JEFFREY BROWN: And now: the tough labor market for younger workers.

A new report finds underemployment among recent college graduates — that is, young adults working in a job that does not require a degree — has jumped to 45 percent.

The terrain is especially rough in the arts these days, as NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman learned, part of his reporting on “Making Sen$e of Financial News.”

PAUL SOLMAN: Gustav Mahler’s “Fourth Symphony,” conducted by James Gaffigan, played by the orchestra of perhaps the world’s foremost college of the performing arts, Juilliard, which costs $55,000 dollars a year to attend.

Though many are still undergrads, these kids make world-class music. No surprise, since they’re immensely talented and most of them have been practicing practically all day, every day, since they were tots and were admitted to one of the world’s most selective schools. Some Juilliard departments have less than a one percent acceptance rate.

So, what are the job prospects of some the world’s most gifted and motivated young college grads?

DIANE WITTRY, Conductor, Allentown Symphony: For any orchestral opening in the United States, you might have, for one violin opening, 300 people applying that are all completely qualified to do that job.

PAUL SOLMAN: That includes the Allentown, Penn., orchestra, which Diane Wittry conducts.

DIANE WITTRY: They play great. They have fabulous technique, great sound, great intonation.

PAUL SOLMAN: So then the obvious question: How do you decide whom to hire?

DIANE WITTRY: It’s almost like the Olympics. My harp player, I was just talking to her during rehearsal, and she had recently taken an audition. They give you a piece that’s really hard, and if you do really well on that one, you get to play another piece, and then maybe you do really well on that one, you get to play another piece.

And she was on the sixth excerpt, and then she messed up and missed a note. And then it’s like, thank you very much.

PAUL SOLMAN: Come on, one note?

DIANE WITTRY: Yes, you make a mistake and you’re out. And that’s how competitive it is in the audition process.

PAUL SOLMAN: And if you think it’s tough for instrumentalists, what about dancers?

Each dance class at Juilliard starts small, 24 students or so, and gets even smaller, through attrition. There are job opportunities for male dancers, less competition for each slot. The women, however, face almost impossible odds.

Gallim Dance Company, a small and upcoming modern dance troupe based in Brooklyn, recently advertised an opening.

MEREDITH MAX HODGES, Executive Director, Gallim Dance: And we had 700 dancers audition for the slot.

PAUL SOLMAN: Seven hundred.

MEREDITH MAX HODGES: Seven Hundred.

PAUL SOLMAN: Meredith Max Hodges is Gallim’s executive director.

MEREDITH MAX HODGES: Many of these dancers were graduates of conservatories, full-time dance programs. These were serious candidates.

PAUL SOLMAN: But no matter how serious, how talented, in today’s job market for the arts, there is no guarantee, or even much likelihood, of success.

Who’s to blame? A familiar culprit has had a hand: the great recession. According to one survey, 75 percent of New York’s nonprofit performing arts groups, those most likely to employ the classically trained, slashed budgets in 2009 and few, if any, are back to pre-crash levels.

A second villain of the piece is technology. When this Mahler work premiered in 1901, there was one way to hear it, in person, meaning dozens of people had to be paid to perform it over and over again. That same year, however, the Victor Talking Machine Company was established, allowing one recorded performance, or a few, to replace many hundreds of live ones.

A century later, searching online for video of Mahler’s “Fourth Symphony” yields 25 million hits. So why leave home, pay real money to sit uncomfortably, so you can hear and see the same thing?

GREG SANDOW, Juilliard: We are in the business of selling buggy whips in the age of the automobile.

PAUL SOLMAN: Greg Sandow teaches a Juilliard course on the grim future of an art form that he says simply hasn’t kept up with the times.

GREG SANDOW: The audience has been aging for around 50 years, so this is not sustainable. The people who are listening to classical music are getting older and are not being replaced by an equivalent number of younger people.

PAUL SOLMAN: One hope is that an aging population will continue to patronize work like this, and the musicians who perform it, for a while longer, though, for some older people, even works like this Bela Bartok violin concerto can be a challenge, and it was written 75 years ago.

