The Problem with Conducting

 https://aeon.co/essays/will-women-overturn-the-world-of-classical-conducting?fbclid=IwAR2VFrkO2FfccyZU19S22TrS_5Trvz0nVZO4RkYuWQaTGGcWnlGtRsVYa7g

I'm sure people here will have THOUGHTS. I'm not linking to this article on the conducting listserv (I'm sure others will) because the misogyny will be absolutely appalling. I don't dare to go into more specifics than to say: if you didn't see the problem before, you were the problem... The problem is not just that the world of classical music is white and male, the problem is that the world of classical music is authoritarian, and therefore appeals best to those for whom the world's authoritarianism guards their privileges.

The other problem is that conducting brings out the worst elements in many music lovers. It's a viciously authoritarian profession, both its practitioners and its followers, where people get their fascist urges out little less than football fans and players do during riots. And if you don't believe me, read some conducting listserves sometime....

But (no pun intended) the focus of sticks in the mud like me (us) on conducting should not be seen as a good development in music. It's an addiction, it's a compulsion, no more necessary to the evolution of music than a sport like Ultimate Frisbee is to the history of physical conditioning. Conducting is a kind of fungus on musical evolution. Some fungi are extremely necessary to the world's circulatory systems, but the meanings they've grown to have to planetary ecology are ancilary to their initial growths, and Mother Nature simply worked them into its biological system. Conducting is not a profession for its own sake like singers or instrumentalists, it's a necessary outgrowth of the need to coordinate 100 musicians into a hivemind.

The greatest conductors are not conductors, they use their disproportionate authority to teach, not dictate. They pursuade through enlightenment and illumination, they do not control; and this is why I have a particular animus toward conductors like Herbert von Karajan and Riccardo Muti whose entire appeal lies in their aura of power. But the destructive need for some people to exert control and receive worship will, ultimately, never go away just because oppressed demographics will be let into the profession's top echelons. Unless orchestras disappear, which is not out of the question, there will be many woman conductors and conductors of color who are marketed, adulated, defended, and protected just as viciously as the Karajans and Toscaninis before them. They will be no more necessary to the world than those Furtwanglers and Carlos Kleibers before them, taking up air that should be reserved for musicians who make music more sonorous than a few motions through the air.