Virtually all of the people I have known in the musical world, including those I met during the years I spent as a professional musician, have been political liberals. As such, they are suckers for every “humane” and “compassionate” cause that comes down the pike, always available to perform at a nuclear-freeze benefit or a pro-choice rally, always ready to sign petitions and advertisements in opposition to one or another putative manifestation of war, racism, or poverty. Granted, not all have been as vulgar about their political leanings as, say, Leonard Bernstein. But if Bernstein’s frenzied scrambling from one left-wing cause to another is a caricature, like all caricatures it bears an easily recognizable relationship to reality.
This may help to explain why I was so startled by the reaction of the American musical community to the news that came out of Detroit earlier this year—the news that, in the name of affirmative action, the Detroit Symphony, one of America’s leading orchestras, had hired a black bass player, Richard Robinson, without the formality of an audition. What startled me was that the reaction was largely negative.
In the “real” world, such news would hardly have been news at all. The procedures of affirmative action—which is to say, race-conscious hiring goals and quotas—are by now taken for granted, especially in high-profile institutions. To complain publicly about them, as I have learned since I left the music business, can be hazardous to your professional health. Yet the cries of protest from musicians over the Detroit Symphony’s decision were immediate and unhesitating. Most surprisingly of all, black musicians were the first to complain, and at least one even went so far as to decline a lucrative appointment in Detroit after word of Robinson’s hiring got around.
What caused so many American musicians to part company on this issue with liberal orthodoxy? When I told an older and more cynical acquaintance of my surprise, he responded with a shrug and a properly world-weary question: whose ox was being gored? He had a point. While musicians are liberals, they are also professionals, and the instinct to protect the sancta of one’s profession from external threat is a universal one. But things are not so simple as that. Indeed, the story of the hiring of Richard Robinson, though set in the somewhat provincial world of American music, is in many ways emblematic of what might be called the decadent period of the civil-rights movement; it tells us a great deal about what we as a nation have done in the name of affirmative action, and what it has cost.
_____________
It started, like so many tales of political intrigue, with a letter1 This particular letter was written by Constance Price, a black violinist who had auditioned for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1975 after obtaining a master’s degree in music from the University of Michigan. Her teacher, Jack Boesen of the Detroit Symphony, had assured her that she would get a job, and his track record gave her no reason to doubt him. Two of Boesen’s older black students, Joseph Striplin and Darwyn Apple, had landed positions with major orchestras, Striplin with the Detroit and Apple with the St. Louis Symphony.
Still, it was her first professional audition, and about 30 other players were competing for the same spot. The odds were stacked heavily against Constance Price, just as they are stacked against any other instrumentalist, black or white, who wants to play with a major American symphony orchestra. Not surprisingly, she failed to get the job. Bruce Smith, a member of the Toledo Symphony and one of her fellow students at the University of Michigan, was hired instead.
Smith had auditioned four times for the Detroit Symphony before being hired. This, too, is not unusual: most people who finally land a position with a major orchestra go through several auditions before succeeding. But after her failure Price chose not to give it another shot. Instead, she took a teaching job at a local high school. She also found a new violin teacher: Mischa Mischakoff, former concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony and, earlier, of the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini. And she went back to the University of Michigan to obtain a doctorate in music and educational psychology.
Nine years later, in 1984, Constance Price finally decided to try again. Her second audition took place at the express invitation of the Detroit Symphony. Like most government-subsidized organizations, the orchestra had been under pressure to improve its record on minority hiring. Now, in 1984, it employed only one full-time black musician, Joseph Striplin, although several other blacks, including Price herself, occasionally played with the orchestra as substitutes.
Price was asked to audition as part of a program to recruit black musicians. But the competition was to be considerably stiffer this time around than it had been in 1975, with 83 candidates instead of 30. Once again Constance Price failed to make it past the preliminaries. This time, though, she sat down and wrote a letter. She sent it to Oleg Lobanov, the then-president of the Detroit Symphony. “I am writing,” she began,
in the interest of Detroit’s black community with regard to the lack of black musicians in the DSO. Having participated in the violin auditions [and been] the recipient of a very high rating, I observed that the selection procedure did not encourage the identification and selection of qualified black applicants. It would seem that qualified black applicants who are citizens of Detroit would be valued and sought out by an orchestra serving the city whose black population is estimated at 60 percent.
