This "journalist" - and I use the term VERY lightly - from the San Francisco Chronicle, has a paying job, where he can write a vile, racist, sexist piece and pollute the world with his unwanted opinion. He is upset that the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra is made up of White men (apart from 4 females)! Mr Joshua Kosman - last I looked it was a free world and we don't need to pander to your libtard measurements, where everything is scrutinised to see how many different races and sexes there are represented everywhere. You don't get to squeal like a little pink pig when there isn't a MINORITY on the team. You call it "racial and sexual discrimination" - and I call you a tosser. You are an example of what is wrong in this world with your air of self-importance, yet vacuous non-opinion. Just reading your piece of racist filth is enough to make me pop an optic vein. Have you ever thought that the reason the VPO is one of the finest orchestras is the world is because of it's history and culture - an orchestra made great because of its team members?? What would make you happy Mr Kosman? Would destroying this orchestra so that you, a turd living in San Francisco, can have your little minority and a few more females on the team? Would that make Joshy Woshy happy? I tell you what, why don't you round up a few non-White males and some females and form your own "representative" orchestra and show the VPO how it's done - instead of whining about it, like the coward you are - in the newspaper? Until then, take your stupid one-eye biased view and shove it where your head apparently resides. I urge all of you out there to email Mr Kosman and let him know how much you value his anti-white views: jkosman@sfchronicle.com.
Here is one of the better comments in reply to the original article:
Marchenoir
This must be a hoax, right ? I mean, it's actually from the Onion, not the San Francisco Chronicle ?
What's important about a classical orchestra is its music. Not the race or sex of its members.
It's called the Vienna Philarmonic Orchestra, right ? Well, guess what, most people in Vienna are Austrian. Meaning, white Europeans. If you have a problem with that, then don't listen to the Vienna Philarmonic. Go buy tickets to the Zimbabwe Philarmonic instead. That is, if you can find such a thing.
Oh, and about this Beethoven gentleman you mention. I'm sorry to break the news to you, but he was a man. A white man. I'm sure that must sound horribly sexist and racist to you.
That said, if you prefer hip-hop, nobody forces you to listen to Beethoven. Just don't whine about the fact that classical music is a white, European thing.
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which arrives in Berkeley this week for a three-concert series that marks its first Bay Area visit in more than 20 years, is by common agreement one of the finest orchestras in the world. It's composed of some of the leading instrumentalists of Europe, their individual musical voices fused into a seamless communal sound that is steeped in a century and a half of tradition.
As it happens, all but four of those musicians are men, and all of them are white. Should this concern us?
That, I believe, is a legitimate question. And here's another: How on earth could it not?
American music lovers ought to be having a real debate about just what it means for an artistic edifice so grand and arresting to be built on a foundation of more-or-less explicit sexual and racial discrimination.
Perhaps there's no problem here. For all we know, there may be some musical performances that can only be produced by an orchestra of white men; and it may also be that those performances are so illuminating, so transcendent, that they trump the fundamental American values of equal opportunity and fairness. I'd love to hear someone make that case.
What we can't do, though, is pretend that the VPO is an orchestra just like any other. It's not. It's the living embodiment of an exclusionary philosophy that should, at the very least, give any thoughtful person pause.
The VPO's commitment to its distinctive personnel policies goes back a long way, but only became a matter of discussion relatively recently. Until 1997, women were officially barred from membership in the orchestra (they could perform with the orchestra, but they couldn't join the official roster).
Organized protests
Then, in the face of some organized protests during an American tour, the orchestra, which is self-governing, relented - a little. One woman, a harpist who had been an adjunct of the orchestra for decades, was admitted to the ranks.
That event was greeted with suitably cautious optimism, but subsequent developments - a grudging increase from one woman to four, including one of the orchestra's four concertmasters - do not suggest that any essential change has taken place. That's why the subject is still alive 14 years later.
The ban on racial minorities - which, in the context of the European musical scene, basically means Asians - has been unstated but even more determined. An attempt to parse the names on the orchestra's current roster suggests the possibility of one part-Japanese violinist, but otherwise the sea of white faces that will fill the stage of Zellerbach Hall promises to be unbroken.
That very homogeneity, according to one view, is what lends the VPO its distinctive character - it's a feature, not a bug. In a 1996 radio interview, for example, transcribed and translated by the musicologist William Osborne, one member described the orchestra's demographic makeup as an essential component of its style.
"The way we make music here is not only a technical ability, but also something that has a lot to do with the soul," he said. "The soul does not let itself be separated from the cultural roots that we have here in central Europe. And it also doesn't allow itself to be separated from gender."
To his credit, the speaker went on to acknowledge the obvious fact that the orchestra's policies are both sexist and racist - but added that he believed these ills to be worth accepting. I would respectfully disagree.
In all honesty, it's not obvious how to respond on a practical basis to this imbroglio. On one level, I'm grateful to Cal Performances for bringing the orchestra here, and I can't deny that I'm looking forward to hearing the concerts.
But at the very least, I'd expect that the proponents of the VPO's policies should be compelled to defend them - frequently, vigorously and consistently. Surely the default position in America should be an opposition to blatant discrimination, and the burden of proof should be on those who favor it.
Easy complacency
Yet that hasn't happened. If the VPO's exclusionary policies are a scandal, so too is the easy complacency with which they have been accepted by audiences and promoters in this country throughout the decades that the orchestra has toured here.
Yes, there have been protests, and the occasional voice raised in opposition. Osborne, most notably, together with the International Alliance for Women in Music, has led a long and valiant effort to bring attention to the situation.
But all too often, the matter has been greeted with a collective shrug, and the opposition met in turn with hostility. The prevailing attitude seems to be that issues of politics and morality - the sort of issues that most people can perceive clearly in connection with, say, corporate glass ceilings or the patronage of lunch counters - are suddenly off limits where music is concerned.
There is something unsettling and sad about this sort of glib aestheticism - the view that anything can be justified in the name of art - because the truth is precisely the opposite. To exempt music, and art in general, from moral considerations is not to protect it at all, but to marginalize it and rob it of any ability to engage on a human level.
Or to put the matter more bluntly: How can a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony truly give voice to the composer's all-embracing humanism when the performing ensemble, by its very nature, stands in opposition to those values?
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