But a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts study summed up the larger trend. Between 1982 and 2008, attendance at performing arts such as classical music, opera, ballet, has seen double-digit rates of decline, in short, fewer and fewer jobs for highly skilled classical performing artists, which means, by the cold law of supply and demand, stagnant or falling wages, except for the brand names who can still draw a crowd.

GREG SANDOW: It’s not like, well, you hoped you were going to be a world-beating entrepreneur, but you end with a solid mid-level job in a corporation. In the arts, it doesn’t really work out that way. You have 20-odd orchestras in what the League of American orchestras calls group one, and the minimum salary is quite respectable.

But then, beneath that, you have orchestras playing four, five, six concerts a year, and the musicians who play in those orchestras are racking up untold miles on their cars, going from gig to gig.

DIANE WITTRY: And a player in Allentown might make $6,000 to $7,000 dollars a year.

PAUL SOLMAN: Six or seven thousand dollars a year? What else do they do?

DIANE WITTRY: What they do is they play in Reading, in Harrisburg, and they play in the Philadelphia Opera, and they play in Delaware Symphony. And then many of them also teach privately and have teaching studios.

PAUL SOLMAN: So we’re creating more and more musicians who, in order to earn a living, have to teach, creating more and more really great students, who then have to do the same thing. It’s like a Ponzi scheme now.

DIANE WITTRY: Because you’re thinking of it like an economist. But we, as musicians, we don’t go into music for the money. We go into music because it’s part of our soul. It’s part of who we are. It’s what we have to do.

We want to share music with the world, and we would do it whether we got paid or not.

PAUL SOLMAN: Now, of course — and Sandow and Wittry agree — it was in a sense ever thus. “La Boheme,” act one, scene one, Rodolfo burns the pages of his new play to keep himself and roommate Marcello from freezing.

GREG SANDOW: But now the problem is worse, because there are fewer of the jobs that used to exist. And many of the ones that still exist, like those in orchestras, they feel precarious and musicians are taking pay cuts.

PAUL SOLMAN: Moreover, though Puccini’s 19th century Bohemians were behind on the rent, even they weren’t in the hole for tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, not unusual for today’s fine arts grads, like 28-year old dancer Caroline Fermin, who says the market salary of $28,000 dollars that she earns from her highly coveted full-time job at Gallim Dance barely allows her to keep up with the payments on the $60,000 dollars she borrowed to attend Juilliard.

Indeed, many artists are calling it quits here in the U.S. and heading abroad.

CAROLINE FERMIN, Gallim Dance: I have a lot of friends that move somewhere to Europe or likewise to have a job that’s supported by the government, that gives more money to the dancers.

PAUL SOLMAN: What percentage of the dancers you know or friendly with are now primarily abroad?

CAROLINE FERMIN: Maybe 50 percent.

EMILY TERNDRUP, Gallim Dance: Fifty sounds right.

PAUL SOLMAN: Twenty-four-year-old Emily Terndrup, graduated from the University of Utah, dances in an off-off-Broadway show to help make ends meet.

EMILY TERNDRUP: It seems like the work is getting divorced from the pay a lot here in America, where, if you like to do this, you should do this for free, where, in Europe, I still feel like it’s, if we’re asking you to come and do this, we will pay you for the time we are taking. It’s disappearing in America.

PAUL SOLMAN: A common lament, though, of course, not just in the arts. But why do performing artists here still stick it out?

WOMAN: If you’re doing something you love, you figure out how to keep it alive. If it’s you and if it’s your truth, you just keep on going.

PAUL SOLMAN: But chances are also that you won’t necessarily make enough to live on.

FITZHUGH GARY, Student, Juilliard: All the more reason to create your job, your own job. Create your own project. Go out there and be your own boss, and figure out something that hasn’t been done before, and chances are you will love it.

