Usually, this English blogs have been dealing with heavy topics. My real interests are, in fact, classical music. So, for a change, today's topic deals with women and violin. (Lily)
Iowa Public Radio (http://iowapublicradio.org/post/parity-time-here-classical-violin)
Is Parity Time Here for the Classical Violin?, 22 June 2014
by Barney Sherman
To paraphrase my previous post, if you think women have it bad in classical music, take a look at supposedly contemporary arts like film, literature, rock, jazz, and country. Blogging for the New Yorker, Alex Ross noted that I “might also have pointed out that misogyny is excruciatingly commonplace in mainstream pop culture.” He adds that classical music
“... can point with some pride toward increasing gender parity in the makeup of orchestras, toward considerable progress in the representation of female composers, and—caveats aside—toward the historic empowerment of the diva.”
Alex’s post is excellent and worth reading in full, but let me use that highlighted sentence to segue to my “Part 2,” which, I said, would look at a classical field that seems to have reached parity. What I had in mind was the violin.
If women have as good a chance as men of reaching the top as classical violinists, it is a big deal, since no instrument ranks higher in professional status. Violin superstars earn top fees, and the instrument has not only a major solo repertory but also prominent roles in core ensemble types like the orchestra, string quartet, piano trio, piano quartet, and baroque band. So has the field achieved parity? And if so, what can we learn from it? As Kai Ryssdal might say, let’s do the numbers.
Part I: HAVE WOMEN ATTAINED PARITY IN THE VIOLIN PROFESSION?
THEN: We Had Male
Women violin soloists certainly did not have an equal shot at the top in the 18th, 19th, or first half of the 20th century. In 1878 the British pedagogue Georg Dubourg wrote, “The common objection is that [for women to play the violin] is ungraceful - a more solid objection, perhaps, is that they do not naturally possess the physical grasp, so essential to the requirements of playing.” And in 1901, a male author in Etude Magazine (hat/tip Cora Cooper ) wrote:
“Where the higher art of violin-playing is concerned, the average gifted woman labors under certain great disadvantages which too often prove fatal, insurmountable barriers to success. How many are blessed with the physical strength which is necessary to carry them through the long hard years of musical servitude? The limit of their physical endurance is not often commensurate with the demands of their art; and just when the greatest effort is required of them—when their highest musical and instrumental possibilities are dependent upon a continuance, if not an increase, of energy and vitality—they fail to put forth the requisite strength, and stop far short of their aspirations."
To be fair, there were more enlightened statements, like the one Brahms made in 1885 about violinist Marie Soldat, who was performing his Violin Concerto: “Isn’t she terrific? Can’t she take on 10 men?” Another came from Brahms’s leading advocate among Viennese music critics, Eduard Hanslick, who in 1897 wrote “If you ask me, concern that a woman can’t hold her own is totally invalid.”
I’m quoting Hanslick from the excellent, thorough, and thoroughly entertaining 2013 book by University of Iowa historian David Schoenbaum, The Violin: A Social History of the World’s Most Versatile Instrument. He shows that some intrepid women did achieve “the highest art” and at least some recognition as violinists (Tully Potter also nicely surveys them), but that men greatly outnumbered women in violin stardom. Men took not only the limelight but also the lucre - Schoenbaum shows that female violin soloists were paid less than comparable men.
Schoenbaum informs us that in 1910 women made up only 16% of the violinists in the Royal College of Music’s professional directory and that a celebrated 1916 book, Famous Violinist of To-Day and Yesterday, gives only 12% of its pages to women. I notice similar imbalances in much later books. The series The Way They Play, published between 1975 and 1985, has an 8:1 ratio of male to female interviewees, and Zdenko Silvela’s 2001 A New History of Violin Playing has entries for dozens of men from modern times but only three women (Ginette Neveu, Anne-Sophie Mutter, and Kyung-Wha Chung).
