Before becoming a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music Precollege, Elizabeth Gartman tutored for two years as she completed her master’s degree at the school. While Gartman described teaching at her alma mater as a beloved experience, Jan. 11 was her last day as an instructor. She cited inadequate pay and a stalled contract renegotiation process as reasons for her departure.

“I loved doing school there, I loved my composition teacher, I loved what I learned, and I loved my students. It was so sad,” Gartam told Spectator about her decision to leave.

Gartam is one of several precollege faculty members who have decided not to return for the spring semester, a decision that comes as the school’s precollege faculty union—the Association Representing Teaching Staff at Manhattan School of Music—voted overwhelmingly on Jan. 8 to authorize a strike—the first in the school’s history of over 100 years.

Following the strike authorization, faculty members, parents, students of the program, and members of other New York City musician unions, including New York University’s support staff union, rallied outside of the school on Saturday morning to support the precollege staff and advocate for their demands.

The private music conservatory, located on 122nd Street between Broadway and Claremont Avenue, holds its precollege program on Saturdays. Faculty of the division work for eight hours in addition to preparation hours for each session. Toward the beginning of the fall semester, ARTS-MSM’s contract expired. It was last renegotiated in 2017 and was subsequently extended during the pandemic. The semester started without a new contract, and the union and institution have been negotiating for months.

“We’ve been working all semester under the terms of this quite old contract, and the school has really, really been dragging its feet in negotiations, kind of through the whole semester,” David Friend, co-vice president of ARTS-MSM, said.

According to Friend, the union initially proposed to raise their hourly rate of $61 to $100 to address the rising cost of living in New York City and reflect the wages of “peer institutions” such as The Juilliard School and The New School’s Mannes School of Music. Since the initial proposal, the school has raised their wage offer to $70 in the first year of a new contract, eventually reaching $100 in the fourth year of the contract. However, according to Friend, the union—which has since decided to accept $80.50 per hour—continues to find the institution’s wage offer insufficient.

“If you’re making significantly more money—or in the case of private instruction, it could easily be twice or more as much money—just financially, people reach a breaking point where, even if they’re very committed to the institution, they just can’t do that anymore,” Friend said.

According to the union, faculty wages have fallen to “nearly half of current pay rates” of comparable institutions. Jeff Breithaupt—vice president of marketing, communications, and alumni affairs at the Manhattan School of Music—wrote in a statement to Spectator that the endowments and tuitions of those institutions are significantly larger than that of the Manhattan School of Music.

ARTS-MSM attributed the school’s hiring of “one of the highest-paid law firms in the country” as a sign of the school’s “willingness to pay legal fees upwards of $1500 per hour while offering their faculty miniscule increases of 50 cents to $3 per hour in recent bargaining sessions.” In response, Breithaupt wrote in a media statement, “It is plainly incorrect to state that MSM is paying attorneys ‘to drag out contract negotiations.’”

“Manhattan School of Music began its history serving children. MSM remains deeply committed to supporting the Precollege Division, and we value every member of the Division,” Breithaupt wrote. “We look forward to the amicable and successful conclusion of negotiations and the signing of a new agreement as soon as possible.”

As the union plans for a strike ahead of the spring semester, Friend has said that the school has started an “opposition campaign” against the union, emailing parents of the program that faculty members are “irrational.”

However, many parents of the program were present at the rally, standing outside of the school in the rain early Saturday morning to support the union’s strike authorization.

“We have the support, yes, of parents—of the people that are directly affected here—but we also have solidarity from a broad coalition of labor groups, just the music community at large,” Friend said during the rally. “We have a petition that’s been signed by over 2,000 people that includes some very prominent musicians.”

For precollege instructors, the support from other musicians and music teachers across the city has felt unifying, representing a larger fight for fair pay for artists as the cost of living in New York City continues to rise.

“We feel like it’s really a fight, not just for precollege faculty, but for musicians who live in New York and who are trying to put together their careers and I think that was a good feeling today, truly,” Adrienne Kim, co-vice president of ARTS-MSM, said in an interview with Spectator after the rally.

According to Adam Kent, president of ARTS-MSM and piano faculty member at the school since 1984, the school has made him and other members feel replaceable since the negotiations began. Kent described an incident in which the school’s lawyer allegedly told union members that they can easily find other instructors.

For Kent, the decision to authorize a strike is deeply personal—he attended the school’s precollege program at the age of eleven.

“There’s a deep feeling of family, of long-term commitment and involvement, and I think that’s probably one of the reasons that had taken us so many years to get to this point,” Kent said. “I think for many, many years, the pay was not good.”