Abstract
Hyacinthe Ravet teaches sociology in a program combining music and musicology at L’université Paris-Sorbonne, and is also a clarinet player. This might account for the strategically crucial place she gives to clarinetists in Musiciennes, her deeply researched study of women in music, which goes beneath the contemporary issues it analyzes so skillfully to execute a deep analysis of the way the genders distribute themselves and are distributed by others through the positions available in the active, always changing world of the professional musical arts in France (particularly but not only Paris). The clarinet, it turns out, perfectly embodies all the issues involved in these changes.
At first, the book seems like a standard exercise in assessing how well women have overcome the prejudices and institutional blockages that have prevented them from getting the jobs, salaries and recognition which men of similar ability get. These obstacles have been substantial and not easily overcome, even when (as happened in a widely-reported incident) a conductor as powerful as Herbert von Karajan decides to hire women over the objections of his orchestra’s members. (They stopped him, for a while.) Ravet mobilizes numerical data from government reports and academic investigations to show that women in fact are systematically underrepresented, in every way that counts, in the easily measured world of professional orchestral music, both orchestres lyrique—opera, ballet and symphony orchestras—and orchestres militaires, which includes bands reporting to the ministre de la defense (the armed services) and those reporting to the ministre de l’interieur (police bands of various kinds). These ensembles, offering permanent jobs and steady salaries, hire more men than women and give the prized first chair and soloist jobs to men more often than to women. The world of popular music, less systematically covered by detailed research on whole populations, and in which the organizations are less well established, gets less attention, though Ravet offers some compelling ideas based on the intensive, fieldwork-based studies of Marie Buscatto (2007) on women in the world of jazz (they work mostly as vocalists) and Marc Perrenoud (2007) on les musicos, the “ordinary musicians” who make themselves available to play whatever kind of work presents itself. Women play almost no part in this world, not because musicians are misognyists (they are not, and recognize talent when they hear it) but because the culture of the trade and especially its routine hiring practices, rooted in the world of men, make no allowance for the somewhat different circumstances of women’s lives, especially the contingencies associated with marriage and parenting.
She shows that women have always played a part in French musical life, but mainly in restricted roles: as organists, pianists, teachers, composers, and eventually in orchestral string sections, mostly as violinists and then violists, but seldom as cellists and almost never as double bassists. Almost never, either, as first chair players or soloists. With an odd exception: the harp has been largely a woman’s instrument, in stereotype and fact, for a very long time.
That seems odd in the context of her analysis of the sex of instruments. Because musicians and laypeople share stereotypes about which instruments “go with” femininity and which ones “require” a masculine player, the stereotypes justified by referring to the physical attributes thought necessary to be able to play the instrument correctly, the big bulky harp, which has to be delivered to the performance site, might make a male player seem more suitable. Common beliefs do not assume that string instruments require more strength than women have, but do insist that wind instrument players need more breath, more stamina, more ability to play loud than women have, especially but not only the brass instruments (trumpets, trombones and tuba). Somehow the bulky harp escaped such definitions.
Woodwinds, stereotypically, seem somewhat less difficult. Stereotyped imagery accepts flutes as playable by women but not oboes and bassoons. The clarinet took a long time to be acceptable and not everyone thinks it is. Then, too, wind instruments accumulate (excuse my bluntness!) spit which has to be emptied (an unladylike activity) and Ravet remarks on the somewhat racy possibilities inherent in the clarinet being placed directly in the player’s mouth. Is that a way for a lady to behave?
In addition, male players often argue that female colleagues will want to take maternity leave, and worry about the consequences of that for orchestral unity and quality (ignoring the similar problems occasioned by the not uncommon absence of male players who become seriously ill), though they have no such worries about women in the strings becoming pregnant.
Players argue these points when they can, and so do some parents and schoolteachers, who refuse to let young women take up wind instruments in school. But the myths do die, at the hands of determined young women who insist on playing the forbidden instruments, very often with the strong support of parents (especially mothers) who are themselves serious, sometimes professional, musicians. Some of these teenagers subsequently win scholarships and prizes, and acquire reputations as good, dependable orchestral players, the equal of men. The introduction of the “blind audition,” in which candidates for orchestral jobs play behind a screen so that hiring committees, usually containing a number of orchestra members, cannot see what gender the player is, gave a final blow to the total male domination of some classes of orchestral jobs. As do international comparisons, which show that gender equality is far more advanced in the United Kingdom and the United States than in France and elsewhere in Europe, though the capabilities of populations in the two countries cannot be seriously taken to explain such differences.
Ravet never forgets that the music business is still not, in any of its branches free of gender discrimination (the worst offenders are in such branches of the popular music business as rap, techno, etc.). But her careful and imaginative research shows us how change happens, and it probably makes a good model, as she here and there suggests, for other areas of social life.
Briefly, organizations change incrementally and changes in one group of them influence changes elsewhere, the feedback from those changes making still other changes possible. When music courses and schools become more open to female students, the boys grow up knowing that girls play as well as they do. When mothers who have played professionally encourage their daughters to ignore those who tell them they cannot do it, and supervise their practicing to make sure that they do, those girls ignore opinions to the contrary and pursue career possibilities others have discouraged them from following. They acquire experience the same way the boys do, and thus become eligible for more and better positions. Musical organizations more influenced by political currents (municipal and military bands) accept women in a way that soon becomes routine. Their example makes it harder for orchestres lyriques to justify ignoring capable, talented female applicants. The spectacle of the “pioneers” (pionniers), the first to break a gender barrier, giving way to the “unobtrusive” (discrètes) who in turn are replaced by the “equals” (paritaires), each wave profiting from the presence of the earlier one(s), illustrated in detail in the story of the integration of clarinet playing in classical orchestras, and models the general process her study illustrates.
Something like this. A (standing for some part of a complex of social groups and networks, such as families, schools, employers, colleagues, etc.) changes in some way we are interested in. Its changes change the conditions of existence for B (another part of the complex) and those two changes change those conditions for C . . . N, changes in the later elements influencing the conditions of existence for the earlier ones, as the people whose activities make up all of them try to get done what they are doing and want to do under the conditions in which they find themselves.
Not a complicated model. The hard part is filling in the blanks the model gives us with real information on what goes on in that part of the social world. Ravet’s book shows us how to do it: how to search out relevant numerical data, how to put your own experience to work when it is relevant, how to use and how to bring historical materials to bear. Knowing, as Ravet does, what has gone on in each of these places, as well as that can be determined, gives you a good sociological result. Ravet sets a high standard. It would be good if more of our work lived up to it.