Recruitment in music

The fundamental need is to treat everyone equally and to judge on performance, not some predetermined prejudice about men, women, colour or religion.

Towards the end of his book on instinctive thought, Malcolm Gladwell describes the recruitment revolution that blazed through the musical world. Until recently, the preserve of white males, orchestras believed, to a man, that women didn’t have the strength. After all, hadn’t Brahms specifically written his second piano concerto so that “a woman’s little hands” could not play it*. As for the brass and woodwind,they didn’t have the lung capacity, the lips, even, to compete with men. But then, in a attempt to stop possible favouritism, screens were introduced to auditions in the US, and so the number of women winning through has increased five–fold!

“The very first time the new rules for auditions were used, we were looking for four new violinists”, remembers Herb Weksleblatt, a tuba player for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, who led the fight for blind auditions at the Met in the mid–1960s. “And all of the winners were women. That would simply never have happened before. Up until that point, we had maybe three women in the whole orchestra. I remember that after it was announced that the four women had won, one guy was absolutely furious at me. He said, “You’re going to be remembered as the SOB who brought women into this orchestra”.”

What the classical music world realised was that what they had thought was a pure and powerful first impression – listening to someone play – was in fact hopelessly corrupted. “Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture” one musician, a veteran of many auditions, says. “Other people look awful when they play but sound great. Other people have that belaboured look when they play, but you can’t hear it in the sound. There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear. The audition begins the first second the person is in view. You think, Who is this nerd? Or, Who does this guy think he is? – just by the way they walk out with their instrument.”

Julie Landsman, who plays principal French horn for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, says that she’s found herself distracted by the position of someone’s mouth. “If they put their mouthpiece in an unusual position, you might immediately think, Oh my God, it can’t possibility work. There are so many possibilities. Some horn players use a brass instrument, and some use nickel–silver, and the kind of horn the person is playing tells you something about what city they come from, their teacher, and their school, and that pedigree is something that influences your opinion. I’ve been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don’t affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart.”

In Washington DC, the National Symphony Orchestra hired Sylvia Alimena to play the French horn. Would she have been hired before the advent of screens? Of course not. The French horn – like the trombone – is a “male” instrument. More to the point, Alimena is tiny. She’s five feet tall. In truth, that’s an irrelevant fact. As another prominent horn player says, “Sylvia can blow a house down.” But if you were to look at her before you really listened to her, you would not be able to hear that power, because what you saw would so contradict what you heard. There is only one way to make a proper snap judgement of Sylvia Alimena, and that’s from behind a screen.

* Brahms ironically described his Herculean epic as “this tiny, tiny piano concerto, with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo”.

“Blink” Malcolm Gladwell: Allen Lane 2005

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