Blind Auditions

[Phoebe]

Curious how our musicians and teachers feel about this article to which various people I know have been responding. Basic thesis: remove blind auditions in order to increase the diversity of orchestras.

My initial reaction is that's a bad idea, because I've always trusted the idea that gender diversity increased in orchestras coincidently with the shift to blind auditions. I know some people have criticized the initial Harvard study from 2000, but the great thing is we have lots of real life data to examine and not just one limited study at a particular point in time. All of that data seems to back up the idea that blind auditions were good for gender diversity, and good for eliminating the type of cronyism that exists in other elite realms where particular mentors or teachers can have a big influence on the fate of their students in a limited number of available positions.

I find it a tad strange that this NYT article is getting a lot of oxygen when there was also recently a NYT article about how Black performers themselves would recommend increasing diversity. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts ... opera.html) Like, maybe we should check on what they have to say before getting into a big debate about this other op-ed? But this article is behind a paywall for me, because I can never get it to accept my credential properly, so who knows what they have to say. I feel like I got one white guys opinion and missed out on what the actual musicians involved in the issue say! The one Black person interviewed in the article who actually plays in an orchestra of the sort the author wants to diversify is also very tepid about the audition-change idea.

I'm also suspicious about any move to put personal identity back in the hiring process when it has been removed, because my own personal experience has been that as long as the people doing the hiring are not a diverse group, they will bend over backwards to find reasons to hire people who are just like them, or who are for some reason or other (i.e. class-based similarity that cuts across ethnic or racial diversity) not threatening to the hiring powers, despite offering some other form of diversity. Candidates who are truly different from the status quo and might shake things up as a result are strenuously avoided, even when there is scant or no justification for doing so.

I'm curious what people who actually know something about music and education think about this, and I'm curious how people who don't come to this issue without a preset political agenda might respond. Because my own views are both heavily influenced by specific people we know and trust, and reinforced by a general distaste for the discourse that has arisen around this issue and this particular article. It's the kind of discourse in which you hear people making assumptions about the types of music kids of different races and classes "tend" to prefer, when if there's anything I've discovered over years of being a student musician and music parent, musicians tend to love enormously diverse kinds of music the more they love music itself, and young people with a casual interest in music today tend to be hip-hop (big umbrella thereof)/pop/EDM fans no matter what their race or class. I have in fact informally surveyed this for years, so I'm pretty confident of result at least in the geographically limited sample I have available. You might even think that people who have a dislike of rap or hip-hop tend to be members of a particular race or ethnicity more than another, but in my surveys I have found that is not the case either. Same with country: people might be surprised who likes it and who doesn't, if they have faulty race-based assumptions. Classical interest among young people is rare enough that I couldn't say if there's any tendency one way or another, but I know my kids are all part of extremely diverse groups of classical players, and when the school system actively supports music education across all genres by making it convenient and even desirable for students to make it part of their regular academic schedule, we see that all sorts of students take part.