You won’t find a greater enthusiast of gender equality than me. I do have my misgivings about using the word ‘gender’ to denote anything other than a grammatical category, but let’s not quibble about semantics.
It’s the thought that counts, and equality of men and women is the noblest thought of all, or just about. Mind you, that men and women are equal doesn’t mean they are identical.
That’s why male and female athletes compete in different categories. A crossover is rare, and it usually occurs only in games like chess, where men’s greater speed and muscular strength don’t come into play.
Something else does though because, whenever women compete in high-level unisex tournaments, they get thrashed. Only one woman in history has ever been able to compete against the best men players, and at the moment there isn’t a single woman in the top 100.
If men and women competed together in the same tennis tournaments, no woman would probably make it into the top 1,000, but at least – and my egalitarian heart rejoices – they get equal prize money in the majors. Yes, they spend half the time on court, meaning their pro rata pay is twice as high. But hey, that’s what equality is all about.
But why are we talking about trivial pastimes like sports? Why not talk about the loftiest heights to which the human spirit can soar? And, jokes aside (you do realise that everything above was said in jest?), that’s where true, rather than bogus, equality reveals itself.
Take music, for example. Historically, one has to come to the woeful conclusion that musical composition isn’t quite a women’s thing. I can’t think of a serious woman composer in the stretch between Hildegard von Bingen (d. 1179) and Sofia Gubaidulina (d. 2025).
(A few years ago it became fashionable to insist that Clara Schumann was every bit her hubby-wubby’s equal, but the same people probably believed that a woman can be born with a penis, prostate and basso voice.)
However, if women are distinctly underrepresented among composers, they hold their own among performers. They are still outnumbered among the great ones, but many can more than hold their own.
Jacqueline du Pré was one of the best cellists I’ve ever heard, Anne-Sophie Mutter is a good violinist (if not quite as good as her career, but stop me before I come across as a misogynist), and the list of superb women pianists is long: Maria Yudina, Clara Haskil, Myra Hess, Marcelle Meyer, Marguerite Long, Anne Fischer, Martha Argerich.
We can do as many actuarial calculations as we wish, but this isn’t a numbers game. It’s clear that the gap between male and female performers, if it exists at all, is nowhere near as wide as among, say, chess players.
That’s why international music competitions don’t segregate men and women. They compete against one another, and many women have won top prizes. Yet again my egalitarian heart rejoices, this time without a shadow of sarcasm.
However, that same inner organ has just skipped a beat. The cause of this cardiac problem is La Maestra International Competition for Women Conductors currently under way at the Philharmonie de Paris.
The competition is billed as “a premier biennial event at fostering gender parity”, and you could see me holding the left side of my chest even as we speak. For ‘parity’ is one step up from ‘equality’, as any strict semanticist will tell you.
‘Equality’ means unhindered opportunities for everyone to excel; ‘parity’ means everyone excelling to the same extent. It’s possible (though in my view undesirable) to legislate for equality, but not for parity. Parity can’t really be ‘fostered’; it can only be achieved by talent and application.
When a need for ‘fostering’ arises, the implication is that, in this case, women conductors don’t have what it takes to succeed on the strength of their own ability. What can be more condescending than that? More detrimental to the very cause inscribed on the banners of La Maestra, ‘gender parity’?
This is yet another validation of a law to which there are no known exceptions: Any ideology always produces results different from those intended. The likelihood of the results being not just different from, but opposite to, those intended is directly proportional to the zeal with which the ideology is pursued.
Feminism is one ideology that provides piles of irrefutable evidence in support. Ever since it was proclaimed orbi et urbi that, a few incidental and correctable physiological features apart, men and women are no different from one another, things have been going from bad to worse.
Just as ‘sexism’ was persecuted, at times prosecuted, with hysterical zeal, women were busily turning themselves into sex objects more than ever before. Just look at the way today’s liberated women dress.
Skimpy skin-tight clothes leaving little to imagination have left the domain of balls and dinner parties to enter the one of office attire. Back in the 1950s it wouldn’t have occurred to a woman to wear a décolleté dress or blouse to work; in the 2020s it’s the norm (just look at women news announcers).