Price sent copies of her letter to two of Detroit’s black state legislators, Representative Morris W. Hood, Jr. and Senator David S. Holmes, Jr. Her intentions in doing so were probably not innocent; given the circumstances, circulating copies of such a letter was tantamount to lobbing a hand grenade through the front door of the Detroit Symphony’s offices. Hood and Holmes, both Democratic members of Michigan’s joint House-Senate General Government Appropriations subcommittee, promptly rose to the bait and demanded that the orchestra offer proof that its affirmative-action program was more than just a formal homage to the requirements of the law.
At this point, Oleg Lobanov made a tactical error. Asked by a legislator why the Detroit Symphony had not hired more black musicians, he reportedly replied that blacks “prefer to play jazz.” This remark, according to Representative Shirley Johnson, another state legislator and member of the appropriations subcommittee, “caused the fuse to blow with regard to Morris Hood.” Hood and Holmes spent the next four years gradually turning up the heat. “Every year on this subcommittee,” Representative Johnson told the Detroit News, “it’s the same. We get into a real heated discussion regarding the DSO and its affirmative-action programs. If it isn’t Representative Hood who brings it up, it’s Senator Holmes.”
The orchestra, seeing the writing on the wall, finally agreed to hire another black musician by 1990 as part of a new affirmative-action plan. That was not good enough for Morris Hood. “What I want to see immediately, if not sooner,” he said last July, “is another black face within the Detroit Symphony in addition to the one we already have. Two blacks in the Detroit Symphony by February 1989.” Hood and Holmes also demanded that the legislature withhold half of the orchestra’s appropriation until it had proved it was “maximizing its affirmative-action efforts.” This threat was not to be taken lightly. Like most American orchestras, the Detroit Symphony is perpetually in the red; each year it receives $2.55 million—8.7 percent of its budget—in appropriations from the state of Michigan.
_____________
For an orchestra to go about “maximizing its affirmative-action efforts” poses a number of dilemmas peculiar to the music business.
Blacks currently make up only 1 percent of the 4,000 musicians employed by America’s leading orchestras. As of 1988, only one of the country’s top orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, had as many as four blacks on its roster. The Philadelphia Orchestra had three, six orchestras had two, and four orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Detroit Symphony, had one each. The Chicago Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra had none.
Why? “Are you telling me we can’t find qualified black musicians . . . in this nation of 200 million people?” asks Morris Hood. In fact, many qualified people believe exactly that. “This is like hockey,” says Joseph Striplin. “If the New York Rangers had to have ten or twelve black players, they might have a lot of trouble finding them.”
The numbers leave little room for doubt. The New York Philharmonic’s Musical Assistance Fund, which provides scholarships and other forms of support for minority classical musicians, recently surveyed the country’s top 25 music conservatories. Out of 5,000 orchestra-bound instrumentalists, it found fewer than 100 blacks. “If you apply the standard bell curve to their probable talent,” says Daniel Windham, who runs the fund, “that means 20 of them are qualified to play in a major American orchestra.”
The fact that black singers are amply represented in the field of opera has led some observers to conclude that the conservatories are discriminating against incoming black instrumentalists. But though such was no doubt once the case, it is no longer so. Today’s conservatories are frankly eager to enroll black musicians, singers and instrumentalists alike. The training a classical singer undergoes, however, takes less time and is far less rigorous than of an instrumentalist; some singers begin studying in earnest for major operatic careers as late as their early thirties. By contrast, a classical instrumentalist who wishes to have a serious professional career as an adult must almost always begin his training in childhood—or not at all.
Yet most American blacks, for a variety of reasons, shun classical music. They do not go to hear it (as any big-city concertgoer can tell you from experience) and they do not encourage their children to play it. To the extent that black children are urged to pursue any kind of musical career, it is usually in jazz or popular music (as Oleg Lobanov got into trouble for saying). By the time the typical young black intrumentalist discovers classical music, it is too late for him seriously to consider it as a possible career. Like it or not, this is why blacks are “underrepresented” in American conservatories and symphony orchestras, and why only one black American classical instrumentalist, the pianist André Watts, has had a major solo career. (Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, though he also plays classical music, is primarily known as a jazz musician.) It is a problem—if it is a problem, and not simply a fact of life—that will not be solved by a thousand affirmative-action hiring programs.
