Chris Swithinbank

The ques­tion of gen­der in­equity in clas­si­cal music is hardly a new one and just a few days ago, Alex Ross posted in the New Yorker in­clud­ing some more re­cent up­set­ting com­ments from Russ­ian con­duc­tors about their fe­male coun­ter­parts. Mean­while in the fran­coph­one world, there has been heated de­bate about re­marks made this week by Bruno Man­to­vani, com­poser and — more im­por­tantly in this con­text — di­rec­tor of the Con­ser­va­toire Na­tional Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, in an in­ter­view with France Musique:

I won’t elab­o­rate on my own feel­ings here, I’ve done that enough in other fora, but in the in­ter­est of this being avail­able to those who don’t speak French, here is a trans­lated tran­script of his re­marks (with thanks to Fa­bi­enne Séveil­lac for the French tran­scrip­tion):

I am a tiny bit… dis­turbed by all the talk about par­ity, or about pos­i­tive dis­crim­i­na­tion. Er, there are few fe­male con­duc­tors it’s true; there are few African con­duc­tors…

If we begin to deal with cat­e­gories, we will have dif­fi­culty re­spect­ing the fact that there are stan­dards, com­pe­ti­tions and also am­bi­tions that can be very dif­fer­ent for a man or for a woman.

As you know, the aims of an or­ches­tra di­rec­tor, of a con­duc­tor are com­pli­cated. We ob­vi­ously en­cour­age every­one to apply to join the con­duct­ing class so that we have as many con­duc­tors as pos­si­ble to pro­vide for French and in­ter­na­tional or­ches­tras, but women aren’t nec­es­sar­ily in­ter­ested, and nei­ther can I put a bay­o­net be­hind every fe­male stu­dent at the con­ser­va­toire, whether com­poser or in­stru­men­tal­ist, who might have the ca­pac­i­ties for con­duct­ing, to force them to choose this ca­reer!

There is also the prob­lem of ma­ter­nity that raises its head; a woman… erm… who wants to have chil­dren… erm… will have a hard time hav­ing a ca­reer as a con­duc­tor, which can change tack abruptly overnight for sev­eral months…and then after hav­ing dealt with… I was going to say taste­lessly the af­ter-sales ser­vice of ma­ter­nity, that is to say, rais­ing a child at a dis­tance, it isn’t sim­ple, so you tell me that men are in the same sit­u­a­tion, but de­spite every­thing, the re­la­tion­ship of a child to its mother is not that of a child to its fa­ther.

There is also some­times even a phys­i­o­log­i­cal re­straint… erm… the pro­fes­sion of a con­duc­tor is a pro­fes­sion that is par­tic­u­larly test­ing phys­i­cally; some­times women are dis­cour­aged by the very phys­i­cal as­pect: con­duct­ing, tak­ing a plane, tak­ing an­other plane, con­duct­ing again… is quite chal­leng­ing, … so there is ab­solutely no neg­a­tive dis­crim­i­na­tion, and it is for this that one might at­tack the con­ser­va­toire, the Opéra de Paris or I don’t know which in­sti­tu­tion, but I don’t know if there should also be a pos­i­tive dis­crim­i­na­tion.

For me, the only dis­crim­i­na­tion, no mat­ter in which dis­ci­pline, is the en­trance exam or com­pe­ti­tion.

This short clip sparked a lot of de­bate and today, feel­ing it nec­es­sary to ex­plain him­self, Man­to­vani used the CNS­MdP Face­book page to issue a de­fen­sive, clar­i­fy­ing state­ment, which I trans­late below:

Where are the women in clas­si­cal music? Con­tin­u­a­tion and end

Just as ‘there is no love, only demon­stra­tions of love’, I think that there is no machismo, only demon­stra­tions of machismo, or bet­ter still, that there is no anti-machismo, only demon­stra­tions of anti-machismo. The in­ter­view I gave to France Musqiue as di­rec­tor of the Con­ser­va­toire Na­tional Supérieur de Musique et de Danse on the pres­ence of women in the con­duct­ing pro­fes­sion has been cre­at­ing con­tro­versy on so­cial net­works. It is first in my role as a com­poser that I would like to re­mind all those who are ready to par­tic­i­pate in such easy pub­lic con­dem­na­tion, that the au­thor of these lines has ded­i­cated four works to Lau­rence Equi­l­bey, has recorded a CD with Su­sanna Mälkki, has re­quested that the Opéra de Paris en­gage this lat­ter for his first stage work at the Bastille opera, and is cur­rently work­ing on a melo­drama with Claire Gibault. There are only demon­stra­tions, I said, and here are some ir­refutable demon­stra­tions, that should al­ready be enough to si­lence the ill-in­formed pros­e­cu­tors.

That being said, the id­i­otic and un­founded con­tro­versy con­cern­ing my­self should not dis­tract from an in­ter­est­ing de­bate, and here the di­rec­tor of the Con­ser­va­toire will be able to ad­dress the re­marks ex­cit­ing the bl­o­gos­phere. (I take the op­por­tu­nity to men­tion that the CNS­MdP is one of the rare in­sti­tu­tions of higher ed­u­ca­tions where one finds an ab­solute bal­ance be­tween male and fe­male stu­dents.) I gave the jour­nal­ist from France Musique around twenty min­utes of in­ter­view time, of which they re­tained only one minute, and if it is im­pos­si­ble to have ac­cess to the en­tirety of that ex­change, here is ap­prox­i­mately what we touched upon.