Let’s go back to the concert platform and look at YouTube videos of the great, pre-emancipated, women pianists I mentioned earlier. Not one of them played in a revealing concert dress – they clearly expected the audience to follow their sublime music, not their undulating breasts.
Then compare them to today’s queen of women pianists, Yuja Wang. If she raised the bottom of her dress or lowered its top one inch, she could be arrested for indecent exposure. (I use the word ‘compare’ loosely, for there can be no musical comparison there. Unlike those wonderful pianists, Wang, digitally gifted though she is, lacks the essential spiritual, intellectual and musical qualities that used to be required in professional performers.)
Back in 2011, I wrote an article entitled A Star is Porn, in which I quoted this passage:
“She is the most photogenic of players: young, pretty, bare-footed; and, with her long dark hair and exquisite strapless dress of dazzling white, not only seemed to imply that sexuality itself can make you a profound musician, but was a perfect visual complement to the sleek monochrome of a concert grand… .”
I commented: “This isn’t the description of a budding lap dancer at The Juicy Lucy bar in a bad part of town. Rather, the cited passage comes from a review of a piano recital at Queen Elizabeth Hall.”
Not bad after half a century of fire-eating feminism. Rather than refusing to be seen as sex objects, women seem to be doing their level best to come across as nothing but the sum of their parts. This encourages not just sexism, but misogyny, a crime only matched by transphobia in modern mythology.
But then that’s how ideologies work.
A competition for women is meant to foster parity with men? I fail to understand how that works. Training and education might foster parity, though that is not guaranteed.
Women are empowered to dress as trollops, which would seem to be exactly what most misogynists prefer. However, anyone who notices a woman dressed as such is branded a misogynist, or worse. She dresses that way for herself, to show her empowerment, not to garner furtive – or overt – glances from men. She may dress to accentuate her curves, but shame (or criminal charges!) on any man who notices. Follow the logic of the modern world. Progress!
Exactly. It’s like black women playing the parts of white men in Shakespeare. The audience is supposed to notice and not to notice at the same time.
Perhaps you will think me a little idiosyncratic but I feel and think, Khatia Buniatishvili transcends your reservations, in an entirely feminine way. Some examples being, her playing of Rachmaninov and Grieg concertos.
She is better than Wang, and could have been a lot better had she developed her considerable talent in her youth. Instead, possibly under her agent’s influence, she chose to build her career on her assets, what a reader of mine once described as DD Major. Just listen to Yudina on YouTube when you get the chance — you’ll get an accurate idea of the standards I apply to pianists.
YouTube has both ladies, playing Pictures at an Exhibition, which will hopefully enable me to understand your view. However, for me, major parts of the Buniatishvili experience is her interaction with the orchestra and her overt emotional reaction to the music, which unfortunately is not visually available for Yudina.
Excuse me … are not visually ….
I’m sorry, but the two simply can’t be mentioned in the same breath, much less compared favourably for KB. That’s like comparing Bach with Offenbach. I can’t think of (m)any pianists with as much ’emotional interaction’ with music than Yudina, but hers came across in the music itself, not facial expressions or rolling eyes. I’m afraid it’s something you either hear or not. ‘Hear’ is the operative word for, unlike, say, pole dancing, music isn’t a visual art. In any case, we are talking about two different levels of performance, and one could go several tiers down before getting from Yudina to the likes of KB.
I like what I’ve heard of the works of Cécile Chaminade, Lili Boulanger and Imogen Holst. I don’t know if they’re what you’d call serious composers, but I think they’re worth hearing.
Anne-Sophie Mutter isn’t among my favourite modern violinists, but Julia Fischer, Catherine Manson and Elizabeth Wallfisch are.
Corresponding to the tendency of female musicians to dress up as tarts is the tendency of male musicians to dress up as punks. Nigel Kennedy started it, but they’re all at it now. I blame the loss of the vitally important distinction between real music and pop music for both phenomena.