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The classical music agency business is dominated by giant New York agencies such as Columbia Artists Management Inc. (CAMI) and International Management Group (IMG). There are also a few dozen small "boutique" agencies that bet on the notion that one or two of their lesser-known artists might become stars under their tutelage.
And there are a few dozen even smaller, elite agencies, often run by agents who are drawn to their work by a love of music and a deep sense of allegiance to their musicians. This type of agent -- and by many accounts, Anders is of this stripe -- enjoys a stellar reputation and is the very symbol of steady, unyielding tradition. But the industry that such agents serve is undergoing rapid, tortuous change.
Anxiety wafted through conference rooms, onto the patio, and through the lobby of the Doubletree Hotel in Pasadena's Old Town section during the first week of August, blending with the wet Southern California heat to form a sticky pall. It shadowed every conversation, every presentation, every tinny round of hollow classical music boosterism hosted in the hotel that weekend.
The occasion was the annual conference of the Association of California Symphony Orchestras. The backdrop was a years-old depression in the niche economy of California symphonies, made more frustrating by the state's current business climate -- full-steam economic boom. Two of the state's largest symphonies, in Sacramento and San Diego, had recently gone bankrupt. The state's premier orchestra, in San Francisco, had months earlier emerged from a bitter strike. Across the bay in Oakland, the city symphony's failure a decade earlier still served as warning to the dozens of other orchestras that were consuming their endowments, outspending their budgets, and otherwise courting doom.
Anxious to avoid a similar fate, symphony executive directors sat at tables trading ideas about how to coax more money out of wealthy patrons.
"If someone says yes too fast, you probably didn't ask for enough," said one orchestra director.
They fretted about finances.
"If the stock market holds, we'll be pretty good," said the board member of a Bay Area symphony that has been speculating on Wall Street to make ends meet. "If it doesn't, we won't be doing very good."
They grumbled about dwindling public spending on classical music as the National Endowment for the Arts enters its death throes in Congress. They lashed out at newspapers, magazines, and radio stations that routinely ignore classical music. They complained about having to trot their musicians around to local schools as a way of passing themselves off as public-service charities to potential donors.
"As a lot of companies in Silicon Valley begin to give, first they give to education; second, they give to social programs; and third, they give to the arts," said Shirley Lewis, president and CEO of the San Jose Symphony. "So we make the argument that we're a social service agency."
And they listened to corporate-donor guest speakers freely admit that they're suspicious of orchestras' efforts to refashion themselves.
"If you say you're doing things to make yourself more diverse, I will take a close look at your marketing strategies," said Linda Kendrix Burroughs, who directs regional corporate giving for Mervyn's department stores. "If you say you're doing outreach, we'll look at the ethnic breakout of your board to see if you are talking the talk and walking the walk."
Tough words amid tough times for the attendant symphony orchestra directors, who are largely of the belief that classical music institutions should flourish as a matter of birthright.
They feel this sense of privilege in part because during the past 30 years, classical music was a fat, happy industry to be in. A booming economy and Sun Belt hubris led to a flowering of classical symphony orchestras during the 1960s and '70s.
But a decade ago, tax-cutting ballot measures in California cut university classical music series budgets. Federal tax reforms discouraged some corporate giving. And the 1987 stock market crash cut into both donations and ticket sales.
Classical music never really recovered, in part because 1960s-bred baby boomers believed, to a much greater extent than their parents, that listening to Cuban Afroantiliana music or American jazz was just as much a cultural experience as going to the symphony or the opera.
Downsizing isn't the only trend wrenching classical music. After years of doing business in parlors over tea, classical music booking has entered the age of cyberspace, free trade, and unabashed competition.
Joanne Corbett-Barnes, an ample, gregarious woman who opened her own agency a half-dozen years ago, is at the forefront of this high-tech new wave. She promotes both classical and "world music" musicians on a state-of-the-art Web site, and does most of her business via e-mail. In fact, Corbett-Barnes says she organized her latest project -- a series of performances around the U.S. by the Ballet Philippines and the musical group Tanghalan Pilipino -- mostly in cyberspace.
"A few years ago, we simply couldn't have handled something like this. It took us six or seven weeks, and I couldn't have done it in seven months if I hadn't had e-mail," she says.
General trends toward globalization have also made it much easier for European agents to come to America on poaching expeditions -- an enterprise that would have been considered unthinkable only a decade ago.
European artists used to have separate management in Europe and America. That's just the way it was done, insiders say. But seven or eight years ago, a group of European managers banded together into a loosely knit trade association specifically aimed at breaking down these traditions. U.S. orchestras and concert promoters were happy to go along; local agents always had added another layer of commissions to the cost of a conductor or musician.
