Video : Feminists disrupt Paris music presentations
March 28, 2013 by Norman Lebrecht 6 Comments
A group calling itself La Barbe (the beard) heckled the presentation of the new season at the Salle Pleyel, demanding more women conductors and soloists.
The head of the Orchestre de Paris, Bruno Hamard, replied that one-third of his orchestra’s membership were women, and the same proportion prevailed at the radio philharmonic orchestra.
Public sympathy is said t have run with the protestors. The same group, masked and bearded previously barracked the season launch of the Paris Opéra (below), where they were howled off by chauvinist journalists.
Perhaps La Barbe should be asking why almost all opera houses and orchestra in France are run by men.
Parmi les commentaires
“Bravo for them !! It’s easy to forget that the vote for women wasn’t won by response to polite requests and reasonableness, but by women who repeatedly risked public humiliation and even gave their lives bringing their protest into the discomfort of the public eye. I applaud these women, and also the Gorilla Girls. If there truly were equal opportunities in all areas and stages, we would be seeing 50/50 happening naturally everywhere, and working conditions reflecting inclusivity rather than male norms. For every hour I’ve worked as a fulltime professional violist in the past 35 years, less than 1 minute would be working under a female manager, conductor, concert master, section principal, all in an organisation allegedly free of overt discrimination. Just the same lame excuses and lack of understanding of attribution theory, weak human resource leadership by successive managements and rule of the jungle in the arts, under the guise of pandering to the mystique of “artistic merit” (= old/new boys club) Encore, encore !!!! let’s open the windows on our stuffy profession”
Helen Tuckey, commentaire en ligne de l’article de Norman Lebrecht, « Feminists disrupt Paris music presentations http://www.artsjournal.com, 28 mars 2013