PAUL SOLMAN: But how does a performing artist who practices all day every day learn how to practice entrepreneurship as well? That is a story for another day, a story we intend to tell soon

BARRY KOLMAN: “But we, as musicians, we don’t go into music for the money.” So says Ms Wittry. I will remember that when it’s time to pay for my kids’ education, or when my car’s transmission explodes, or at the checkout at my neighborhood Wal-Mart. Yes, we musicians love our music and yes,we are born with this gift and this mission to make the world a more beautiful place, but so many have their heads in the clouds and have no idea what your world will be like when you’re 50 (music retirement age) and still a member of “the 300 Club” of auditionees. Love your art but have a back up plan.

So the Symphony spent two years finding their golden boy international conductor from Montreal. They thought they snagged a super star who would spend time in Columbus; live there and be a vital part of the Columbus community not just as Maestro but as Citizen.

Four years later, their Maestro resigns citing that he wants to spend more time in Montreal with his new family. One certainly cannot fault the Maestro for that decision. But when the Search Committee elected him to be their next music director, did they really think that he would be a visible fixture and a local ambassador for the Symphony? What are these Search Committees thinking? Are there no talented, experienced, excellent American conductors to choose from? Are all of us more experienced conductors just not “cute” enough?

“Oy, so we got to go through yet another two year search? Nah, let’s just pick out a bunch of conductors who we already know and hope we can find a suitable one who may, you know…stick around for awhile. We don’t need no stinkin’ suitable applicants!”

The news of their Maestro’s departure hit the newspapers on June 18, 2013, stating that a 10-12 person Search Committee will be formed. Two weeks later, their new season was posted online with an array of guest conductors, some American, one from Montreal (really?). The fastest search in modern times! At the speed of a mouse click!

With the problems the Columbus Symphony have endured-firings, strikes, salary cuts, deficits- I sincerely hope that this “expedited” search works. The “Search Committee” owes it to the musicians and the generous people who are the patrons of this Orchestra to choose a conductor who will really invest his time and be a true citizen of Columbus, not just one who flies in and splits.

Their departing Maestro, as talented as he may be, has a right to make a very personal decision regarding his career and private life. But there are many others, perhaps equally as talented, who understand that a music director’s work is not over when the applause dies down. It just begins.

Pssst…Omaha…you might want to get your search committee together…I’m just saying.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2013/06/18/zeitouni-done-when-contract-expires.html

Rafael Schachter, Jew Who Led Verdi’s Requiem Mass in Terezin Concentration Camp, Honored Decades Later In Prague

By DENIS D. GRAY 06/26/13 12:55 PM ET EDT

PRAGUE — In a concentration camp designed by the Nazis to eradicate Jewish cultural life, among 120,000 of its inmates who would ultimately be murdered, a rising young musician named Rafael Schachter managed one of the miracles of the Holocaust.

Assembling hundreds of sick and hungry singers, he led them in 16 performances learned by rote from a single smuggled score of one of the most monumental and moving works of religious music – Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass.

“These crazy Jews are singing their own requiem,” Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the genocide, was heard to remark after attending one of the performances at the unique and surreal camp of Terezin, in what was then German-occupied Czechoslovakia.

But for Schachter and his fellow prisoners, this Mass for the dead became not an act of meek submission to their fate, but rather one of defiance of their captors, as well as a therapy against the enveloping terror.

For Schachter would tell the singers: “Whatever we do here is just a rehearsal for when we will play Verdi in a grand concert hall in Prague in freedom.”

Seven decades later, in the capital of what is now the Czech Republic, his promise was finally fulfilled – the Roman Catholic Mass played in memory of the remarkable Jewish man and his fellow musicians who perished, among them brilliant composers, artists and intellectuals from across Europe.

“Rafael was not able to do it, so tonight we will play the requiem on his behalf,” said Murry Sidlin, an American conductor and educator who explains that his life’s mission is to illuminate the legacy of Terezin. He spoke before the event which took place this month, staged in St. Vitus, the magnificent 14th century cathedral which towers above the city from its hilltop location within the compound of Prague castle.

Filling the seats and pews beneath its soaring Gothic vaults, mingling among the tombs of Bohemian kings and Holy Roman Emperors, were Prague citizens, young and old, Catholic clergymen and members of a Czech-Jewish community which numbered more than 350,000 before World War II and is now reduced to fewer than 10,000 in the Czech Republic.

