Thanks for sharing your story — I was doing a Ph.D in musicology in hopes of doing a study of ethics and music but long story short, I was kicked out. Don’t really have a place to publish my findings now, but thought I’d share some of it here:
It’s really weird to see a lot of the harassment claims in the news right now since the research in music <-> ethics I was doing at USC was starting to prod at these issues slowly. I’m sure the panel has another story to tell but I’d like to think that I was kicked out for political reasons now. There’s nowhere to publish my research in any official sense now, but maybe I should write a blog post or something just to give myself some closure. Couple of main points I’d like to get out, though:
- There’s a power dynamic involved in classical music in relation to rehearsal and performer selection that’s often used inappropriately by conductors and composers, even in academic settings. As your story shows, this applies not just to women but men as well.
- Blair Tindall is often portrayed as being “crazy” but she seemed perfectly reasonable to me when I did an interview with her. Maybe she’s complicit in the sense that she played “the game” but she’s definitely not a psycho. (She also dated Bill Nye the Science Guy for a while but that’s an aside.)
- Classical music likes to think of itself as an “enlightened” artistic medium, making the culture very resistant to even the suggestion that they might need to be regulated in ways that other industries are typically beholden to. A lot of classical musicians tend to identify as liberal but this is generally not reflected in institutional policy, making it fairly dangerous as far as workplace standards go.
- There is pretty much nothing written about music and ethics as a related thing in the last 100 years, at least in the mainstream publication worlds. This fact should raise some concerns, to say the least. (Although there are individuals here and there doing some work in the are if you look hard enough.)
- In regards to composers and high-profile artists in general, all of this neuroticism and dysfunction is clearly reflected in the works that they create, but postmodernism’s insistence that artworks have no inherent direct meaning creates a culture where artists are broadcasting their abusive thoughts while its patrons remain oblivious to what it’s actually saying. This is probably the craziest part of the contemporary art scene right now, and why nobody outside of itself has any reason to take it seriously. It’s in the medium’s own interest to clean this up because art always speaks the truth, and coating it with some BS isn’t going to speak to audiences in ways that it really needs to.