But let us assume that qualified, or qualifiable, black candidates can be found. What then? In practice, affirmative action has come to consist of the use of color-conscious goals and quotas to increase minority representation in a given industry or academic enterprise. But a symphony orchestra that tries to apply such goals and quotas in its hiring of musicians immediately runs afoul of established audition practices instituted in the last decades—at the urging, as it happens, of black musicians themselves.
In 1969, two blacks who had previously auditioned unsuccessfully for the New York Philharmonic filed a complaint with the New York State Commission on Human Rights, charging the orchestra with discriminatory practices. The two, cellist Earl Madison and bassist Arthur Davis, asked the commission to require that they be allowed to take part in a “blind” audition, in which candidates perform behind screens in order to prevent judges from making decisions based on personal knowledge of the auditioner.
Such auditions were not standard practice in 1969, and the New York Philharmonic, arguing that “blind” auditions prevented judges from observing a musician’s “physical technique” (in conductor Leonard Bernstein’s words), managed to persuade the commission to turn aside Madison and Davis’s request. Yet while the Philharmonic won its case, it lost the battle of the headlines. Said Whitney Young, president of the National Urban League: “It is shameful for a major cultural institution, one that gives concerts in a beautiful new hall financed by public subscription, to cling to a color bar while other fields are in the process of discarding it.” In due course orchestras throughout the United States, the New York Philharmonic and the Detroit Symphony included, would adopt a blind-audition policy (it was under such a policy that Constance Price failed in 1984 to win a position), and the American Federation of Musicians would make blind auditions an industry-wide condition of union-sanctioned contracts.2
The new policy was acclaimed by the black musical community as a major step toward ridding American orchestras of discriminatory practices. Another major step was undertaken in the 70’s, when American orchestras began to develop full-scale minority-outreach programs. By today, according to the Detroit News, the Detroit Symphony’s program actually “establishes specific racial quotas and timetables for every aspect of the DSO operation—from administrative appointments to the makeup of the chorus and the board of directors.” Although several key features of this program have been jettisoned in recent months as a result of budget cuts, the Symphony has managed by means of it to develop a talent pool of local black substitute musicians who are given frequent opportunities to perform. Furthermore, it does not hold auditions for an open chair until at least one black musician has agreed to try out.
But the two initiatives designed to help black musicians are in conflict, both practical and philosophical. Thus, in 1988, thanks to the affirmative-action program, the Detroit Symphony succeeded in attracting nine black candidates out of a total field of 244. But blind auditions made it impossible to single out such candidates for special treatment once beyond the initial screening. In the event, no black players, not even the orchestra’s own black substitutes, got past the preliminary auditions last year,3
_____________
According to the iron logic of affirmative action, any certified minority group that is “underrepresented” in a given industry is ipso facto the victim of conscious and deliberate discrimination. This was Morris Hood’s explanation in 1988 for the Detroit Symphony’s failure to have hired a second black player: “If, after thirteen years of pursuing it and talking about commitment, you tell me that you cannot find another black musician, I say that is totally untrue.” And since black musicians had failed to make the cut at blind auditions, it followed that such auditions were themselves responsible for the underrepresentation of blacks in American symphony orchestras. Pursuing this logic to its conclusion, a three-member team appointed by Michigan’s Governor James J. Blanchard now recommended that the Detroit Symphony develop “new audition procedures that will . . . assure . . . the hiring of [minority] musicians.”
At first, the orchestra remained adamant. Its music director, Gunther Herbig, told the Detroit News that “I am absolutely committed to the blind-audition process. It is the most just process which I [have] found anywhere in the world.” Joseph Striplin said flatly that “[t]he audition issue is an area in which people in the black community are wrong. . . . I know that there isn’t discrimination in the auditions.” But the Detroit Symphony soon learned that it was behind the times. The old ideal of color-blind equality of opportunity had long since been abandoned in favor of the newer vision of race-conscious equality of outcome. Striplin, backed by several other players, eventually came around to endorsing a “one-time-only” affirmative-action hiring program in an attempt to “prime the pump, to create role models, people whose example and influence will be felt within the black community.”
