In classical music, the gender gap persists.

“The essence of a conductor’s profession is strength. The essence of a woman is weakness.”

These are the words of Yuri Temirkanov, the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 1999 to 2006, whose interview was quoted by Alex Ross ’90 in his recent article for The New Yorker, “Women, Gays, and Classical Music.” In 2007, Temirkanov was succeeded by Marin Alsop—one of the most well-known female conductors in the world.

The gender bias shown in Temirkanov’s interview carries over to the performance arena as well. In 1982, clarinetist Sabine Meyer was asked to join the Berlin Philharmonic as one of the orchestra’s first female members. At the conclusion of her trial period, the rest of the orchestra members voted against her in an overwhelming vote of four for, 73 against. While tone contrast was cited as the original reason for the issue, many, including the orchestra’s own music director, Herbert von Karajan, insisted that her gender was what caused her dismissal.

At the same time, a study published in 1997 by Princeton professor Cecilia Rouse and Harvard professor Claudia Goldin showed that under blind audition conditions, the likelihood of a female musician advancing from the preliminary rounds of an audition increased by 50 percent, hinting at conscious and unconscious biases that continue to hold women back in the field of classical music.

Even within the Boston area itself, such a gender divide prevails—the Boston Symphony Orchestra has never had a female music director, and Harvard’s own Bach Society, whose conductors serve year-long terms, has only had two female conductors since its founding. As women’s representation in many fields approaches or even surpasses the halfway mark, classical music lags further and further behind, both in the wider music community and at Harvard itself.

GENDER PERFORMANCE

But though it has a ways to go, the music world has improved vastly, according to one professional. The director of piano seminars at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School and the namesake of the Angel Ramón Rivera Piano Competition, Angel R. Rivera has been on both ends of the audition process and has witnessed such an improvement personally.

“I have hired so many women conductors. It is unfair that today, women in top positions have to be so much more qualified than men,” Rivera says. “One of the most influential people in my life was Lorna Cooke deVaron, my co-conductor at NEC—I have never learned so much in my entire life.”

As Rivera continues to push for women’s equality in music—commissioning pieces by female composers and constantly striving to expose his classes at the NEC Preparatory School to female performers and composers—he recognizes that the state of women in music is much better than it used to be. “While it absolutely still is a problem today, women in orchestras used to be almost unheard of. The gender divide in music has improved so much over the past 30 or 40 years.”

In many respects, opportunities for women in classical music have indeed improved at Harvard and in the greater Boston area. The compositions of Harvard’s three main orchestras today—the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, the Bach Society, and the Mozart Society—all have near-equal distributions of men and women, as does the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Harvard’s own Music Department also shows balance between the genders. Although only one of the eight music concentrators is female, the majority of joint concentrators and students pursuing secondaries in the field are women —four of seven and eight of 11, respectively.

However, the gender equality is only skin deep. Even within Harvard’s orchestras, a closer analysis of the numbers reveals instruments weighted by gender. Instruments such as the double bass and horn section tend to be very male-dominated at Harvard and beyond, with HRO’s trumpet and trombone sections being entirely male. For other instruments, such as the flute, the players are mostly female. Harvard’s statistics are in keeping with the professional musical world and may even be slightly better: the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s gender divide in instruments is even more polarizing, with only men in the basses, oboes, trumpets, trombones, percussion, and clarinets.

A DIVIDED ORCHESTRA

This gender divide seems to stem not only from subjective auditions but also from a lack of gender diversity in the auditionees, implying that the gap begins when children decide what instrument they want to play. According to a 2008 study done at the University of London, historically, girls have consistently chosen to study instruments that are smaller and have higher pitch, while the boys tackle the heftier, deeper instruments.

Adela H. Kim ’16, who is currently comping The Crimson’s Arts Board, comes from a family of musicians. Her father, a pianist, and her mother, a violinist, both went to Juilliard, as does her sister, who is studying the violin. Kim plays the clarinet, an instrument typically dominated by male players, and was admitted to the joint Harvard-NEC program after studying at the Juilliard Pre-College for seven years. However, the clarinet was not her first choice.

“When I was little, I really wanted to play the piano, but my father told me, ‘People out there don’t respect women pianists,’” Kim says. Entering Juilliard Pre-College in seventh grade, Kim was one of the only female clarinetists in the school and her teacher’s only female student. When it came time to compete and audition in a male-dominated field, Kim had to worry about aspects of the audition that wouldn’t concern her male colleagues.