“Physically and emotionally, I’m drained,” said Jay Fishman recently over lunch at a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis.

Fishman was explaining why he plans to retire this month after 36 years as artistic director and conductor of the Minnesota Sinfonia, an ensemble of 26 professional freelance musicians whose innovative Music in the Schools program over the years has reached as many as 200,000 inner-city students and thousands more audience members at concerts around the Twin Cities.

And the orchestra will retire with him.

“My health is good,” said Fishman, who had just turned a spry, wiry 77. “I still love working with the musicians, and I still love music,” he said. “The problem is raising the money. The wear and tear finally got to me about a year-and-a-half ago. I was finishing up a grant application to the National Endowment for the Arts. I decided right then that I’m not going to write any more grant proposals. I simply can’t do it. I had a concert the next day at the Basilica, and the relief I felt was unbelievable. I was starting to have fun again.”

Making matters worse, support for the arts from foundations is diminishing, he said. Other priorities have taken hold, and this is a special problem for the Sinfonia – the “people’s orchestra,” as it is known – which plays 60 or 70 concerts a year on a modest budget of between $400,000 and $700,000 but doesn’t charge admission for its concerts and whose audience, in part, is low-income.

“This means we can’t make it on ticket sales,” he said, “and we’re not big enough to launch big fund drives, and so the money isn’t there.”

A few years back, Fishman and his board of directors devised a succession plan whereby after Fishman’s departure the orchestra would continue under new leadership, and there was the possibility, for survival’s sake, of merging with one or more other local arts organizations.

That plan was abandoned. Fishman had begun to worry. Perhaps some of his core concepts – free admission and education programs at inner-city schools – might be abandoned in a partnership. He quoted longtime board member Bruce Humphrys, who told him, “You know, Jay, the best thing to do is to close it down and then you’ll be remembered for all the good work you did in the schools rather than as an organization that ultimately failed.”

As it happens, the Sinfonia likely will continue at least into 2025 with its Music in the Schools programs to comply with its non-profit tax status, which requires that all contributed money be spent. But as far as regular concerts go, Fishman and the Sinfonia will gracefully take their final bows in two concerts this weekend: Friday at 7 p.m. at First Covenant Church, 1280 Arcade St., East St. Paul; and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Basilica of St. Mary, 1600 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis.

Receptions will be held afterward at both events. There will be no admission charge and, as is customary at Sinfonia concerts, children will likely be present. Unlike just about any other orchestra in the country, the Sinfonia touts a “bring the kids” policy and means it.

Musical roots

Fishman grew up on the North Side of Minneapolis in what was then largely a Jewish community. It was a musical household. Fishman’s father played violin in the Minneapolis Symphony under Dmitri Mitropoulos, though because the musicians at that time didn’t make enough money to live on, the elder Fishman drove a laundry truck during the summers.

Fishman entered the University of Minnesota in 1965 with the intention of studying medicine. Music, however, proved to be a stronger attraction, and so he began studying composition with Paul Fetler and Dominick Argento. It wasn’t until his senior year that he got his first taste of conducting, leading the university’s chamber orchestra. He was hooked.

Fishman went on to study conducting at the Indiana University School of Music, where he met Joyce, his wife-to-be, a violinist, in a practice room. Joyce eventually got a job with the Louisville Symphony, while Jay, developing his fundraising and administrative skills, worked to revive the Louisville Chamber Orchestra, which had folded a couple of years earlier. After two years in Louisville, the Fishmans moved to London, where Jay studied privately with Neville Marriner, founder of the revered Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, in the years before Marriner – Sir Neville, after his knighthood – took over the reins of the Minnesota Orchestra.

Returning with his wife to Minneapolis in 1978, Fishman worked to realize his dream of starting his own chamber orchestra, an ensemble that would bring music to everyone regardless of age or financial means. The dream brought to life the Minneapolis Chamber Symphony, initially a summer orchestra created to fill gaps not serviced by the Minnesota Orchestra or the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. As the orchestra grew in proficiency, it added a limited winter season and began to attract ever larger audiences along with funding from many of the region’s major foundations and three grants from the National Endowment. Even so, there was trouble ahead.

Fire Fishman?

By the summer of 1989, as the orchestra wrapped up its 11th summer season, it became clear to Fishman that his egalitarian vision of the orchestra and its community wasn’t shared by the orchestra’s board of directors nor its management.

As Fishman recalled it, “The board told me, ‘We want to create a second St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.’ I said, ‘That’s really stupid. Why would the community want to support a second chamber orchestra when they can barely support the first one?’ The board wanted to appeal to the upper echelon so they could say, for business purposes, they’re on this elite board.”
The two visions of the orchestra’s role in the community – and which section of that community should be served – proved to be irreconcilable. And so on the evening of Aug. 15, after a concert in Golden Valley, the final concert of the season, the executive committee of the board fired Fishman. Several members of the committee, none of whom, according to Fishman, had ever been seen at one of the orchestra’s concerts, showed up in the parking lot and handed Fishman a packet of forms he was asked to sign and return no later than Aug. 24.

