Orchestra's overture to diversity: Still flat

Sixteen years ago, the Philadelphia Orchestra confronted its image as "an elitist, lily-white" organization - as its president called it - by launching a "landmark" corrective measure.

Its Cultural Diversity Initiative, the orchestra said, would increase the minorities in the orchestra, in the audience, and on the board, its vendor list and its staff.

"The board realizes that this city has substantial minority populations . . . and has to concede that until now, the orchestra has not been representative of that diversity," said Theodore A. Burtis, head of the orchestra's board in 1991.

But in 2007 the orchestra is no closer to representing the city's diversity.

Peer out into Verizon Hall, where the audience is a sea of white faces. (Only 1 percent of subscribers were African American as of the last count, in 2001, the orchestra says.)

Look onstage. Three players are African American - the same three whose arrival in the early 1970s elicited headlines that barriers in the orchestra world were crumbling.

Go behind the scenes. The orchestra's board has less African American representation than it did in 1991.

The Philadelphia Orchestra: still, in the words of former president Joseph H. Kluger, "lily-white" a decade and a half later.

What has been standing between the orchestra and progress all these years?

"The day-to-day things it takes to run a nonprofit, and all of these major things in the last 15 years - when that happens, you take your eye off certain things because they are not pressing to happen that minute. It's not an excuse but a reality," said Elizabeth Warshawer, the orchestra's former chief operating officer, who oversaw personnel until February.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has made some headway in bringing its sound to African Americans - who make up 43 percent of Philadelphia County and 20 percent of the eight-county region - with an annual tribute to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., neighborhood concerts that have resulted in a developing relationship with groups in Camden, and other programs. The orchestra is brought before at least 25,000 schoolchildren in Verizon Hall and the Academy of Music each season - a diverse racial mix, to be sure.

But in its core concerts - as well at the board and staff levels - the Philadelphia Orchestra and the city's African American population continue their long tradition of largely ignoring each other.

"You can't get around the fact there are a lot of people of color who we are not engaging," said J. Edward Cambron, the orchestra's marketing chief, who, as a two-decade employee, has tracked this issue. "It's hard."

Other major orchestras are hardly doing better.

In 1970, there were four African American musicians in America's so-called Big Five. By 1977, the number had risen to five, the Associated Press reported.

At the start of last season, 30 years later, the numbers remained abysmal. Philadelphia had three, Boston two, Cleveland two, New York one, and Chicago one - the first in its 110-plus years, a trumpeter hired in 2002. Total: nine African American musicians out of the more than 500 in those five orchestras - 1.7 percent.

In a wider look at orchestras of all sizes, a 2005 American Symphony Orchestra League survey found 237 African American members - just 2 percent - in 176 orchestras that responded to the question of how many they had.

Since 1991, the Philadelphia Orchestra says, it has sustained a concerted effort to make itself less white in different levels of the organization.

The orchestra's Cultural Diversity committee did meet regularly, Cambron said, and its members advised on ways to reach out to potential musicians, vendors and employees who were African American.

But after a number of years it stopped meeting as a separate committee, and its mission was integrated into the work of other standing committees.

Asked why the effort had not produced, after so many years, greater representation in the organization by African Americans, Cambron said:

"I think we tried a lot of things and didn't see a lot of measurable results. Some things we did see measurable results. The partnership in Camden is a good example of what it takes - a sustained relationship-building effort."

Yet little, if any, progress has been made on almost any front.

African Americans account for about 1.5 percent of ticket sales; if you subtract the annual King concert, the percentage is even lower.

The three African American musicians are several decades into their tenures, raising the possibility that after they retire the orchestra will again have no African American players.

Though the orchestra's board has nearly doubled in size since 1991 (when it had 41 members), African American representation did not grow. Today's 77-member board has only three African Americans - one fewer than it had in 1991. The board has one Hispanic (a member of the orchestra) and no Asians.

The orchestra has four African American administrators in a staff of about 75, none at the senior level.

"I'm disappointed in where the orchestra is today," said Beverly Harper, president of Portfolio Associates and a community-relations consultant who helped assemble the initial committee of community leaders for the diversity initiative. "There has not been progress. I don't know why."

James Undercofler, the orchestra's president since August, said Warshawer's explanation of more pressing issues in the last 15 or 16 years rang true - two transitions to new music directors, the move into a new hall, a 64-day musicians' strike, ongoing financial ills.

