An article about the strike by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra in last Sunday's Perspective section was unclear about orchestra salaries. The center management and the orchestra agree that the average base weekly pay for each of the 61 ballet musicians is $1,134.91. But the center's and the orchestra's estimates of the total value of the weekly package, including rehearsal pay and various benefits, differ by hundreds of dollars.
The Sun regrets the error.
There will be less music in America this year. The alarming situation at the Kennedy Center is a harbinger.
FOR THE RECORD - CORRECTION
On Sept. 1 the center's Opera House Orchestra, which plays for ballets and broadway shows, went on strike over wages and work guarantees. It's easy to understand why. The orchestra had been playing under a contract that provided 10 weeks of work at approximately $2,000 a week and the center had offered a new contract that not only would have eliminated wage guarantees, but also proposed to eliminate the orchestra over the next four years.
But it's also easy to see why the center offered such a contract: The previous arrangement called for all 61 players to be paid even when an entire evening of ballet used recorded music. The center wanted eventually to replace the Opera House Orchestra, which is made up of free-lancers, with the National Symphony Orchestra, which is paid for 52 weeks of work and is actually part of the center. The NSO has been playing four times a week to houses that are sometimes less than three-quarters filled. The financially troubled center figured to save more than $1.5 million by slowly replacing the free-lancers with the NSO musicians, who could thereby reduce the number of their classical subscription concerts.
Some of the thousands of people who have been laid off recently by IBM, Westinghouse and Eastman Kodak may wonder what is so terrible about part-time employees being given essentially three years' notice to find new work. But no one goes quietly into the dark night of unemployment. When Opera House musicians struck, the National Symphony musicians honored their picket line, canceling the first two weeks of this season's concerts (and sacrificing two weeks of pay). The NSO leaves Tuesday for a tour of Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union. When it returns -- if the strike has not been resolved -- it will presumably continue to honor the picket line.
