Podium politics You d think after four centuries of role reversals, cross-dressing and vocal ambiguities, opera would be well beyond gender issues. LYDIA PEROVIĆ probes one area where it isn t 26 Opera Canada
Tania Miller Spring 2015 27
Why are there still so few women conductors in the world of classical music and opera at a time when orchestras are becoming to a great degree thanks to blind auditioning resolutely more mixed? The classical reviews and listings site Bachtrack.com put specific numbers on what might readily be guessed in its annual report for 2014: only five women appear on the list of the top 150 conductors, based on a survey of 25,000 musical performances around the world. What about the Canadian stats? Torontobased Kapralova Society is Canada s only organization archiving sources on the gender imbalance in classical music, but although it hosts a general list of women conductors, it hasn t explored the field in detail. Opera Canada decided to pursue the issues by talking to six conductors at different stages of their careers. Two are dedicated exclusively to conducting (Judith Yan and Tania Miller), three combine conducting with at least one other calling (Caron Daley, Kinza Tyrrell and Sandra Horst) and one (Leslie Uyeda) has retired from conducting to dedicate herself to composing. Kinza Tyrrell In the last 15 years, only two women have conducted in the pit of the Canadian Opera Company Julia Jones (Le nozze di Figaro in 2007) and Anne Manson (A Midsummer Night s Dream in 2009), just two out of 106 productions. During the same period, out of 62 Vancouver Opera productions, women again conducted only two Karen Keltner (Of Mice and Men in 2002) and Leslie Uyeda (Il barbiere di Siviglia in 2003). Next season, Kinza Tyrrell joins the line-up as conductor of VO s new production of Nico Muhly s Dark Sisters. The symphonic world likely shows similarly sparse statistics just take a look at the season programs of your favourite orchestra over the last few years. Does the gender inequality matter? Doesn t the question of who gets hired to conduct come down to basic issues of talent and hard work? The question answers itself by being asked: if talent and hard work were what ultimately mattered, there would inevitably be more women on the podium at least as many as are coming out of graduate and professional-training programs. Unlike science, technology, engineering and math the so-called STEM disciplines female students are not necessarily self-selecting themselves out of postsecondary conducting programs. Indeed, two of our interviewees, Miller and Daley, remember their graduate schools as gender balanced. It s once out of school, in a world where like hires like and in an industry with too few precedents to radically challenge male authority in conducting, that women start losing ground. There are no young artist programs dedicated to conductors in opera companies to match all the singers programs (although Pacific Opera Victoria is considering one), and while training institutes and fellowships exist, these are too few or too expensive. It s hard to get into this field, says Daley, who, parallel to conducting, teaches music education at University of Toronto. With the Halifax Summer Choral Conducting Symposium, which I founded, I wanted to create opportunities for people like myself 10 years back. I was 22 and dying to wave my hands I see the same thing today. I teach undergrads who want to be conductors, but don t know how to start. These programs exist to help bridge the gap. Her own trajectory included choirs and piano playing as a child, dance training through elementary and high school, and a music degree in voice from University of Western Ontario. At 20, she realized she wanted to become a conductor. I loved singing, but concluded that it didn t grab me enough. I wanted the problem solving and the collaboration of conducting. I remember looking at the orchestral score thinking: I must know this. I must know all of it. A single melody line was kind of boring. Little by little, she started to work with choirs, and went to Ohio State University to complete a Master s in conducting and another in voice. I had heard of Hilary Apfelstadt, who is now at UoT, and went to Ohio State so I could work with her. She remains one of my most important mentors. After grad school, she moved to Rocky Mountain, North Carolina, to teach. There Photo: (previous page) rob destrube; (this page) Kevin clark photography 28 Opera Canada