February of this year arrived, and no black musician had been hired. Hood and Holmes renewed their threat. This time, they persuaded the rest of the appropriations subcommittee to go along with them. The move was well-timed—the orchestra was on tour in Europe and in no position to deal with bad publicity, much less with an attempt to cut its funding in half. One week later, the members of the Detroit Symphony voted to waive the audition requirement in their contracts to permit the agreed-upon “one-time-only” affirmative-action hire. The bass section of the orchestra unanimously recommended Richard Robinson of Detroit, who had spent the previous year playing with the orchestra as a substitute. The orchestra’s state appropriation was released the next day.
Initial reaction to Robinson’s employment was positive. Thus, in a typical comment, Catherine French, chief executive officer of the American Symphony Orchestra League, said that “the DSO is to be applauded.” In fact, the only person who seemed to have doubts was Robinson himself. From the very beginning, he appeared uncomfortable about the circumstances under which he had secured a chair in one of America’s top orchestras. “I took the job,” he told the Detroit News on the day of the announcement, “mainly to help the orchestra and the people I have come to know as friends over the last year that I have been working in Detroit as a substitute musician.” A few days later he told the New York Times, “I would have rather auditioned like everybody else. Somehow this devalues the audition and worth of every other player.”
_____________
It soon turned out, however, that Robinson was not the only black musician with misgivings. In a front-page story on the affair (March 5, 1989), the New York Times quoted Darwyn Apple, Jack Boesen’s former student and Constance Price’s old friend: “The intrusion of politics into an area where legislators are ignorant could wreak havoc with artistic integrity. This is going to discourage blacks from going to Detroit, or even applying.” Michael Morgan, the black assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony, put it even more bluntly: “Now even when a black player is hired on the merits of his playing, he will always have the stigma that it was to appease some state legislator.” The Times also revealed that James DePriest, a highly respected black conductor who had been approached by the Detroit Symphony to replace Gunther Herbig as music director, declined the offer on account of the controversy stirred up by Hood and Holmes. “It’s impossible for me to go to Detroit because of the atmosphere,” said DePriest. “People mean well, but you fight for years to make race irrelevant, and now they are making race an issue.”
Perhaps more suggestive than the reactions of these black musicians was the fact that so few newspaper editorials endorsed the hiring of Richard Robinson. It is hard to believe that five or ten years ago, America’s opinion-makers would have failed to back the Detroit Symphony in its decision. Today they seem less certain.
Indeed, a growing number of people around the country—and not just in the music business—have begun to speak openly about some of the evolving negative effects of the policies of racial preference that have been undertaken in the name of affirmative action. Although such criticism has long been a staple of conservative or neoconservative thought, it has now also penetrated the liberal community. Within weeks of the hiring of Richard Robinson by the Detroit Symphony, for example, the New York Times Magazine published an article by Joseph Califano in which the Democratic activist and former Secretary of Health and Human Services recommended that his party rethink its commitment to “goals and timetables.” In Harper’s, the black academic Shelby Steele blamed affirmative-action policies for the increase of racial tension on college campuses and called for “skewing the formula for entitlement away from race and gender and back to constitutional rights.” And the Supreme Court, America’s most sensitive barometer of shifting public opinion, recently overturned a Richmond, Virginia minority set-aside program as unconstitutional.
Nevertheless, although second thoughts about affirmative action are now increasingly aired in public, the policy itself is not only alive but flourishing, and (as a recent poll of Fortune 500 companies reveals) has become entrenched throughout the major institutions of American society. The Detroit Symphony case is thus merely a late example of affirmative action at work in an “industry” that had previously resisted it.
Moreover, while the Detroit Symphony insists that Richard Robinson’s hiring was a “one-time-only” exception, there is reason to doubt that its troubles will end here. Within days of the hiring, David Holmes announced that two blacks in the Detroit Symphony were not enough, and issued a new list of what he would regard as acceptable changes in the orchestra’s hiring procedures. Among these new requirements was the presence of one or two black candidates at each audition—with the total number of candidates considered at each audition to be limited to ten—and, for each black candidate, an opportunity to rehearse with the Detroit Symphony prior to auditioning.
