Episode 197: Facing the Music
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…three women in classical music on inhabiting what has been a very traditional world…
“In a way a female persona is much more vividly felt - a physical persona. And I think that men don't have that same kind of thing. But then when we're in a position where we're potentially losing a job or something like that, those things start to come into play.”
“I remember I won second place. And the feedback from the head judge was that I shouldn't have worn slacks. I remember reading those comments and I was so upset because he didn't say anything about the actual playing.”
“I try to really focus on that hope that the diversity and the future of horn will be balanced, and I hope that for all instruments of course.”
A life in music. Coming up on The Broad Experience.
If you’ve been to a classical concert recently you’ve probably seen plenty of women in the orchestra. They’re certainly there - even if it’s still rare to see a woman conductor…or to hear a piece of music composed by a woman.
Things are improving for sure, but as with so much about women’s work, a lot of the issues lie beneath the surface. And there is so much we could talk about because classical music is a whole world but as usual with this show, I’m going micro rather than macro.
Today we’re going to meet two pianists and a horn player. Each is a different age and at a different stage of her career. But they have a lot in common. They all grew up practicing their instrument for hours a day. They began performing in public when they were quite young. And they’ve spent years studying their art – doing undergraduate, master’s degrees and sometimes doctorates as well.
Dr. Lydia Brown is chair of the collaborative piano department at Julliard, the renowned performing arts school in New York. I actually had to look up what collaborative piano meant - essentially it’s what used to be called an accompanist - so rather than a solo pianist, a pianist who plays with and for another musician. As Lydia says, the term collaborative piano raises the status of the pianist whose job is not just to play but to work successfully with other people.
Lydia is in her early fifties now, and she began her career as a solo pianist, then switched…
“I felt very judged as a solo pianist. I felt like I was always trying to play toward kind of an unhealthy standard. And I was never really at that standard. But then, I don't know, once I made the decision, that this was something I maybe could trust, that being on stage with other people was really a very natural fit, I just started to pursue it.”
AM-T: “I was reading an interview that you gave for Juilliard and something really struck me. Let me find that line. Oh, yes. So you were asked what your elevator pitch is on what a collaborative pianist does, and you said, ‘collaborative pianists should be innately generous, helpful, and ever empathetic.’ Boy, do those sound like stereotypical female traits!”
“Well, you know, it's funny that you say it because I think that is true. I've often felt actually that women come to the profession very naturally. I don't think it's a mistake that the people that actually kind of in a sense guided and founded the work in this country are female. We need all of those qualities to be good collaborators. I think women often have those qualities innately. I have seen my female students in the same way that probably my teachers saw me, we’re able to kind of navigate situations in ways that come naturally to us. And I think somehow our listening, our ability to be receptive, I mean, those things are really important in our field.”
Lydia says she’s had some wonderful women mentors - famous names in the field - Jean Barr, Elizabeth Sawyer Parisot, Margo Garrett. They were pioneers. And when she was first working she was so busy trying to get jobs and make ends meet…she didn’t think much about her gender. But as the years went by that changed.
“I've always felt I've had to work twice as hard <laughs> as a man to get to the same place. And I don't think you'll find a woman really in our profession who doesn't feel that. The only way to engage is to be as good, if not better. And to accept that gender disparity is somewhat in the profession.”
AM-T: “That's interesting to hear, especially as you mentioned all those fantastic female teachers and mentors that you had. And yet you - it's still a thing.”
“It's still a thing. I mean, I feel like the women that that guided me and inspired me, they all had wonderful work. The best women in the profession still get good work. But I still feel like in terms of the number of jobs that we get, we get fewer jobs. It feeds into the fact that we also get paid less in academic settings. I mean, we know this. We're still fighting for those places of equality.”
When it comes to getting work, more than anything jobs come through recommendations. So when you start playing professionally you’re always hoping the artist you play for will hire you again, and recommend you to others. The whole thing is highly reliant on relationships and pleasing the people you work for.
Lydia says her female students will sometimes confide in her that something they’re experiencing feels off.