Also gathered together were several relatives of the dead. Terezin survivors present included Felix Kolmer, who last saw Schachter at Auschwitz as the two were separated on arrival into two lines by Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” an SS officer and doctor who conducted horrific medical experiments on inmates.

Schachter was herded into the line of those condemned to immediate death, and perished in 1945 at the age of 39, one month before the liberation of his country. The 91-year-old Kolmer, who still teaches physics and works on behalf of camp survivors, escaped death at Terezin and two other camps. But some 50 members of his extended family did not.

“What Rafi – that was his nickname – did, strengthened us,” Kolmer said. “The cultural life to which he belonged gave us the power to better resist our own fates, not just in Terezin but later in Auschwitz so we didn’t go to the gas chambers like sheep to the slaughter.”

Kolmer and Schachter were among the first of some 140,000 sent to Terezin – Theresienstadt in German. Described in Nazi propaganda as a “spa town” built by Hitler for the Jews, in reality it served largely as a collection camp for deportations to the killing centers of Eastern Europe. The inmates included some of the finest talents and minds of European Jewry, uprooted not only from Czechoslovakia but Germany, Holland, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere.

The Nazis initially kept it secret, but gradually began to tolerate an incredible flowering of intellectual and artistic life. Enough instruments had been smuggled in to form the Terezin Orchestra and a jazz group called the Ghetto Swingers. Cabarets, an opera and operettas, complete with printed handbills, were staged. Inmates gave more than 2,400 lectures on subjects ranging from physics to the cinema.

Conditions were nonetheless appalling. Survivors of Schachter’s chorus recall emerging from a dark, airless cellar where they rehearsed after hours of grueling forced labor to step over the skeletal bodies of inmates who had in the meantime succumbed to starvation and disease. Their own chorus of some 150 had to be replenished twice as members were deported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

A brilliant conductor and pianist, the normally mild-mannered Schachter was described as “like a crazed man on a mission,” determined to realize the Requiem despite the hardships and even strong opposition from some rabbis and elders who wondered why Jews should be performing a Christian Mass and worried that their captors might see it as an apology for their Jewishness and react with brutality.

Sidlin says it’s clear that Schachter’s determination stemmed from knowing that as his chorus members fought off starvation and illness, often not knowing the fates of their children and loved ones, the only therapy was total immersion in music – and Verdi’s carried a special message.

“We became that music,” a chorus survivor, Marianka May, said, explaining how the fear of tomorrow was transformed into hours of pure joy. She was one of several survivors of the Terezin chorus who appeared on large video screens installed in the cathedral for the concert.

“The Nazi occupation of Europe was the most profound statement of insanity ever made by mankind. And here these people were the firsthand victims of the insanity,” Sidlin said. “What they found in the arts, the lectures, the scholarly pursuits was grounding, they found something that was sane, something that was still beautiful and they were linking themselves to that and not the other thing.”

Eventually the Nazis even encouraged these activities, paving the way to what Sidlin calls a “sadistic lie.” Under pressure from Denmark after the deportation of Danish Jews to Terezin, Germany allowed a visit by the International Red Cross. Before its June 1944 arrival, gardens were planted, the inmates’ barracks renovated and shops stocked with goods. The old and sick, some 8,000, were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. The Red Cross delegation spent six hours in the camp, which included tea with German officers, and gave Terezin a clean bill of health.

The visit also marked the last performance of the Requiem. Four months later, Schachter and most of the chorus were deported to Auschwitz, almost all murdered on arrival. A generation of young composers was wiped out at the same time: Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Hans Krasa and Viktor Ullmann, who composed three piano sonatas at Terezin. Combining the Central European tradition with Czech idioms and the latest directions in contemporary music, experts like Sidlin are certain they would have become the successors to Dvorak, Smetana, Janacek and other Czech greats.

Sidlin came upon this music by pure chance, browsing through a book on the subject in a Minnesota bookstore and coming to a brief mention of the 16 Requiem performances by a 150-strong chorus. “I thought to myself, `This is impossible, knowing what it takes to produce the Requiem under optimum conditions. If there is any truth to this it is miraculous,'” he recalled.

