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The opening night gala at the San Francisco Symphony was going off beautifully, with 2,700 patrons enjoying the glitter and glitz of the evening, not to mention some fine music. Over 1,500 supporters had dinner at Davies Symphony Hall, and the orchestra was reportedly in top form for the performance under music director Michael Tilson Thomas. And then, in the middle of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, someone pulled the fire alarm.

As orchestras around North America struggle to stay afloat or, in some cases, rebuild, a split is developing over the issue of what type of management is best for a symphony orchestra. Some orchestras are turning to corporate-style managers with little musical background, in an effort to make fiscal responsibility the first priority. Others are actively steering away from that course, stressing the importance of an understanding that the main focus of the organization is music, and not profit. In the former camp is the revitalized Calgary Philharmonic, which has risen from the ashes of bankruptcy as a bare-bones organization with a skeleton staff, little overhead, and, as it happens, booming ticket sales.

All this talk about symphony orchestras dying has some orchestras feeling unfairly treated. “The impatience orchestras are showing with continued talk of crisis is perhaps indicative of a sea-change in their own philosophy toward their situation. And Orchestra Canada representatives say it’s high time to shift the focus from fighting the short-term fires to eradicating the deep-rooted problems that have been fuelling the flames for decades.”

“The popularity of Apple’s iTunes song service has demonstrated that customers like to pick and choose their songs online. New statistics from the music industry indicate that labels are shipping more singles to stores, too. But whether the stats signal the return of the single is still a bit of a puzzle.” The industry denies that it is making any sort of concentrated effort to market the single more heavily as an alternative to illegal song-swapping, but “faced with falling CD sales for the third year in a row, it’s to the music industry’s benefit to offer music in formats that consumers will pay for.”

The world’s largest producer of CDs has announced that it will drop the price of the average disc sold in the U.S. by 30% this fall. Universal, which has suffered from a 3-year slump in album sales, will lower the retail price of an average CD from $17-$19 to $13, and lower the wholesale cost from $12.02 to $9.09. The price cut is seen as an acknowledgement by Universal that the problems of the industry go beyond the phenomenon of online piracy, and that consumers are no longer content to pay inflated prices for pop music.

As CD sales have dropped 15 percent in the past two years, recording companies have become more shrill in their contention that piracy is hurting their business. On the other hand, maybe CD prices are just too high. So Universal – one of the Big Five – is dropping its album prices. Come October, the company will lower the “suggested” price in the US for most CDs to $13 – down from $17-19.

An EMI exec defends the pricing system for CDs. “The gap between the perception of how record companies like EMI work and the actual reality is now a chasm. I sometimes wonder if it’s because music is intangible that people forget that there are many more costs involved than merely manufacturing a piece of plastic.”