so he never, I think, got the following.  I honestly can’t remember whether his leaving was his idea or our idea, but I don’t know that either side, no matter whose idea it was to initiate his departure, I don’t know if there was any crying on the other side, no matter which side started it. Not because anybody was horrible or evil.  It just wasn’t a great marriage, and maybe nobody’s fault.

Major:Yeah.  Do you remember much about Winston Dan Vogel?

Ryan:  Not the slightest thing.  I—when did he join, do you know?

Major:Yes, umm…1986 to ’90.

Ryan:  Okay, see—that’s during my rapidly declining involvement phase but not willing to get off the board. It’s a, you know, I wanted to be supportive, but I have not much recollection of him at all and really didn’t work with him, to speak of.

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Major:  Okay.  You’ve been very helpful in talking about the merger process and giving us a lot of information about the difficulties along the way and the various issues.  And now,  it’s a long time later, but now it’s successful.  What can you say; what can you tell us about how the merger finally became successful?

Ryan:  This is really speculation, but I think it’s just tincture of time.  I think that, I’m really going to be speculating because I haven’t been active with the symphony for many years except for a couple of years ago, I was the facilitator for their current strategic plan, but that role had a little bit to do with my knowledge of the symphony but mostly to do with the fact that I know how to do that pretty well.  Mostly not because I’ve done it professionally, but just because I’ve watched a lot professionals do it badly.  If you learn enough things not to do what’s left is the thing to do.  In any event, I think just the tincture of time.  I think that the leadership of the orchestra, both artistically and the volunteer leadership, has managed over through ups and downs to probably spend money a little more than in any normal sense should have, if you are talking about fiscal responsibility, but I think the community has gained from that a very much better orchestra than it would have had, had they been fiscally responsible.  So, I think one of the—and the reason I’m saying that in response to your question about what made the merger work, things work when they are a success. You know, when you’re involved with an orchestra that’s successful, then there’s plenty of room for people to get along because they’re happy with what’s happening.  And so I think really the growth and the quality of the orchestra…I think there’s a much better working relationship between management side and the musicians, based on what I can tell, and people seem to be on the same page.  The strategic plan was created by a committee made up of musicians and staff people and volunteers, you know, from the board and was a very collegial group, you know, there was union representatives and this and that.  You know there’s union and there’s management, it’s all just one big happy family, at least in that process.  And so, I just think that it’s—just like small thinking and backbiting can feed on itself, success can feed on itself.  So I think there are a lot of folks in the community who worry about the financial side and the idea that you really do ultimately have to pay for what you have, but I think that the community has benefitted from having more than we can pay for, for a few years, and having some debt left over.  The last few have been good, though…

Major:  That’s right, they have.

Ryan:  They’ve balanced the budget, and more power to them.

Major:That’s right.  What contribution has the VSO Foundation made to the symphony’s viability?

Ryan:  You know, I really don’t know anything technically about the foundation except that it exists, but we really didn’t have a foundation.  When I left—you can really say that I effectively left my involvement after I was president, so that would be ’84, even though technically I remained on the board; that period of time was just going to the occasional meeting and doing what I was told but not

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really being fully engaged.  So there was no foundation. I think the foundation—there have been some interesting issues there because, as I understand it, they effectively pledged the foundation’s assets to borrow money.

Major:  I gather.

Ryan:  Now, exactly how that was done technically, I couldn’t tell you, so when I use the word pledge, which is a technical term, I may not be using the right term for what was actually done, which effectively turned the foundation which was supposed to be an endowment into ordinary annual operating expenses, and there are many of us who feel that that was a breach of trust with the community.  And so, I know they’re about to crank up another capital campaign, but before I’d consider giving to it, we’ve got to figure out how is it you make sure there’s absolutely no way on earth that you can ever in any way get at that money.  So, I think that the foundation has contributed to the success because, without those assets, they couldn’t have borrowed the money they needed to spend more than they had, but, on the other hand, I think there’s been a legacy of certain people, not everyone but certain people, who feel like, well, can you really trust the symphony?  If you are being asked for endowment that’s going to support great music in Hampton Roads for generations to come, can you really trust these folks to make good on that promise?  So that—those are kind of--the good side is, it saved the day.  The bad side is the way they had to do it left some scars.

Major:  Mm-hmm.  Were there, are there mostly a few individuals or sub-sets of the board or other groups, other people who are responsible for fundraising now?  Or…

Ryan:  I have no idea.

Major:In your time?

Ryan:  It was a pretty well shared activity, in my recollection.

Major:  You mean shared among all the board members.

Ryan:  Yeah, yeah. I mean that never comes out uniformly, but I’ve been on other boards where there was a much higher concentration of just a few people did  everything and the others did nothing, and my recollection was that there was a little closer to parity, at least in terms of effort.  Maybe some people had access to bigger dollars than other people, but you know that--I don’t remember just having a lot of people sitting around who just wouldn’t do anything.  I’ve been on boards like that, some of them were very successful because if you have the right few people you can still get along but…  Nowdays, I have no idea how it works but I’m not involved with it, except as a donor.

