Blind Orchestra Auditions Alleged to Be Unfair Based Purely on Optics

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.

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Chinks III

Since writing Chinks II, I’ve felt uneasy about calling the Vietnamese workers in that nail salon ‘racists’. It’s true that they pigeonholed an African-American patron as a lazy welfare recipient who was unwilling to get a job. They seemed to take pleasure in voicing all the hurtful stereotypes that could be applied to a total stranger. I found their behavior cruel, terrifying and ironic.

The barb at the heart of Chinks II was minority on minority hate. Yet I described their hate speech as “tittering... nonsensical verbal massaging.” Even if the taunting was meant to be indecipherable, wasn’t I being a bigot myself by writing about it this way?

I can’t think of more alternatives to the pronoun “them.” That’s probably because I don’t know much about the Vietnamese women who taunted a black woman that day. (Here again, I resort to the roughest of rough sketches: “that black lady”). I don’t know their names. I don’t know where they live, although it’s probably not far from my own neighborhood. They are caricatures precisely because I have so few details with which to draw my group character sketch. And what would my cartoon self-portrait look like?

Qipao1

On the day of Chinks II, I was the most socially normative minority in the room. Being light-skinned, speaking with an American accent, growing up in a solidly middle-class household and earning a professional degree all help me to appear more “white” and inviolable. Who knows? It could have been my blessed-in-every-way-second-generation-Chinese-American presence that precipitated the verbal attack that I describe so vehemently. It’s not that I think I am the center of every story; though this story - all the Chinks stories - are about me and my perception of race. Chinks II simply exemplifies the pervasive, insidious, contagious nature of bigotry. This is a barb that hasn’t stopped pricking.

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Veteran speaks out about the military’s greatest weapon: racism

In this video, a military veteran named Mike Prysner spoke out about the military's main weapon: racism. He argues that without racism, none of the military's expensive weapons could ever be used, and there would be no chance that the working people of one country would be convinced to kill the working people of another country. His argument regarding the power of racism is another way of pointing out the explosive power of ingroups and outgroups and the curing power of diversity--a willingness to embrace the humanity of people unlike ourselves. For more on the often-used recipe for going to war, see this post on "War Made Easy."

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Does Gingrich think racism is evolving?

I loved this op-ed piece over at Huffpo by John Ridley - "Note to Newt . . . " - regarding Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor's supposedly racist comment about the perspective of a Latina woman in a 2001 speech. Ridley is right on target with his comparisons of "old racism" and "new racism" - as if a comparison can even be made. Mostly, Newt and his ilk just seem annoyed that "they" just don't know their places these days. Not women, not minorities, not gays . . . life just isn't as simple when everyone goes off and thinks they're just as good as the good ol' white guys. Sotomayor's point was essentially that anyone who has seen the system from the bottom up has a deeper experiential perspective from which to draw when discussing said system. That doesn't make her every thought on it correct or best, but overall, her perspective has more to draw on than that of a privileged white male who never had to fight for his place at any table, let alone on any bench. I don't discount white males, by any means, and neither did she. Lots of them, present company included, are wonderful, open-minded, intelligent and fair people. By calling her comment "racist," Gingrich has merely shown he has precious little understanding of what racism is really all about.

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What are the teabag protests really about?

What are the teabag protests really about? Their message is so incredibly incoherent, that it's clear that these sparsely-attended "protests" weren't really about what they were supposedly about, at least for many of the protesters. Therefore, we need to explore the subterranean reasons. On Keith Olberman's show, Janeane Garofalo suggests that what really upsets the teabaggers is that there is a black man in White House. With her theory, Garofalo is echoing one of my suspicions. And check out the blogger who took the microphone at one of the protests and had the protesters eating out of his hand, to demonstrate the incoherence.

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