This text was originally published on Catherine Kintzler's website at https://www.mezetulle.fr/critique-musicale-inclusive-par-andrei-j/ .
Andrei J. attended a concert by the Orchestre de chambre de Paris on March 4 at the Cité de la musique. The review he provides below expresses a kind of disappointment. Not that the musical performance was bad, but the programming choices and the conditions of the performance fell short of the ambitious goals of inclusivity and diversity that any cultural institution should set for itself today.
On March 4, the Paris Chamber Orchestra (OCP) gave a concert at the Cité de la Musique on the following theme: " Folk inspirations ". One is surprised by this title from an institution particularly committed to promoting all cultures on an equal footing, to breaking with old hierarchical patterns. The title of this concert can indeed be shocking in that it contains a contemptuous point of view towards local cultures that have been dominated for too long and that no longer have to be, for too long relegated to the rank of "folklore" like certain minority languages are reduced to the rank of "dialects". We have not yet sufficiently brought down supposedly learned - Western - music from its pedestal: how could a Beethoven symphony be superior to a dance played by the fiddler of a village in the Carpathians? Also, "Expressions of Diversity" would have been a more acceptable title.
Furthermore, one is surprised by the choice of composers, Béla Bartók and György Ligeti, two males and what is more white, heterosexual and… deceased – when there are so many young composers to discover. Yet this is the mission that the Paris Chamber Orchestra has set for itself, a mission that is that of the Philharmonie de Paris, at the forefront in this field. This orchestra, starting from the observation that “women remain a very small minority in composition” and to “compensate for this pitfall” has created an Academy of Young Women Composers, “dedicated [sic] to young female musicians who do not dare to take the step of composition." The orchestra's website states: "A multi-year academy, it is an incubator [sic: since it concerns women, this word risks referring the unemancipated reader, not to the language elements of the capitalist-globalist business world but to the image of an incubator...] for young female creators and an opportunity to train in writing for orchestra."
In addition, the program distributed at the entrance to the concert hall emphasizes that the Paris Chamber Orchestra is a "musical actor engaged in the city" and that it "develops a civic approach [sic] addressing everyone” – beautiful ethics, even if the author thought it was a good idea to use a generic masculine here, thereby making no less than half of humanity invisible!
It is specified that it is "one of the youngest permanent orchestras in France"; here we are not talking about the age of the orchestra (forty years old!), but about the average age of the musicians - and while it is true that we could regret the presence of two white male instrumentalists close to fifty or even past it, the others remain very young and therefore vigorous in virtuosity and open to others. Above all, we can read, the OCP is "the first truly gender-balanced French orchestra". Granted, the fact remains that that evening it was conducted by a white male, young, certainly, even if he is approaching forty... Why do we still so systematically avoid giving conducting roles to women? Are they therefore less capable of wielding the baton than men? Why not have given the direction of half the concert to a female conductor? (And why were the works of a young female composer from the aforementioned Academy of Young Female Composers not programmed, to balance Bartok or to match Ligeti?) It will be objected that the violin concerto was performed by a woman (with feminine features, however, from another time, that of male domination, with that make-up and that long pale green dress… one would have thought one was in the 20th centurye century). Then, the list of members of the orchestra reveals that parity is not respected since there are 60% women and 40% men. However, as Christiane Taubira courageously said, strong in her status as a cis but racialized woman (and a cursed poet), "it is now time for men to experience the minority" (Libération, January 29, 2018). We regret in passing that the first three people in the orchestra are designated as "solo supersoloist", "solo violin", "co-solo", instead of "sola supersoloist", "sola violin" and "co-sola" since they are women.
We will salute the efforts of the Paris Chamber Orchestra in the direction of Wokist societal realism. But we must go further. Up until now, the OCP has shown its attachment to a binary conception of the human race which would therefore be divided into two irreducible blocks: men on one side, women on the other. In the future, we will have to take into consideration non-binarity, gender fluidity (which will certainly lead to complicating our counting operations). Indeed, it would be good if at the end of the brochure each name were accompanied by the mention (in English, so that everyone understands) He, She, It ou Other, that the racial affiliation as well as the spiritual options (if any) of the musician be indicated. Because as far as we could see, there were not many musicians from visible minorities on stage. Similarly, we would like to know where to place them on the LGBTQIA+++ scale because the over-representation of cis-gender heteronormatives would be problematic for an institution that claims to work within the framework of deconstructivist neo-progressivism.[1]. It was that at the same time, in another room, YUNGBLUD, a twenty-five-year-old British singer-songwriter and zodiac sign of Leo, who had the courage, in December 2020, to make his coming out as a pansexual and polyamorous person (even if he seems, according to the specialized press, to have a penchant for people who menstruate). When will orchestra members, conductors and conductors reveal their intimacy and its fluctuations in order to reassure us, so that we all feel represented?
Performing works by Bartok and Ligeti that take up the music of diversity is a good thing, even if their reinterpretation by so-called classical music has, as we have alluded to, something condescending – would it not have been better to have a group of Romanians play in their traditional costumes, with their own instruments? But, here too, we must go further and draw conclusions, it would be time, from the major work of Susan MacClary, whose translation was published by the Philharmonie de Paris and which is prominently displayed at the entrance to the bookshop in the concert hall, Feminist openness, Music, gender, sexuality. So to deconstruct "learned" Western music. Finally, we rewrite the masterpieces of literature to make them readable (Roald Dahl is only the beginning). Well, we must recompose the masterpieces of Western music to make them audible ("hearable" as journalists say today). After the rewriters, we need recomposers to purge "classical" music of all its hetero-patriarco-dominant aspects. Thus, for example, we should no longer be able to represent the IXe Beethoven's symphony without having smoothed away all its masculine rough edges, since, as Ms. McClary has so aptly shown, "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is probably the best example in the musical domain of the contradictory impulses that have governed patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment."[2] – let us cross out the recapitulation in the first movement (“a horribly violent episode in the history of music”) as the composer himself crossed out the dedication of the IIIe to Bonaparte!
Or, in the same way, while we were counting the number of men and women in the Paris chamber orchestra to check whether it was really equal (another male over-presence in the brass section, definitely! Are women therefore lacking in energy in the eyes of the artistic team, which is nevertheless predominantly female?), it seemed to us that we were hearing violent or distressing episodes that should therefore have been deleted or recomposed.
And the triumph of the musicians at the end of the concert shows that there remains a long, hard work to be done in awakening and penetrating new ideas.
