Paying far below the average industrial wage to our choral elite is nothing to be proud of, writes Michael Dervan
The director of the Arts Council, Mary Cloake, has made a number of valuable and interesting points about the current, quadruple resignation crisis at the National Chamber Choir. In a letter to The Irish Times last week, she referred to "important national policy issues for contemporary music" and wrote that "a coherent system of public support for contemporary music is essential if we are to have a diverse and musically rich quality of life".
This contrasts starkly with the position nearly 10 years ago, when a December 1997 letter to the editor from the council's then music officer Dermot McLaughlin confirmed that the council had "no explicit policy for contemporary music any more than it has for jazz, traditional music, choral music, etc", and maintained that "until contemporary music in Ireland produces its own passionate advocates or 'champions', the existing stagnant situation regarding performance will continue".
The recent publication by the Arts Council of Sounds New - A Review of Supports to Contemporary Music in Ireland, and the initiation of a debate about its findings, are significant if belated steps in rectifying the grim picture outlined by McLaughlin.
Not everything in Cloake's letter, however, is accurate. "The Arts Council," she wrote, "has supported the choir since 1990, remains its primary funder, and is working with all the parties involved to ensure its sustainability in the long term."
The Arts Council did not in fact support the choir in 1990, nor in 1991, 1992 or 1993. The choir didn't even exist in 1990. It came into being in 1991 as the result of a public campaign following the disbanding of the RTÉ Chamber Choir. That choir was axed as part of the national broadcaster's response to the notorious Broadcasting Act 1990. And political concerns about taking on responsibility for an undertaking that RTÉ had ditched were at the time offered as an explanation for the council's reluctance to fund the choir. In 1993, after the Broadcasting Act was amended, the RTÉ Authority decided to reverse its earlier music cutbacks. Only after that decision did the council start funding the choir.
Incredible as it may seem, given the blanket nature of Cloake's reference to the council's funding of the choir, the NCC's first Arts Council grant was the princely sum of £12,000 (€15,236) for a children's opera project in 1994. In the same year the choir began a relationship with Opera Ireland, providing a professional core for the company's chorus. In 1998 the council changed the NCC's designation from an opera client to a music client, although neither the nature of the choir's work in opera nor the level of its grant changed significantly at that time. What has changed significantly over the years has been the level of the council's support for the choir. Counting in euro, the six-figure level was breached in 2000, and in 2004 the council's support reached €300,000 and for the first time outstripped that of RTÉ.
The choir's dramatic renaissance began in May 2002, when Celso Antunes took up his appointment as artistic director, and there is no doubting the fact that the growth in Arts Council funding has been central to the choir's successes. With a 2007 grant of €345,000 the NCC is now one of the council's largest music clients. Only the Irish Chamber Orchestra (€1.13 million), Music Network (€725,000) and Contemporary Music Centre (€385,000) are more heavily supported.
RTÉ has been progressively reducing its support for the choir, from €260,000 in 2005 to a scheduled €115,000 in 2008. There is no certainty at all about RTÉ funding thereafter. The resignations which triggered the choir's current crisis - of Antunes, chief executive Karina Lundström, board member David Byers (since followed by artistic director emeritus Colin Mawby) - were precipitated by internal disagreements about the appropriate response to the projected funding shortfalls.
But the fuss engendered by the ongoing cutbacks and possible ultimate withdrawal of RTÉ funding masks an altogether grimmer picture of the choir's situation.
The starting salary for the choir's singers at the moment is €19,671. Salaries for comparable singers abroad are rather different. The BBC Singers, for instance, are paid £32,338 (€48,354). The members of the Danish Radio Choir, for a 32-week year (with 20 weeks "set aside for holidays and other activities"), receive 300,000 kroner (€40,250). The weekly work schedules for all three choirs are comparable.
In other words, on a weeks-worked basis, the British singers are paid nearly 2½ times as much as the members of the NCC, the Danes not that far short of three times as much. The Arts Council has justifiably wrung its hands about the low earnings of Irish creative artists, and published a report documenting the difficulties of trying to earn a living as a theatre practitioner. Serious account obviously needs to be taken of the underlying situation at the National Chamber Choir, too.
Let's imagine that some fairy godmother were to wave her magic wand, so that the choir miraculously managed to weather its current crisis without receiving even a single extra cent from the council. Let's ignore all those who regard the current board as disgraced, and throw in a successful transition to a new chief executive and artistic director, or even - it's a fairy godmother, after all - a return by the much-loved Antunes.
Everything would now be okay. Or would it? The fact is it would still take at the very least an extra half million euro a year to bring the salaries of the choir members in line with their equivalents in countries which many people now believe to generate less wealth per capita than Ireland.
It should be borne in mind that, unlike Britain and Denmark (and most other European countries which support full-time opera choruses), the 17 posts in the NCC are the only full-time professional jobs open to choral singers in this state.
The Arts Council and the Minister for the Arts, John O'Donoghue, like to point to successes in their area of responsibility. You could, of course, argue that the National Chamber Choir's low salaries represent one of the productivity achievements of the century.
But paying significantly less than the average industrial wage to the members of the State's only full-time professional choir - a choral elite that has been acclaimed for performing to the highest international standards - is not something anyone should be proud of.
What audiences all around Ireland can remain proud of is the extraordinary achievement of Antunes and his singers in having established and maintained such high levels of choral excellence and genuine artistic adventure.