German orchestras: We need more women conductors

German orchestras: We need more women conductors

News

norman lebrecht

January 18, 2023

There are 129 professional orchestras in Germany.

As of now, four of them have women as music directors – which is more than ever before, but nonetheless discrepant.

Gerald Mertens, head of the German orchestra association Uninsono, issued an appeal yesterday for more.

He said more than one in three conducting students in Germany are now women. things could change quite fast.

Comments

  • Gustavo says:

    But the orchestral repertoire out there is still male-biased, isn’t it.

    So we also need more female composers competing with Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner so that conductorship can become an equal female profession.

    I don’t see things changing fast.

    Mankind cannot change history.

    • Amos says:

      So women in orchestras can perform the music of male composers but are unable to conduct it? Logic courses should use your comment to define the term syllogism.

      • Gustavo says:

        No, but pushing for 50% female conductors won’t change the fact that 99% of the whole orchestral repertoire worldwide has been composed by males.

        Does anyone dare to ask why?

        • Una says:

          You can’t change history but you can change the present with a view to the future – plan but not project!

        • Gus says:

          Yes. I don’t know what rock you’ve been under, but lots of people ask why and suggest possible explanations, both publicly and privately.

          Do you dare share your own pet theory?

        • Sue Sonata Form says:

          This sexual/identity politics really is growing very exhausting indeed. If you have talent let’s all hear about it. But please do remember it’s a uber-competitive field, so don’t try and use YOUR gender to step over others – no matter from which of the 25 genders they come.

        • Amos says:

          First, no one is “asking” for 50% women conductors merely equal access/opportunity. Second, the vast majority of the orchestra repertoire was written between 1700 and 1900 when women were prevented from taking part in the most basic aspects of society like voting and in many countries attending university or music academies. Fanny Mendelssohn and Amy Beach were the exceptions and even they faced resistance despite their obvious gifts. Your original claim is still both illogical and without merit.

  • Uri says:

    this is such BS!!!
    Gender is not quality!
    conductors should be chosen only by merit. Not by color, sex discrimination, age, or politics.
    enough talking about this as if this is more important than musicality and conducting abilities.

    • Hugo Preuß says:

      The ratio means that 96.89 percent of orchestras have male conductors and 3.1 percent have female conductors. I somehow doubt that this reflects only the distribution of quality and merit and absolutely nothing else.

      • Norabide Guziak says:

        You might be alone in that presumption.

      • Sue Sonata Form says:

        That ‘nothing else’ includes something as insignificant as child-bearing and child-raising. Such a drag having to do that, especially when it hinders your ‘career’. Having both a professional career and raising children is beyond exhausting and nobody is interested in the least in discussing that.

        • Hugo Preuß says:

          But that is true in every walk of life. And yet, it does not seem to prevent women from having a larger share than 3.1 percent in legislatures, as faculty, as legal or medical professionals. A *much* larger share…

  • David says:

    We need good conductor, no matter he or she.

  • Bone says:

    With colleges and universities worldwide churning out more female graduates I’m sure it is just a mater of time.
    But, really, in today’s world, what is a woman, anyway?

    • Hayne says:

      I don’t know. I’m not a biologist.

      • Sue Sonata Form says:

        But you believe “the science” of climate change, right?

        • Hayne says:

          Sorry, that was a direct quote from Ketanji Brown Jackson when asked, “Can you define the word ‘woman’. She now sits on the US Supreme Court.
          Idoicracy indeed.

      • Amos says:

        Comrade H please remember that the next you recommend human beings take equine anti-parasite drugs to treat viral infections.

        • Hayne says:

          Besides Ivermectin, don’t forget:
          Doxycycline
          Budesonide
          Azithronmicin
          Hydroxychloroquine
          Fluvoxamine
          Dexmethasone
          Colchicine
          Prednisone
          Vitamine D
          Zinc
          Quercetin
          These are some of repurposed drugs used and shown in many peer reviewed studied to help in treatment. Why do you conflate my reporting with what many thousands of doctors and scientists are showing? Look it up yourself.
          Here’s a tough question for readers. Can people like our friend Amos ever be red pilled?

    • Anthony Sayer says:

      “But, really, in today’s world, what is a woman, anyway?”

      Good point. As any old substandard male sportsman can identify as a woman in order to win a medal maybe it’s time for the music profession to adopt this approved insanity. That’ll put the crotchets among the quavers.

    • sardonic says:

      Pretty obvious “Bone” doesn’t know what a woman is.

  • Pauline V. says:

    The best conductor, the best musician should get the job. Regardless if male, female, black, white, jewish, atheist, ecc. or what agency they are coming from.
    It’s about time to concentrate on music.

  • Paul West says:

    This is almost like sexism inverse. We don’t need more women conductors. We need more good conductors they are a female or male.

  • anon says:

    It’s amazing how many people believe that nowadays we are choosing by gender or race etc instead of talent, but in the past we chose only by talent.
    In the past conductors were almost all white men. In the present they are an increasingly diverse mix of genders and races. How can you not see that we are *now* starting to choose by talent, while in the past conductors were chosen because they were one gender and race?

    • Tamino says:

      You got that wrong. Correlation is not causation. Traditional gender roles have had many reasons, last but not least very existential ones. Ignorance is not the answer to your question. Just because current generations lack the empirical knowledge of hardship of life in the distant past, that doesn’t give them the right to judge it wrongly.

