Klarinet Archive - Posting 000099.txt from 1999/02

From: Ken Wolman <Ken.Wolman@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] Women and orchestras
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1999 13:45:47 -0500

Lelia's posting is absolutely brilliant, and anything I say here will
only roil the waters even more, but there are some few observations I
need to make, some of which may seem to come from deep in left field.

> 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

This breaks down into issues of gender as well as race. Where I went to
school, in the Bronx in the 1950s, my neighborhood didn't HAVE any black
kids, so racism never became an issue. I shiver to think of what might
have happened if a black child had shown up at PS 102 in 1953, when I
was handed my first clarinet. No, our prejudice was of another kind.
You had two choices of instrument: clarinet or violin. Guess how it
broke down? See, it wasn't really a CHOICE at all because the boys all
got assigned to the clarinet and the girls got assigned to the violin.
Somehow, down there in the Bronx gut back in the mid-50s, the violin was
thought of as a "girl's instrument" and the boy who took it up would
most likely be labelled a "faggot." Oh, forget those guys like Heifetz,
Francescatti, Stern, or Milstein. If you took up the violin you were
going to wake up as Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. This was my introduction
to Folk Wisdom USA circa 1953.

> 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....)

Yeah, like that famous black drummer Gene Krupa, I guess:-).

I remember hearing stuff about how women could not make it as concert
pianists because they lacked the physical strength and hand-span to
negotiate the keyboard demands of the major composers. Uh-huh. I
wonder if Martha Argerich grew up hearing that one too, or if it was an
Urban Legend indigenous to certain neighborhoods in New York City.

> Well, how many black classical violin or cello virtuosos can you name? How
> many black concertmasters of major orchestras? How many black conductors?

None and Henry Lewis, Marilyn Horne's ex and the man who raised the New
Jersey Symphony from a bar mitzvah pickup band with strings into
arguably the best regional orchestra in the country. I don't even want
to think about the crap that man probably had to eat on the way up....

> 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.

Right. In the process, this is what happens, and it goes far beyond
music and into the totality of education. You wind up with people who
refuse to learn that "white shit," who somehow self-foster the delusion
that it's enough to be Tall, Black, and Proud to survive in a world that
at the same time is regarded (not entirely without cause) as run by a
bunch of fat rich white guys. Well, what happens? Nothing. Social
immobility, or worse, the maintenance of a permanent underclass. And
this plays directly into the needs of a society that requires its corps
of social untouchables to do its dirty work while helping maintain the
stereotype of the Lazy/Shiftless/drug-addicted/drunken/[now]Hostile
black.

Twenty-plus years ago I worked as an administrator at a community
college in the heart of Paterson, New Jersey. When I made the above
statement at a public convocation, the looks I got from the other
administrators (all white) suggested that I update my resume (I was
doing so anyway). We were trying to establish basic academic standards
at what was designed as a vocational school. We were requiring that our
graduates knew how to read and write ENGLISH--not Spanish alone, not
something that sounded like rap music without the music. Why? Because
the ability to do these things was and remains essential to getting up
any kind of economic ladder. We were requiring our students to read a
few "great ideas." Well, here I was, saying this was wonderful and at
the same time it was real dangerous because the anonymous They out there
had a vested interest in its failure. If you teach people to think
critically and objectively about the causes of their oppression, if you
teach them to analyze instead of indulging in Victimology, then you have
created a fabulously dangerous weapon: a thinking human being. And, I
asked, if we raise the aspirations of our minority students, "Who is
going to clean our toilets?" That is, who will be our Untouchable caste
if the former Untouchables refuse to do that stuff anymore: clean our
johns, clean our suburban houses, and fight our fake wars.

So by self-segregating--and our black and Latino students did it then
too--they were playing right into the scenario. They were as enslaved
to a culture of Self-Pity and hopelessness as their ancestors had been
bound to a plantation in South Carolina.

> 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?

In case there's someone I haven't offended, here's more. The difference
is that people who label themselves as Oppressed make a career out of
it. This is not unique to "minorities." I was born into a people who
STILL turn any critical remark in the political arena into a charge of
anti-Semitism. I recently joined a religion that regards the yammerings
of a second-rate playwright like Terrence MacNally as an attack on the
Catholic faith. I have heard attacks on MacNally turned into the
dreaded charge of "homophobia" or gay-bashing. I have heard black
speakers say that they CANNOT be racist against whites because racism is
a purely white condition: so they get a free, label-less pass to hate
me, but I can't return the favor by proposing a White Studies program
that hires David Duke as the counterpart to Leonard Jeffries. I have
heard women-only radio shows in New York in the late Seventies that
blatantly insulted men, hung up on them, and spoke not even with
condescension but outright hatred: a radio show on that same station
(WBAI-FM) would not even have put a men-only radio show on the air
unless it was some sort of New Age Consciousness-Raising "Oh I'm So
Guilty" act of male contrition.

In other words, in case I haven't been nearly insulting enough: it is
politically incorrect for the Vienna Philharmonic to bar women, but it
is quite correct for the Women's Philharmonic to bar men.

No apologies. People have called me worse things in my life than racist
or sexist. All shoes fit if you think they do, but check your own feet
first.

Ken
--
Ken Wolman dbtrader Deutsche Bank, N.A.
1251 Sixth Avenue New York, NY 10019 212-469-6494

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