Justin Davidson is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning music and architecture critic at
New York Newsday.  He is one of the most recognized arts journalists in
America.  Please read this.  It is an incredibly good article.

William Osborne

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Vienna is slow to change its tune
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JUSTIN DAVIDSON
March 2, 2007

In the symphonic music world, the Vienna Philharmonic defines prestige. It
performs annually at Carnegie Hall, its concerts are almost always sold out,
its New Year's celebration in Vienna is broadcast around the world, and
having stood on its podium is a conductor's equivalent of Olympic gold. The
Philharmonic is Austria's preeminent purveyor of Austria's most visible
export: classical music. But it is more: To many people around the world,
and in its own corporate estimation, it embodies the quintessence of the
Western musical tradition.

I have heard and written about the orchestra many times, but I will not be
attending Friday's Carnegie Hall performances - or Saturday's, or Sunday's -
and it may be years before I review it again. A decade after it supposedly
committed itself to entering the 21st century, I believe that the Vienna
Philharmonic has relinquished its claim to serious consideration as a
dynamic cultural organization.

Almost exactly 10 years ago, on the eve of another U.S. tour and under
pressure from the Austrian government, the orchestra struck down the statute
in its bylaws forbidding women from becoming members. That change permitted
Anna Lelkes, a harpist who had been playing in the orchestra in an
unofficial capacity for many years, to become a full-fledged member. She has
since retired.

In the decade since that change in policy, the orchestra has replaced about
40 people, and still has a solitary female member - another harpist,
Charlotte Balzereit - and 136 men. Even if every one of the women now in the
long and blockage-prone pipeline made it into this most rarefied of
classical clubs, they would still only number five by 2010. The Citadel, the
South Carolina military school that reluctantly admitted its first woman in
1996, has a far better record of adaptation.

When challenged on this issue, the Philharmonic answers that it is making a
good-faith attempt to increase the number of women in its ranks, and offers
a number of "buts": 1) Most members stay in the orchestra for life, which
keeps the rate of turnover low. 2) The organization is dedicated to a
fundamentally historical mission, so it need not reflect contemporary mores.
3) Its highest concern is the refinement of its art, and if the price to be
paid for that is a sluggish creep toward equality, so be it. Finally, the
orchestra's identity depends on a complex of highly local traditions, so any
new member must not only be a brilliant musician, but also someone capable
of imbibing and integrating with the orchestra's spirit.

Mary Lou Falcone, a New York-based spokeswoman for the Vienna Philharmonic,
and one of the more indomitable women in a world historically controlled by
conservative men, told me to be patient, that the orchestra works on its own
time scale. "What I see is the openness of the Vienna Philharmonic to have
auditions that include everyone. They're preserving the best of their
tradition and a sound that's been there for 160 years, a distinctive sound,
which most orchestras today don't have."

But the geological pace of change is not merely a regrettable obstacle in
the relentless pursuit of quality. It is product of a narrowly
preservationist, antiquarian philosophy, which fetishizes sound at the
expense of spirit. The composers in the Vienna Philharmonic's pantheon were
all disturbers of the peace, and they railed against the city's recurring
fondness for the status quo. Beethoven was a liberal idealist, a radical
egalitarian and artistic revolutionary who would have been revolted by the
claim that performing his forward-looking, constantly renewable music
required an inflexible reverence for custom.

Most orchestras are conservative: They keep reheating the same masterpiece
soup, seasoned with the occasional novelty. But some - the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, for example - aspire to flexibility, excitement, leadership
and collaboration with the creators of today. Few major ensembles have quite
so hidebound a philosophy, and none so monochromatic and homogeneous a
membership, as the Vienna Philharmonic. (To take one top-tier example, women
constitute 40 percent of the New York Philharmonic.)

The world's most important orchestra treats the symphonic repertoire the way
re-enactment societies treat the Civil War: as terrain for the obsessive
pursuit of historical correctness. There is a place for this, of course. We
should be grateful for the efforts of so many dedicated people who put their
expertise and time to the service of faithful reconstruction of the past.
Obscurity becomes part of these organizations' charm.

But if we judge an orchestra's quality by what it contributes to the
vibrant, dynamic musical culture that keeps the symphonic tradition alive,
rather than by the transparency of its string sound, then the Vienna
Philharmonic would occupy a dusty corner.

The orchestra's defenders make one additional argument: It is a completely
private association, which receives no public funds, and so it does not
actually have to change at all. Aside from its symbolic value to the
Austrian nation, however, it is also an association made up entirely of
Austrian civil servants: the tenured membership of the Vienna State Opera
Orchestra. For those musicians, membership in the Philharmonic amounts to a second job. It is difficult for an American to understand why the glacial
pace of change in a group so tightly (if indirectly) linked to the
government causes no apparent public embarrassment except in the liberal
Green Party.

The Vienna Philharmonic cannot keep women out forever, especially since it
professes not to want to. Even a group that holds nostalgia in such high
regard has its progressive contingent. Inevitably, the orchestra will
change. And when it does, I will recover my interest in hearing what it has
to say, hoping to detect that great old sound fired by new ideas.

Copyright (c) 2007, Newsday, Inc.

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