Klarinet Archive - Posting 000096.txt from 1999/02

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Women and orchestras
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1999 11:55:18 -0500

Kevin Fay has answered my major disagreement with Lisa Canjura-Clayton's
rejoinder to my post about the Women's Philharmonic. I do think that some
specific (but no longer widespread) instances of discrimination, such as the
situation at the Vienna Philharmonic and the local hiring bias that Paulette
W. Gulakowski describes, still need redress, but that the best way to handle
these is on a case-by-case basis as they arise. A few additional points:

>>>Not everybody has the inclination or the strength to continually challenge
the sexism inherent in the music world straight out of college.>>>

It seems to me that shelter groups for adult women in the arts actually
reinforce, exaggerate or even cause anxiety about working with men. I've just
deleted a corroborative description of behavior I've observed in such groups,
as too long and too far off topic, not about music. If anyone wants that
stuff, please e-mail me privately. Suffice that I now refuse to participate
in women-only arts and entertainment forums where I used to be active, because
I object to their gender bias and to their tendency to foster self-pity, and
because I think that in the USA, they've outlived their usefulness and
deteriorated into preaching to the faithful. Granted, things are different in
some other parts of the world, so why did the Women's Philharmonic organize in
the California Bay Area, of all places? Why not Kuwait, where there's plenty
of money for an orchestra and plenty of room to improve women's status?

Antonucci wrote,
>They dream of creating memorable music, launching female virtuosos to stardom
and, with a little luck, knocking some of the smugness out of their male-
dominated industry.>

I wrote,
>>Go through Antonucci's article and substitute religious or racial words for
gender words and my first reason will become squirm-producingly obvious. See
what such changes would do to the first sentence: "They dream of creating
memorable music, launching Christian virtuosos to stardom and, with a little
luck, knocking some of the smugness out of their Jewish-dominated industry."
Is that offensive enough? >>

Canjura-Clayton wrote,
>>>Bad comparison. There aren't centuries of constant, blatant discrimination
directed at Christian musicians. >>>

By changing Antonucci's gender words to "Christian" and "Jewish", I haven't
turned his line into a mere plea for justice for Christians, as you apparently
read it. The reason I asked if it's offensive enough is that it's also
blatantly anti-Jewish. As I think Jewish readers of the list and those who
remember the "Wagner" thread will have recognized, changing just those two
words mutates Antonucci's line into one tenet of the familiar anti-Semitic
screed of those who believe (along with Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler and the
KuKluxKlan) that Jews dominate the entertainment industry and that gentiles
should kick the Jews out. (Notice the violence of the word "knocking," which
is Antonucci's word and not one I changed.) I reject the *type* of reasoning
Antonucci paraphrased (as a reporter, of course, he was explaining the
opinions of the people he wrote about, not necessarily agreeing with them)
because there's bigotry at the root of such thinking, whether it pits
Christians against Jews, blacks against whites, women against men or whomever.
I don't think the hiring process for musicians should be a battleground where
one group conquers or dominates another.

Canjura-Clayton wrote,
>>...African-American boys weren't pushed away from instruments other than
pianos or harps.>>

In 1957, the same grade school music director who steered a girl (me) away
from drums and trumpet succeeded in steering a black male classmate toward
drums (because, the teacher said in front of the class, "Negroes have natural
rhythm") and away from the violin the child was eager to learn after attending
a violin recital. The director (who was a very talented teacher, BTW; I liked
him a lot, even though his biases made me furious) didn't come right out and
utter the old standard that only white kids were smart enough to learn the
violin. No, evidently he considered himself enlightened, because he warned
this kid that because of racial discrimination, a "Negro" classical violinist
would never get a job, while a "Negro" would have no trouble getting work as a
drummer! (Hmm, familiar stereotypes about African Americans sure fit in well
with the drummer jokes that assume that drummers are drugged, drunk, crazy and
stupid....)

If the Women's Philharmonic idea spreads, I can envision a time when residents
of a women's musical ghetto might pressure colleagues to stay away from, say,
the Vienna Philharmonic, because it's "not womanly enough." Sound ridiculous?
Well, how many black classical violin or cello virtuosos can you name? How
many black concertmasters of major orchestras? How many black conductors?
Today, self-selection probably accounts for more of the disparity than white
racism: In some black communities in and around Washington, D. C., for
instance, children have internalized the bigotry of earlier days to the point
where they now re-define victimhood as racial solidarity and put peer pressure
on each other to learn the especially "black" instruments like sax, drums or
trumpet and to stay away from classical music altogether, because jazz is
black and classical is white. If you play classical violin, you're not black
enough: you're an Oreo, an idea that probably would have sounded beyond weird
to one of the rare black classical violinists struggling for recognition a
century ago. I think that to avoid this type of self-destructive nonsense,
musicians should join forces to combat discrimination in general, instead of
fragmenting into comparatively weak, narrow-focus groups that, in their self-
absorption, too easily lose sight of the big picture.

Regarding the old-style "all-girl" orchestras, Canjura-Clayton writes,
>>These early orchestras were marketed for sex appeal and sex appeal only...
[snip]... Another thing you're confusing is *sex* versus *gender*. I don't go
to the Women's Phil as a lesbian looking for some sort of sexual thrill.>>

I realize that. I'm trying to do something more subversive than merely
confuse sex appeal with gender. I'm equating them: arguing that the fact of
the discrimination, per se, matters far more than the stated reason for it.
If being a woman is the first job qualification, before consideration of
whether this is the right musician for the job, then IMHO, that's a much
bigger problem than whether the women wear G-strings or conservative suits, or
whether they turn anybody on. If it's okay for the Women's Philharmonic to
keep men out, then why isn't it okay for the Vienna Philharmonic to keep women
out?

I wrote,
>The idea of putting women musicians in a women's orchestra is fundamentally
demeaning, in the same category with "separate but equal" and the Colored
Restroom.... If a group of men had proposed an all-female orchestra, I'll bet
we'd raise hell. >

Canjura-Clayton wrote,
>>There's a HUGE difference between handing somebody something and having them
do it themselves.>>

Yes: Doing it to ourselves is worse, IMHO. When we voluntarily retreat from
open competition, instead of waiting for someone else to discriminate against
us, we internalize and reinforce the stereotype that we're too frail or too
inept to compete on equal footing. I have no problem with women forming a
league of our own for sports where it matters that women and men differ in our
ratio of muscle mass to body size, for instance. However, there's no
legitimate *musical* reason to separate male and female musicians, unless
we're talking about male and female singing voices. Among instrumental
musicians, pro-woman favoritism only exchanges one injustice for another. I
favor fair play, for everybody.

Lelia

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