And just last year, BBC Music Magazine polled 100 current violinists about the players who had most influenced them; the “golden age” of the violin apparently seems a man’s world to those polled, since their final list of “20 most influential violinists” included only one woman, Neveu. She was killed in a 1949 place crash at age 30; here’s a sample of what the world of music lost:
As for women in the top orchestras of a century ago, the numbers can be counted on one’s fingers. Schoenbaum notes that in 1913 Sir Henry Woods hired six for the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. As best as I can find, the Royal Concertgebouw, the Cleveland Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphonies each hired a women string player in 1897, 1918 and 1925 respectively. But these women were exceptional, and the prejudice they faced is driven home by another quotable male found by Cooper in Etude in 1901:
“Imagine a refined, delicately-constituted young woman enduring the actual hardships which fall to the lot of every individual orchestral member of the Metropolitan Opera! Let any woman who imagines herself capable of performing such work as these men perform acquaint herself with what is required.... She will be quickly disillusioned…. In a word, the orchestra is decidedly not woman’s sphere.”
Honest, I didn’t make that up (and we’ll get back to the Met Orchestra). Etude’s commentator didn’t discuss female string quartets, but Schoenbaum does, noting that the standing joke was “How do you become a millionaire by playing quartets? Start out as a billionaire!” Several leading women violinists did start quartets nonetheless, including Soldat, Vilémina Neruda, Geraldine Morgan, Isolde Menges, and Mari Iwamoto. But all the major quartets that left large bodies of recordings in the pre-digital era had male first violinists. I welcome correction, but the trend is overwhelming:
Men dominated the classical violin profession as late as, oh, 1970.
Not anymore.
NOW: It's Parity Time!
Today, any plausible list of the foremost violinists would include at least as many women as men. The numbers:
VIOLIN SOLOISTS: Having said what I did about plausible lists, I need to point you to one. Lacking a ready-made list, I came up with something that will have to do: my own. I’ve included every violinist under the age of 45 with enough of a solo career to have been heard of by me, who almost never leaves Iowa and knows violinists mostly by recordings or reputations. I managed to come up with 78, and - drumroll - exactly half are men and half are women. You can probably come up with a better list (consider mine a wiki and feel free to let me know what you’d change), but I’d guess that your list will be similar in its gender parity.
As Kai would say, cue the happy music!
One could argue that my list is just names and doesn’t “weight” the artists by their artistic or commercial stature. So here’s a stand-in for that: Gramophone recently posted a list of ten violin concertos to start your collection with, recommending a best recording from recent years. Of the ten recordings, seven are by women:
- the Beethoven and Alban Berg Concertos played by Isabelle Faust (a multiple Gramophone Award winner)
- the Brahms Violin Concerto and Bruch First played by Julia Fischer (whose Mozart and Tchaikovksy recordings are also outstanding),
- the Shostakovich First played by Lisa Batiashvili
- the second concertos of Bartók and Prokofiev played by Patricia Kopatchinskaja.
One could question any given selection, of course but a revised list probably wouldn’t increase male representation.
Midori Goto, born in Japan in 1971, one of the women who has reached the pinnacle of today's violin profession. (She also does serious educational outreach work, as in this picture.)
Credit (http://www.midoriandfriends.org/)
It might even reduce it. Check out a favorite of mine that isn't on the list - Midori’s Mendelssohn Concerto, recorded live with the Berlin Philharmonic - or Faust’s Bartok, or Viktoria Mullova or Janine Jansen or Rachel Podger or Anne-Sophie Mutter or Anne Akiko Meyers or Hilary Hahn in various Bach concertos. Or listen to all six play Bach for evidence that women don’t all play alike, or in any non-meaningless way play “like women."
STRING QUARTETS: I mentioned the male first violinists who dominate the classic quartet recordings. By striking contrast, today some of the best-known quartets have a woman playing first fiddle. Here are the ones I can think of: the Amar, Arcanto, Belcea, Casals, Cavani, Cecilia, Chiara, Corigliano, Cypress, Daedalus, Dante, Delray, Del Sol, Enso, Gesualdo, Lark, Kepler, Klenke, Pavel Haas, Pacifica, and Ying String Quartets. Someday maybe I’ll get real numbers but for now, I’ll predict that they won’t undermine the case that women have achieved parity.
ORCHESTRAL VIOLINISTS: Back to numbers. To make sure we’re comparing apples to apples, I’ll look only at the best American and European orchestras, operationally defined as the top 16 chosen when Gramophone magazine polled 100 experts from around the world to come up with a list of the world’s best orchestras.
