Hacker News Reader

Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

This can be true, but orchestra is a performance act. If I look at it as a business, I don't see anything wrong in giving higher value to more attractive performers. On the other hand it's important how much higher value they get (and the multiple round audition when only one of the rounds is blind makes sense).

View on HN

Hire a bunch of good looking actor models and let them pretend to play instruments while playing recorded music for maximum value.

Pop music anyone? All in music industry can be fake, including music. All except fans.

With streaming platforms, even fans (as measured by various analytics) are fake.

That's essentially saying the orchestra should cater to the audience's prejudices, and could be used to justify any prejudice.

That's how entertainment industry works though?

Yeah but what is the point of having culture when it isn’t allowed to change views, give new perspectives and so on.

Also: Give me the best orchestra. I don’t go to the concert to gaze at a bunch of beuatiful penguins and ladies in dresses. I go there to listen to music. If they are good I don’t give a damn about their looks.

Visual appearance is indisputably part of the orchestral experience, otherwise they'd play out of sight (to reduce distractions from the audience) in comfortable clothing.

Well sonic waves travel with the line of sight, if you wanna get a direct signal, they will have to sit there either way. And you want to see them playing ans performing. Do they need to look really pretty to do that? Not necessarilly. Some of the best classical musicians are not beauties at all.

Indeed, if it doesn’t it doesn’t make any money and disappears unless it gets subsidies. So the WNBA and orchestras get subsidised and can have professionals whereas without subsidy their losses would force them out of existence in short order.

And orchestras do get subsidies because society feels they have value even if a cabaret would earn more money.

Certainly a segment of the entertainment industry earns money by catering to the worst aspects of human nature, but that's not the whole industry.

The majority of people involved in the industry are not visible to the audience.

> the orchestra should cater to the audience's prejudices

An orchestra must give the audience what the audience expects. Is just an expensive entertainment act.

Well, what your typcal symphony orchestra audience wants is a mix of challenging (for the performs & listeners) pieces and the well-known standards. Stray too far either way and it's a miss.

It not just entertainment for a lot of people, unless you consider all cultural events "expensive entertainment acts".

For diverse values of "the audience."

The problem in real world is that anyone has a bias, there are people you instantly like or dislike and there is no objective thing so you end up liking people that are like you and reject people that are different.

An orchestra could be run that way, sure. But surely it's implicit that any orchestra that's interested in blind auditions is trying to do the exact opposite of what you've described.

Individual members of a classical orchestra are not really visible to the audience though. They're not necessarily hidden, but they're generally too far away for looks to matter very much (except possibly in cases of extreme disfiguration).

And even then the result can be mindblowing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PyYcnXQZJY

Not exactly a classical orchestra, but it serves well to illustrate the point.

The difference between classical and jazz musicians points to a deeper conversation about diversity. Classical musicians are a cog in a big musical machine, so they are almost by definition less diverse. There's no room in a classical orchestra for a pianist who can't reach the far ends of the keyboard (Michel Petrucciani), there's no room for a guitarist with two-and-a-half working fingers on his fretting hand (Django Reinhardt), there's no room for a singer with a completely unique vocal range (Jimmy Scott).

Jazz is more amicable to diversity than classical music on a fundamental level, because it's based on improvisation and unique personal expression. If you're physically unable to play the same way as everyone else, you're pretty much useless to a classical orchestra but you may well become a pioneer in jazz.

Some obstacles to diversity can't be overcome with blind auditions and quotas and sensitivity training. Some environments are lacking in diversity because they are structurally incompatible with diversity; they can't have diversity retrofitted on to them, but need to be reformed from the ground up.

Classical music is fine as it is, no need to change.

Why should being based on improvisation and unique personal expression be the be-all-and-end-all of analysis? Not everybody wants to play / hear improvised music.

> Classical music is fine as it is, no need to change.

Classical music is dying, because the audience is literally dying of old age. Jazz or folk can sustain itself as a niche pursuit, because a small ensemble can profitably play to a small audience; a symphony orchestra has an enormous wage bill and has to fill a large hall week in and week out.

Classical music can renew itself and guarantee a sustained future, but it can't do it without fundamental structural reform. If classical musicians want a secure future for their art form, they need to seriously reflect on what classical music is, what it could be and what it needs to be. It's not enough to offer cheap tickets to under-30s, it's not enough to have the odd pops concert in the park - lip service will not abate an existential threat.

https://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2011/03/age_of_the_audien...

Classical music is alive and well in the form of film scores.

You make a good point.

Of course the justification fits to the sex differences as well. You should hire the gender that makes music performance more enjoyable for your audience.

In fact, maybe the goal should be to find how much gender bias is customer preference try to achieve that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com