This Made Me Wince, a Lot.

Before I get started on a tweet from the League of American Orchestras,  I do want to note that they have had a group of Black conductors speaking to them this week and they do seem to be making some efforts in the right direction -- but the cluelessness here is uh I don't know what to say.

The text of the tweet pictured above is: 

CEO Jesse Rosen of the League of American Orchestras: Events of past weeks have changed my own beliefs about the centrality of racism in our society, beyond other forms of discrimination. We have not yet figured out what this means for our org, or how to be good partners w/ respect to equity in resources.

I took a look at Rosen's page on the LAO web site, and gosh. He is a middle-aged white guy, pretty typical of orchestra and opera company executives.*

But he's not uneducated and probably he reads The NY Times and other major newspapers. How....can he have missed how central racism is? There are the basic historical facts that the European colonists started out by stealing the land that's now the United States from the indigenous people and also that a good chunk of the US economy was funded by enslaving African people who were kidnapped from their homes, tortured, raped, abused, bought and sold away from their families.

After that, I bury my head in my hands. The LAO has been collecting and publishing orchestra repertory reports for a long time. If you take some time to look at them - and you hope the organization's CEO would do this - it's pretty obvious that orchestras play hardly any music by Black composers. I mean, 99% of what they play is by white men, who are also 90% or more dead and who are mostly European.

And the LAO has or should have a pretty darned good idea of who is playing in its constituent orchestras (98% white or Asian or of Asian descent) and who the executives and staff of the constituent orchestras are. The CEOs are almost entirely white men, with a smattering of women. Off the top of my head, I know of maybe four orchestras currently led by Black conductors (Edmonton, Berkeley, Oakland, Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra). (Oh, wait, William Eddins is now Emeritus at Edmonton, sorry!)

So this gives you an idea of why you get a lot of denial about the existence and impact of racism: if you're one of those who have the lowest possible difficulty setting, it's pretty easy to not notice the situation of other people. And it might take being hit over the head by an obvious police murder or ten (these go on all the time, people) and a lot of protests to finally realize what a big deal this is.

I'll close by saying: listen to Black people. It's not as if there haven't been plenty of conversations and plenty of attempts by Black individuals to tell musical organizations and individuals at those organizations what's going on with racism in classical music.

Updated: Added a couple of sentences about Black conductors.


* I'm sitting here and quietly contemplating the fact that the first three prominent female executives who crossed my mind - Deborah Borda, Christina Scheppelmann, and Francesca Zambello - are all partnered with women.