Photo: courtesy caron daley weren t many choral conductors in this town of 50,000, so I got a phone call one day. We ve heard you re in town, they told me. Will you come and conduct the symphonic choir we have here. I was 24, but I said, Yes. Working on such major pieces as Mozart s Requiem and Beethoven s 9th Symphony is how Daley started her professional career. Four years later, she took a job in Toronto with St. Michael s Cathedral Choir, and began her doctorate. I realized I wanted to teach at university and work as a professional conductor. I feel the conductor is always in part a teacher, whether they call themselves a teacher or not. As a two-year residency with Toronto Mendelssohn Choir draws to a close, she continues to teach at UofT and is considering applying to the Dallas Opera s newly established Institute for Women Conductors. I spend a lot of time watching women conductors in my field, visit them, watch them teach and conduct. How are women managing to do this against all odds? Canada s biggest opera company has admitted a couple of young conductors to its Ensemble Studio training programme, and Judith Yan, now Artistic Director of the Guelph Symphony Orchestra, was its first alumna. The COC residency was a crucial step in her career. My mentor and teacher was Pierre Hétu, who was wonderful. In music, as with any other industry, most of the education is passed down, and you learn the behaviour as well how to do the job and how to handle different situations. Maestro Hétu would bring me to the concerts and take me back Caron Daley stage. He would introduce me to the conductors, and he would coach me this is what you say and this is how you behave which is quite important. Hétu was the first to suggest that Yan meet the COC s Richard Bradshaw, which soon happened at a conducting workshop. There was an immediate chemistry with Richard. I didn t realize at the time that I would love opera so much. I thanked him at the end and asked him if it was okay for me to come and watch his rehearsals. The conducting apprentice impressed the seasoned Maestro so much that he offered her a job. But Yan didn t feel quite ready for opera, and instead worked for the next two years as pianist and repetiteur with the National Ballet of Canada. There, she says, she learned how to work in an opera house and as part of a team. When she decided she was ready for opera, she got in touch again with Bradshaw, who invited her to audition and then offered the position of resident/intern conductor. That was when she realized conducting was her calling. As a child, she had studied ballet for 10 years so physical movement was a familiar musical vocabulary. Communicating with physical movement that translates to music that was dropped into me by age 4, that part was familiar, she says. And as a composition major at university, she had already attended and analyzed orchestra rehearsals. Yet there s so much to learn being a conductor, it s endless and sometimes it s necessary to acknowledge that you have no clue. When you re just starting out, you often hear advice to the effect that you have to pretend you know everything and you can t show weakness. Well, I think that s crazy. If everybody around has 20-30 years of experience over you, they re going to know when you re faking. Any orchestra will work with you if you re strong in the convictions and knowledge you have and are not afraid to ask when you don t know something. You re hired to do a job, to pull it all together, to solve the problem. But part of solving the problem is knowing when you need help to solve the problem. Tania Miller, Music Director of Victoria Symphony Orchestra since 2003, had her first breaks as a graduate student at University of Michigan, where she got to observe four orchestras in action and later conducted her first opera with Michigan Opera Works. That this was Handel s Semele would later help her get Spring 2015 29
In music, as with any other industry, most of the education is passed down, and you learn the behaviour as well how to do the job and how to handle different situations. Judith Yan work with the Carmel Baroque Festival and Opera McGill. As the next milestone, she cites her job as Vancouver Symphony Orchestra s conductor-in-residence. With cover-conducting, Pops and kids and light classics, I ended up doing 25 to 30 concerts a year. The experience was incredibly enriching. You re watching all the pros come in, and you re also viewing the impact of each conductor on the orchestra. Miller started off as a pianist, but became a multi-tasking musician in her small Prairies community from an early age. At 13, I was playing church organ and played whenever it was necessary funerals, services of any sort. This led me to choral conducting. Putting myself through university was always a matter of having some sort of church job that involved conducting choir. Her undergrad degree was in piano performance and music education, and she caught the conducting bug at a University of Calgary summer course. Kinza Tyrrell also started as a pianist. Getting a first solo with an orchestra at the age of 12 (filling in for somebody, she was given six weeks to learn a Bach concerto) was an important musical rite of passage. Later, winning a place in San Francisco Opera s Merola program as a pianist was another critical career move, and after that so was a doctorate focusing on accompaniment in Lieder and mélodies. Tyrrell has never pursued conducting exclusively since that would mean giving up piano, which she loves too much. But conduct she did, the first time filling in for Rosemary Thomson at rehearsals of the Opera Nuova summer program for vocalists and collaborative pianists in Edmonton. I was nervous when I was asked. It was an exciting summer for me, but