Can a guest conductor fire a musician?

April 28, 2022 11:53 AM

I seem to remember a story told to me by a music teacher growing up, that a guest conductor for a large orchestra (we lived in Cleveland) is given complete authority over the orchestra during rehearsals and performances, to the point that they can even fire players if they deem it appropriate. I remember she told me that a guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra had fired two players during a rehearsal, and the players were quietly re-hired after the guest conductor was gone. Is that possible?

I'm sure this ultimately comes down to contracts, and those might be different for every orchestra, but I'd like to know if there's any truth to this.

It seems counter-intuitive that a large organization like an orchestra would give that much authority or power over to another person for such a brief time.

Thank you!

posted by ToucanDoug to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

This post called "Conductors say the darndest things" seems to suggest that even regular conductor's don't have that power.

This seems to match up with this post "What can get a musician fired from a symphony orchestra?".

That being said the guest conductor is usually at least somewhat respected (otherwise why are they there?) and I would be surprised if they couldn't kick someone out of their concert, after-all it's very common for a symphony to have alternates for every position, and on top of that the full count is often not required for any given piece of music. So they can probably kick people off a certain gig, but probably not fire them, is my best guess.
posted by tiamat at 12:16 PM on April 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

This wouldn't/couldn't happen. Sure a guest conductor might ask that someone not be in their performance, but most orchestras in the US are unionized (the American Federation of Musicians), so even the full-time conductor most likely couldn't just fire someone without some kind of lengthy process.
posted by jonathanhughes at 1:26 PM on April 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

It seems plausible that a guest conductor with sufficient star power would be allowed to insist a specific player wouldn't be part of the orchestra for their performance. I'm sure they could kick someone out of rehearsal.

I'm confident that they would not have the authority to fire a player in any kind of permanent way. Orchestras are generally unionized and this kind of thing would definitely not happen. The permanent members of the orchestra would receive a salary, so if they weren't performing for a specific date, they'd just have some time off. A replacement would be hired for those specific dates and paid per rehearsal and performance. No one would need to be rehired afterwards because no one would have really been fired.

Having a tantrum and "firing" a couple players sounds very much like the kind of behaviour that would have been tolerated decades ago but would be less tolerated now.
posted by ssg at 1:26 PM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Best answer: That sounds like not a guest conductor story but a George Szell story. If this was an “old times” tale, it wouldn’t surprise me - which is one reason classical musicians have unionized in a lot of places. If this is a more modern tale, it might be possible if they were not union musicians (not sure if that’s the case there but I’ve heard stories up here.)
posted by warriorqueen at 1:31 PM on April 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, the guest conductor often has a lot of latitude. The regular conductor may be in another country. The guest conductor is in a certain sense 100% responsible for the artistic performance of the orchestra. And a number of players aren't actually members of the orchestra, they are on short-term contract. In a smaller community orchestra, even a paid one, it's pretty common that none of the players are actually employees, they are all 1099 contractors. So it wouldn't be surprising to me that, in theory, a guest conductor could exclude someone from the performance.

Fired, though? I'd guess not. There would be a contract, either an employment or a short-term contract, I doubt you could keep someone from getting paid. It would be more like getting benched.
posted by wnissen at 11:36 AM on April 29, 2022