Sidlin, 73, whose paternal grandmother and her family where killed in a Latvian ghetto, contacted Holocaust experts but found little until he tracked down survivors, and the story began to unfold. Then, he said, one morning at 4.a.m., he bolted out of bed with a thought and combed the text of Verdi’s masterpiece:

“Who shall I ask to intercede for me, when even the just ones are unsafe…Give me a place among the sheep and separate me from the goats…Nothing shall remain unavenged…That day of calamity and misery, a great and bitter day.”

“I could see that almost every line of the Mass could have a different meaning as a prisoner. `Deliver me O Lord’ for them meant liberation. Nothing remaining unavenged was certainty of punishment for their captors,” he said. When Sidlin checked with the survivors they confirmed his insight into why they were so drawn to the work.

“Schachter told his chorus: `We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say.’ This was their way of fighting back, their form of resistance, defiance,” Sidlin said.

So in 2008, he started the Defiant Requiem Foundation, which includes the Terezin-based Rafael Schachter Institute for Arts and Humanities, attracting participants from around the world to perform concerts and study not the Holocaust as such but the application of Terezin’s lessons to human rights today.

Sidlin, currently a professor of music at Catholic University in Washington D.C., has also led performances of the Requiem – actually a concert drama with the operatic composer’s work at its core – in the U.S., Hungary, Israel and Terezin. It will be played next year in Berlin. This month, he was awarded the Medal of Valor by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a prominent Jewish human rights organization based in Los Angeles.

In the Czech capital, as the evening light filtered through the multicolored stained-glass windows, the Prague Symphony Orchestra musicians, 150 singers and conductor Sidlin, all dressed in black, began what is at any time an emotional wringer, Verdi’s music surging between chilling, thunderous depictions of the Day of Judgment and tender pleas for salvation, between unbounded joy and heartbreak.

Here, actors embedded in the orchestra rose at moments to speak the words of Schachter and others, remembered how they took their battle to the high moral ground, refusing to let their captors dehumanize them, rising from their own depths to the spiritual heights of Verdi’s music. A piano briefly replaced passages of the orchestral score, a haunting echo of Schachter playing the instrument to accompany his singers.

The silent, rapt audience, some in tears, watched segments of a Nazi propaganda film about Terezin showing children singing, eating thickly buttered bread and swaying on hobby horses as the mezzo-soprano, soprano and chorus intoned, “O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, grant them eternal rest.” Everyone, including 3-year-old children, who appeared in the film was executed immediately after it was made.

There was no applause when the performance ended, the musicians silently leaving one by one but for a lone violinist who played fragments of a mournful Jewish melody. On the screens, families were being loaded onto trains. The doors were slammed shut and locked, a little girl looked out of a window, and the carriages rolled toward the concentration camps.

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Les Poissons Voyageurs, a Montreal group, is one of the acts in the Accordions Around the World festival this summer in Bryant Park.

By LARRY ROHTER/New York Yimes

Published: June 26, 2013

The accordion just can’t get no respect

Guitar players have Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix as avatars; accordionists are stuck, at least in the public mind, with Lawrence Welk and Frankie Yankovic. Pianists have the works of Bach, Chopin and Scriabin to challenge them; accordion players are saddled with requests for “Lady of Spain” and the monotonous oompah oompah of the polka.

But the free Accordions Around the World festival at Bryant Park this summer is offering accordionists an opportunity to change the stodgy image of their instrument, which was invented in Europe in the 19th century. Every Thursday through Aug. 29, from 5 p.m. onward, accordion players are stationed around the park, where they perform a varied repertory meant to show off their instrument’s versatility and range.

In keeping with its name, the festival’s emphasis is on folk and international genres like zydeco, vallenato, tango, klezmer, musette, qawwali, forró, bachata and the music of the Balkans. But last week’s edition, with 20 accordionists involved, also found Matt Dallow playing the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black,” Phillip Racz covering Frank Zappa’s “Peaches en Regalia” and Art Linowitz, who performs as Art Now, serving up Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.”