To earn a position in one of these orchestras, a violinist has to play on a level comparable to a solo artist - the competition is that intense and the standards that high. So how are women violinists doing? The answer depends on which side of the Atlantic you’re on. In the USA, a 2009 study found that women slightly outnumber men in the violin sections of the 13 top American orchestras. It's not so slight if you restrict the count to Gramophone’s “World’s Best." In the US that includes the “Big Five” (the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Philadelphia Orchestra) plus the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and MET Orchestra (the Metropolitan Opera's orchestra). Whether you look at the Big Five or all Eight, in 2014 the violin sections have a solid female majority at 58% - 148 women, 107 men. (By the way, remember Etude’s mention of the Metropolitan Orchestra? Right now half its violinists are female - and there’s universal agreement that it plays better now than it ever did in the past.)
Meanwhile, in the top eight European orchestras on Gramophone’s list, the violin sections show the opposite ratio: 61% of the violinists are guys.
Tallying the totals is a little complicated, since these European orchestras have more violinists on average than the American ones (about 23% more), which raises the total number of males counted. But I’ll ignore that and add the two continents together. I come up with 307 men and 274 women violinists in the top 16 orchestras - that is to say, 53% male and 47% female, which is not perfect but statistically close. And if you move past the top 16 to less-famous orchestras, it gets closer. (A caveat: Men still disproportionately hold the positions known as "concertmaster" in the US - the four top violinists in the orchestra - because seniority is a central part of how that position is filled. But with time, this position, too, is balancing out. In fact, now one of the Vienna Philharmonic's concertmasters is Bulgarian violinist Albena Danailova. How remarkable is it to have a woman in that post? Read on. But first, my conclusion
If you want to see a high-level arts profession in which women and men are equals, check out today's classical violin scene.
Part 2: HOW DID IT HAPPEN, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
Some professions center on gender-specific attributes - think defensive tackles vs. supermodels, or for that matter basso profundos vs. coloratura sopranos. We don’t need an article explaining why the former professions are all male and the latter all female.But that is not true of classical instrumental playing. The violinists I mentioned above bristle at any suggestion that they play the classics in a “female” way different from males, and in fact no critic could accurately guess which recording of Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms is by a woman and which by a man. (One can usually tell which generation a violinist is from, and perhaps their teacher’s “school,” but gender? Impossible.)
In a craft that has no gender-specific demands, parity should be no big deal. But it is: as I noted in Post 1, it’s very, very unusual. So it’s worth taking time to consider how it happened. I’ll begin my considerations by examining why American violin sections have higher percentages of women than European orchestras.
“Wassup Europe?”: Two explanations. I see two main reasons:
- Legacy: how soon the ball got rolling. If you want to guess the gender balance of an orchestra’s violin section in 2014, you can do better than chance if you simply know how many years it’s been since the orchestra accepted its first woman (not including the harpists - I’ll get to that). That’s partly because orchestral musicians usually have tenure of decades, so even when the gender barriers fall it takes a while for women to even have openings to try out for.
I won’t bore you with the overall stats, because it’s so obvious, but the clearest comparison is of the Royal Concertgebouw, the only European major orchestra with a majority-female violin section - 2:1, like an American orchestra - to the Vienna Philharmonic, which has only five women violinists, the fewest of any majors. The Concertgebouw accepted its first female string player back in 1897, while the Vienna Philharmonic hired its first only six years ago, in 2008. Vienna was the last major orchestra to admit women, 15 years after the previous holdout, Berlin. The Viennese gave in only in 1997, when the USA's National Organization of Women threatened boycotts and demonstrations of the orchestra's planned US tour. Just before embarking, the VPO held a last-minute vote, and the younger players "for" votes overwhelmed the retired players' "against" votes, according to the woman admitted, harpist Anna Lelkes. (By the way, Gramophone's critics ranked the Concertgebouw the finest orchestra in the world; yes, those Viennese fiddlers are glorious, but not more than the Dutch ones.)
