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Age, gender and orchestras |
Editor's Abstract (Click to Hide)
Recent controversy (March 2009) involving the Phoenix Symphony, its Music Director, Michael Christie and several of its musicians have gained attention in the orchestral music world. Mr. Christie's attempt to fire or demote several players has been met with legal challenges and lawsuits alleging age discrimination. Polyphonic Senior Editor Robert Levine uses the Phoenix mess to reflect on age, gender and race discrimination in orchestras.
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A visitor from another planet might ask, upon learning of the current mess in Phoenix, whether such discrimination on the basis of illegal and invidious criteria such as age, gender or race is systemic in our industry.
The answer is neither “no” nor “yes.” Such discrimination is not systemic in the sense of being the intended result of processes deliberately built into the hiring process. Indeed, vast amounts of time and energy have been put into designing a hiring process that is, quite literally, blind to any characteristics other than the ability to play. But bias and discrimination do exist, and factor into far more personnel decisions than we in the industry would care to admit – enough to make a surprisingly large impact on the demographics of orchestras.
Everyone has biases. Some are quite strange; I remember vividly an audition many years ago when the Music Director expressed a very negative opinion about musicians of Japanese extraction (although he was just fine with musicians of Chinese ancestry). And that bias most definitely affected his decision that day.
But the most commonly seen biases – on the part of both Music Directors and orchestra musicians – are against musicians of a certain age and women musicians. These biases play out differently in the career cycle of musicians, though. The bias against women seems to be mostly in hiring musicians for principal vacancies. The base against older musicians seems to be in hiring for all positions, but is more apparent at the end of musicians’ careers.
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