These arguments have had me thinking back to the days when I regularly sat on audition panels (though mostly for young musicians seeking solo careers, rather than for positions in orchestras), and of the many occasions on which I found myself plumping in vain for a singer or player whose work might have been rough around the edges or not yet informed in certain matters of style, but which had a vitality and individuality of expression that seemed to me more worthy of investment than others of greater polish and learned obedience. Obviously, orchestral players can’t display too much roughness or expressive individuality. But I can’t help wondering if—were I the music director of an orchestra and thus skilled enough and experienced enough to understand how a particular player’s tone, phrasing instincts, habits of articulation, and so on would work out in the ensemble I’m trying to build, and once he or she had been passed through the preliminaries by a panel I trusted to understand my priorities—I might not have often made different choices than those that have been made. Maybe not. Maybe these were the best of those heard, even for my taste. Maybe the qualities I find lacking are really all there, waiting to be summoned by the right conductor—after all, the capability seems to be present. But I feel that I probably would have selected differently in some cases. And, while this may be just an operatic eccentricity of mine, I not only want to see the players, but to conduct them, to look them in the eye and see how they respond in certain passages I’ve chosen as key points, how our temperaments mesh. For in these respects, even crack technicians are by no means indistinguishable, and therein lies how I’m going to get what I want. Would these choices of mine have resulted in fewer women? Fewer Asians? Possibly a couple of African Americans? A Martian? Not my problem. As the Commission on Human Rights affirmed, I have an “unquestioned right” to hire the players I believe are the “best” for the kind of music-making I want to encourage, and I must trust myself to ensure that factors of gender, ethnicity, or others of non-artistic origin are not compromising my judgment.

I was gratified to see that three weeks after Tommasini’s article, there was an unusually full and thoughtful letter response to it. With one exception, the correspondents (most, but not all, professionally or academically involved with music) located the problem(s) at earlier points along the pipeline of potential applicants. They point to the inequalities of opportunity that exist much earlier in the personal and artistic growth process for many minority aspirants. These are both cultural and economic, and in my own opinion are most effectively addressed very early on, in elementary and middle-school years, and in a broad educational, arts-and-humanities context as well as the narrower, training-oriented one (i. e., can a promising child find, and afford, a top-level teacher? a top-quality instrument? travel expenses? lunch? can he or she sustain the effort?). Can’t board the train without a ticket, and an audition for the NYPO or Met orchestra is the last stop, not the first.