Major:   No, well right.  We, when the call comes, we make our gift so that we don’t ever get called on or asked or anything because we respond right away.

Ryan:  Right.

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Major:  So if there is somebody doing a lot of fundraising, we wouldn’t know who it was because we’ve already responded.

Ryan:  Well, I’ve gotten hit up for, a couple of years ago--they were in this last ditch effort and were going back around to get people to give just a little bit more so we could finally have the budget be in the black.  So I gave some extra money.  I did get called on for that, and they are about to lower the boom on me again.  Next Tuesday Carla and Richard Waitzer are meeting with me.

Major:  Oh, I see.

Ryan:  The person who set the meeting up promptly promised it was not a fundraising call.  Lie, lie, [Laughter] total lie.

Major:  It couldn’t possibly be anything else.

Ryan:  Exactly, we just want your thoughts on the capital campaign.  It’s not my thoughts you want.

Major:  Right, right.  What about the contributions of the Symphony League?  How did they contribute to the viability of the symphony?

Ryan: In modern times I haven’t the slightest idea.  When I was president, you know, I felt like the league was kind of just a nice little thing, but it wasn’t; nobody was hitting any homeruns.  They were selling a few tickets.  You know, they were expanding the base of folks who were interested in the symphony but not in any giant way.  It was kind of small steps, not big steps, so the league was kind of a nice-to-have organization, rather than a must-have, critical centerpiece.  Today it may be the centerpiece of lots of activities; I couldn’t tell you.   I don’t have the slightest idea.

Major:  In early days, they ran the subscription campaign.

Ryan:  Well that’s—they may have nominally done that, you know, they may have.  I may be selling them short.

Major:  I don’t know about in the time period you’re talking about, but in earlier times, they started the process of having a subscription campaign.

Ryan:  And maybe one of the reasons I don’t think much about the subscriptions because that’s what they were doing when I was around, and I’ve just forgotten it. [Laughter]  Because, you know, I don’t remember focusing a whole lot of attention on—I mean, I can remember that, you know, I told you before that I had this rule... Don’t assume you can do a whole lot more this year than you did last year unless there is a plan, and there were occasions when the plan was things like we’re going to have some extra morning teas or coffees that we’re going to have with the league.  I’d go, “Sorry, that’s not going to get it done.” [Laughter]

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Major:  Right.  In 1985, the records show that musicians were put on salary, so it was a fulltime salaried orchestra for the first time.  How did that happen finally after so many years when the symphony was…? 

Ryan:  Per service.

Major:Per service.

Ryan:  Well, it happened the year after I peaked, and I don’t have a good answer for that one. [Laughter]  One of the things that’s worth asking, and my memory isn’t good enough, is what’s the difference between the two formats if you get away from the technical nits and look at the big picture?  If I said in the next year I’m going to hire you to do a hundred of these interviews, and I’ll pay you so much per interview, then you’re a per interview worker.  If I said I’m going to pay you the same amount of money as a salary for the year, and your job is to do the same number of interviews, one time you are a salaried employee and the next time you’re a per service employee.  You get paid the same thing, and you did the same work; did anything change?  And I’m not saying that’s what happened, but I would challenge you as you ask other people that question, to ask the question, what really changed?  Did those musicians suddenly get a whole lot more money or just maybe a little bit more money?  Did they get a whole lot more services or just a few more services? Did it apply to everybody or just certain people who were already guaranteed lots of services anyway?  So what was the real net effect on the musicians because my guess is, without knowing this for sure, that was more incremental than it sounded like, not that it wasn’t an improvement.  Always the big challenge with the orchestra and I suspect it’s still true is trying to figure out how to go from an orchestra where the musicians have to have some other source of income to an orchestra where they don’t have to have some other source of income, and the trouble is that the number of services you can have is radically different under those two models, and indeed the number of services you must have to generate income are very different, and there’s a little bit of a quantum leap because if you’ve got somebody who’s only earning half their money from the symphony, let’s say, you can’t increase their symphony involvement 15 per cent because that would completely wreck the way they’re earning the other half of their money, because it’s in teaching or other kinds of things where they just can’t carve that back 15 per cent to make room for the other 15 per cent of the symphony.  So you kind of, the question  always was, how do you make the leap with folks so you can pay them a decent wage?   I have no idea of the facts, but I’d be willing to guess if you ask the musicians today, are they earning a decent wage, they’d undoubtedly say no.

Major:  Well, I know more or less, what the figure is for; the ones who are not principals, I believe the figure is in the high twenties.

Ryan:  Yeah, well how many people would call—let me put it this way, say you were a single mother with two kids, would you call that adequate?  Probably not. [Laughter]  I think it’s probably still not adequate, and they’re still fighting that whole dilemma of, in some sense, to have the orchestra you want and to pay

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people what you’d like to have them be paid, you need to have enough demand for the services to make some balanced sense out of that and balance it, and a community this size has trouble, I think, reaching that level.  So, all I can say about the shift to salaried versus, is ask the question about how did it change? How did the number of hours commitment change?  Did the total dollars change, and  was it really all that different or was it at least partially cosmetic?