The board was giving him two options. One was to conduct several concerts during the next 12 months and to receive payment for a composition of his, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and also to do a certain amount of fundraising. His fee would be $10,000 and he would resign as music director, for which he had been earning about $20,000 a year. Should he not accept these offers within the next nine days, the executive committee would recommend that the board fire him.

Fishman said no.

The resulting brouhaha, surely that year’s biggest ongoing story in local music, extended for several months, igniting heated acrimony between musicians and management and among members of the orchestra’s board. By the end of the month, six board members had resigned, three of them protesting the firing of Fishman. And on Aug. 31, 19 of the orchestra’s 24 musicians delivered a petition to the orchestra’s office calling for the resignation of the management and all board members who voted to fire Fishman.

“It wasn’t just the firing of Jay,” cellist Camilla Heller told the Star Tribune at that time. “We were upset with the way the board of directors was guiding this thing the past year. They killed off our audience.” Season ticket sales, in fact, had dropped from 600 in the winter of 1987 to 25 two years later.

Recalling these now mostly forgotten events of 35 years ago, the impression that lingers is of how spectacularly inept the board and management of this little orchestra was in dealing with the crisis. First of all, they wouldn’t say why they fired Fishman. Nor would they agree to meet with him. And the board chairman, asked by a reporter if it was true that ticket sales had dropped radically, could only say “I don’t have those figures,” thereby confirming a growing impression of the board’s collective vacuity.

An orchestra makes front-page news

Fishman, on the other hand, acted decisively. As the late Joan Didion would have put it, he took control of the narrative. Just five days after getting his walking papers, he called a press conference to protest the actions of the board and held it in North Commons Park, the neighborhood he grew up in. What a picture it made. Here was this diminutive fellow in a suit and tie standing in front of a music stand surrounded by TV cameras and reporters reading a press release about being fired from the orchestra he had created 11 years earlier. The scene evoked David and Goliath: the little guy taking on his oppressors. The photo appeared on the front pages of local newspapers and was reported extensively on TV and radio news.

Fishman recalled, “People would stop me on the street and say, ‘Are you the guy who got fired from an orchestra?’”

If there was to be a new orchestra – and that seemed a possibility, if not a likelihood – it would need a different name. Fishman came up with Minnesota Sinfonia, and he asked friends to serve on his board. He asked David Zimmerman, then co-owner of the Orpheum Theater, to serve as board chair. Zimmerman, according to Fishman, said he would do it only if the new orchestra was involved in education.

“I said, ‘David, that’s a no-brainer. That’s one of my top priorities,’” Fishman said.

Minnesota Sinfonia’s debut

The Minnesota Sinfonia made its debut before a capacity audience at the Basilica of St. Mary on the evening of Oct. 20, 1989. Minneapolis Mayor Don Fraser appeared at the start of the program, proclaiming this as Minnesota Sinfonia Day and calling the orchestra “an important new musical resource.”

It was clear that the concert wasn’t only about music. The large turnout – about four times what had been expected, according to a board member – and the standing ovation Fishman received at the end, along with enthusiastic applause from the musicians, at least half of whom had played with the Chamber Symphony, could be taken as a vote of confidence in the conductor, who had emerged as the underdog in the dispute over his firing.

A little girl in the audience was heard to ask her father, “Dad, why are we here?” The father said, “We’re here to support Mr. Fishman.”

At the end of the concert, Fishman walked to a microphone and, overcome with emotion, thanked the musicians for their support. Words failed him, and he left the stage in tears.
Fishman’s debut season was made up of four free concerts at the Basilica, a summer subscription series at Wiley Hall at the University of Minnesota and a group of community concerts, most of them outdoors. And he published a mission statement pledging to “serve the musical and educational needs of Minnesotans, with primary emphasis given to families with young children, inner-city youth, seniors and those with limited incomes.”

He had tried out some of these ideas during his days leading the chamber orchestra in Louisville. He recalled, “We went into schools where people had no idea what an orchestra was, let alone classical music, and we did everything from Mozart to Scott Joplin. We were going to do a Mozart divertimento once, and I asked the audience, ‘How many of you have heard of Mozart?’ None of them had.”

Classical music in the schools

With a grant of $10,000 from U.S. West, Fishman launched Music in the Schools, going the first year to two inner-city schools (and eventually to as many as 22). Rather than have the kids bused to a concert hall – the standard practice – Fishman brought the orchestra to the schools and played in gymnasiums.

