Viennese to Reconsider Refusal to Admit Women

The world-renowned Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra will reconsider its long-standing refusal to admit women in the face of mounting political pressure in Austria and planned protests at concerts in Costa Mesa and New York.

Members of the 155-year-old orchestra will meet this month--three weeks before it plays at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on the first leg of a U.S. tour--to take up “the women question,” an orchestra employee said Friday from Vienna.

American activists planning the protest campaign say a vote by the orchestra to allow women into its ranks would not defuse demonstrations.

The orchestra--which is widely regarded as one of the world’s best and commands the highest fees--is made up of 148 musicians: all men. It also excludes members of ethnic or racial minorities, although its music director, Daniel Barenboim, is Jewish.

“Public opinion is coming in from all over the world, especially from America,” Andreas Mailath, the Austrian government’s director general for the arts, said Friday in Vienna. “There also have been inquiries and demands in our parliament about the exclusion of women.

“As I understand from our talks” with the orchestra, Mailath said, “there will be a general assembly of its members on Feb. 18. We have heard from two of its main people [that] there will be a proposal to have women admitted.” Orchestra President Werner Resel has declined to comment until after that meeting.

All the orchestra’s members also are civil servants in the Vienna State Opera orchestra, from which the philharmonic players must be chosen. The Vienna Philharmonic, however, is a private, self-governing society. Consequently, the Austrian government maintains, it cannot order the philharmonic to accept women or ethnic minorities.

Still, “nothing in the orchestra’s charter says it cannot hire women or minorities,” said Monique Buzzarte, a board member in New York of the International Alliance for Women in Music, which is mounting the protests with the National Organization for Women. “It’s just tradition.”

“I think there is a chance for them to overturn tradition,” Mailath said. “And now that we have solved certain legal questions about maternity leave and some other protections concerning night work for women, there cannot possibly be any legal excuse for them to say, ‘Well, this is impossible.’

“Quite honestly,” said the government official, “this is not a problem where they should even think twice about it.”

However, Nora Graham, who is coordinating the West Coast protest for the Alliance for Women from her home in Los Angeles, said Friday that the orchestra has “said things like this many times before and then taken no action. They’ve always slimed their way out of it. They’ll say anything to appease us.”

“However they vote,” Buzzarte added, “it will not affect the protests in New York or Orange County. We’re out to educate the public. We’re going to let the public know the facts, and the public can then choose to support the orchestra or not.”

The Philharmonic Society of Orange County, which is bringing the orchestra to the Performing Arts Center for concerts March 4 and 5, said ticket sales will not be affected by protests.

“We’re sold out,” said Dean Corey, the society’s executive director. Tickets for concerts in New York March 7-9 also are gone.

Pauline Oliveros, a composer on the advisory board of Alliance for Women who taught for a decade at UC San Diego, said that defenders of the orchestra have tried to make the case that “its unique sound” depends on “emotional unity” and “male bonding.”

“That is just a cover,” Oliveros said. “I don’t subscribe to the theory of gender-based music. . . . It’s a form of racism, a remnant of it. And it’s very hard to penetrate. Women have been actively discouraged from bonding with men in music for thousands of years.”

Adding its voice to the protest, the New York chapter of the American Federation of Musicians issued a statement Friday appealing to the orchestra “to end the [exclusionary] policy.”

Women’s rights activist Gloria Steinem released a statement Friday supporting the protest. She suggested the orchestra change its name to “the Vienna Men’s Philharmonic” to explain “why women have been systematically excluded.”