As a general rule, if you meet classical music artists, they tend to be politically more liberal than average, certainly the American average. In spite of that, classical music is still very much a conservative, man's world in many ways. For one, most of the composers represented on concert programs are male, especially orchestral programs. Demographically, compared to 100 years ago, it's certainly been a sign of progress that women are well represented as a percentage of orchestra members (the Vienna Philharmonic aside), not to mention as globe-trotting soloists.
One other not-so-liberal aspect of classical music-land is illustrated on orchestra podia: the small number of female conductors relative to male conductors. One such lady conductor just visited town recently, in fact this weekend. She is perhaps the most famous female Finnish conductor now, if not ever. Granted, the list isn't long; from the Finnish wikipedia page on Finnish conductors, I can tell that only 4 names are female. So who is she? Well....
Her name is Susanna Mälkki, and she is music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the French contemporary music group founded in 1976 by Pierre Boulez (who turns 85 this year, BTW). In fact, if you're sensitive to the subtleties of languages, you'll remember that certain words are gendered in any given language. In English, the term "music director" is not gendered, of course. In French, however, the term is gendered as follows:
* Male:
directeur musical
* Female:
directrice musicale
It's actually a bit of a tiny jolt to see Mälkki's French-language biography and to see the gendered title, not because of anything negative about it, but because it's so rare. Some examples of her work with the EIC are as follows:
Away from the EIC, across the Channel, in more professorial mode:
Likewise, in Dutch, the word for "conductor" is also gendered:
* conductor (male):
dirigent
* conductor (female):
dirigente
In the printed 2009-2010 season brochure of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam, for example, the young Chinese conductor Xian Zhang is duly listed:
"Xian Zhang, dirigente"
Of course, she's the only one listed as such, since she's the orchestra's only female conductor on this season's concerts in Amsterdam. Interestingly, however, the on-line listing of her concert there uses the wrong gendered word. She is the new music director of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, so fittingly, she talks about the Verdi Requiem here:
You can parse the multiple drolleries of languages here, with a Chinese conductor speaking in English with video subtitles in Italian.
Needless to say, this ramble barely begins to scratch the surface on the topic of female conductors becoming more prominent now compared to the past, which, among others, Blair Tindall has written about in the NYT back in 2005. With time and each generation, the proportion of female conductors will certainly increase, if not actually reach parity. The American classical scene, however, may not last long enough, if this 2008 report from the National Endowment for the Arts is anything to go by:
"From 1982 to 2008, audiences for performances in classical music, ballet, non-musical theater, and — most conspicuously, jazz — have aged faster than the general adult population. Even among the most educated, adults are participating less than in previous years.
A single survey cannot explain all reasons for the nationwide decline. But this report offers many possibilities, not only for locating likely causes, but also for seeing a way forward. Take one observation: since 1982, the share of 18-24-year-olds who report having had any music education in their lives (now 38 percent) has dropped by more than a third. For visual arts training, the proportion (now 21 percent) has nearly halved. Or another finding: that a gulf exists between the participation rates of certain geographic areas — notably the Northeastern and South Central states — suggesting regional disparities in access to arts opportunities of the type captured by the survey."
Hmm, blue state - red state disparity, anyone? Contrast this, going back to Susanna Mälkki, with Finland, where Warren Hoge explains in this 2003 NYT article how someone like Mälkki could emerge from a country like Finland to make her career in music as she has:
"Finland's politicians actually had a lot to do with the country's becoming the classical music powerhouse it is today. Three decades ago they began devoting a large part of the proceeds of the country's high tax regime to financing music education and providing subsidies for composers and performers. The result today is a network of 150 academies, 31 orchestras and 45 annual festivals.
Finland may be the only country in the world where the annual opening day of Parliament ends with the legislators attending the opera.
'It sends out the word that those who make music are the important people in society,' said Erkki Korhonen, 46, an academy-trained piano soloist who is the general director of the Finnish National Opera."
A tale of two countries and societies, yes?
With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol below, where your loser stories of the week are solicited for general perusal and possible snarky reply. You get to do the same to others' stories too, of course :) .