The answer to the question in the title — I think it’s yes.
My thesis here: That classical music should be more diverse not just because of social justice. And not just because — in a 2019 world where, in the US, just about everyone in the public arena makes a point of being diverse — we look like backward fools because we’re so white.
There’s also something else. If people of color played a larger part in what we do, we in turn might play a larger part in the world. Thus helping to close the gap between classical music and the rest of our culture.
And what if funders gave orchestras an ultimatum? Diversify now, or no more funding!
My thinking started with a casual remark I read in the Washington Post:
One of the contemporary entertainment industry’s strongest claims to social relevance is stars’ participation in the fight for LGBT equality.
This wasn’t the conclusion to some grand investigation. It was just a thought offered in passing, as something self-evident. Toward the start of a piece on a megachurch big in Hollywood that hides how anti-gay it is.
So, reading that, I thought…
If fighting for LGBT equality helps make the entertainment industry socially relevant, what are we — what is the classical music industry — if we don’t play any visible role in those fights at all?
No visible role in the LGBT struggle, nor in the fight for racial and ethnic equality.
Maybe it means we don’t have many claims to social relevance. Despite our increased presence in communities, despite performances in prisons and other good things we do outside our opera houses and our concert halls.
We’re not involved in the major issues of the day. The film and record industries, by contrast, are deeply involved. Hence the racial uproar at the Grammys this year, and the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag in 2015. The only reason there isn’t a #ClassicalMusicSoWhite hashtag — I might guess — is that no one in the wider world cares about us enough to bother making one.
So what if this turned around?
What if — after a public struggle that made major news — we got a lot more diverse?
I think that would be fabulous for us.
So let me propose a scenario. Suppose a coalition of major donors, enough of them to make a decisive different, told our orchestras, “Not another dollar from us unless in two years you raise the number of musicians of color you’ve got from 4% to 15%.”
The 4% number was cited as unacceptably “intractable” by Susan Feder, the head of arts funding for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in a press release announcing a modest diversity initiative in partnership with the League of American Orchestras.
So now suppose it has to greatly rise. Otherwise no funding!
What would happen?
Oh, the commotion! The screams and screeches! The pushback from conservative board members! And from the musicians’ unions!
But the change has to happen. Facing a boycott of major donors, orchestras would have to get more diverse really fast if they wanted to survive.Our or
And so in two years the smoke clears. The National Symphony hear in DC — a black majority city, don’t forget — comes onstage with 15% black and Latino musicians.
Don’t you think they’d get some attention? Especially if it were happening in every city. Especially since there’d been a two-year struggle, which would make headlines, just as orchestra financial crises (and the one at the Met Opera) did in recent years.
Now the struggle is over, at least for now, and orchestras have changed their color. (Literally.) Or started to. Don’t you think people would come to concerts to see that? Especially people of color?
This might bring new vitality to orchestras. New visibility. A reason for people in the wider world to care about them. Now they’d matter. Because they took a stand on something we’re all talking about.
I’ll post next about how I think the change could happen quickly. Even though there seem systemic reasons why it couldn’t. Like the established and I’d think contractually mandated practice of blind auditions, meaning that musicians audition for an orchestra behind a screen, so nobody can see who they are, and those who get into the orchestra are supposed to be picked purely for their musical ability.
I think all that could be overcome. And that the musical quality of orchestras wouldn’t suffer.
I love this so much… an idealistic and straightforward leap into the future where we cut the hemming and hawing and pulling at beards while we discuss the nuances of ‘excellence’… instead, we tell orchestras and universities and conservatories that diversity will be linked to real funding (not just funding for ‘special programs’)… that they have to hustle and create a welcoming environment for diverse people to be welcomed to the stage and to curate their talents to the highest level. And as you mention, our current system of ‘fair auditions’ would make this impossible. And on a different topic, it also reminds me of a conversation that I had with a former student a few days ago wherein I was trying to explain to him why a 60 year old instrumental virtuoso of any colour could never ever win an orchestral position… while I was unable to answer his simple question of “why” in polite terms, I could aver that it is an absolute truth. As always, thank you for raising all the taboo topics in such compassionate yet clear and provocative terms. If more voices can join yours, and if we keep performing our music, maybe diversity will become a true value.