“They feel like they don’t know why this is happening but did this ever happen to you? I have to say I felt the same way, when I was their age when something did happen you felt a little like it was unfair but you felt you couldn’t really speak about it. I feel women now are thankfully able to speak about it more, and I also feel as a mentor to them I also can speak about it more. In a sense it’s a different climate than it was.”
AM-T: “When you’re saying some students do bring this little unfairnesses up with you sometimes, what kinds of things are we talking about?”
“Sometimes they’re not really sure. My student will say, I always played for this person and then they didn’t ask me. They asked so and so to play this concert. And in those situations you’re not always sure what it is. This is the reality of the work is that you don’t really know. If you lose a job say to a man, it could be for many reasons. I’m not saying it’s only because the person is a man. But as a woman, when a job you think should be given to you because of your relationship with someone, and when it doesn’t happen there’s kind of a knee jerk reaction if the man gets the job, just a little bit of a niggling feeling of how much of this is the fact that I’m a woman?”
She says women have to deal with perceptions of their appearance that can complicate their hiring…
“In a way, a female persona is much more vividly felt - a physical persona. And I think that men don't have that same kind of thing. But then when we're in a position where we're potentially losing a job or something like that, those things start to come into play. Am I wearing the wrong gown? Am I wearing my hair a certain way? Maybe I shouldn't be wearing lipstick. I mean, these are things which we shouldn't have to think about. I personally have had to think about it. I know women before me have also.”
And the ones after her. Renate Rohlfing is one of them. Renate was a student of Lydia’s at Juilliard - you heard her playing at the top of the show and you’ll hear her again. She’s in her late thirties. She’s been playing the piano since the age of three. She’s performed throughout the US and the world.
MUSIC HERE
Renate grew up in Hawaii, in Honolulu. She began performing as a kid. She took part in one local competition at the age of thirteen…and got an early introduction to sexism.
“I remember I won second place, and that wasn't the part that was upsetting. It was a man who won first place, but OK. And the feedback from the head judge was that I shouldn't have worn slacks to the competition.”
AM-T: “They wanted you to wear a skirt or a dress?”
“A dress, even though there was no dress code, you know, it was just, wear something that's performance appropriate. And he said I should have worn a dress. And this is a very famous pedagogue and an international performer himself. And after that I remember reading those comments and I was so upset because he didn't say anything about the actual playing. So I was getting this feedback that was so gendered it was impossible for me to really understand, especially as a 13 year old.”
She had lost out because she didn’t look feminine enough. So for years afterwards…
“I wore dresses. It was very traditional, you know the classical, formal gowns. It’s even more challenging in the classical singer world. I once heard a man say, ‘I really don’t like seeing women’s ankles on stage.’ [laughs] So you know, long dresses, something pretty conservative…”
Once she got to college in New York she began to experiment a bit with some short dresses, off the shoulder…the more risque the look, the more likely it was a teacher would say she might want to be a bit more modest.
For many years, including when she was an undergrad, nearly all her teachers were men.
Then she went to Juilliard for graduate school.
“My time at Juilliard, that was the first time that I had a female teacher and really a female mentor. And she changed my perception completely of how I can understand that kind of feedback and resist it, and not let it make me so upset that it becomes like a block.”
This particular teacher, Margo Garrett…who was also one of Lydia’s mentors…had had to overcome plenty of her own obstacles in the profession. She was candid with Renate in a way others hadn’t been.
“...she was talking about the length of my dress and she said, you know, you just wanna be careful that depending on where, what is the height of the stage, where are the audience's eyes going to be, what's their level so that you are not making people feel uncomfortable, so that they're not distracted maybe by too much leg or you can also feel comfortable in the length of your dress…that's why I wear slacks now, <laugh>. But um, that you know, depending on where you're sitting, they're going to have different angles of your gown or your attire. And that was just so illuminating for me.”
She says not all Garrett’s female students appreciated that kind of advice. And Renate didn’t follow it all herself. But she says hearing from another woman who herself had performed extensively and dealt with a lot of judgment…it made all the difference to her. It was clarifying. These days she nearly always wears pants.