Looking to the future, he said: "There are no barriers that I have perceived yet, at the board, staff or orchestra levels, and there is nothing to keep us from moving ahead aggressively" on diversity.

Undercofler recently said that engaging minority audiences was at the "top of my high-priority list," and that he expected to roll out projects and programs in the next year, details of which he declined to discuss.

What he would say was that while projects such as the orchestra's work with community groups in Camden and its King concerts were "wonderful," what was needed was "substantive change in your core product and core activities."

The King concert is a lasting outgrowth of the diversity initiative, and it attracts a largely African American audience. But it has not been a feeder to other concerts, as the orchestra hoped, and beyond that one night audiences are as solidly white as ever.

"I haven't seen any change at all," said Darrell Gordon, 80, who observed the orchestra's audiences for three decades as one of the few African American subscribers. "I wish it were so, but I never see more than eight or so African Americans at a concert."

The orchestra's Cambron said what was keeping African American listeners away from the orchestra was the same thing keeping away many others: lack of exposure to classical music in childhood.

"That's the whole thing," Gordon said. "More and more black people have money today, and of course more and more have a good education and have gone to good schools. But if I hadn't studied violin starting when I was 10, I don't know if I would have been interested at all. It sure fired me up. It really made me love good music."

Harper said lack of early exposure might be an issue for a younger generation. But older generations did learn the classics in school, and for them there are other barriers.

"The feelings of discrimination and racism run very deep, and you don't change that overnight," she said.

"Classical music . . . has created a very negative impression within the African American community about what it stands for, who plays it, and who listens to it. In popular media, the perception is that it's upper-crust, snooty, white and condescending," said Aaron P. Dworkin, an African American violinist and founder and president of the Sphinx Organization, a Detroit-based advocacy group that works with young minority classical musicians.

There was a time, just 40 years ago, when African Americans were told to not even audition for orchestras, said Henry Fogel, president of the American Symphony Orchestra League. He said he pointed up that fact in speeches and writings because "there's no reason for people to believe that things are different if we don't admit how we behaved."

In some ways, the Philadelphia Orchestra does look more than ever like the city in which it lives. A third of the musicians are women. In the fall, women took over principal chairs in the cello section and in the traditionally male-dominated brass realms of horn and tuba. Almost 15 percent of the orchestra is Asian or Asian American. Two members are Hispanic. Perhaps a handful identify themselves as gay.

But the orchestra has made little progress in expanding its African American membership since violist Renard Edwards won an audition in 1969 and became the orchestra's first African American member.

Two others were hired soon after - violinist Booker Rowe in 1971 and double-bassist Henry G. Scott in 1974.

But not one in the more than three decades since then.

"That's dismal," Edwards said. "If anyone creates music on the face of the earth it's African Americans, and that they can't find one more male or female African American that can play with this orchestra - something is really wrong."

Orchestras have generally low turnover, especially "destination" orchestras such as Philadelphia. But the ensemble has had plenty of hiring opportunities.

In the 16 years since its Cultural Diversity Initiative was announced, almost half the orchestra's personnel has turned over.

Since 1970-71, about 100 slots have been filled - almost the entire membership.

The orchestra says that artistic quality is the sole criterion in auditions, that the pool of African American applicants is small, and that auditions are done behind screens to ensure fairness.

But there are plenty of reasons that auditions from behind the screen are not entirely blind.

First, screens come down in the "final final" round of auditions. Second, finalists often play a week or two of a tryout in concerts and rehearsals with the orchestra, as recently happened with finalists for the principal cello job. Third, candidates for principal jobs are often specifically recruited. A member of the orchestra might call a friend or former student playing in another orchestra.

The fact that more than a dozen musicians in the orchestra are related to each other - by blood, marriage or romantic entwining - suggests that other reasons contribute to certain applicants' landing jobs beyond the musicianship emanating from behind the audition screen.

Musicians also tend to get jobs when their teachers are on the audition committee - not just because teachers know their students' sound, but also because audition committees are looking for someone whose playing will fit in stylistically. For that reason, young players seek certain teachers.

"You learn the style of the orchestra you are auditioning for," Dworkin said. "But to do that you have to go around on the audition circuit, take lessons, build your network, and that takes resources. Minority musicians don't always have those resources."

Is the orchestra recruiting African American musicians today?

