Strings Attached: The History of the Metro Arts Commission & The Nashville Symphony
Part One: The First Bankruptcy & The Rise of Phil Bredesen
Preface
Despite finally getting medication support for my ADHD, a major contributing factor in my publishing at least 20,000 unsolicited words on the Metro Arts quagmire since March 7th, I have lost my battle to stop writing about this topic.
In the immortal style of Silvio Dante’s terrible Michael Corleone impression:
This time, however, it is solicited. I was approached by some stakeholders, some of whom have to make decisions about the future of this Commission, to write about the history of Metro Arts to give a sense of how we got here.
I’ve found that the best way to tell this story, maybe the only way, is to talk about Metro Arts’ deeply entangled relationship with The Nashville Symphony.
To date, the Symphony has received $8,216,400 in Metro Arts funding — more than double the next recipient and a full 16% of all arts funding in the city’s history.1
But more than just being its biggest recipient, The Symphony is the very reason why Metro Arts Commission funding exists — and the way that funding came into being, and how it was controlled in the intervening decades, tells us a great deal about the conditions that made today’s arts crisis inevitable.
This is a story about more than just arts funding — an admittedly boring and esoteric topic in itself. This a really story about how systems of power are designed, something we need to understand deeply if we want to deeply re-design them.
Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.
-Herbert Marcuse
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Part One: The Symphony's First Bankruptcy & The Rise of Phil Bredesen
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 1984
In deconstructionist philosophy there’s a thing called a “rich text”, a piece of writing with revelatory layers of meaning and complexity that, when studied closely by a careful reader, unfolds a reality much vaster than just the words themselves.
The current struggle over arts funding can seem on its surface like a disastrous Twitter thread come to life — a clash over identity politics and conflicting worldviews, shallowly rooted in the culture war that is “now”.
But when you go back to Metro Arts’ origins, we can see that this history is a rich text that teaches us about the arts, power, class conflict, individual choices, and the intractable social crisis within which we all feel trapped.
This long, winding story will help us understand how we got to the point where appointed city arts commissioners are sending emails like this to their grant recipients:
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This paragraph itself is a "rich text" that could be analyzed in future sociology classes to uncover the underlying ideological stalemates that prevented people from understanding each other in the “culture wars” of the 2020s. Without context, it’s just another of infinite examples of people talking past each other in escalatingly dangerous ways. With the full context of the history of Metro Arts, it’s extraordinary.
Prompted by Metro Legal’s reversal of a funding vote by the Arts Commission last July, the conflict over funding has driven a wedge into the broader arts community, with firm “us” vs “them” lines drawn.
On one side are smaller arts organizations and individual artists (many of whom advocate for funding to follow strict adherence to anti-racist equity theories). On the other side are what they call the “art monopolies” that, while often promoting “diversity,” tend not to put their money where their mouths are.
So as new policies and legislation are moving forward to untangle the city's arts funds and determine how they are used in the future, a history lesson in "how we got here" seems like a good idea.
I agree with Mark Twain that history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. And in Music City, the rhyming history of arts funding looks a bit different than it did a few decades back — there’s more of an explicit emphasis today on racial equity issues in today’s bitter feuds. But, a review of public records reveals, we could time travel to public arguments over Metro Arts funding in, say, 1992, and not know we’d left the 21st century.
The best way to tell this complicated story is to focus on one art “monopoly” and its relationship with Metro Arts: The Nashville Symphony.
Bear with me. This journey is going to be more like a meandering Wagnerian opera than a quick Rossini aria. But history and human systems take time to unfurl themselves and reveal their hidden folds. Find a good seat and let’s have the curtain rise.
From Public Art to Public Funding
In its original form, the Metro Arts Commission mostly oversaw truly “public art” – murals, public festivals, and the beautification of public buildings and spaces. As a tiny city department three staff members, the most outward-facing thing they did was put on the yearly “Summer Lights Festival” whose offerings included “croissants and Coke, country music, and classical symphonies.”