terrifying at the same time. When she returned the following year, she was named Assistant Conductor to Gordon Gerrard for a production of La périchole. Soon after, Tyrrell was invited to join the COC s Ensemble Studio, then joined the staff the following year as rehearsal pianist and assistant conductor. She worked on three operas a year for about four years before Vancouver Opera wooed her to B.C. She s worked as Music Director of Vancouver Opera in Schools, Principal Repetiteur, Assistant Chorus Director and Children s Chorus Master since, all at VO. I ve taken plenty of staging rehearsals, but you don t get a lot of orchestra time. Dark Sisters will be the first time when I ll have all of the time with the orchestra. Sandra Horst, the COC s renowned Chorus Master, also started off as a pianist/accompanist and continued into choral conducting. I came into the Ensemble at the COC and was playing at rehearsals. One day they needed somebody to prepare the chorus, too, and that s how it all started. She has also branched out into teaching and is today Director of Musical Studies at University of Toronto, where she conducts one show per year. She has also conducted in the pit at the COC, but while orchestral conducting was an option, she always preferred the chorus. Composer Leslie Uyeda conducted five productions at VO between the early 1990s and early 2000s, and was the company s Chorus Master up to 2005. I recall being in a master Photo: johan perrson 30 Opera Canada
Photos: (top) michael cooper; (bottom) courtesy leslie uyeda class given by the Metropolitan Opera s Joan Dornemann, before I had given much thought to conducting. She said to all of us young coaches, If you have an opinion, be a conductor. I guess I decided that I had opinions. She became aware soon enough that forging a conducting career would be a challenge. It seems that for a woman to have a conducting career, for the most part, she has to start her own organization or have a very influential backer. Were the orchestras cooperative when she was starting out? I knew I was pioneering to a certain extent, but being in Canada, the worst treatment I received from orchestras was silence. And one engagement did not necessarily lead to another. I think this is still a problem for many women. Someone has to promote you, other than an agent. If that doesn t happen, it can be difficult. Until young women can see that there is a path they can take, like their male counterparts, the successful women conductors will remain the exception rather than the rule. Yan has a similar take. You have to outlast everybody, essentially. I think it s a challenging job and you have to stick to it through the hard parts. It has so many levels; it s not like coming out of school with a degree with which you can apply for a job and get it. You can t go to school and study CEO. Horst reminds that the fact that some European orchestras have traditionally been closed to women musicians doesn t help some of this culture survives even after the orchestras open up. When I was at Juilliard, there were no women in the Masters of Conducting program, she says, while today she encounters few women in University of Toronto conducting programs. Kinza Tyrrell isn t reluctant to talk about a glass ceiling. There is one on this whole profession, she says. She also notes that Sandra Horst some of the Vienna Philharmonic s brotherhood culture persists. The Vienna Phil members didn t want the oestrogen tainting the boys club. They were worried about pregnancies and maternity leaves disrupting the orchestra. If a core group of players are used to playing with each other, they argue that when newbies come and leave and come back in, it changes the chemistry between the players and this affects performance. Leslie Uyeda She also cites the widely publicised recent statement of conductor Vasily Petrenko, which got him into trouble with classical music lovers around the world. A woman on the podium, he reportedly said, can be too attractive a distraction for the musicians of the orchestra (presuming, of course, that the musicians are chiefly male and heterosexual). Tyrrell has herself already received more comments on her appearance than her male colleagues will likely hear in their lifetime. Rather than hearing how good my languages were, or how well I cued or played, I d sometimes hear from some of my male colleagues after rehearsals about how good I looked. Feminine dress and relatively youthful appearance can work against a female conductor s authority. I see the respect my male colleagues get, even those younger than me. I am often friendly and humourous in rehearsals, and people like that I m approachable and can break down what the maestro meant by what he said. But this kind of troubleshooting is a conducting assistant s work. It ll be interesting to be the principal conductor and be the head. Could this kind of troubleshooting and caretaking be one of the reasons why there are more women in choral conducting? I really instinctively know how to deal with a group of singers, says Horst, while I don t feel as instinctive with instrumentalists. For me, that