Symphony Is Only a Part-Time Job : But Musicians Find Many Paying Opportunities for the Rest of Their Time

So, you’ve sweated through the preliminary auditions, agonized through the finals, endured the probation period and collapsed with happiness upon getting the nod: You’re a tenured member of the Pacific Symphony.

Now what? What’s at the end of the rainbow?

The orchestra will be playing classical subscription concerts, pops programs, family concerts and a summer series. It also will be playing for choral concerts and for such visiting dance companies as the Kirov, San Francisco and Joffrey ballets and the American Ballet Theatre.

If you play every one of these programs--and, as needs vary, not every musician is asked to play every program--your take home pay will be about $18,000.

Which won’t make much of a down payment on a condo in Newport Beach.

But probably you will have other options. Louis G. Spisto, the orchestra’s executive director, says that all the Pacific’s concert dates and rehearsals for them take up about 24 weeks out of the year, “roughly 50%” of one’s time. Which leaves “plenty of opportunity for doing other things.”

In fact, even though the musicians have a contract with the orchestra, the Pacific Symphony is essentially made up of free-lancers, according to Robert W. Stava, secretary-treasurer of the Orange County Musicians Assn., the union that represents them.

Even if the Pacific can’t keep them busy--and can’t keep food on their tables--on a full-time basis, “all are full-time musicians” who also teach, play in other orchestras or, if they’re lucky, tap into the lucrative Hollywood studio market, Stava said.

Granted, it’s hardly the most stable and secure life imaginable. But, as Spisto notes, this is the professional musician’s lot in life. If anything, he said, Pacific Symphony members have it a little better than most. “There are more than 1,600 orchestras in the country,” he said. “Only about the top 50 can offer the type of contract we are.”

The average Pacific Symphony member receives only about 50% of his income from the orchestra. “The key,” Spisto repeated, “is that they’ve got to be flexible. They’ve got to be willing to do a variety of things and, if they are, they will do very well. Many of our musicians make far more than the average major orchestra player throughout the country. In fact, some musicians came to Southern California to seek the diversity and income that goes with it.”

A number of the musicians, he said, end up making more than the $67,000 he gets as executive director.

“Some earn a great deal of money,” he said. “Some basically are making a modest living. But my sense is that they all are doing reasonably well.”