All that changed in 1988.
That year, the Nashville Symphony Board faced a tense contract negotiation with their Orchestra Union. This negotiation, it turned out, came the same fiscal season as a global financial crisis: the $1.71 trillion shock to the stock market known as “Black Monday” (which inspired a criminally underrated Showtime series of the same name).
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Black Monday couldn’t have happened at a worse time for the Nashville Symphony.
Rolling into 1988, the board and fundraising executives hadn’t done much to prepare the Symphony for financial hard times. This was a tremendous oversight as Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act cut taxes for the country’s largest corporations had vastly, and predictably, changed the landscape of philanthropy over the past two years.
A reduction in the corporate tax rate meant that a good chunk of donations to arts institutions would be drying up, and a need to diversify funding streams should have been obvious to any decent fundraising team.
Without a need to hide profits in cultural institutions in exchange for tax relief, brand exposure, and political clout, the Fortune 500 was giving less and less each year. But the Symphony’s donor development team wasn’t responding in suit, and Black Monday caught them with their pants down with a contract negotiation looming.
The Symphony was cash-poor because of its failure to stockpile contributions or drive up ticket sales, and it had rising costs after a 1986 strike by the Nashville Orchestra Union. The strike had earned the players a promise to have their yearly pay base doubled over several years, increasing it to a paltry $17,500 ($46,000 in 2024 money).
The 49-day strike in 1985 led to a memorandum of understanding that Orchestra pay would be doubled over the course of four years. But the bad fundraising and bookkeeping by the board and management in the intervening years meant that they were likely going to renege on this agreement.
With fundraising stagnant and the economy in the toilet, The Symphony’s board felt its only option to pay its rent for TPAC’s Andrew Jackson Hall was to drive a hard bargain with the Orchestra Union. In 1988 Reaganomics was in full swing, even in the non-profit sector — why increase your incoming revenue when you can just take salaries away from those who can least afford it?
The Symphony needed someone to recant their promises to the Orchestra, and to put a good face on it to the public. Their chosen negotiator was a carpetbagger from New York State. He was a Harvard grad who’d worked on Eugene McCarthy’s failed campaign against Richard Nixon. He’d moved to Nashville only 13 years earlier and made a not small fortune selling off an insurance company he’d founded. He had failed in his bid for Congress, and lost in a run-off for Mayor the year before, but his political star was only rising.
In only three years time he’d be Mayor. In fifteen years he’d be Governor. The Symphony’s negotiator was Phil Bredesen.
Playing Chicken With Tchaikovsky
All the history I give here is from contemporary news sources, mostly from The Tennessean Archives, which track the Symphony’s financial crisis from start to… well… it seems to have never really finished.
The 1988 season was gearing up to have a $900k shortfall according to Bredesen and the board, though the Orchestra union leaders thought this figure was exaggerated.
The nearly million dollar purported deficit was seen by some as a negotiation tactic to lower the Orchestra union’s demands. But Bredesen drove a hard bargain: reduce the number of performers, lower your wages, and sign the contract, or we file for bankruptcy.
The Tennessean described it as the board “lobbing the ball” onto the Orchestra’s side of the court, pushing the blame onto artists for their greed in fighting for a living wage from a board comprised of millionaires.
The striking Orchestra members held tense meetings, calling the Board’s bluff and waiting for them to back down. A June 13, 1988, Tennessean article retells the last night before the bankruptcy filing deadline.
Unemployed Nashville Symphony musicians met behind closed doors last night and early today in an 11 hour attempt to stop orchestra boardmembers from filing for bankruptcy protection today.
Symphony board member Phil Bredesen was waiting outside the Blair School of Music auditorium at Vanderbllt University late last night In hopes of negotiating with the musicians who began their meeting at about 9 p.m.
"If they vote to allow me Into the meeting, I think we'll be able to work things out in an hour or two," Bredesen said.
