‘They can’t all conduct, honey”, Lydia Tár informs her daughter as she hands each of her dolls a pencil to use as a makeshift baton. “It’s not a democracy.”
In her sharp put-downs, sidelining of procedure, and singular, maniacal artistry, Tár – played by Cate Blanchett in the film of the same name – embodies all the tropes of the autocratic conductor. The first of a glut of forthcoming “maestro movies” (Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biographical drama Maestro is currently in production, as is The Yellow Tie, on the life of firebrand Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache), Tár isn’t just a character study, though – it depicts the intertwined social and artistic hierarchies, subtle codes and often grotesque power dynamics of the orchestra as a workplace.
Tár’s orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, is self-governed, famous for its lengthy process to choose its chief conductor. Yet her behaviour reveals how vulnerable those principles can be to an overbearing authority figure – she proceeds to “rotate out” her assistant conductor, and seemingly rigs caucuses in favour of a player she has her eye on. “She has to pretend to play into the democratic structures that exist there,” says Dr Anna Bull, author of Class, Control and Classical Music. “But Lydia’s perspective is that it isn’t a democracy. Instead, it plays into the cult of personality.”
The vicissitudes of the person at the podium, however, are just one challenge faced by orchestral musicians. In Tár, there’s a glimpse of the final stage of the process to select a new cellist; by that point, they would be past multiple auditions to whittle down a group of musicians who probably started playing before their teens, studied at conservatoires, cut their teeth in the weird world of orchestral odd-jobs as a rookie freelancer – choral societies, function bands, one-off scratch performances – and endured similar unsuccessful auditions for positions at opposite ends of the country. It’s a gruelling process even to get to the trial stage, where a handful of players are placed on rotation so that both player and orchestra can get a feel of the orchestra. At that point, when factors such as “a good fit” within a section become crucial, it’s easy to see how different hierarchies can dissolve into one another.
Orchestras have tended to have a pyramid power structure, with the conductor at the top, and everyone else further down: a principal player above a sub-principal, both ahead of a “tutti” or section player, and all ahead of a “dep” – a non-permanent player deputising. “It’s very important to differentiate between the artistic hierarchy and the social, personal and political hierarchy, which, for me, shouldn’t be the same structure,” says Dave Rimbault, a tutti violin at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and a union rep for the Musicians’ Union. “Historically, across the sector, there was an issue where that was mirrored.”
These structures quickly develop their own internal codes – such as the orchestra finding “subtle ways of letting conductors know that they’re not happy”, says Bull. From pointed looks between principal players to the moment clarinettist Knut Braun scrawls a cross on to his sheet music of Mahler 5 to mark Tár’s fall from grace, Todd Field’s film sheds light on a mini-vocabulary of behaviours that allows the orchestra a secret form of communication. A discreet rub of the trousers mid-performance to congratulate a colleague for a well-performing solo; a waggled foot to indicate a mistake; the phenomenon of the “clang”, where players imitate a bell ringing when someone brazenly name-drops: all are titbits of non-verbal dialogue that help foster camaraderie.
For freelancers, deputising for missing players, filling in vacancies or simply there as “extras” for particular pieces, constantly adjusting to these social idiosyncrasies becomes yet another layer in an exhausting and insecure profession. “I’m always conscious that there’s always someone watching how you’re behaving and listening to how you’re playing,” says one orchestral brass player in the north of England, who adds that the mental toil of fitting in can escalate to apprehension about the tiniest of actions: “the politics of where to sit on the bus for out-of-town dates”, or “where to put your bags in rehearsals”.
“It’s a different sort of pressure,” says Gabriel Dyker, a former freelancer and now a violinist in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra: “Turn up, do the job safely and hope to get called back. A lot of that is just trying not to stick out.”
Dr Christina Scharff, author of the monograph Gender, Subjectivity and Cultural Work: The Classical Music Profession, relates blending in to the sociological idea of homophily – the reproduction of sameness. That has obvious consequences for representation and equality within the orchestral sector – especially when fears of disrupting that “sameness” can create issues around the reporting of problems. A 2022 survey from the Independent Society of Musicians showed that 87% of women working in the orchestral sector reported experiencing discrimination, with 68% describing incidents of sexual harassment. By contrast, levels of internal non-reporting among group performers (including orchestral musicians) were among the highest of all the groups surveyed, at 80%.
Why is low reporting such a persistent problem? “Another potential industry-wide issue in the past was very much this ‘them against us’, ‘managers against players’ issue,” says Rimbault. A culture of not making a scene allows problems to fester. “We like to keep the management out of the room and sort of keep things among ourselves,” Dyker says.
After the Musicians’ Union’s 2022 findings showed almost half of musicians had experienced sexual harassment at work, of which 85% of incidents went unreported, the trade body launched their Safe Space Scheme, a reporting scheme for those experiencing harassment. The aim is to empower from below, flattening some pre-existing social hierarchies by giving freelance players and contracted players an equal voice on specific pastoral issues. “Then, if the person on the lowest salary in the orchestra – like me, the tutti second violin player – has that level of enfranchisement, and feels that they’re as valued as a conductor, the principal, then you are only going to feel more valued in your workplace,” Rimbault adds.
If there is a way to go regarding equality in the orchestra, then some will take solace in the fact that the worst excesses of leaders like Tár are on their way out. “The film is nostalgic for that kind of mid-century fetishisation of monolithic, all-encompassing power,” Bull says, noting how the film regularly references the likes of Herbert von Karajan and Wilhelm Furtwängler – more assertive conductors from the art form’s history.
But with principal conductors today embarking on shorter tenures with fewer performances (not to mention less acceptance of that type of leadership in today’s society) there’s also less chance for power to be so narrowly consolidated. “The 1960s, 70s and 80s conductors were more of that domineering style,” says Dyker. “I do feel that it’s probably more something of the past.”