Holmes’s laundry list was denounced by other Michigan lawmakers—and ignored by Morris Hood. But black politicians in other cities have surely noted the example of Detroit, and in those cities which have “minority” majorities the pressure to step up black hiring by symphony orchestras is likely to increase as a result. The arguments will be more sophisticated in New York and Chicago, but the effect will almost certainly be the same: a gradual relaxation of the blind-audition procedure for minority candidates.
The consequences of such a relaxation are easy to predict, since similar developments have already taken place in many large corporations and graduate schools. Once blind auditions are shunted aside in favor of color-conscious selection procedures, symphony orchestras will begin competing directly against each other for a severely limited pool of talent. Such competitions will inevitably be “won” by the orchestras with the most money and prestige: New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and Los Angeles. Second-rank ensembles like the Detroit Symphony will be left, holding a bag long since emptied of first-rate black musicians.
Not that this will trouble the likes of David Holmes, who told the New York Times that the shortage of black classical musicians could be solved by training non-classical musicians to play in symphony orchestras. “Music is music,” he said. “Do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do. I learned that in school.” Although few would embrace so explicitly philistine a position, kinder, gentler versions of the “music is music” argument are already in circulation. Here is Phyllis Fleming, formerly the Detroit Symphony’s education and outreach director, who now runs an all-black orchestra in Washington, D.C.:
[A]ny major orchestra wants, first and foremost, to preserve a certain artistic tradition. That is the highest priority. And while they talk about creating programs for education and outreach, they really want to do everything they can to maintain that tradition, so it doesn’t allow much room for change with regard to programming, guest artists, affirmative action, or anything else. . . . I’d rather work for an organization that is devoted to recognizing the talents of various ethnic groups at various levels. That’s more important for me now than playing more Brahms and Beethoven.
_____________
Fifty years ago this April, the Daughters of the American Revolution prevented Marian Anderson, the great black contralto, from giving a recital at the racially segregated Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. At the urging of the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes invited Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That performance is still remembered today as one of the great symbolic events in the history of the American civil-rights movement—though Miss Anderson, at the age of eighty-seven, continues to be somewhat reserved, even diffident, about acknowledging its larger implications. (“I wasn’t trying to sway anybody into any movements or anything of that sort, you know,” she told the Chicago Tribune recently.)
Times change, and so do the symbols that suit them. But in the case of Richard Robinson, at least the diffidence remains. Reluctant to serve as the symbol of a cause, he insists that he took his job with the Detroit Symphony not to break down the doors of prejudice but “mainly to help the orchestra.” Still, Robinson symbolizes the fate of one important aspect of the civil-rights movement in 1989 just as surely as Marian Anderson symbolized it in 1939.
Everyone in a position to know agrees that Richard Robinson is a fine bass player. In the short run, it seems likely that he will retain the respect of his fellow musicians. They are, after all, good liberals. But they are also artists, and should the Detroit Symphony now begin systematically to lower its musical standards by abandoning blind auditions, it is safe to assume that in spite of Robinson’s own misgivings about being hired without an audition, he will become the unwilling portent of the decline and fall of what once was a very good orchestra. That is a hard load to carry. But it is a load already carried by tens of thousands of talented middle-class blacks who have been hired in the era of mandated equality of outcome and who spend each day having to prove their worth again and again in the eyes of skeptical colleagues.
Such are some of the fruits of the decadent period of the civil-rights movement.
_____________
1 This account is based on a four-part series of articles published in the Detroit News last October by Nancy Malitz, the paper’s music critic.
2 In fact, the Detroit Symphony’s procedure is far more “blind” even than the prevailing norm. While most American orchestras remove the screens after the preliminary auditions, the Detroit Symphony’s final auditions are also blind—a policy reportedly adopted to reduce still further the likelihood of accusations of racial discrimination.
3 On the other hand, blind auditions have had an immediately beneficial effect on women: between 1973 and 1988, the number of women in the Detroit Symphony jumped from six to eighteen, and other orchestras reported comparable increases.