No, said Warshawer. No systems are in place to increase the number of African American candidates, but perhaps more can be done, she said.

"There are things we can do to influence the composition of the candidate pool, do a lot more legwork, make a lot more phone calls, find the people out there who may not be applying," she said.

Such an effort, though, costs money in staff time, she said.

Paul Meecham, president and chief executive officer of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, said real change happened when classical music made connections to children at an early age. (Violinists, especially, begin training well before school age, often as young as 3 years old.) One idea Meecham talks about, which came from Baltimore's incoming music director, Marin Alsop, is to create a youth orchestra closely associated with the Baltimore Symphony and have professional musicians mentor the young ones.

"There are many cultural reasons and socioeconomic reasons why the pool is not very large by the time they get to the conservatory level," Meecham said. "It would be interesting to work on how you address that. It might be possible to create a [youth] orchestra that is a different kind of model. It's a dream."

Orchestras sometimes do seek out African American candidates only to be turned down.

Violinist Diane Monroe was one of them. At the Curtis Institute of Music, she was enough of a star to be concertmaster of the school's orchestra, and when Philadelphia Orchestra concertmaster Norman Carol was retiring in 1994, he asked her to audition. She said no. Her career was going in the direction of solo and chamber work, and she did not feel that the orchestra life was for her, she said.

But she has one regret: that the message of her presence in the ensemble's most visible spot - a position of great authority and prestige - was never sent to aspiring African American classical musicians.

"It would have meant a multitude of goodness to people. It would have changed a whole lot of lives."

Violist Edwards said some African American musicians coming up through schools chose chamber music over orchestras. "Some don't want to be part of an organization," he said.

African Americans aren't being kept from jobs in orchestras because of racism, but because of the relatively few African Americans in conservatories, said Jerome Ashby, an African American horn player with the New York Philharmonic and a teacher at several major colleges, including Juilliard and Curtis.

Last year at Juilliard, the Peabody Institute and Curtis - schools with particularly strong showings of graduates in American orchestras - just 4 percent of the classical-music students were African American.

"I don't tend to think that there is a conspiracy to hold African American musicians back. It's a matter of getting the number of prospects up," Ashby said.

The subject of African Americans in American orchestras bubbled up in the 1960s with a mix of fury and idealism. Complaints were filed with human-rights commissions; protests were held.

In 1971, when the Philadelphia Orchestra performed at Overbrook High School, 100 African American students walked out in protest just as William Smith was about to give the downbeat to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5; they said they could not relate to an all-white ensemble (half the orchestra - including Edwards - was playing at another school that day) and music in which they had no interest.

But plenty did have an interest. In New York around the same time, the Symphony of the New World, a fully integrated orchestra featuring works of black composers, had a brief, hopeful life.

That period of idealism yielded one important innovation, the American Symphony Orchestra League's Fogel said: Screens went up in auditions. And then, he said, "the issue died down because orchestras were able to say, 'Yeah, it's true that we did practice discrimination, but we stopped when we put up these screens. And the fact that we're not getting applicants is not under our control, and, therefore, there isn't much we can do about it.' "

It's not that orchestras want to keep African Americans out; most are "desperate" to increase the number, Fogel said. "But we are dealing with a very shallow pool of candidates."

What could bring African Americans through the classical-music pipeline more quickly and in greater numbers?

Leaders point to one conspicuously unoccupied chair in classical music today: the star African American soloist, the cellist or pianist who could be a beacon to aspiring musicians - a household name big enough to appear in watch ads and car commercials.

"I think it's very interesting that in other areas we have brought to the fore African American geniuses - Tiger Woods in golf and the Williams sisters in tennis - in supposedly white areas," said violinist Monroe. "I think it would be really wonderful if someone black and talented were in the front, as Yo-Yo Ma is."

What would the emergence of such a figure in classical music mean?

"Wow. Oh, boy. It would mean a walk into the closed circle," Monroe said. "There would be a whole shift. It would set all kinds of examples for children playing instruments everywhere."

And what would the audience reaction be if one day the Philadelphia Orchestra walked onstage looking like Philadelphia, 43 percent African American?

"I think they'd just drop dead," Monroe said. "Because orchestras are about tradition, and part of that tradition is how it looks. For some, it would be a permanent block in their minds."

But after the shock wore off, she predicted, the majority would say, "This is a breath of fresh air. Hello? What took you so long?"