The ques­tion of quo­tas of women in the con­duct­ing class was raised. First of all, I said that the con­duct­ing class has not been ex­clu­sively mas­cu­line for a long time. Sev­eral fe­male stu­dents have com­pleted their stud­ies re­cently (most re­cently, Alexan­dra Cravero bril­liantly com­pleted her mas­ters diploma in 2011 and was em­ployed on an opera pro­duc­tion at the CNS­MdP the fol­low­ing year). In my opin­ion, a sys­tem of quo­tas in nei­ther de­sir­able nor ap­pro­pri­ate at a school. It is the qual­ity of can­di­dates at the en­trance exam that is im­por­tant, not their sex, or their ge­o­graph­i­cal ori­gin. (In­ci­den­tally, peo­ple seem rel­a­tively rarely upset about the al­most total ab­sence of black or North-African con­duc­tors, some­thing I for one find trou­bling.) It would be in­ac­cept­able to put in place the least dis­crim­i­na­tion at the en­trance exam stage, be it pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive.

That said, I am de­lighted by the en­trance into the prepara­tory class for con­duct­ing (known as ‘ini­ti­a­tion’) of two young women for the aca­d­e­mic year which is be­gin­ning, and I re­ally hope that they will be able to enter the ad­vanced class at the end of their cur­rent course.

Dur­ing the in­ter­view, I also stressed the fact that many women are not in­ter­ested in the con­duct­ing pro­fes­sion, and that the en­cour­age­ment of an in­sti­tu­tion has its lim­its. One can­not force a per­son to en­gage with one ca­reer or an­other.

Re­gard­ing the po­ten­tial rea­sons for this lack of in­ter­est (and I stress the ad­jec­tive ‘po­ten­tial’, be­cause — not being a woman my­self — my re­marks are at once a per­sonal opin­ion, but also a syn­the­sis of state­ments made by women), I men­tioned ma­ter­nity, a ques­tion that often poses it­self at the same time as a con­duc­tor’s ca­reer is be­gin­ning (be­tween 27 and 35 years old). With the ‘ser­vice après-vente’ [af­ter-sales ser­vice, or cus­tomer ser­vice] of ma­ter­nity (an un­for­tu­nate turn of phrase, I admit, but it is also ad­mis­si­ble to have a sense of hu­mour when dis­cussing se­ri­ous sub­jects), I said that only with dif­fi­culty could a mother com­bine an in­ter­na­tional ca­reer as a con­duc­tor (very dif­fer­ent from the level of in­volve­ment of an in­stru­men­tal­ist, be­cause play­ing a con­certo or a recital does not in­volve a week of re­hearsals) with a re­cent birth. The re­la­tion­ship of a child to its mother is not the same as that to its fa­ther and deny­ing this from be­hind an an­gelic egal­i­tar­i­an­ism is rather dis­tant from re­al­ity.

Fi­nally, and this is surely the most im­por­tant, I re­peat­edly stressed the fact that the sit­u­a­tion has al­ready evolved a lot. Who could have imag­ined 20 years ago that one day it would be a woman (Marin Aslop [sic]) who would con­duct the clos­ing con­cert of the Proms? Like­wise, the fact that hav­ing con­ducted my bal­let Sid­dharta, Su­sanna Mälkki was asked back to the Opéra de Paris, shows that the old, macho habits of cer­tain or­ches­tras have com­pletely dis­ap­peared. Of course, we are far from par­ity, but once again, this idea has no rel­e­vance for me in the cur­rent state of af­fairs, and it is too early to be able to en­vis­age it. But the op­ti­mism is real.

Putting me on trial for machismo (which gives rise to quite vile opin­ions con­cern­ing my per­son on so­cial net­works and which do no ho­n­our to those who hold them) is si­mul­ta­ne­ously un­just and un­jus­ti­fied. France Musique, a sta­tion in the Radio France group, is a chan­nel linked to two won­der­ful or­ches­tras where we can­not say that the bal­ance of in­vited con­duc­tors is par­tic­u­larly well re­spected. This is nor­mal for the time being, and the sit­u­a­tion will no doubt evolve with time. In any case, whether it as a com­poser or as di­rec­tor of an in­sti­tu­tion of higher ed­u­ca­tion, I hope to par­tic­i­pate in the emer­gence of fe­male con­duc­tors with ef­fi­ciency and ap­pro­pri­ate­ness, far from the ephemeral pas­sion that ex­cites ster­ile de­bates where any­thing goes, even the basest taw­dri­ness.

Bruno Man­to­vani
Di­rec­tor of the Con­ser­va­toire Na­tional Supérieur de Musique et Danse de Paris

While on this topic, com­poser Clara Ian­notta draws my at­ten­tion to the fol­low­ing doc­u­ment pro­duced by the Société des Au­teurs et Com­pos­i­teurs Dra­ma­tiques: ‘Où sont les femmes ?’ (PDF). It is an im­pres­sively com­pre­hen­sive sur­vey doc­u­ment­ing gen­der (im)bal­ances in a va­ri­ety of the­atre and opera con­texts in France. Col­lab­o­ra­tions with fe­male artists at var­i­ous French in­sti­tu­tions reg­u­larly ac­count for less than 15% of that or­gan­i­sa­tion’s work.

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6 Oc­to­ber, 8pm: The trans­la­tions have been re­vised in a cou­ple of small de­tails after some feed­back.