In Reply to: Not precisely an answer to your questions. posted by mwhitmore on April 22, 2015 at 16:28:01:
Hi - this is almost certainly untrue. The London orchestras may have slightly more liberal rules regarding missing one rehearsal than many orchestras here in the states, but I would think that if a player had to miss more than one, he would have to take off the production entirely, and then someone else is hired to play the entire thing, and this would be worked out in advance - there is always a time limit on when you have to notify them that you are taking leave. The only time someone is sight-reading a performance is if someone else had to call in sick, which musicians do very rarely, much less often than they should, honestly. I know I have been guilty of playing when I should not have.
If anyone is really curious, I can very easily check. And by the way, that would not be a "union rule" per se, it would have to do with the policies of each individual orchestra. Every orchestra has a master agreement with the union, but each master agreement would be different. It is the same here. I am actually an executive board member of my local, which has a large jurisdiction involving many different CBAs. Every one of them is different. There are of course many things which are the same in all of them, conforming to industry standards. But rarely are any two orchestra's leave policies exactly the same.
The main difference between England and the US, as far as the work rules go, is that England is pretty much what is called a closed shop. They will always hire a national if there is a qualified one, which there pretty much always is. That is not the case here in the US. For instance, there is only one horn player in all of the major orchestras in London right now, though there are one or two others trying to make a living free-lancing there. Some American horn players have gone to London for some of their schooling, but they pretty much all have to come back here to make a living.
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Follow Ups
- RE: Not precisely an answer to your questions. - learsfool 23:00:39 04/22/15 (1)
- Thanks. - mwhitmore 11:13:07 04/23/15 (0)