You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby

Via my good friend Kate Holzemer (and the several hundred other musicians who seem to be passing this around on Facebook) I’m pleased to link you to this classic Time Magazine article from 1966 on the fab new trend of, well, um…

…oh, just read it:

Lady musicians are having a heyday. The Cleveland Orchestra now has 11, the San Francisco 17, the Houston 25 and the American Symphony 44. Trombonist Betty Glover, 43, adds class to the brass of the Cincinnati Symphony; Helen Taylor, 24, plays a mean English horn for the Houston Symphony. The rare bird in the Los Angeles aviary is Barbara Winters, 28, who, to produce the needed penetrating sounds from her oboe, must pit her trim 120 lbs. against male fellow oboists who average a burly-chested 200 Ibs. To maintain the exceptional breath control necessary to control her contrary instrument, Winters swims and works out daily at a gym. “It leaves me almost no time for social life,” she says. “I’d hate to think what I would do if I were married.”

Oh, good lord. My parents always told me that the ’60s were all about equality and progressive thinking. Guess not…

Orin O’Brien, 31, the newest member of the New York Philharmonic, scurried into Philharmonic Hall one rainy night last week and, ignoring the musicians’ locker room, got dressed in a washroom… Miss O’Brien, who is as curvy as the double bass she plays, does not mind. On tour, the men make up for it by falling all over themselves to carry her bags, and save her a seat on the bus.

As curvy as the bass she…? Wow. I’ll have to try that one out on our new female bass player and see what she thinks of the compliment. Though I think I’ll be sure to try it at something slightly greater than arm’s length. (Ms. O’Brien is still plying her trade with the NY Phil, by the way.)

As casually offensive as the author’s language seems today, the really bad stuff is all from male musicians who clearly think they’re being reasonable and acting in the best interests of working women.

Lady-Killer Zubin Mehta, 30, who appreciates a well-turned ankle as much as a well-played musical phrase, has different reasons. He has enforced a limit of 16 women in his Los Angeles Philharmonic, because “a woman’s life in the orchestra is not as long as a man’s; she is just not as good at 60 as a man is at 60…” Most musicians agree that women are all right in their place—just as long as that place is not the first desk, a position that gives them authority over the other players in their section. When that happens, egos get bruised… The majority of conductors avoid such problems by refusing to promote women to the first desk.

Ugly, ugly, ugly. And once again, this was in 1966, not 1926! No one’s ever accused symphony orchestras of being on the cutting edge of anything, but I’ll admit, this article took me aback. I was born a decade after it was written, and I’ve literally never met a musician who admitted to believing that women were anything but the absolute equal of men on the concert stage. (I have met more than a few who still seemed to think that making unsolicited passes at the attractive ones was somehow okay, but that’s a different issue. There are creeps in every line of work.)

For the record, the first female musician appointed to the Minnesota Orchestra (nee Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra) was Australian violinist Jenny Cullen, hired by the MSO’s second music director, Henri Verbrugghen, in 1923. And I’m sure that the men of the MSO reacted to the hire in a completely calm and professional manner…

…or not.

She got the job only because she was having an affair with the boss. At least, that’s what the men said — even though the boss was fond of saying she looked like “a shy vegetable.” They alleged that [Cullen] had violated immigration laws and union rules… They threatened to shut down the season.

Sigh. Shoulda seen that coming, I guess. I can, at least, report firsthand that no such sexist garbage attended the hiring of our Ms. Hicks as the orchestra’s first female staff conductor several years back. In fact, if memory serves, her selection from an impressive crop of finalists (all the rest of them male) took about ten seconds of deliberation for those of us on her audition committee. (Yes, I was on Sarah’s audition committee. Funny how life works.)

The Time article makes note of the Boston Symphony’s innovative use of screens to hide the gender of auditioning candidates from those passing judgment. It was, of course, exactly those screens that eventually allowed women to become the nearly equal (by numbers) force that they are in today’s music world. By the looks of things, they’ll outnumber us Y-chromosomers on the concert stage within a generation or two. And when they do, well… I can only hope they’ll treat us a heck of a lot more kindly than we’ve treated them over the years.