s more work, it takes more thought to deal with them on a psychological level. I don t know why. It s not like I don t know instrumentalists I have played with them and I am one myself. But there s something about the psychology of conducting a group of singers that comes more naturally for me. Daley expands this line of argument: In a choral setting, it s about a relationship, about teaching, you can crack a few jokes You are also taking care of people s bodies, care about the temperature and the humidity. There are also more amateur choirs than amateur orchestras. I think the basic premise is that anybody can learn to sing, whereas not everybody will be good with an instrument. When I m in front of a professional orchestra, I m not going to start with, Hi guys, how s everybody doing. They are on the clock and rehearsals must be efficient. Even if I m conducting a professional choir, the rehearsal cannot be that driven. It has to be more about the person before me. Daley, too, often gets comments from the audience about her appearance. Things about my hair, and things about my dress. And I get them to the exclusion of comments about the music making. She tries to look at it philosophically. They are not used to seeing a woman on the podium that s another one I often hear, Oh, I ve never seen a woman on the podium before. And that s what they re noticing the dress. But this sometimes overtakes the music and they can t get past the fact that they re watching a woman. That s an issue for me, for sure. What does make a good conductor and how do we ascribe his or her authority? It s a key question, but the Zeitgeist, unconscious prejudgment and dominant media narratives may shape our understanding of the profession more than we realize. The young and rising Britain-based, New Zealand-born conductor Holly Mathieson wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Spring 2015 31
iconography of conducting, investigating the ways in which the public saw, discussed and understood how they moved, dressed, behaved and conceptualised their role, both on and off stage through three case studies from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. Embodying Music:The Visuality of Three Iconic Conductors in London, 1840-1940 is an exciting read and available in PDF format (https://otago.ourarchive.ac.nz/handle/10523/461). Luckily for women, it appears that what each individual conductor brings to the podium also affects the way authority is ascribed, accepted and honoured. B ut what, according to the Maestre, makes a good conductor? Having a vision and carrying people with you on that journey, inspiring people, and through that getting them all to play their very best, replies Miller.The actual live performance is its own category. You let go and let the music take on its own life. You enable that life you have worked out all the details, rhythms, sound, bowings and as a result the music can come forth, in sometimes surprising ways. In her view, the authority of a conductor comes from her responsibility to represent the composer. A true respect comes through honouring that role. A great conductor not only knows the score inside out, she or he also understands the composer. The ability to communicate is also foremost. To harness individuality from every section of the orchestra and to make sure that everybody is working towards a common goal that s bigger than themselves. The role of the conductor is to achieve this great desire for oneness and for excellence as a group. Tyrrell echoes the sentiment. A good conductor is the one who puts the composer and librettist first, and is like a vessel for the piece to come through. Also, someone who gets the best out of the performers and who is flexible, understanding, approachable. According to Daley, the authority comes from the conductor s command of the music and vision of it. The ability to read energy levels is also important: A certain intuitive, perceptive quality is necessary. The conductor needs to know how to help people see the vision, to communicate it and make it compelling. It s also about giving voice and empowering. When something goes wrong, you don t blame the singer for anything, you must take the blame for everything. Instead of me saying, Tenors it s flat, I ll say, Tenors try this. My job is to empower the musicians to do better. That means I have to know how they can do better. And are they ever overawed by the greatness of the material they conduct? Maybe when I was a student, but not now says Horst, summing up the consensus. I try to teach students that everybody comes to a realization in their own time, This is how I play this today, this is what I can do with the piece, and you have to accept it. Every time you do it, it will change. But you realize, This is what I have to say. And this is music for everybody. July 23 to August 5 2015 Artistic Director and General Manager Grégoire Legendre The Quebec Opera Festival has already established itself in the North American summer opera circuit with cutting-edge productions and world class execution.» It s a rendez-vous! www.festivaloperaquebec.com 32 Opera Canada