Chris Swithinbank

As it’s In­ter­na­tional Women’s Day, I won­dered how well that most re­ac­tionary of mu­si­cal beasts, the or­ches­tra, would stand up to tests of gen­der equal­ity. I won­dered how many fe­male com­posers were being per­formed by Man­ches­ter’s three or­ches­tras this sea­son, and then ex­panded my re­search into con­duc­tors, soloists and rank and file player num­bers. Per­haps un­sur­pris­ingly, the num­bers don’t look great.

Let’s start with the good news. Be­tween them, Man­ches­ter Cam­er­ata, The Hallé and the BBC Phil­har­monic list 193 mu­si­cians as play­ers on their web­sites. Of these, 93 are women, or 48.2%. Ac­cord­ing to a 2009 Mid-Year Pop­u­la­tion Es­ti­mate avail­able from Man­ches­ter City Coun­cil women make up 48.8% of the pop­u­la­tion in Greater Man­ches­ter, so that pro­por­tion looks spot on. It is worth not­ing how­ever that gen­der bal­ance within sec­tions of the or­ches­tra seems to vary: the strings con­tain­ing more women while brass sec­tions tend to con­tain more men. The pro­por­tion of women to men across or­ches­tras is brought down by the BBC Phil­har­monic, whose ratio is closer to 3 women to 4 men.

That’s about where the good news ends. Of 77 soloists this sea­son, just 27 are women, a lousy 35%. That looks even worse if you take singers out of the equa­tion, drop­ping to 31.8%. That means less than a third of the mu­si­cians per­form­ing con­certi in Man­ches­ter are women.

The land­scape for fe­male soloists looks a lot bet­ter than that for con­duc­tors though. That’s be­cause if you were to take Man­ches­ter or­ches­tras as your guide there aren’t any. Not a sin­gle woman is being em­ployed as a con­duc­tor by any of the Man­ches­ter or­ches­tras this year. Not one. But 34 men are.

Com­ing back to my ini­tial cu­rios­ity. How many fe­male com­posers are being per­formed by these in­sti­tu­tions? The an­swer is: two. 99 names ap­pear on pro­grammes, some mul­ti­ple times, but the other 97 are all male. The names of this ap­par­ently lucky cou­ple are Nina White­man and Sally Beamish. Nina’s Win­dows on the Neva was pre­miered by Man­ches­ter Cam­er­ata in Oc­to­ber, while Sally Beamish’s The Song Gath­erer (Cello Con­certo No. 2) was per­formed by Robert Cohen with the Hallé in De­cem­ber. Of course, the his­tor­i­cal na­ture of or­ches­tral pro­gram­ming means that or­ches­tras will have a quick de­fence: ‘the ab­sence of fe­male voices is an un­avoid­able re­flec­tion of his­tor­i­cal so­ci­ety.’ Hence the fact the only music by women com­posers played this sea­son is by liv­ing com­posers. Fair enough, but 13 dif­fer­ent works by liv­ing com­posers were per­formed by these or­ches­tras. 2 com­posers out of 13 still leaves us with just 15.4% women.

So, where are the women in your local music scene? It’s not that they don’t exist, but they are being ne­glected by some of the most highly funded and pres­ti­gious mu­si­cal in­sti­tu­tions. In a re­cent ar­ti­cle for the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle, Joshua Kos­man wrote, ‘music lovers ought to be hav­ing a real de­bate about just what it means for an artis­tic ed­i­fice so grand and ar­rest­ing [as the Vi­enna Phil­har­monic] to be built on a foun­da­tion of more-or-less ex­plicit sex­ual and racial dis­crim­i­na­tion.’ His crit­i­cism holds true to greater and lesser ex­tents for or­ches­tras around the word. I would urge you to do the maths, work out what your local or­ches­tra — or what­ever cul­tural in­sti­tu­tion you value — looks like de­mo­graph­i­cally and ask the dif­fi­cult ques­tions.

Sources: Man­ches­ter Cam­er­ata sea­son brochure; printed BBC Phil­har­monic sea­son brochure; down­load­able cal­en­dar from The Hallé; player lists on the web­sites of all three or­ches­tras.