First they came for Aunt Jemima
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@George-K said in First they came for Aunt Jemima:
insisted that we have violists play the opening of the solo viola part to Mozart’s “Sinfonia Concertante” at auditions. It is not at all technically demanding
So many viola jokes come into my mind right now.
E flat is a notoriously hard key to play in tune.
Lolwut? Unless the author is talking about the microscopic theoretical pitch differences between, say, a D# and an Eb, what is he talking about? It's made from the same twelve tones.
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On the topic of symphonic orchestras and the racial constitutions of their players, I have seen argument that says the racial distribution of an orchestra's players should somehow mirror the racial distribution of the "community" where the orchestra is or the "community served by the orchestra."
What does that really mean, and should that even be the right objective?
A medical clinic, a police department, a fire department, a school, a coup kitchen ... yeah, it's relatively easy to identify the "community" served by those institutions.'
But what "community" does an opera or an orchestra serve, really?
Just because an orchestra established its home base in metropolitan area X, does that mean the orchestra "serve" the community of metropolitan area X? What if most of the locals don't listen to that orchestra anyway and the orchestra gets its revenue primarily from out-of-town audience and out-of-town donors?
I tried to find statistics on the racial distribution of audiences of operas or orchestras. I could not find any. Going just by casual observation, I can tell you that most of the time the racial composition of the audience of an orchestral performance look very different from the racial composition of the people living and working around the area where the orchestral performance took place.
Western, classical symphonic orchestra has a very Euro-centric heritage. The pioneers who made the art form what it is were overwhelmingly European and overwhelmingly white. So what? After you get the racial composition of the players to reflect the racial composition of the "community served by the orchestra," are you going to demand that the orchestras play works by a mix of composers whose, as a group, also reflect the racial compositions of the "community served by the orchestra"? What would the Seoul Symphony or the Beijing Symphony or the Calcutta Symphony or the Siam Philharmonic be playing then?
As an art form and as an economic concern, symphony orchestras are on the decline anyway. In the grand scheme of things, I really don't have much of problem to let it fade away, white/Euro-centric or otherwise.
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@Axtremus said in First they came for Aunt Jemima:
I tried to find statistics on the racial distribution of audiences of operas or orchestras. I could not find any. Going just by casual observation, I can tell you that most of the time the racial composition of the audience of an orchestral performance look very different from the racial composition of the people living and working around the area where the orchestral performance took place.
My concert buddy (we go to 5-6 a year together) is a black Englishman. Often he is the only black face in the hall. Sometimes we'll notice one or two more.
A couple of years ago I was going to do a quick in-person introduction with a PW poster who was going to be at the same concert. He was trying to work out this elaborate plan on how we'd find each other (we hadn't shared pics) and I said 'just come to row XX before it starts. I'm the middle aged white guy in glasses sitting next to the middle aged black guy in glasses'. He found me no problem.