    • Sue Sonata Form says:

      I don’t recall from anything I’ve read that audiences rejected Clara Schumann’s playing because she was female. And she had 7 kids and a psychotic husband.

  • william osborne says:

    There are a number of complex factors that influence the acceptance of women conductors. Are 37% of conducting students that Gerald Mertens mentions conducting majors? Or are they students simply filling a course requirement? How many of the women are choral conductors?

    Orchestras are often preoccupied with their status and see their Music Director as an important part of establishing and strengthening it. They will often suffer severe abuse from a conductor if “his” presence enhances the image of the ensemble. In the same way, they are too often less willing to accept women conductors because they are seen as automatically lowering the orchestra’s status in the public’s biased eyes.

    We never let our ears contradict what our eyes think they are hearing.

    Conductors are so strongly defined by patriarchal, masculine characteristics that the industry has struggled to find marketing concepts for women conductors. We try to ignore that power and public subjugation, threats, the whipping and slashing of the phallic baton, and the orgiastic build to climax under the watchful and absolute authority of the conductor are part of what patrons expect from orchestras, and that these expectations seem to contain vicarious satisfactions of sadism.

    Will the public want to see women in this role—or will it despise them for it, perhaps as the film Tár suggests? Are a bunch of male musicians as willing to suffer abuse from a woman conductor? Even women in the rank-and-file of orchestras are often expected to be something like “gang chicks”—especially in the brass sections.

    Why do sadomasochistic tendencies seem to be an inherent part of Western classical music? (The examples are numerous like Reiner, Toscanini, Szell, etc.) Are these tendencies essential to our self-expression, or is art just an excuse? Are these values changing, or will women conductors continue to face discrimination from their earliest training onward? Many questions yet to be answered.

    And finally, we sometimes put conductors on the podium simply because we want to see what they can do–a perfectly legitimate initiative. There’s nothing wrong with consciously giving women a chance to prove themselves.

  • Serge says:

    What we need, is more personalities. Not another chick, well dressed conductor who can pull off an “impressive” Shostakovich 5 or Tchaikovsky 6 identical to absolutely everything else you heard the last 20 years.

  • Doug Grant says:

    Do we actually have any conductors today of the calibre of those of the 1950s and 1960s? More and more I listen to the old recordings and find inspiration and exhilaration that is missing today. Orchestras too seem to lack personality and distinction, despite undoubted technical excellence.

    • Tamino says:

      Now the big irony is, that one of the few orchestras that actually has kept such a deeply musical and distinct personality are the Vienna Philharmonic, one of the traditionally most male orchestras still.
      (Don’t kill the messenger.)

      • Anthony Sayer says:

        Spot on.

      • William Osborne says:

        A comparison with older recordings shows that they have lost a lot of their sound and style. For a long time, the most Viennese-sounding orchestra was the Czech Philharmonic, mostly because it was locked behind the Iron Curtain and couldn’t be influenced by international trends.

    • Sue Sonata Form says:

      They are a reflection of the zeitgeist; it’s all about ‘the vibe’.

  • zandonai says:

    I went to doctor’s appointment yesterday and on the sign-in sheet it asked you to choose 1 of seven gender options… smh

  • madeleine.richardson@telenet.be says:

    How many famous women painters are there compared to male? Or women film directors in Hollywood? It takes time considering women have been excluded from many of the arts (with the exception of literature and where they are necessary for acting, dancing or singing onstage) for most of history and the fact that in some countries, even today, they can’t even get an education.

    • Tamino says:

      there is also the semi-proven theory, that male intelligence and female intelligence have bell curve distributions that are aligned in the middle… same average intelligence… BUT the curve for males is wider on both sides… more geniuses AND more idiots.

      In my experience that correlates with reality.

  • David says:

    I totally sympahize with those claiming that we should choose conductors/musicians/any profession by merit. I believe we all would want this, since we all believe in excellence, and we work towards it as a source of motivation.

    However, the irony is that this is indeed not the state of the world. Men have not historically dominated the music industry because of merit. They were neither inherently better nor did they work harder than women. It’s because of discrimination and from benefitting from the social system.

    This is NOT to say that all men therefore do not deserve their position. What we observe here is the reason for that fact that the MAJORITY of positions were filled by men historically, and how it continues to today.

    The whole point of promoting women/minorities/those who did not have opportunities previously is to rectify this system so that we do come closer to choosing based on merit. I hope we can have a calm discussion about this, and make distinctions and not oversimplify, on both sides of the debate.

  • Kman says:

    Cue the “choose the best candidate” crowd, a stance that most people would agree with. But the bigger point is: let’s create a more diverse pool from which to choose the best candidate. A more diverse pool will beget a more diverse set of “best” candidates out there. Why would this be controversial?

  • Mark Mortimer says:

    I, for one, an getting rather bored of this token female conductor thing. True- there are some fine lady conductors out there who deserve more recognition but there are hundreds of equally talented male ones who can’t get a position let alone a gig because a selfish & an increasingly decrepit older generation stubbornly refuse to hand over the baton- probably mostly because of the money. What Germany needs is more conductors full stop.

  • Bedrich Sourcream says:

    Rushing women into conducting positions does everyone a tremendous disservice, especially them, and especially the qualified men who get displaced. What next, autistic conductors?

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