In an orchestra, you have a principal flutist and a principal oboist. Should they be paid the same? That depends. Does one have more seniority than the other? It might be fair to pay the senior player more.
In an ideal world, it would not matter if one is a man and the other woman.
A lawsuit filed by Elizabeth Rowe, principal flutist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, claims that she is paid less than principal oboist John Ferrillo because he is a man and she’s a woman.
The Washington Post article by Geoff Edgers mentions that Ferrillo is 63-years-old but doesn’t mention his seniority until close to the end. According to his page on the orchestra’s website, he joined in 2001.
I think that in Edgers’s place, I would have mentioned Ferrillo’s support of Rowe’s career much higher up in the article. Ferrillo is quoted saying Rowe is “every bit my match in skills.”
Well, Ferrillo does stop short of endorsing Rowe’s salary demand, and thinks that it’s not his place to tell management how much to pay him or anyone else. And I certainly wouldn’t advise him to take a pay cut to be on par with Rowe.
So the oboist has three years seniority on Rowe, who joined in 2004 after 250 other applicants for the principal flutist position were considered and rejected. Maybe those three years of seniority justify paying Ferrillo $314,600 but Rowe only $250,149.
Instead the Boston Symphony management is arguing that flute and oboe are “not comparable” and that there are fewer high-caliber oboists than there are high-caliber flutists.
Both of which sound like reasonable arguments on their face. The flute and oboe were different instruments to begin with, and they have evolved to be quite different in many regards.
However, to be flippant and reductionist about it, all woodwind instruments of the orchestra are essentially just souped up tin whistles.
Put a fipple on a tin tube, drill six holes and you can probably get one octave of a D major scale. You can get one higher octave by overblowing, and yet another by overblowing more, but the sound is likely to be shrill and inelegant.
If you drill a seventh hole high up on the “back” of the tube, that gives you a better way of getting at the higher octave, but then that’s one more hole you need to cover to sound the low octave.
To play notes outside the D major scale you need to half-cover holes. I have never been very good at that. When I try to half-cover, I usually either cover too much and get the next lower note in the D major scale, or cover too little and get the next higher note.
At some point in the Renaissance or the Baroque, someone got the bright idea of putting covers on some of the holes, which would be lifted slightly by pressing keys.
I think it was in the Romantic period that keys and covers for all the holes became standard. Fingering precision became less of an obstacle for players to get really good at the instruments.
Of course this very brief and general overview of woodwind history pretty much skips over all the interesting details of the development of the clarinet and the Boehm system of fingering.
In Michael Haydn’s time, flute and oboe were not just comparable but interchangeable as well. For most of his orchestral music, Haydn used oboes but not flutes (this is also true of a lot of Joseph’s early music).
In his Symphony in D major (1788), Perger 29, Sherman 37, it seems clear to me that Haydn expects the first oboist to set aside his oboe and pick up a flute for the middle Andantino in A major.
I’m pretty sure all the players in a performance back then would have been men. It would surprise Haydn to know that the flute has come to be considered a woman’s instrument. Though of course many of the famous players are men.
Antonio Salieri, like Michael Haydn a very important influence on the unoriginal Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, certainly did not consider flute and oboe to be interchangeable.
Please enjoy this recording of Salieri’s Concerto in C major for Flute, Oboe and Orchestra, here arranged for wind symphony, though the two soloists are still a flutist and an oboist:
Well, the camera work does leave a little bit to be desired. Before the first entrance of the soloists, the camera operator is looking at the back row clarinetists. “Come on, get back over to the soloists!” are the words I would have been furiously mouthing to that hapless operator.
The oboe is supposedly a much more difficult instrument than the flute. That doesn’t quite mesh with my experience, though I don’t pretend to be anywhere near Rowe or Ferrillo in regards to skill.
At about the same time Rowe was applying to the Boston Symphony, I was taking the basic woodwind course at Wayne State University. That would have been a great time to study engineering at Wayne State (now not so much, maybe wait to February).
