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ABSTRACT
The number of occupations which have hardly altered at all, thus not suffering from Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’, is very restricted. However, one such profession is the contrabassist's. Classical music is still largely produced in the same way as when it was first performed. There is very little productivity change in the actual production of music from bygone times. This, too, is a phenomenon rare in society at large and in the economy in particular. In this study I test Baumol's Cost Disease with the Swedish Hovkapellet bass players as my focus. The disease occurs when salary increases in jobs that have seen no increase of labour are accepted. Have musicians such as bass players seen a stagnating salary development compared to professions in industries which have actually seen labour productivity growth? This, together with other related issues, is discussed based on longitudinal salary data for the Hovkapellet musicians and similar data from Copenhagen and Paris. All data are primary data collected from the orchestra archives. The data indeed verify the Baumol Cost Disease hypothesis. The open question discussed is whether that is an actual problem or not.
ORCID
Staffan Albinsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5993-4065
Notes
1 In English the most commonly used name of the instrument which the contrabassist plays is ‘double bass’. The musician may thus be called ‘double bass player’ or ‘double bassist’. However, in all other major European languages the instrument is called by its alternative English word ‘contrabass’, used in this article, with slight spelling changes according to language standards.
2 Quantity = β1*Labour + β2*Capital + ε (the Solow Residual).
3 However, it could be argued that the inherent, allegedly not calculable, value is established as the level of funding which governments provide.
4 The opera organisation has had several names since 1773. The original formal name which occurs on early payrolls is the Kongelige Majestäts Håf-Capell och Spectacler (The Royal Majestic Chapelle and Spectacles). During most of the nineteenth century both the opera (‘the lyrical theatre’) and the dramatic theatre were combined into the Kongeliga Theatern (The Royal Theatre). From 1888 the two ensembles were split but the opera retained its name until 1997 when it was re-named Kungliga Operan (The Royal Opera).
5 The Hovkapellet was already two and a half centuries old when the opera was established by King Gustav III in 1773. King Gustav Vasa's accounts for 1526 lists 12 salaried orchestra members. Norlind and Trobäck (Citation1926) provide some salary data for the first century. Karle (Citation2001) provides lists of orchestra members for some years of the eighteenth century before the Hovkapellet became attached to the then new royal opera. One of them was Peter Gabriel (sic). This German bass (violone?) player was employed from 1621 and compensated with 350 Swedish daler per annum.
6 Lista över musiker i Kungliga Hovkapellet; The list is constructed from published research by, primarily, Karle (Citation2001) and Norlind and Trobäck (Citation1926).
7 HILD was recently made public, however in Swedish only, at http://es.handels.gu.se/avdelningar/avdelningen-for-ekonomisk-historia/historiska-lonedatabasen-hild.
8 Their choice of commodities in the baskets for CPI calculations for different time periods are summarised in Table 4, p. 281.
9 However, a surname does not guarantee a specific nationality. Some players with foreign names, like Uttini and Berwald, were actually born in Sweden by immigrant musician parents.
10 Lobell (Citation2008) has described the SMU and its relation to foreign currencies in great detail.
11 I choose past tense in this case as musicians on stage now are much more frequent.
13 There was no international super star like Jenny Lind on the payrolls in 1980 (albeit some solo singers of the Stockholm opera also on occasion sang abroad). Lind first appears on the payroll of 1834 but the entry lacks details regarding her salary as apprentice – the other apprentices, however, earned 50 riksdaler per annum. Lind's salary after her debut in 1837 was 700 riksdaler per annum. When she left for Berlin in 1844 her salary had rocketed to 1800 riksdaler per annum.
14 The author spent 34 years, from 1976 to 2010, in orchestra management.