And sorry for the late reply–it’s been a busy end of the school year and I’ve been dealing with ‘writer’s block’ I guess.

I’ve been waiting for Brandon VanWaeyeberghe to finish his master’s thesis, but in 2005 he published a study: “Musical Chairs: A Study of the Supply and Demand of Orchestra Musicians in the United States” –his master’s thesis was supposed to chart (if I remember correctly) the supply side of graduating music students. Here are some statistics mentioned in the Musical Chairs piece:

*There are just 18 American orchestras with a 52-week schedule. Around 60 work 40+ weeks per year.
*Between these 60 groups, there are circa 250 full-time openings per year total, all instruments. The most openings were in 1986 (328), and the least in 2006 (192). The number of advertised jobs is trending downward*.
*Not all spots are awarded to newcomers—many are offered to those with previous appointments.
*Some orchestras now favor subs over full-time members, to cut costs.
*Openings typically have 150-300+ applicants, depending on the instrument. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra recently received over 500 audition tapes for a single flute post.
*Some instruments, such as tuba and harp, typically have 1 or 0 openings in a given year.
*Each year, music schools graduate 11,000 undergraduate music majors, 4,000 with master’s degrees, and 800 with doctoral degrees. Around 5,600 are performance majors. There is no concrete data on the percentage of these students actively pursuing full-time orchestral work.

I mentioned VanWaeyenberghe’s study and David Cutler’s mentioning of it with the statistics here.

Essentially, it was much easier to get into even a Big Five orchestra then than it is now, because the schools weren’t turning out vast numbers of enormously overqualified people.

Many people use the fact that a lot of conservatory grads can’t find work as an example of why Classical Music Is Dying and Orchestras Are Falling Apart, but taken together, these two things indicate that conservatories are simply turning out way too many students. It wasn’t the case that orchestras were rolling in money before 1960, and all of the thousands of overprepared music school grads could get jobs. If there is an imbalance in supply and demand, it’s not that demand has plummeted, but that supply has gotten insanely out of hand. The kids who are giving up music and getting accounting jobs today would have been qualified — and employed! — as concertmaster for most city orchestras in 1920.

Somehow I doubt that this is something that most faculty members in big music schools are willing to admit. They flooded the market. And they are not only preparing their kids for jobs in yesterday’s market — they are preparing them for jobs in a market that never even existed! It was NEVER the case that shedloads of Juilliard and Curtis graduates could all find jobs in the golden hazy days Back When Classical Music Was Appreciated. Never.