This was Bredesen’s offer:
To reduce the Symphony from 86 to 60 players, and to cut their base salaries from $17,500 to $15,873 ($42k a year in 2024 dollars).
Bredesen, it must be stated, was a negotiator holding out over a $1,627 salary cut. Having sold his controlling interest in HealthAmerica Corp two years earlier, he was worth at least two hundred million dollars.
The image of that night is stark and cinematic to me. The northerner businessman, worth nearly a quarter billion dollars, sitting outside an auditorium, daring striking musicians paid less than half the area median income to blink first and accept their subjugation, or be blamed for killing the Symphony.
The musicians didn’t blink.
They didn’t even let Bredesen in the room that night.
Bredesen and the board filed the Bankruptcy documents in Federal Court the next day.
And still the union held.
Apparently, it takes a while to go bankrupt, there’s more than just one document you gotta hand in, and the Board wasn’t ready to tell Nashville that it was a major metropolitan city, “Music City” no less, with no Symphony.
In July, Bredesen brought a new deal back to the union, this time with a smaller reduction of players, and something new.
Bredesen offered the union a carrot, a show of good faith from the city that would help make up for the fundraising shortfalls of the board and management.
Along with a smaller cut to the number of players and a new head of fundraising, the “Orchestra's executive committee” the Tennesseean wrote, “have recently been encouraged by a verbal agreement between symphony board chairwoman Martha Ingram and Mayor Bill Boner.”
That agreement was for a new type of funding mechanism from the city that, in this first year alone, would add $250,000 to the Symphony’s coffers.
Mayor Bill Boner (whom Bredesen lost to in his bid for mayor the previous year) offered the Symphony a quarter million dollars that would be distributed by the Metro Arts Commission in exchange for free public concerts.
This was the invention of Metro Arts funding as we know it today. It was not a well-thought-out plan for how to best invest in the city’s art, to enhance its vibrancy or character. It was, to recycle Arts Commissioner Nefflin’s words, a “selfish and shortsighted” backroom deal that used public funds to lure working-class artists off the picket line.
It would change the city forever.
The Fall of Boner & The Election of the Symphony’s Savior
This is the fun part where we get to talk about Bill Boner.
While this is partly a detour through a burning trailer park for the fun of it, there is something to glean from rehashing the shit show that was the one-term mayorship of William Hill Boner.
Bill Boner was, in virtually every way possible, the opposite of Phil Bredesen. It was a contrast, stark and public, that would help Bredesen replace Boner in 1992, his first step to ascending to the governorship.
So. Bill Boner… Where to begin…
Bill Boner is the kind of four-term U.S. Congressman whose Wikipedia page goes into explicit details about his performance in a single high school basketball game. An East Nashville native, he had a Clinton-esque preternatural aptitude for the political game, effortlessly being elected governor of Boys State and high school class president.
After managing a gas station and teaching P.E. at Trevecca Nazarene, he decided to run for Clifford Allen’s U.S. Congressional seat under the assumption that he wouldn’t be much competition as he was close to dead. “All of Allen's opponents except Boner withdrew from the race,” his unsourced Wikipedia page claims, “apparently out of concern for ‘kicking a man when he's down.’” Boner had no such concerns. Allen died and Boner went to Washington.
His ten years in Congress were uneventful — except for that time he gave his third wife Betty, a defense contractor, a $50,000 contract, prompting him to resign amid a congressional ethics investigation. He was only unemployed briefly, quickly pivoting to a campaign for Mayor and beating out the untested out-of-towner Phil Bredesen.
That’s when shit started getting real weird.
In 1990 Bill appeared on the Phil Donahue show and announced his engagement to Country Singer Traci Peel, despite Boner still being married to Betty.
Peel was enamored with the aptly named Boner. One night the two were invited for a meeting with a reporter from the Nashville Banner at a T.G.I. Friday’s. Arriving with Peel, Boner pointed from across the restaurant at the reporter and bellowed out “She interrupted me while I was having sex tonight!”