That wasn’t the only wardrobe change she made.
“I remember I thought I had to wear heels for the longest time and, you know, not two inch heels, like three four inch heels. And then I realized one day, like I actually have a hard time playing the pedal on the piano with these heels. Why don't I just get something that looks chic but is really comfortable, and hardly anybody is looking at your shoes anyway, you know, from far away on the stage. And that was like a huge revelation to me. But because I had seen people for so long wearing heels on stage, I just thought that was what I was supposed to wear.”
She says it just hadn’t occurred to her until fairly recently how important it was to feel comfortable while she played.
“It's taken me, you know, since college, like over 15 years to really understand like, the goal is for me to feel really comfortable in whatever I'm wearing. I have to feel comfortable moving. I have to feel comfortable expressing myself. It's such a simple concept, but nobody told me that.”
MUSIC HERE…
I mentioned earlier that Renate grew up in Hawaii, which she calls blessedly multicultural. She’s a mixture of races: Pacific Islander, Asian, and white. Her mother is Japanese-American. She says her mum, who has a Japanese name, faced a lot of racism once she left Hawaii as a young woman and went to the US mainland. She didn’t want her daughter to go through the same thing and she felt her foreign-sounding name was part of the problem. So Renate says her parents gave her a German first name they liked, to match her German last name. Her middle name is Japanese.
“And for a long time I didn't use my middle name as part of my performance name, because I had that in my mind, are people going to have a certain opinion of me. And in classical music, especially for a long time, and even still there are, people have really serious prejudices about how Asian pianists play.”
Ashley: “Who knew?”
“Yeah. We would hear things like, ‘Oh, well Asian pianists are very technically proficient, you know, they follow directions really well, but there's no emotion,’ things like that. And I'm sad to say that I just kind of accepted that I didn't say like, Well that's ridiculous. If I heard an Asian pianist at school, you know, play with emotion, you just kind of think, oh, well maybe they're the exception. Right. And so you don't even think about all of these biases that you develop from other people. And now I'm so happy and proud to be, to have a Japanese name that I can use.”
AM-T: “What is your Japanese middle name?
“Tsuyako. So my mother's maiden name is Tsuya, which means ‘shiny like the moon’. And
then 'ko' is child.”
Neither Renate nor Lydia has children. Renate says having a child adds a whole ‘nother layer to the trickiness of being a performer, especially since so many are, like her, freelance. Your work hours are unpredictable. Carving out the time for daily practice when you have a small child at home can be very challenging. Then there’s finding work. As she puts it, ‘the hustle is very real’ and often harder to keep up when you are caring for others.
[Come in with 15 secs or so of horn playing…]
My next guest is about a decade younger than Renate, in her late twenties.
“I’m Christine Stincchi and I’m a horn doctoral student at Rutgers.”
[More horn here…]
“I was inspired first by my cousin Jen and I grew up going to her concerts and her recitals and hearing her practice when I came home, and I just loved the sound. I started on piano. It didn’t connect with me too much. I wasn’t a very good practicer. But once I picked up the horn in fifth grade I really loved it and it just took from there.”
“Traditionally in orchestras the horn players have been mostly male and in fact one of the horn gurus I look up to, Sarah Willis in the Berlin Philharmonic…she’s the first, was the first female brass player in Berlin when she joined several years ago. So that’s huge for horn history in really opening up the doors for it to be not just male dominated but more equal.”
[Horn playing under Christine]
“I might be one of the only musicians that I have pretty much one outfit that I will go to…I should probably have a spare, you know, just in case, laundry day. But I have one pair of pants that are my favorite black pants. I do feel more comfortable in pants. They’re stretchy but they look professional. And for me, flats are most comfortable, just to feel grounded on the stage, as opposed to heels.”
AM-T: “What is it about the French horn that is so alluring?”
“The sound. It’s like a melted dark chocolate sound or a melted butter. It’s just so luscious and it blends with any combination of instruments.”
