Orin O’Brien, the first female double bassist in the New York Philharmonic, broke gender barriers in classical music. (Source: netflix.com)
New DelhiMar 6, 2025 16:00 IST First published on: Mar 6, 2025 at 16:00 IST
In the 1960s, when noted conductor Zubin Mehta was at the peak of his professional eminence, he made a remark about women musicians in classical orchestras. “A woman’s life in the orchestra is not as long as a man’s; she is just not as good at 60 as a man is,” he had said, a statement echoing the sexism in prestigious orchestras.
Mehta was 30 years old and the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, where he had once imposed a limit on the number of women in the orchestra to 16. It was probably a carry-over from his days at the all-male Vienna Philharmonic, his learning ground as well as the first orchestra he would conduct. A Time magazine article in 1966 spoke of how “women were ill-tuned to the rigours of symphony life and played erratically during menstruation or when they are concerned about family problems”.
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The same article called double bassist Orin O’Brien, the first woman to join the New York Philharmonic Orchestra full-time under the direction of Mehta’s colleague, friend and the widely influential Leonard Bernstein, “as curvy as the double bass she plays”. It forgot to mention her arduous training and musical excellence or that she was an usher at Carnegie Hall for two years and heard and imbibed every note with utmost attention.
Almost half a century later, a documentary made by O’Brien’s niece Molly O’Brien, The Only Girl in the Orchestra, which tells the story of her struggles and successes, has won an Academy Award for the Best Documentary Short Film.
It’s interesting how O’Brien, who retired from the orchestra in 2021 after a 55-year-long career, didn’t want a film to be made on her. She told her niece that she wasn’t important enough. Daughter of movie actors George O’Brien and Margaret Churchill, she would shrink from attention, thinking that the other members, the men, would resent her for it. “The double bass is in the supporting role in an orchestra. You don’t want to stick out. You’re the floor under everybody; that would collapse if it wasn’t secure,” she says in the film. Bernstein, in one of his letters, once wrote, “Whenever I look in her direction, I see her intently looking back at me and I marvel at this concentration. How does she do it? Has she memorised every note of every bass part in every work we play? It is as impossible as any other miracle.” But O’Brien played and she persisted.
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The documentary on O’Brien is also a reminder of the gendered world of classical music where men and women did not play music together, where women musicians had to overcome discrimination — their talent and creativity dismissed, their presence deemed as distraction — just to persevere in their chosen vocation. Conductor Vasily Petrenko had said about a decade ago, “A cute girl on a podium means that musicians think about other things”. In 1930, when Antonia Brico became the first woman to ever conduct an orchestra, it was considered “daring”. She was called a “female conductor”, her gender qualifying her professional position. The arrival of blind auditions would eventually help as everyone auditioned from behind a screen in a thickly carpeted area where their heels would not give away their gender.
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Among the many battles that have and are being fought by women in the world of classical music, the foremost remains that of trombone player Abbie Conant who, in 1982, initiated legal proceedings against the city of Munich for discrimination after she was demoted to second trombone despite being selected as first trombone in blind auditions. She was also denied solos and was being paid less than her male counterparts. During the legal battle, lawyers blamed her physical strength for demotion, following which Conant had to go through a battery of tests including blood being drawn from her ear, getting her ribcage examined and blowing through numerous machines to measure the capacity of her lungs. It took her 13 years, including four to get her position back and five for equal pay, for the legal recognition of the discrimination. Then there was principal flautist Elizabeth Rowe’s lawsuit in 2018 against Boston Symphony Orchestra demanding that she be paid as much as the other principal musicians in the orchestra.
Women were banned from auditioning for the prestigious Vienna Philharmonic until as late as 1997, when they were forced to accept Anna Lelkes as a temporary harpist as there was a dearth of male ones. When she performed, neither was her name mentioned in the programme, nor was she shown on television. The cameras had been instructed to pan on male musicians. The press secretary of the Philharmonic said in 1996, “Compensating for the expected leaves of absence” (meaning maternity leave) was a problem that they did not “yet see how to get a grip on”. The first time the Vienna Philharmonic appointed a woman musician in a permanent role was in 2003. Ursula Plaichinger, a 27-year-old viola player, became the first woman to play in the orchestra in 158 years. The Philharmonic made sure that Plaichinger did not speak in any interviews. Once race is thrown into the mix, the journey becomes even tougher.
O’Brien’s beautifully told story brings women in classical orchestra into the spotlight, many of whom have had to work doubly harder to prove themselves and yet listen to things like “your place is in the kitchen,” as Austrian conductor Hans Swarowsky once told Lelkes. The gender gap sounds shocking in today’s day and age but it continues to exist in many orchestras. But the tide is also turning. Women recently surpassed the number of men in the New York Philharmonic: Now there are 45 women and 44 men. This little win may not heal the years of explicit bias, but it’s a start. O’Brien, now 89 years old, is still teaching the nuances of double bass. The attention at the Oscars would have probably fazed her. Perhaps she hid behind her giant double bass and tinkered with it.
suanshu.khurana@expressindia.com
