I’ll open this article with a tweet by “The Science Femme, Woman in STEM”:

Blind auditions were introduced in order to focus on talent, not what a musician looks like. In his book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell celebrates blind auditions:

The world of classical music – particularly in its European home – was until very recently the preserve of white men…But over the past few decades, the classical music world has undergone a revolution…Many musicians thought that conductors were abusing their power and playing favorites. They wanted the audition process to be formalized…Musicians were identified not by name but by number. Screens were erected between the committee and the auditioner, and if the person auditioning cleared his or her throat or made any kind of identifiable sound…they were ushered out and given a new number. And as these new rules were put in place around the country, an extraordinary thing happened: orchestras began to hire women. [pp. 249-250]

Musician and educator James Boldin concurs.“The ability of even highly trained musicians to make split-second evaluations of a player’s skill is compromised [by the way they look].”

In the referenced NYT article dated July 15, 2020, writer Anthony Tommasini urges that blind auditions are not fair (“The status quo is not working”), because (he argues) there are not enough Blacks playing for major orchestras. It is stunning that Tommasini makes this allegation of impropriety without offering any statistics showing the extent to which Blacks listen to classical music while growing up, the extent to which they aspire to be classical musicians or the extent to which they apply to and graduate from classical music programs. Why has he failed to tell us the extent to which Blacks aspire to be classical musicians?  These numbers (which I haven’t been able to track down) bear strongly on what I think about Tommasini’s numberless conclusions.  If Blacks, as a percentage of the population, are less interested in classical music, the small numbers of Blacks in major orchestras might reflect that lack of interest in classical music, not anything nefarious.

Tommasini argues “over the past century of increasingly professionalized training, there has come to be remarkably little difference between players at the top tier.”  He is arguing that there is so little difference among the musicians in the top tier that they are all good and there is thus no need for auditions. Apparently, according to Tommasini, orchestras should should simply assemble the musicians that are merely passable, then completely dispense with the meritocracy.

American culture is at an intense impasse. Many of us strongly believe that professions ought to be staffed by those who are best at doing the tasks demanded by the profession. Most of us want the best possible surgeon operating on our children and we want the best pilots flying our airplanes.  Increasingly, however, other people are making arguments that there is something wrong with any profession where the practitioners are not representative of society as a whole. They argue that bad optics constitute a prima facie case of unfairness.  I strongly disagree with the latter viewpoint unless it can be shown that participants are being excluded because because of the way they look.

When I attend classical concerts (I attend about one per year), I notice that the percentage of Asian musicians is much bigger than the general population of the U.S.  I assume that Asians* are “overrepresented” because they have more interest in classical music than the population at large.  This article from 2012 sets forth the numbers offered by Slate:

Asians make up just over 4 percent of the U.S. population, but 7 percent of U.S. orchestra musicians are Asian, and the figure rises to 20 percent for top orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic. At the elite Julliard School for music, one in five undergraduates—and one in three Ph.D. students—is Asian.

I have never seen any evidence that there is a pro-Asian hiring bias by orchestras.  I assume that Asian musicians excel at blind auditions because they make better-sounding classical music according to the people who hire classical musicians.

Why did Tommasini fail to interview those who hire musicians for major orchestras as part of his article?  Is it possible that those who do the hiring would A) argue that even at the highest levels of performance, there are noticeable differences in music quality among professional musicians, and B) they support blind auditions because this allows them to hire solely on the quality of the music?  I wonder even more, why would a person who hires musicians for a professional orchestra consider stepping into the current maelstrom of Wokeness in which Tommasini indulges by stating, on the record, that they hire the best musicians blindly, thereby putting targets on their backs for attacks based on implied or institutional racism? What would those who hire classical musicians have to gain by contributing to this type of article, which declares unfairness without considering extent of interest in classical music by the various demographic groups? Without this information, this type of article written by Tommasini is a cheap shot based upon innumeracy (or worse) and one-sided evidence.

I choose my own music based on sound. I rarely know what the instrumentalists look like when I listen to new music on internet “radio.”  I like what I like and I could care less what the musicians look like. Blind auditions sound like a good idea for me because I do it all the time when I hear new music and then make an intuitive judgment as to whether I like that music.

I believe that the NYT needs to be avoid assuming that there is something wrong just because membership in a profession doesn’t reflect the population at large. This argument, which is increasingly putting the focus on every profession, and which claims that every profession and college class must be representative is growing into an obsession these days. Where else should we apply it?  Is there something wrong when those who are gospel choir singers, professional football and basketball players, jazz musicians and hip hop musicians lack the proportion of whites (or Asians) that one finds in the general population?  The logic applied by the NYT article is the same logic that would conclude that police officers are sexist because 73% of people arrested in the U.S. are men. Men are arrested more often because then commit more crimes than women.  Why aren’t there more men teaching kindergarten?  Why are there not more women car mechanics?  Why are only 43% of college students men? It is not surprising that demographics of every group don’t represent the U.S. population at large.

I applaud organizations that take a special interest in offering education and training to Blacks who aspire to become professional classical musicians. It would be great if everyone who is interested in classical music had the opportunity to be exposed to that genre along with opportunities to perform and excel.

*I don’t like to use the term Asians, in that it awkwardly and crudely lumps together people from many different countries.  But this is the term used by the Slate article.  I also consider it destructive to lump people into the cartoonish categories of “black” and “white.”  See also here.  I need to also make it clear that while I think racial categorization of any type of pernicious, I am aware that bigotry exists in many places–many people do categorize others in these ways and discriminate against them based on these categories. Wherever bigotry exists, it should be vigorously prosecuted and socially condemned.