- Blind Auditions - Legacy is part of the story, but not all. Another practice that increased the number of women in American orchestras was blind auditions. Our orchestras started using them in the 1970s after two African-American musicians brought charges against the New York Philharmonic in 1969 for racial discrimination. The orchestra and Leonard Bernstein took them seriously, and one result was “blinding.” In such auditions, a screen keeps the judges from seeing the applicant who’s playing, which means that gender is as hidden as race. Orchestras also try to hide non-visual cues to gender - the player enters on a thick carpet or barefoot to hide the sounds made by shoes, and are often advised not to wear fragrances.
A lot changed in the world in the 1960s-80s, including the rise of “second-wave feminism,” so how could we separate out the contribution of blind auditions to increased female participation? As it happens, a brilliant and elegantly designed study published in 2000 by two economists - Claudia Goldin of Harvard and Cecilia Elena Rouse of Princeton - did just this.
Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University
(Credit Harvard University)
Cecilia Rouse, who is Dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where she is also Katzman and Ernst Professor in the Economics of Education AND Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, AND Founding Director of the Education Research Section.
(Credit Princeton University)
Goldin and Rouse looked at confidential data from eight major US orchestras, and concluded:
The screen increases - by 50 percent - the probability that a woman will be advanced from certain preliminary rounds and increases several fold the likelihood that a women will be selected in the final round.
The blind auditioning process has its own problems and some critics, and many European orchestras - including the Berlin Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra - do not use them. But this study suggests that it explains part of the differing gender balances across continents. One major European orchestra that does use them now is the Vienna Philharmonic, and it started doing so precisely to help redress its long exclusion of women.
- Auditioning More Applicants - Fifty percent is a lot. But Goldin and Rouse find other influences. American orchestras started auditioning more musicians for each opening, which gave more women a chance - especially in violin sections, since these typically employ 30-40 players, compared to wind or brass sections that have only a handful of players. That means more turnover from violinists leaving or retiring, and thus many more openings for which both genders can apply.
- Declining Sexism - Also, Goldin and Rouse note a decline in sexist attitudes among those making the final hiring decisions - people who used to say that women’s playing was too “feminine” for, say, the manly-manly music of Beethoven’s heroic works.
- More Women Going for Major Careers - Finally, Goldin and Rouse find that a significant piece of the puzzle is that more women started going for major professional careers. This trend was happening in many fields and involved many variables. For example, Schoenbaum and Potter both note that marriage and maternity often meant “retirement” for women violinists with significant solo careers. Maternity was actually used as an argument against admitting women by older Vienna Philharmonic players as late as 1996.
In any event, the increasing participation of women in professional life must explain part of this post’s basic point about the rise of women in the classical violin.
But wait - if more women are going for major careers, that ought to affect all instruments in the orchestra equally, right? Yet that is not what we see when we look at orchestras. Which brings us to one important element of the women in the violin story: instruments are “gender-stereotyped.”
Another Element: Women Choose the Violin Often Compared to Other Instruments
Behind every classical instrumentalist is a child who worked very hard from an early age to master the craft. How early? The great violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter has argued that the violin’s technique is so exacting that after you turn six it’s too late to become a classical professional. And as it happens, girls tend to choose different instruments than boys do.
This "gendering" is quite measurable:
- at America’s top conservatory, Juilliard, in the second half of the 20th century, women were 2-3 times more likely to focus on strings and winds than on brass instruments, and this ratio did not change over those 50 years;
- the harp has been considered a feminine instrument for a long time; in 1945, Time reported that 99% of America’s 4,000 harpists were women, and even now, in my 16 orchestras, only two have male harpists (San Francisco and London).
- the double-bass has long been a guy thing and still tends to be: out of the 155 double-bassists employed by my 16 orchestras, only seven are women.
And if you think this kind of stereotyping is passing into history, a recent study in the UK found that children still tend to choose gender-stereotyped instruments. The researchers report that “girls predominated in harp, flute, voice, fife/piccolo, clarinet, oboe and violin, and boys in electric guitar, bass guitar, tuba, kit drums, tabla and trombone.”
Electric guitar? Sure enough, not even one woman made Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Yet isn’t it obvious that women have all that’s needed biologically to become guitar heroes? Similarly, there is no biological barrier to women who want to play the double-bass or horn or tuba. Indeed, the first woman member of the New York Philharmonic was double-bassist Orin O’Brien - who was hired by Leonard Bernstein in 1966, and is still there! But she remains the only woman in that section.
