Letter from Ernest Fleischmann
Executive Director, Los Angeles Philharmonic Association

To the Editors:

It was inevitable that Samuel Lipman, that consistently amusing, often provocative “art-for-art’s sake” gadfly, would find fault with the concerns I have expressed about the future of the symphony orchestra. It was probably also rather inevitable that he would omit and/or misrepresent—in his article “Is the Symphony Orchestra Dead?” (September, 1987)—a good deal of the essence of my arguments.

None of this would matter if his contribution to this urgent debate provided the stimulation and, indeed, wisdom one expects from someone whose views are given credence in the corridors of musical power. It is sad that, instead, Mr. Lipman saw fit to take up almost seven pages of his esteemed publication with his usual condemnation of musical administrators, those “enemies” of art “whose skills lie entirely in the merchandising of that which has already become famous somewhere else.” While he admits that the symphony orchestra’s “present condition is [neither] healthy [nor] happy,” and further agrees that “the problems with orchestral life, and with musical life as a whole, are great,” the solutions he puts forward can only be described as generalized clichés of surprising naïveté.

“It is time,” writes Mr. Lipman, “for musicians to take their futures into their own hands, by demanding that conductors be chosen for their musical skills rather than for their European celebrity status.” In actual fact, for many years now, musicians in our orchestras have provided detailed,