[HORN SOUND HERE…switch to the next part of recital with piano…]
AM-T: “Do you think about your gender much in the context of what you’re doing professionally, or what you will be doing professionally, or not really?”
“Yes and no. I think I’ve thought about it a lot in the past, when the great horn players that I still look up to, Dennis Brain being one of the big ones, um, these huge horn gurus that we look up to are, yes, male, from the 1900s…but the female horn players who are up and coming and may be more so now filling up the seats in orchestras and military bands you know, in 20, 30 years it very well may be they’re the names students are looking up to more so than the names I grew up hearing.
Going back to your question, I don’t think about it on a day to day basis…in terms of thinking about will I land this job because I’m female, because it’s opening up more in the brass field, being more balanced. And I think that - I hope - orchestras and wind ensembles and college teaching jobs are looking for a more diverse body of musicians and teachers to fill their spaces.”
Throughout this segment you’ve heard Christine playing the horn at one of her recent recitals. The earlier piece is called Tanguito. The latter piece is Hope Spring Eternal.
Earlier in the show Renate Rohlfing talked about that feedback a judge gave her at the age of thirteen. Feedback that had everything to do with her appearance, nothing to do with her playing.
She says throughout her career she’s often found honest feedback on her work to be elusive. But you need it to improve your performance.
She says she misses the kind of feedback you used to get as a professional player, from writers and critics. She says that has largely gone away during the years she’s been playing. With so many newspapers going out of business or cutting costs, there are fewer arts journalists to cover live performances. Fewer music critics.
Renate says the digital era has changed her profession just as it has so many others.
“In college what I noticed started happening is that, and it's really extreme now, is that performers started to be more beholden to producing content or performing all the time. And then the feedback you would get… the feedback you would get would be so superficial, Um, when people give concerts, you know, ‘oh, congratulations.’ Lots of party emojis, lots of heart emojis.”
She says it all left her feeling unsure. Had the emoji bestowers even been to the concerts? Or were they hundreds of miles away, swiping from the sofa? She says this vacuum of old fashioned feedback - even when it’s critical - makes her feel a bit lost…
“...it's like you have to prove that you are performing, that you are an artist, and you're not getting any response back. Or even like, wow, even if it was super negative, at least that's a response and somebody had a strong reaction to it, you know, like, ‘Wow, I hated that. Like, I hated that piece.’ And then you could say, ‘Okay, why?’ That you can really engage with a lot more, than this whole, like, congratulations emojis, getting a couple hundred likes. And then it's just gone. It's like, it disappears after 24 hours.”
Renate performed all over the US, in Asia and Europe, for about twelve years. And during that time…
“I did actually start thinking about something that my favorite professor at Julliard, Margo Garrett said is, she said, ‘You need five people in your life that will talk to you and be honest with you. And so figure out who those five people are and just take them and talk to them everywhere you go.’ And now I only have friends who will be really honest with me.”
They became her feedback machine.
But after performing consistently for so long, Renate changed tack a few years ago. She went back to school and did a degree in music therapy. She’d been feeling itchy for a while.
“I wanted to do more with music. And I felt like music's role, especially in America, was really changing.”
And that fewer people were connected to classical music in particular.
Renate still performs and she’s lucky enough to do it when and with whom she likes. But her main job these days is working with non-musicians, people who have trouble communicating…
“The reason I really love this new pivot into music and health and the intersection of music and health is that you're getting such honest feedback all the time from your clients and from the work because you cannot mistake people being affected by music and what's affecting them and how it's affecting them. And people are not going to fake that. I work a lot with kids who are on the spectrum, and they are the most honest and unfiltered and they will express whether something's bothering them, you know, affecting them positively or negatively. And so having this constant engagement and feedback has been really, really meaningful for me.”
Renate Rohlfing. Thanks to her, Lydia Brown and Chrstine Stinchi for being my guests on this episode. And thanks to Renate and Christine for allowing me to play some of them for you.
Renate is going to take us out. Both the pieces she’s played during the show are by Mendelssohn. I’ll give you more information about the music and the guests under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.