Peel then infamously told the reporter the 45-year-old was able to have sex with her for “up to seven hours.”
The LA Times reports that his constituents weren’t entertained by these revelations, and soon bumper stickers were being printed saying: “Seven Hours for Traci. Three Years for Metro.”
Also, one time he went “undercover” wearing a fake mustache to see how easy it was to buy drugs in Nashville and went on Oprah to talk about it.
I bring all this up because this is precisely the kind of politician that did not play respectability politics the way he needed to stay in power in '80s/'90s Nashville. While Nashville might embrace him today as, say, a horrifically successful anti-CRT podcasting powerhouse — in 1988 he was not a person the establishment could rely on to represent their priorities, or perhaps more importantly, social status.
That’s why it’s worth noting that, even though the Metro Arts deal with the Symphony was Boner’s and Board Chair Martha Ingram's brainchild, it was Phil Bredesen who got the credit for saving the Symphony.
The Tennessean was sure to frame Bredesen as a politician, even though he’d never won an election. “Bredesen, a former candidate for Nashville mayor and U.S. representative, has taken an integral part in efforts to prevent the symphony's permanent demise.”
Bredesen's credit for preventing the Symphony's dissolution was not for applying his business acumen to help it evolve with the times and sell more tickets. Nor did he simply use his $200M net worth to shore up the $900k deficit, the fault of poor fundraising in a Reagan economy that had less use for corporate philanthropy.
In truth, the Symphony did build up their donations with the help of Board Chair (and Bredesen political backer) Martha Ingram and fundraiser Carroll Shanks. But in every instance, it was Bredesen, not Ingram, Shanks or the Symphony’s publicist, who was positioned in the media to talk about how the “Symphony was saved.”
"I think a lot of wounds have been healed,” the Tennessean quoted him in December 1988. “I won't say they're all gone, but we are making a lot of progress."
Bredesen’s work for the Symphony’s influential board, chaired by philanthropic juggernaut Martha Ingram, proved his allegiance to a particular vision of Nashville. Thrashing an artist’s union into submission is what it took to prove, to the donor class and Nashville’s right-of-center liberal constituency, his bona fides as a “social liberal/fiscal conservative”.
It was this brand of compassionate yet tight-fisted liberalism that helped him cruise into the Mayorship against the progressive Betty Nixon. Nixon, a Nashville native, was endorsed by women’s groups, community activists, and a Black political caucus. She had been a Nashville City Council Member at the same time as she worked in the state government while earning a master’s degree in business administration.
Truly “dancing backwards in high heels” the Tennessee Lookout’s Holly McCall reflected on her in 2023. Like so many women in the spotlight, Nixon was required to overachieve, but this effort was held against her.
Her political qualifications, much more evident than Bredesen’s, only led Nixon to be branded “shrill” and “probably a lesbian” by political commentators. Her $55,000 Vanderbilt salary and $109,000 of political donations were no match for Bredesen’s personal wealth and $955,000 of political donations.
Nixon was trounced by Bredesen, who won not just the Mayorship, but a referendum he bankrolled with $30,000 of campaign contributions that kept control of Metro’s internal auditor within the Mayor’s Office. The referendum would have given the City Council split control over auditing the city’s finances. The “insider candidate” as Betty Nixon branded him, had won not just the Mayorship but tightened the reins on how the city could be held accountable for its financial dealings.
Not for the last time, “saving the Symphony” from an economic collapse of its own making would be the proving ground of a political aspirant. In 2013, another non-native son would use financial maneuvering of the floundering Nashville Symphony to build his reputation with the power brokers of the city.
Both times, the Symphony’s private failings were underwritten by public funds, which by 2024 would total $8,216,400 for the Symphony — more than double the next recipient and 16% of all arts funding in the city’s history.
But first, we’ll look at the first ten years of Metro Arts grants — an era where money began to flow from the city to arts in ways it never had, but always under the tight grip of its new Mayor, the Symphony’s first “savior.”