The Orchestra

That article in the New York Times about making orchestras more "diverse" ("To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions") got me thinking about the nature of orchestras in general. I have also been watching some of the new set of videos of Valery Gergiev conducting the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater playing symphonies by Shostakovich shot in Paris. Excellent productions, not only in the high quality videos, but also the discipline and passion of the mostly young Russian musicians. Here is an example, the Symphony No. 1:

This is a symphony composed in the Soviet Union in 1924-25 when the composer was only nineteen, performed by an orchestra of Russian, not Soviet!, musicians under a Russian conductor, shot in Paris by a French crew. Is that diverse enough?

I'm not sure what the New York Times would require of a Russian orchestra in terms of skin color, but no, there are no black musicians in the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra. Perhaps there are just very few black residents in Moscow. There are certainly many women musicians and I imagine there is a variety of representatives of the ethnic minorities in Russia.

What this kind of identity politics misses when it looks at an orchestra is the incredibly diverse achievement it already is. The instruments of the orchestra have an amazingly wide variety of origins. The bowed string instruments originate somewhere in Central Asia, no-one knows exactly where or when. The double reed instruments like the oboe were brought back to Europe in the Middle Ages by the crusaders. The cymbals are Turkish in origin. The glockenspiel and marimba percussion instruments come from Indonesia.

The orchestra is a kind of synecdoche of Western Civilization; in many ways it is a model of a successful society. It is characterized by the fusion of an astonishingly broad range of skills and artistry from the design and construction of the instruments (the violin design is from the workshops of Cremona, Italy in the late 17th century) to the technical skills of the performers who train for decades to achieve this level of precision. Oboe players have to spend a significant amount of time making their reeds with special machines because professional level players can only use custom reeds. Some flute players even cut their own sound holes. There is a particular street in Paris where the best people to do bow re-hairing work. The symphony orchestra is a remarkable achievement in so very many ways even before the first note is played.

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of all is that this group of very different individuals, in terms of their different instruments, geographic origins, course of studies, personality, age groups and so on, this very diverse group of individuals, is able to be pulled together into an ensemble with perfect coordination.

What bothers me about articles like the one in the Times with passages like these:

But orchestras must be a part of changing the landscape, too, by getting rid of blind auditions.

Change can be unnerving. Might the gains female players have made be reversed if the screen comes down? Might old habits of favoring the students of veteran players return? Orchestras will need to be transparent about their goals and procedures if they are to move forward with a new approach to auditions — one that takes race and gender into account, along with the full spectrum of a musician’s experience.

Change, change, change! Observe the underlying and hidden assumptions here: things as they are, are untenable, we must change. The present situation is very bad and violates fundamental human rights. Diversity must be imposed at any cost. What is missing in this is how long it has taken to develop the practices and traditions of the orchestra and how fragile they are--like civilization itself. Orchestras are standing on the brink right now and the New York Times is concerned about racial quotas.

The orchestra, as an institution is fundamentally good. It is the product of hundreds of years of development in terms of the instruments, the techniques to play them, the repertoire contributed by composers, the subtleties of orchestration, the financial support and construction of suitable performance spaces and on and on. Unless we appreciate all that, we should not be demanding fundamental change.

The worst opinion pieces always start with some supposedly unchallengeable assumption that is always, always wrong. The Times subhead says:

If ensembles are to reflect the communities they serve, the audition process should take into account race, gender and other factors.

Why should ensembles reflect the communities they serve? What community does the Emerson Quartet reflect? What about individual artists? What changes when you move up to an orchestra? The only thing that I can see is that an orchestra is a better political target than, say, Yuja Wang. The assumptions underlying the statement that "the audition process should take into account race, gender and other factors" are multitudinous and treacherous.