I just got back from a chamber music competition (my quartet got an honorable mention, yay!) and while I was there, I had a conversation with a mentor/friend who is a grad student in a music school.
He was just talking about the pressure of doing auditions for orchestras (big ones, like the Cleveland Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra) and how blind they are. The judges sit behind a partition and—here’s the relevant part, in case you were wondering—the players walk on a carpet when they enter the stage, so the judges don’t know their gender from their gait or shoes.
First of all, if this is a huge problem, I would personally refrain from wearing heels if it gave away my gender and thus put me at a disadvantage.
But I was just surprised that it is such a problem. How does one’s gender affect one’s playing? Especially for music, you don’t have to be particularly manly or strong (or any of those stereotypical masculine things) to be good. I mean, I’m glad they do the whole carpet thing but who would have known it’s so necessary? I have noticed though, that as a young player, a lot of my fellow musicians are girls. I guess it’s considered a girly thing. But in the professional world, so many big names (Hefeitz, Perlman, Casals, Yo-Yo Ma, etc) are guys. I’m generalizing of course, but maybe there’s a trend?
Anyway, I don’t know how many of you are into classical music and the likes (it’d be really cool if you are! Come talk to me and we can be best friends!) but I could totally connect this to pop culture and today’s entertainment industry too…
So while reading Mozart in the Jungle I came across some information about this. I don’t actually have the book, so I can’t cite specifics or even quote directly (it was a library read). But basically when orchestras went to blind auditions, the number of women who won orchestra jobs went up by a huge amount - I think it was an increase of 4 or 5x. That’s huge. And the thing is, even judges who didn’t think they had a bias against women clearly did if the change was that drastic.
