Donald Satz: >Of course, organizations want "name" conductors for prestige purposes >and to increase their audience. In professional sports, we tend to think >that the "name" athletes paid many millions of dollars per year are a drag >on the economic viabilty of the organization and an abomination to boot. >However, many of these athletes bring to the organization more money than >the amount of their large salaries. This can happen with conductors as >well. True. A lot of that money for athletes comes from broadcasting revenue, which orchestras cannot command, though. All of this brings out my most radical instincts, not to mention personal resentment at being asked constantly to subsidize conductors who make such a disproportionately greater income than the highly skilled musicians they conduct, just because they have "prestige." Mostly, I just ignore organized sports, but it is worth noting that besides the broadcast audience the live audience for sports events is generally quite large. In the case of classical music the live audience has to be relatively small because even orchestral music cannout "sound" properly in too large a hall. As a consumer of the arts, I don't mind helping to pay the salaries of the players, which are relatively modest. But there is a sense of being suckered, and a sense of injustice, when there are constant calls for people who are only moderately well-off to subsidize a seven figure salary--or whatever it is--just because the conductors' agents have been able to bid up the price beyond the real means of the purchaser. Jim Tobin