Major:  Right. [Laughter] At some period, the symphony made, worked out an arrangement with Norfolk State to sort of jointly recruit so that people recruited for the symphony would also be recruited for the faculty at Norfolk State.  Do, do you have a recollection of that arrangement?

Ryan:  No, not at all.

Major:  Okay, not at all.

Ryan:  No.

Major:  All right.  Are there things that you thought we might ask that haven’t come up, things that you would like to comment on.

Ryan:  Well, there was one other theme that came up during my years, and I made a little effort to do something about it, but it was not very effective, and that had to do with the abysmal acoustics of Chrysler Hall.  And while I enjoy classical music, symphonic music, I’m not a real serious music buff.  And so I would hear people talking about the acoustics at Chrysler Hall, and I’d think yeah, yeah, yeah, okay so the acoustics, you know, I’m thinking well, these are people who can hear things that I can’t hear, like wine buffs can taste fruit in wine that, you know, I can never find the apricots and the cherries [Laughter] and all this stuff that’s in the wine.  Well anyway, so I dismissed it entirely.  One of the things that happened during my year as president maybe even started before that, is that I would go to each version of some of, of certain concerts, so we’d have a concert at the Beach, a concert—same music in Norfolk, and the same music on the Peninsula.  On the Peninsula we went to, I think it’s called Ogden Hall, which is at Hampton University, and it was designed by the same guy who did Carnegie Hall, and it was just unbelievable, the difference in acoustics between Chrysler Hall.

Major:  Really.

Ryan: Oh, I mean it was like the difference between listening to a portable radio the size of your hand versus a fabulous stereo.  It was so good.  The same music.  You just wanted to go crazy, it was so good, and I suddenly realized that—and the difference was just emotional.  I mean, when you hear a great piece of music played wonderfully with a lot of sound intensity, you don’t have to think about oh, was that good.  You are just swept away, and that’s what would happen in Ogden Hall.  You’d just be swept away by the same symphony that would leave you sitting in Chrysler Hall going, “Well, that was nice.”  And so I really wanted to see something done about that, and we talked about it a lot.  We

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actually looked at some buildings, a place where we could have a symphony hall other than Chrysler Hall and decided that nobody was going to believe that.  In other words, we couldn’t get enough people to go do what I had just done to ever get enough believers to make it work.  And there was, at that juncture, not enough other things;—there was no competition for Chrysler Hall time particularly then because the perfect reason to move the symphony somewhere else would be to get a better symphony hall and allow Chrysler Hall to serve a better mission.  That would be the perfect storm, that would allow you to get everything you wanted, and neither part of that, you know, was going to work.  So, they did either during my time or shortly thereafter they made some efforts to, using amplification to increase the liveliness of the hall, to increase the resonance of the hall, not by directly micing instruments and that sort of stuff but by doing some other kind of alchemy where you had microphones here and there which has created a greater resonance because the trouble with a general purpose hall is that it’s deliberately designed to be serviceable for speaking events, plays and that sort of stuff, where, which is the antithesis of the acoustics you want for music.

Major:    Yes.

Ryan:  It is the opposite end on the resonance spectrum, so… You know, the one thing I wish I could have done was to have initiated a successful effort to fix all of that, and of course that whole question of should there be a symphony hall is still kind of bubbling around a little bit. I don’t know exactly where it is at this juncture although I think maybe they have decided, like I did, it’s too big of a bite.

Major:    I’m not sure.

Ryan:  I’m not sure either, but _____Ogden Hall was fascinating because it—I guess sadly but perhaps because it was a Black institution, it clearly did not have as much money as—you’d go into to Ogden Hall, you could see the absence of a lot of money.  One of the interesting consequences of that lack of money at least—and I’m speculating just based on looking at the hall—I don’t have any inside information or any outside or even available information, but they had three kinds of seats in Ogden Hall.  They had the newest looking, plushest seats, which were upholstered cushions on both the back and the seat, very comfortable.  Then they had some that had an upholstered seat but the back was made out of wood.  It was shaped, but it was wood, and then they had some that were wood and wood.  Well, the upholstered, padded cushion with the wooden back was the seat to have because all those wooden backs would pick up the music.

Major:    Yes.

Ryan:  And transmit directly into your body particularly, the lower notes.  You know, you could have been deaf, and you would have known where the kettledrums were.  You know, I mean it was just…

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Major:    Yes.  

Ryan:  The padded and padded deprived you of all of that, and the wood and wood fixed it so you couldn’t quite concentrate on the music because your derrière was suffering. You know, so your mind can only absorb what your derrière can endure. [Laughter]  That was kind of the problem, so that was a wonderful hall, and to me it was like an old comfortable shoe, so I wished we could of and still wish we could have a symphony hall.  They’d probably pad the seats though, which would be a shame. 

Major:    I don’t know.

Ryan:  You never know; you never know.

Major:    You can talk about that when you speak with Carla and…

Ryan:  And Richard.

Major:    And Richard this week.

Ryan:  Yeah, yeah.

Major:    In fact, I hope you do.  Well, this has been a fascinating afternoon.  I really have enjoyed it and thank you very much.

END OF INTERVIEW

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