Three years ago, the Israeli conductor Talia Ilan set herself a challenge of posting an image of #oneconductoraday, just to see how many she could find, dead or (mostly) alive.
Today, she reached 1,000.
Here‘s a video’s she’s made of them.
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Terrific! But, offhand, can you name ten of them? Five?
Yup.
Ilan
Mallwitz
Grazinyte
Alsop
Stutzmann
Boulanger
Dudarova
Young
Falletta
Haim
Nice going, Brett! But they’re not even in alphabetical order! Now let’s see if you can name Talia’s remaining 990… Again, off the top of your head…and no googling this time!!!
You cannot fathom that other people know stuff that you don’t, can you?
The Dunning-Kruger is strong in you.
So, after your challenge is accepted and met, you simply up the ante to something impossible? Classy. BTW, can you name, off the top of your head, 1.000 male conductors?
Bruh, I can’t even name 25 male conductors, and I’m a concert violinist. Calm down – conductors are not even all THAT important.
(Is Boulanger still with us?)
Karina Canellakis
Barbara Hannigan
Susanna Malkki
Jane Glover
Eun Sun Kim
Xian Zhang
Marie Jacquot
Oksana Lyniv
Keri-Lynn Wilson
Lidiya Yankovskaya
Gemma New
Easily
Chan
Mälkki
Scappucci
Glover
Kim
Hannigan
de la Parra
Stasevska
Wilson
Candellari
I got 18 but it was very quick and mostly of young conductors i dont know but some real prominent ones were in the mix: Hannigan, Tyla, Alsop, Glover, Lyniv, Stutzmann,de la Parre, FalettaHaim, Maliike, Chen, Young Mallwitz as well as the dead which should have given you your 5 without effort Zarathustra!
It’s actually not that hard, unless of course you’re suffering from unconscious bias. Or conscious bias.
Indeed — as Zoroaster’s subsequent shifting of the goalposts demonstrates.
Any Carlos Kleiber, Bernstein, Karajan, Gatti, Järvi, Muti, Abbado, Bychkov, Barenboim, Rattle, Blomstedt, Mehta, Salonen, Netopil, or Chailly among them?
Sometimese even much better than them. But your problem is that YOU can only enjoy big names…Once you will have to estimate anonymouse recordings, I’m not sure you will always choose the ones above. Want to try?
To answer your question: NO.
I have played under 8 of the names (with 3 of them regularly in the past), and of the 10 female names listed by Brettermeier with 3 (with one of them regularly), and in my experience none of the female names listed can compare with the worst male conductor on your list.
That doesn’t mean that in 20 years it won’t be the case (I’ll be retired or dead then, so maybe I won’t see it), but the truth is that right now the pool of female conductors is not big enough for artists of that level to emerge.
What happens now is that, for political reasons, orchestras MUST now have female conductors and female conductors who, through the “natural course” and development of music careers wouldn’t had made it to stand in front of a professional orchestra, are given the opportunity to conduct professional orchestras. We are beginning at the end, pushing women into conducting careers and letting people believe that they are the pinnacle of conducting and, I am sorry, the ones I have seen on the podium are not.
Want a bigger pool of female conductors? Encourage women to study conducting (and men to play harp and gr. Flöte) and let things fall in place by its on way…
Very perceptive and well stated!
Reply of the year. That’s exactly what is happening.
Just. Brilliant. Spot on.
Over 1000 female conductors… and yet you still went with a fiction one from a film for the thumbnail?
Using a picture of a real one would have been unfair to over a thousand of others.
And herewith has each one had her 0.7 seconds of fame.
Such a fantastic project!
Well done Talia!
How marvelous! I had no idea there were so many. So, the question is, why aren’t they leading the biggest, most important orchestras in the world? There are some exceptions, but, why the hesitancy on the part of orchestra committees and patrons? Could it be that the men who serve on these Boards are scared of women? Or, the male players in orchestras?
Now, do Concertmasters (or Concertmistresses as they used to call them in the old days.
As one of those 1000 women in the video I can tell you it is because this revolution has just started. The old boys club has kept women out for a long long LONG time just because we don’t have wieners. No turning back now.
If we montaged a thousand different male conductors the portion conducting A-list orchestras would also be small.
See the comment of FrauGeigerin.
This video is great. Women are truly taking over the conducting world.
Slipped Disc notes major milestone that has lifted up 1000 real conductors who are women but uses a picture of a fake conductor!!! By the way, she’s got 1300 more and the list grows daily.
See my response to Jack above here.
Strange, there are none in my CD collection. I was tempted once by a Don Pasquale with Alfredo Kraus, but old Sarah managed to massacre even that (similar to Lenny’s Falstaff, another carnage). Then, one beautiful day, I attended a concert conducted by Ms. Alsop (Mahler and Korngold, the horror remains engraved in memory). But no, wait, I do have two CDs with Malkki and two directed by Ophelie Gaillard, so I was wrong after all.