Many hypotheses have been forwarded about why instruments are so “gendered” - an unpublished draft of this post considered their pros and cons. But I haven’t come across any really good data, so I’ll stay out of it for now. It’s not critical to my point, in any case, which is that
The rise of women violinists results from an intersection between reduced barriers to entry for women violinists with increased likelihood of having a full-time professional career plus a strong interest among women in this particular instrument.
Part 3: "Taragate" Revisited
I waded into this topic in response to a notorious case of fat-shaming - the superb Irish mezzo Tara Erraught dissed because she supposedly didn’t look the way certain male music critics wanted her to - and I can’t ignore that issue with respect to the violin, much though I want to be totally positive. The good news is that we no longer filter out half of humanity’s violinistic genius because of gender. But the less-good news is that we do filter out some genius over ideals of physical appearance. As Jessica Duchen writes, “it has become much harder for soloists... to be noticed unless they look as good as they sound.” That is a loss to the artists who don’t get the careers, and also to the rest of us. As Duchen puts it, “if indifferent artists who are supremely photogenic are snaffling the opportunities – and keeping out potentially great ones who are not – audiences are being duped.”
Duchen adds that this affects “young women most of all.” I couldn’t find research on that but I find it convincing. In any event, NPR’s Anastasia Tsoulcias, in an excellent post reflecting on these debates, gets to the core issue when she says, “I hold out hope that the lion's share of reflection is directed toward how much we collectively make a woman's body the ultimate arbiter of her worth.”
To be sure, we can’t expect classical music to redress all the world’s injustices - the “beauty premium” distorts many labor markets. And of course, sometimes a supreme violinist coincidentally also looks exactly like what the fashion industry seeks. But when that happens, such violinists HATE being judged for their looks (for example, here’s an interview with the wise and musically outstanding Nicola Benedetti). More to the point, statistically many more supreme artists do not look that way. Case in point: would the great Neveu get a contract from today’s major media conglomerates (Universal, Warner, etc.)? My guess is that we would be hearing her on an indie classical label - and perhaps that’s part of why such labels often produce the best recordings.
I’ll go back to my Post 1: classical-music culture is doing better in this regard than most of popular culture. But that’s no reason to rest on the laurels, folks! When we talk about taking classical off its pedestal and connecting it to the wider culture, that’s a good thing when it means performing Sibelius in parking ramps, encouraging less formal conduct at concerts, and recording creative collaborations between Pulitzer-winning composers and Indie rock giants- but not when it means pressuring violinists to appear as so-called “violin babes.”
This is, by the way, another argument for blind auditioning. And here’s another modest proposal: blind CD reviewing. I’d love it if it record-review editors would switch to a system of hiding the identity of the artists on recordings sent to reviewers. After all, few of us hear a performance as "it is"; our preconceptions about this or that artist tend to shape what we experience. Those preconceptions can include not only artists' reputations but also their appearance, age nationality, and gender. In concert halls these demographics can't be hidden, but in CD reviews it would be relatively easy.
Conclusion: WHAT WE LOST WHEN WOMEN WERE EXCLUDED, WHAT WE GAIN FROM ENCOURAGING EVERY CHILD
Back to the good news. We violin devotees savor the geniuses recorded in earlier times, like Adolf Busch and David Oistrakh (to name two of my special favorites). But Oistrakh regarded Neveu as his superior - we know that because he wrote it to his wife when Neveu beat him in the first Wieniawski Competition in 1935. And then there were all the women, documented especially well by Schoenbaum, who didn’t have the option of developing their talents and careers. I love the golden-age violinists, but the era would have been even more golden if women had had an equal chance to participate.
Thus the biggest takeaway from considering women and the violin is that gender balance is good not only for artists - it's good for the art. The rise of women in the violin is not just something to note, it's something to celebrate and emulate. Tell your kids they can play whatever they want (harp, double-bass, electric guitar or violin) regardless of gender, and you’ll be doing not only them but everyone else a favor. Really - as Kai says, do the numbers!
(End)