Could diversity get us more attention? No, but efforts must be made anyway. Example: orchestras used to be mostly male; efforts were made, now there are a lot more women. Did this increase attendance? No. It has mentioned on this very blog perhaps once or twice that declining attendance might be an issue . . .
Did this change make classical music relevant? I cannot say that it has, but it has kept it from being totally irrelevant or too out of touch. Teaching at a community college, I often am prompted by class discussions to spontaneously play some particular piece from YouTube. I tell the class that this is “YouTube” roulette, because you never know exactly what you are going to get. When the vid turns out to be some all-male orchestra, I feel a bit of a creepy vibe in the room, and I can only remark that ‘that is how it used to be.’ When it is clearly an all-Euro heritage orchestra, I feel compelled to justify it . . . ‘ah, this orchestra is based in Sweden.’
But diversity getting us more attention? No. Virtue signaling is perhaps necessary to maintain the current and near-future audience, but it is not sufficient to expand the audience.
Interesting, Dave. Thanks for these thoughts. Certainly worth pondering!
Part of my thinking was that racial and ethnic diversity wouldn’t be easily achieved. There would be public struggles. And these would make headlines, which would draw attention. As happened, to my knowledge, only in one instance when women started coming into orchestras. Of course that was when the Vienna Philharmonic resisted having women. That certainly brought attention to the orchestra, but I wouldn’t expect it to have increased attendance. For reasons I’ll detail in a moment, though I also think the situation in Europe might be different from the US.
The reasons I think adding women didn’t make a great change would first be that there weren’t huge public fights about it. And then women had always been part of the classical music scene. The majority of conservatory students were women. The instrumental players among them just weren’t allowed to get very far in the orchestra field. For that matter, if you go back to the early decades of the last century, the audience for classical music had many more women than men.
So when women started to play in major orchestras, this was a needed and welcome change (certainly welcome to the women who got those jobs!), but not one that dramatically changed the look and feel of the field.
Bringing in large numbers of nonwhite players would be a major change. If you go back before WW II, you’d find a great deal of classical music activity in black communities, but very few black professionals in the larger classical music world, of course because of racism. And while those barriers are down, we still don’t see many musicians of color onstage, or for that matter in the audience. This is a larger barrier than white people might think. I remember doing a lengthy article back in the 1990s about African-Americans in classical music, and talking to black women in Chicago, whose kids played in a youth orchestra, and who felt they wouldn’t be welcome if they went to hear the Chicago Symphony in Orchestra Hall. Whether or not that in fact was true, whether or not they’d be welcome, it’s important that they felt that they wouldn’t be welcome, and that there would be hardly anyone who looked like them joining them in the audience.
So. Put a lot of women in the orchestra, and this doesn’t make a seismic change in the field. Women are already in conservatories, and in the audience. Bring players of color in, and that really is a dramatic change. These are people who aren’t strongly represented in conservatories, aren’t strongly represented in the audience. And whose presence onstage in large numbers would have to be the result of dramatic changes in how orchestras operate. Which would provoke resistance, which might include the kind of labor disputes that made headlines at many orchestras and at the Met Opera and Chicago Lyric Opera during the past 10 years.
That’s because to put large numbers of nonwhite players onstage fairly quickly, orchestras would have to change the current way that new musicians are hired, prioritize nonwhite players as substitutes, and then use substitutes much more often, even when the fulltime players still were available. I believe that would provoke resistance, to put it mildly, from the unionized musicians who would rightly see the new initiatives as removing pregotatives they’d had for all their careers, and which they’d thought they could count on. They’d most likely perceive themselves as damaged, and they’d want to fight back.
At the end of this, we’d have had a few years of very public struggles, and then a dramatic change in the look and feel of the concert hall, bringing in people just not seen in such concentrated numbers before, pretty much anywhere in classical music. Hard to believe this wouldn’t get a lot of attention. I don’t say that this alone would bring in so many new people that it would solve our audience problem, but I think it would bring some in.
And don’t forget that this struggle within orchestras would be running parallel to similar struggles in other areas of life and culture. So orchestras would now be more strongly seen as part of the contemporary world, which they certainly aren’t seen as now. I think that would also make a change.
Of course I’m just speculating here, as you have to admit you are. I hope the big change happens, and then we can see which of us is right!
Indeed I am speculating, and I hope I am wrong!