“There’s nobody doing anything like what we do in the schools,” Fishman said. “We make a big sound, and the kids are, like, 15 feet away. They can see and hear everything. I was asked to go to Carnegie Hall to observe their educational program. So I went, and I watched the kids. First of all, the pieces were too long, and there was no coherent theme. And the kids were bored silly because they couldn’t see the musicians. The stage is so far away. These kids are all 8, 9, 10 or 12. They don’t have the patience for this. Kids today have a short attention span, and you need to play a variety of styles.

“My rule is never program a piece that’s more than three minutes long, though I might have one that’s four or five. And I’ve always had a guest soloist who would sing and be a storyteller. For years we had Joe Carter, who’s no longer with us. Joe would walk in and, speaking in his Boston accent, would have them eating out of his hand within 30 seconds. Then he would tell a story and sing. We did that 60 or 70 times a year.”

For each school there is a two-month program of preparation and study, culminating in each school’s “Sinfonia Day,” when the musicians visit classrooms and then everyone gathers in the school’s gymnasium for performances of the music that students have been studying in class. Fishman also made listening tapes (later CDs) for students to hear the music the orchestra will eventually play, and over the past 35 years, he has created more than 80 orchestral arrangements and original pieces to support the musical content.

Response from students and teachers has been enthusiastic and gratifying. A third grader wrote: “Thank you for coming to my school. This is the first thing I ever enjoyed.” Recently, a student came up to Fishman after a performance and told him, “You are my role model.”

Once a year the Sinfonia plays at a school that works with students with disabilities. Nearly all are wheelchair bound and have limited communication abilities. Occasionally, a brave student will try to sing with the orchestra while Fishman holds a microphone to the student’s mouth and helps with the words. One such student’s mother was in the audience when her son sang. A teacher told Fishman afterward that she watched the mother, and there were tears streaming down her face. A few days later Fishman received a letter from the mother, who wrote, “Thanks for helping my son feel good about himself.”

Fishman urges orchestras to focus more than they do on music education. “If nothing else, it’s enlightened self-interest,” he said. “Where are their audiences going to come from if they’re not taught?”

Legacy support

As time went on, the Sinfonia continued to prosper. (The Chamber Symphony fared less well. After firing Fishman, the board hired Jere Lantz, then music director of the Rochester Symphony, as his replacement for the 1990 season. Burdened by a six-figure deficit, the orchestra ceased operations two years later.)

Fishman added a winter concert series to the schedule as well as a Young Artist Competition, wherein high school age students could compete and earn solo performances and cash prizes, and a few years later a Youth Outreach Week during which students spent a week rehearsing and performing with Sinfonia musicians. With support from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Arts and Heritage Fund, the Sinfonia was also able to tour its concert programs and Music in the Schools to rural Minnesota communities. And courtesy of the McKnight Foundation, the Sinfonia was able to commission and premiere more than 50 new works by Minnesota composers.

The much-in-demand soprano Maria Jette performed as guest soloist with the Sinfonia in several programs over the years and was impressed. “Jay has a really super roster of players,” she wrote in an email. “More than that, it’s incredible to me that these concerts are completely free to the public. They manage to fill the quite nice auditorium at Metro State in St. Paul – literally fill it. And their audience seems to be composed largely of folks who wouldn’t otherwise get to a classical orchestra concert. Last fall, I was stopped on the street by a couple who had heard me at the Basilica in last year’s program. They’d never heard a live classical/operatic performance, and they were gushing about it. I find this inspiring.”

And all this, mind you, on just a handshake. The musicians of this orchestra have never had a contract. The musicians’ union hoped to impose a contract quite a few years ago, but the musicians voted it down, Fishman said.

And finally, retirement

About to finish lunch, Fishman was asked: What does a 77-year-old conductor do when he retires? This particular 77-year-old said he plans to “compose with some regularity” and also to edit and clean up some of the scores he and others have written for the Sinfonia over the years and then donate them to one or more libraries.

Fishman reflected for a moment on his career, which has been considerable – 11 years with the Chamber Symphony, two with the orchestra in Louisville, two more in London and 36 with the Sinfonia. Adding that one year with the University of Minnesota Chamber Orchestra makes it over 50 years of professional conducting, 48 of them in the Twin Cities.
“To have that kind of career and to work with such great musicians on the world’s greatest repertoire and to work with composers, it’s been an amazing career and something I’m truly grateful for.

“I wish it could go on, of course. I wish the Sinfonia could go on beyond me because of the work we do in schools and the free admission and all the rest of it. Be that as it may, just what we’ve done over this time, it’s hard to find the words to say other than I’m just truly, truly grateful.”

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