WOMEN IN THE ORCHESTRA.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue XX, 16 November 1895, Page 603

WOMEN IN THE ORCHESTRA.

Where the development of the New Woman may tend in matters of music it would at this stage be hard to determine, says the Musical Courier. A year may find male orchestral players looking out against a new corps of competitors. We may have swollen female cheeks puffing forth the brass wind, a muscular limbed lady of bicycle development presiding at the bass fiddle, and a

young woman with boxing biceps tattooing the drums. We may have a growth of woman conductor who will general a corps of male musicians into enthusiastic action. There’s no telling. Women are just beginning to whisper among themselves that they feel there is something left for them to accomplish in the matter of professional music which they have hitherto neglected. There seems no reason why women might not have a

local string orchestra all to themselves if they desire to. With a light repertoire, no travelling to do, and no arduous rehearsals,they might make a successes a unique feature in social engagements. Beyond this there would not seem much outlook for them. Why confine them to strings, will be argued, and especially to a light repertoire, when women have been known to play successfully the cornet, French horn, trombone, flute, and even clarinet, and where as solo violinists they perform works of equal magnitude with those performed by male artists. PHYSICAL INCAPACITY. It is quite true that an occasional and very exceptional woman has been known to make a fair soloist on brass and wood-wind instruments, and by dint of searching as many women might be discovered in a generation as might be trained to handle the brass and wood-wind sections in an orchestra, but the same argument will apply to them as to their sisters of the fiddle. It is one thing to be able to perform a solo well and quite another to sustain a position in an orchestra. To appear before the public for 20 to 30 minutes incidentally and play a sonata or concerto is no test whatever of the capacity to work steadily in an orchestra from two to three hours at a stretch, attention concentrated on a conductor's desk, and this point of performance having been reached through months of arduous lehearsal. The most capable and intelligent of women can never become factors in an orchestra of any serious aims for this reason. It boots little to argue the question of feminine capacity to handle one instrument better or worse than the other. Taking it for granted that women could accomplish as good results with every other instrument of the orchestra as she can with the violin, her physical incapacity to endure the strain of four or five hours a day rehearsal, followed by the prolonged tax of public performances, will bar her against possible competition with male performers. She may learn to play the trombone if she please just as well as the fiddle, but she will never arrive at playing it in an orchestra throughout works of any special moment, which have demanded consistent and protracted labour for their study. The female violinist who laudably divides honours with her male brethren is well equipped technically for a good position in an orchestra. There are dozens of young women who play well enough for an orchestral place. But even were a mixed orchestra of men and women together, a condition probable enough to consider, about how many works of novelty and magnitude in a year would the ordinary woman find herself physically equipped to carry through rehearsal ? Not more than a third, probably, of what men are able to do. Women for solo work can increase their repertoire by degrees of their own arbitration, rehearsing how and when they please, but the grinding tax of rehearsals with an orchestra which undertakes the production of several weighty novelties each season, together with keeping in the best order a long list of standard works, would send her physical forces completely to the wall.