Can we once and for all end the tired narrative about there being no opportunities for women conductors?
No.
There is still a glass ceiling for these profoundly outstanding musicians simply because of a tired old stereotype so
prevalent among the concert going public. And even MORE so among the people in the top tiers of orchestral management. They are TERRIFIED of change.
I guess you didn’t understand the point of this hashtag. It actually wants to show you that the reason you don’t see women on stages of major orchestras is NOT the lack of women conductors. So women conductors DO exist but the most talented of them still don’t get their deserved place in the classical music world, mainly because of conservative and demagogic people like you.
As long as there are female musicians who want to conduct but lack the talent, skills and knowledge to make it to a professional career without constantly reminding everyone that they are female and therefore they deserve opportunities and visibility just for being a female, it won’t happen. The decent ones don’t talk about that all the time, but the bad ones you never heard the end of that speech. Because some female conductors need the “extra help” because they can’t do it on their own, and the “visibility”/patriarchy/etc. speech is bought by many and feared by even more (everyone is afraid of being labelled these days), the extra opportunities for females / female-only opportunities will not stop.
By the way: I am a woman. I made it long time ago to good professional orchestras on training, talent and hard work alone, not telling everyone that I have XX chromosomes. I needed neither a female-only violin masterclass, nor a female-violinist-only internship in the orchestra. And so didn’t my extremely talented female players in the orchestra. We just performed better than the other male and female players that auditioned the same day and we got out jobs. Female-only opportunities only benefit the mediocre ones, not the really good ones, and should end.
Lucky you to have been able to join an orchestra as a woman player. If you were born 30 years earlier, you chances would be much smaller. and if you would be born 50 years earlier, you wouldn’t even have a chance. Go and learn history. You owe the feminist women who paved the way for you to have a professional life in music while you can also spit on them. Very moral and very logic of you to do so.
Beautiful answer. Thank you.
I was not lucky, I was good, and did not (and do not) need a pack of internet feminists to tell me what feminism is, and to tell me that I am a victim or that I was lucky to get a job because I have a vagina. Again: no, I am not a victim; no I didn’t need help to get my first position in a professional orchestra (probably before you were even born); I didn’t need luck. I just needed to be the best player in the audition.
The feminists you mentioned from mid-19th or early 20th century fought for equality. What you sell is NOT feminism, because what is called feminism these days doesn’t seek equality with men, it seeks revenge and putting women in a position of privilege, not of equality. So, no, I am not one of your feminists and don’t want to be one. Real feminists go to auditions, practice and do their jobs the best they can, and educate their children (yes, we women get pregnant and have children, not men) to be fair and non-discriminatory when they grow up. I hear about these “programs for women”, “women conducting fellowship”, “women’s orchestra”, “competition for women”, “visibility measures for women” and I cringe. Real feminists don’t need to remind everyone that they are female; remind the world that their great-grandmothers were once treated unfairly and denied a lot for being women; don’t try to convince everyone that they deserve recognition and visibility and privilege for being women to compensate for a historical disadvantage (because that is something very likely they have not experienced themselves)… they come to the audition (where I or another of my female colleagues will for sure sit in the panel) and they play their Mozart concerto and the orchestral passages brilliantly.
Talent, art, and craft. The rest is just words and more words that only benefit those who cannot earn their living as professional musicians on their own merit.
We would love to know how many female musicians are there on your orchestra, FrauGeigerin. We all think of a well known German orchestra, and if that is the case there aren’t many women in it. Since you mentioned it, could you tell us approx. the percentage of women in the orchestra where you work?
I will confirm neither the orchestra nor the country (maybe you are correct, maybe not), because I don’t know what is the importance of that. What is interesting is the reason behind your interest.
I can tell you that the majority of the tenured musicians are women. And that without any positive or affirmative action or female fellowship or any of those artifices My colleagues earned their position on their own merit.
This project is so important! It make it so wird to see programs of orchestras without any women conductors… It is not possible the exuse that they didnt find any, and not cool at all…
Happy to see Marie-Jeanne Dufour in the video!
She engaged me to my first operahouse in Germany and we did many wonderful productions together!
Actually, brothers and sisters, this was just a TEST to determine how much concern there is out there regarding the issue of female conductors! I care…and obviously you all care too! Congratulations to all of our “leading ladies” and may your ranks swell with even more talented members as orchestral administrators finally realize that this infamous “glass ceiling” has been shattered once and for all!!!
Barbara Schubert at 11:53 is an absolute treasure, and could teach most men on the podium a thing or hundred.
Nicolette Fraillon, Nathalie Stutzmann, Simone Young, Jessica Cottis, Marin Alsop