Orchestras shouldn’t be affirmative-action programs Douglas Murray
I recently left the Metropolitan Opera in New York after a performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. A friend who was with me had never seen the work before and suddenly blurted out how amazing it is that anybody could view such an art form as elitist or somehow difficult to access. True, it was past midnight, and we had started this journey through Wagner’s lightest work at around 6 p.m. In other words it was only around twice the length of the average Hollywood film these days. Yet opera has a reputation for elitism that cinema does not — which is strange, because, as my friend noticed, everything about the work we had just seen was not just egalitarian but wildly so.
The mastersingers themselves, you will recall, are all members of various trade guilds. The art of song-making is revered in the town of Nuremberg, but equally revered are the trades from which the masters come. Hans Sachs is a cobbler and is admired by all for his hard work and mastery of shoemaking as much as for his mastery of songwriting. Equally admired are the bakers, the tailors, and all other craftsmen. In Wagner’s Nuremberg, everybody who masters his trade is revered.
It was a moving thing to hear, this reflection on the simple egalitarian nature of Meistersinger. Because opera lovers today — like all lovers of classical music — are to some extent made to feel as though we’re guilty of something. In the English-speaking countries, most politicians and other public figures will actively avoid mentioning whether they like classical music. Those of us who are less shy about our love of these works have been made to feel that we are the problem. The fact that other attendees at this particular performance of Meistersinger included a pretty good cross section of age groups and other demographics could do nothing to dull this particular apprehension: the sense that we who enjoy going to concert halls and opera houses have in some way become an embarrassment to the venues that tolerate us.
It has been like this for years, with bureaucrats of the musical world and maestros increasingly bemoaning the whiteness and the elderliness of their audiences. Any reasonable person would have long ago made his peace with certain facts of artistic life. There are some art forms that you appreciate as a child, some that you learn to appreciate as you grow older. The retired have more time and disposable income than the young do, and there is nothing wrong in itself with the elderly enjoying particular pleasures or forming the backbone of particular audiences. Throw in as many access opportunities as possible (one reason some of us got into the art form), subsidize tickets, or give free tickets to the young, and you’ve done most of what you can do, other than encourage schools to actually teach music properly. But that is beyond the remit of the orchestral venues themselves.
Even age is not the main problem, though, according to the critics. Today in America there is another: the issue of whiteness. And as the post–George Floyd revolution continues to flow through every aspect of American and the wider Anglophone life, this aspect has become — to use a vogueish word — especially problematic.
In July of last year, the Washington Post insisted that classical music is finally “reckoning with racism.” The New York Times kept its finger equally firmly on the nation’s pulse by writing repeatedly about the alleged racism of classical music and opera. Using a classic and comfortable diversion tactic, such outlets landed especially on the issue of “blind auditions.” This is the process, praised only a few years previously, in which auditionees to major orchestras play from behind a screen so that if there were a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan on the selection jury, he could not refuse to hire the performer on the basis of skin color alone. The idea that there is any orchestra board in America in the 2020s that suffers from such a problem is itself a grand delusion. Reality is quite the opposite. It is hard to imagine any auditioning board that would not look with disproportionate favor on any black or minority ethnic performer. The Times and other major newspapers have, nevertheless, returned repeatedly to the lie. The lie that opera and classical music are not merely elitist but part of a systemic problem: that the death of George Floyd demands a reckoning. And that part of that reckoning should include getting into the question of whether black Americans are fully represented in the nation’s woodwind sections.
It isn’t just the composition of the orchestras but the schedules themselves that reflect this. Across the U.S. and the U.K., orchestral conductors and others are being forced to establish gender parity not just among players but among composers. A tricky business in itself. Worse is that there is an increasing demand for ever more diverse — i.e., non-white — composers, too. Not that there aren’t any. There have been a number historically, and many of them are happily working today. Still, there is no getting away from the fact that the canon of Western classical music is dominated by men — and men, specifically, who have committed the compounding errors of also having been white and, fatally, of not still being alive today.
A glimpse at the schedules of Carnegie Hall this season reveals the deep unease about what used to be a traditional program. To take an example at random, the current season at Carnegie includes a band whose work, we are told, incorporates “batá drumming, dancing, and singing of Orisha chants that serve to call down and pay tribute to the deities.” I do not wish to single out Carnegie Hall or the particular concert in question. But it is an unavoidable fact that in the schedules of concert halls and opera houses in the Anglosphere one senses a certain chill of fear in the air. Performers who belong to an ethnic minority are being put literally center stage. Billboards focus on the non-white faces to any extent that they can. Anything but living white males playing works by the dreaded dead white ones.
This manifests in more and more ridiculous ways. In October, the Royal Opera House, in Covent Garden, suddenly made a great song and dance about their celebration of Black History Month. What should Black History Month have to do with London’s leading opera house? Only the same thing it has to do with everything else. A deep desire not to get caught on the wrong side of a sharp and unforgiving cultural cliff. Among other things, the Royal Opera House promised “social media takeovers from our global community of Black creatives and performers.” Other activities included a new chamber opera retelling the story of a Guyanese political activist who had performed a hunger strike in 1953.
But even these are the softer edges of the revolution. The harder edges get felt in activities like that which broke in September, when the English Touring Opera was revealed to have fired half of its orchestral players. At a time when the ensemble had, like most of the performing arts, barely struggled through the COVID season, this seemed like an unnecessarily cruel move. But then it was announced that the reason for the mass firing was a duty that the orchestra had — following the strictures of the Arts Council, which pays part of their income — to increase diversity within its ranks. As a range of American orchestras and ensembles have also discovered in recent years, the soft language of diversity can get awfully hard, awfully fast. And the feeling of warmth that the phrase engenders does not survive the first loyal players’ losing their livelihoods because they are of the wrong skin color.
This is all wildly, provably wrong. Any opera lover can reel off the names of great black opera stars with as much ease as a basketball fan can reel off the names of great black basketball players. The claims made of the classical-music world are made by people — especially journalists — who time and again reveal that they are fighting a shadow that does not exist, boxing against an enemy that, if it ever was alive, died off an awfully long time ago.
So there is the racism claim, the sexism claim, and much more. But my own belief has come to be that the most likely reason that classical music is struggling is that it runs counter to an even more deeply prevailing ethos of our time. For it insists on technique at a time when people are told that they should just express themselves. Unlike other art forms, classical music cannot be faked. As I have mentioned in these pages before, you may easily bluff your way in the visual arts these days. Even in the written word. But if you sit down at a keyboard or stick a clarinet in your mouth, it becomes awfully clear, awfully fast, whether you can actually play it or not. Likewise writing the notes on the stave.
It is this that makes classical music vulnerable. But it is also one of the things that makes it great — perhaps the best and surest place for the preservation of culture. For it is not elitist in that it is only for an elite. Today, this great tradition is accessible to anybody who can type a few names into Spotify. There are even premade playlists, so one doesn’t even have to search. Accessing classical music has never been easier. But it is elitist in a different sense, in that it is exceptionally hard for talentless frauds to break into. Talentless frauds hate that — and like to break things they cannot have.
Anyhow, I hope that the guild of musicians continues through this unforgiving era, lambasted, quota-ed, and sometimes sacked out of existence though they may be. For performers and audiences alike should keep in mind what the audience at the end of Meistersinger knows: that when it comes to the art of song, that which is great and true will always win through.
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