In May I wondered “What happens to classical musicians in the Age of Corona?”:
The audience for live classical music and opera is perilously close to the 82-year-old average age of a Covid-19 victim in Massachusetts (source). Concert venues are shut down by orders of the governor, First Amendment right to assemble notwithstanding. Even if it were legal to host a concert, would the core of elderly patrons show up?
The New York Times has an answer: the musicians become more diverse, at least in terms of skin color (but if, for coronasafety, there is a limit of one audience member at a time, there can’t be too much skin color diversity in the audience!). “To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions”:
American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions, especially in regard to Black and Latino artists. In a 2014 study, only 1.8 percent of the players in top ensembles were Black; just 2.5 percent were Latino. At the time of the Philharmonic’s 1969 discrimination case, it had one Black player, the first it ever hired: Sanford Allen, a violinist. Today, in a city that is a quarter Black, just one out of 106 full-time players is Black: Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet.
The status quo is not working. If things are to change, ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.
Related:
- “A Famous Study Found That Blind Auditions Reduced Sexism in the Orchestra. Or Did It?” (Reason) : In May, Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman took a deep dive into the study. He described them as “not very impressive at all,” and had great difficulty trying to locate the 50 percent statistic within the modest findings. “You shouldn’t be running around making a big deal about point estimates when the standard errors are so large,” he wrote. “I don’t hold it against the authors—this was 2000, after all, the stone age in our understanding of statistical errors. But from a modern perspective we can see the problem.”
- Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (starring Will Ferrell, on Netflix, in case you are tired of old recordings of older music)
I have an idea: since Blacks are way over represented in the NBA and underrepresented in classical music orchestras and white people (along with Hispanics, Chinese, Jews, and Indians (both dot and feather) are way under represented in the NBA and at least white people and probably Jews and Chinese are way over represented in classical music orchestras why don’t we just have them switch? So some of the Black basketball players could be retrained to play the oboe or whatever and the oboe player could be retrained to throw a ball into a hoop? That would reduce systematic racism in both the NBA and the classical orchestras.
I was intrigued. I don’t subscribe to the Times so I actually took the effort to View Source, snip out the meat of the article from the surrounding
Javascript, paste it into Notepad++ and open the file in Edge. That works fine, by the way, and you can subvert the paywall in about 10 seconds. I did it for a good cause.
Interesting article, even if it’s partially contradictory. If the pipeline isn’t the problem and the talent pool is there, in a blind meritocratic selection process you’d expect that the orchestras wouldn’t be encountering this problem. And since the number of orchestras (and hence the number of players) doesn’t seem to be increasing very fast, this kind of affirmative action is going to mean that someone else has to lose their spot on the stage. I suspect that’s what the author is trying hard to elide past.
So what you have to do is find someone to spend more money to help Black classical musicians from the beginning and then let the unions and the juries doing the selection figure out what their quotas and policies should be. They’re going to have to do that themselves.
Here’s an idea: Kanye West is worth $3 billion according to all his recent bragging. Forbes puts his net worth at $1.3 billion. Who knows? Oprah Winfrey is worth $2.6 billion. Neither of them appear to have taken much interest in the plight of Black classical musicians recently, despite West’s forays into opera. So why don’t the two of them get together, donate $25 million each and start a foundation to increase the talent pool, help young players with expenses, and things of that nature, while the unions and the orchestras hammer all the rest of it out? They could each do one fundraising event a year and help hundreds or thousands of Black kids who want to develop their talents and lower the barriers to pursuing a lifetime of classical music study and performance. Then there would be no argument that the talent pool is there, and who knows, they might not even have to abandon the blind selection because there are a surplus of Black musicians, greater than their representation in the general population.
Aside: Really amazing. The full source of that article is >350kb not including the images, CSS and the external Javascript, but the article itself is only about 1400 words long.
And everyone knows meritocracy is fundamentally racist, so the idea of a blind meritocratic selection process is also fundamentally racist.
GB Shaw got the Devil to say something to say on this in Man & Super:
“Have you ever been in the country where I have the largest following—England? There they have great racecourses, and also concert rooms where they play the classical compositions of his Excellency’s friend Mozart. Those who go to the racecourses can stay away from them and go to the classical concerts instead if they like: there is no law against it; for Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allows them to do. And the classical concert is admitted to be a higher, more cultivated, poetic, intellectual, ennobling place than the racecourse. But do the lovers of racing desert their sport and flock to the concert room? Not they. They would suffer there all the weariness the Commander has suffered in heaven. There is the great gulf of the parable between the two places. “
Season 1 Episode 15, “The Hideaway” (1971), of The Odd Couple television series, is about this specific issue — minority representation among classical musicians.
We need more gay Zoroastrian Zanzibaris in the WNBA.