Instead, I was awkwardly going for a music composition degree, which would have been about as useful for getting me a job as my film studies degree… but that’s a whole other story.
The basic woodwind class was mostly for music education majors. They would take it two semesters, learn clarinet, saxophone, flute and maybe bassoon. Prof. Russell Miller said that if I was in the music education program, I would be required to take flute.
But since I wasn’t, I didn’t have to. I couldn’t go straight to oboe, though. First I had to take clarinet and alto saxophone in one semester. Then in the beginning of the second semester, bassoon, before moving on to the oboe. I was the typical clarinet beginner, making pretty much all the usual beginner mistakes.
I found alto sax to be a very pleasantly easy instrument. And its system of transposition makes it very easy even for a beginner to start on one sax and move on to another, like alto to baritone or tenor to soprano.
I was kind of good at the bassoon, but I just couldn’t get the damn thing to sound middle C, much less any note above that. But I still intend to write plenty of tenor clef solos for bassoon.
And then the instructor was very surprised at how good I turned out to be at the oboe. Good for a beginner, but still impressive. The grounding in woodwind basics from the tin whistle, clarinet, sax and bassoon certainly helped.
For me to get really good at the oboe would have of course taken a lot more training. My curiosity was satisfied. Flute and oboe are both instruments I write for, but playing flute is something that has never actually interested me.
Okay, so I don’t really have a good basis of comparison for the flute. There is one aspect of the modern flute (and piccolo) that is radically different from the other orchestral woodwind instruments: it’s held transverse for playing.
Ergonomically that’s not so good. At Flute Specialists in Clawson you can buy a neck joint for your flute to help with your playing posture. They even have at least one vertical headjoint, so that you can play your flute more like an oboe or a clarinet.
Obviously that’s not something a professional player in a major symphony orchestra would use in concert. Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Edgers article:
In the group listed in tax filings, there is an instance when the principal flute player is a man and the principal oboe is a woman in the same orchestra. St. Louis Symphony Orchestra flute player Mark Sparks earned $166,191 in 2016, according to the most recent tax documents; principal oboist Jelena Dirks doesn’t rank high enough to be listed on tax returns.
Cleveland Orchestra principal flutist Jeffrey Khaner says his pay increased mostly because other orchestras wanted to poach him. Khaner suggests Rowe should talk to other orchestras, but also acknowledges his own male privilege.
But why should she have to threaten to move? I hope that Sharon Sparrow, acting principal flutist for the Detroit Symphony, likes this city enough to stay, that she wants to be considered for permanent principal.
On the other hand, the Detroit Symphony is now a “community-supported orchestra” (an unfortunate result of the 2010 strike) which mostly means that players make less than before but management somehow makes more.
So if Sparrow wants more prestige and higher pay, Detroit might not be the place for her. Rowe likes Boston and it looks like she wants to stay there. Her husband, Glen Cherry, also plays in the Boston Symphony.
The case heads to mediation, I intend to post an update here when I get more news. At least it looks like she did not sign away her right to go to court in her contract.
For now I leave you with an old interview with Elizabeth Rowe.
Friday, Dec 21, 2018 · 5:20:02 PM +00:00
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Alonso del Arte
Not much to update. The Boston Globe has named Elizabeth Rowe an “honorable mention” for Bostonians of the Year 2018. Presumably the mediation process is still going, or it might be on hold because of the holidays.
I wish that in the original post I had emphasized that the Detroit Symphony musicians took a pay cut to resolve the strike, and that management got pay raises after the strike.
Somehow there’s always money to pay the CEOs, even when the whole company is going bankrupt. Just look at Sears.
It is true that although Rowe makes less than John Ferrillo, she still has a pretty good salary, better than some lawyers and doctors.
But hey, let’s not ask how much money Boston Symphony management gets paid.
I can play oboe, but nowhere near as good as John Ferrillo, and maybe I could play flute, but nowhere near as good as Elizabeth Rowe.
So I couldn’t possibly do either of their jobs. Somehow I think I could do the job of a Boston Symphony executive, at least one that doesn’t need to be a lawyer or an accountant.