[Dixielandjazz] The Curse of Beauty / Sexism in Music / Frumpy anyone?

[Stephen Barbone]

About 2 years ago I asked one of the "experts" on Dixieland for an
opinion about Wooden Nickel Jazz Band and Brady McKay. The response was
something like this: "Well, if you want to impress the OKOM Festival
audience in the USA get a good looking singer like Brady and they will
fall all over themselves about the band and the singer." He then went on
to disparage both.

OK, I thought, here is a bad case of jealousy from a bandleader on that
scene. I had listened to their CDs and loved both the band and the way
Brady sang. (But never "saw" them) Perhaps the opiner resented what WNJB
and McKay were doing because they were better received than he and his
band?

So, while the below is not OKOM, it sure as hell relates to the problems
women have in music (and any other business).  And it relates to the
problems that good looking women have, which carry over into OKOM. As an
aside, for those who have not seen the subject of the article, "Lara St.
John", perform  , she is a certified babe. Better yet, she is an
absolutely wonderful musician.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

May 27, 2004 - New York Times

The Curse of Beauty for Serious Musicians

By ANNE MIDGETTE

         When the violinist Lara St. John gave a recital in Toronto in
February, she gave a lot of thought to what she was going to wear.

Ms. St. John, 32, is well aware of the power of image. For one thing she
is a striking six-foot blonde. And while this week saw the release of
"Re: Bach," her first album for Sony Classical, the CD she will probably
always be best known for is "Bach Works for Violin Solo" from 1996. That
is the one on which she appeared naked on the cover, holding her violin
across her breasts.

The picture was more artistic than shocking. Showing Ms. St. John from
the waist up with the violin completely hiding her chest, it revealed
nothing inappropriate for a family paper. But from the reaction, you
would have thought she had posed for Penthouse. There were accusations
of sexploitation and child pornography. (Ms. St. John was 24 and looked
younger.) There were also phenomenal album sales: more than 30,000
copies, big stuff for a classical music recording.

The cover has remained a mixed blessing. Because of it many in the field
have pigeonholed Ms. St. John in the booming genre of classical
crossover, lumping her with other musicians of far less artistic
substance, like Linda Brava (a Finnish violinist who has indeed posed
for Playboy) or Vanessa-Mae (a violinist remembered for her wet T-shirt
poses and electric violin arrangements).

But this is patently foolish. Ms. St. John is a substantial musician,
and she has never strayed from the classical repertory. "Re: Bach" is
her first crossover album. In person she is also less a bimbo than a
bird of paradise, striking and unconventional. And while she clearly
enjoys vamping for photos, she's very serious about the music.

"I'm actually pretty conservative when it comes to performance," she
said.

For that recital in February, Ms. St. John chose her best gown, a simple
navy blue silk. "I did it on purpose, because the recital was so serious
I didn't want trouble with the visuals," she said. But as it happened,
John Terauds of The Toronto Star wrote: "The visuals may have faded, but
the music burns more brilliantly than ever. An almost matronly St. John
shambled out onto the Jane Mallett Theatre stage in a wrinkled
pigeon-colored number that had to be one of the ugliest frocks to see
stage lights this season. . . . Yet the intensity and beauty of the
music St. John made were almost too much for one sitting."

Ms. St. John, never one to hide her light, fired back a response, which
the paper published, including the observation that her "pigeon-colored"
frock was navy blue. But she was still steamed in a telephone interview
a month later. "I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't," she said.
"The guy was really nice about the concert, but did that have to be the
first paragraph?"

In sports, film and pop music, many leading women have turned their
strength into an asset. But Ms. St. John is not the only evidence that
classical music still seems to have trouble dealing with strong women.
If you're attractive, it seems, you must also be cheesy and commercial.

In a telephone interview from his London office, James Jolly, editor of
the classical-music magazine Gramophone, said: "I get reactionary
readers. I can never unpick their argument. If you've got an attractive
woman who is talented, how are you supposed to show her? They seem to
think she should be portrayed as frumpy."

Diane Walsh, a pianist, observed, "The image of a beautiful young woman
inspires deeply ambivalent feelings in everyone." Successful female
pianists of the past, she noted, have not been generally noted for
beauty: Clara Haskil, Myra Hess. "Some musicians seem to have a second
wind when they no longer have their young figures," she added, citing
Alicia de Larrocha, whose career didn't take off until she was nearly
40.

One reason being attractive gets bad press is that classical crossover
albums so often flaunt image to play the virgin-whore dichotomy to the
hilt. Take Bond, a string quartet of four model-beautiful young women
who play electric instruments in skin-tight catsuits. Take the Opera
Babes, two classically trained singers who scaled the charts with mixes
like "One Fine Day" (from Puccini's "Madama Butterfly"). Sex really does
sell:
Bond's first album sold two million copies. (A third album,
"Classified," is due in June.) Proponents of this kind of thing say that
it is just part of an effort to find a niche for classically trained
artists in a world in which they seem to be increasingly irrelevant.

But classical purists, of course, abhor it. And the crossover approach
strengthens a tacit corollary belief that to open up classical music to
contemporary influences is to dilute it. Certainly images of strong
women bring a very different flavor to a field still characterized to a
large extent by its tight hold on the familiar (starting with its
repertory). In a sense the resistance to strong, attractive women is
comparable to resistance to so-called Eurotrash opera productions or to
"La Bohème" on Broadway: resistance against any change to a status quo
that already feels very, very
fragile.

But the idea that women who are attractive are somehow being exploited
is amusing given that some of the most visible "babes" in classical
music are entirely responsible for their own images, thank you very
much. Ms. St. John, for instance, has never even had a publicist. She
has called the shots on all her previous album covers and was a little
surprised at Sony's choice for the image on "Re: Bach." "It's just so
friendly," she said. "I thought they would want to go for something more
out there."

Also self-determining is the Eroica Trio, a group that has made a
trademark out of good looks and fine couture. "For record covers we
insisted on having approval of our own image," said Erika Nickrenz, the
group's pianist. "We were worried about unwittingly being exploited."

But the trio is often dismissed as some kind of women's shtick. And it
is often taken for granted that anything they do is projecting
sexuality. "For the Brahms CD that came out in January 2002, we ended up
using head shots without any of our bodies showing," Ms. Nickrenz said.
"We thought, there's no way anybody can pick on us for being too risqué;
it's just our heads. But people still said we had a sensual, come-hither
look."

It's notable that women in classical music come under fire for their
image, since each must create her own identity from the start. "The
template is male," Ms. Walsh noted. And not only in terms of career —
there are still fewer female instrumental soloists than male ones, still
fewer women than men in top-flight American orchestras — but also in
terms of what you wear. There is no female equivalent of a man's
standard concert
uniform, the tuxedo.

Of course men are also evaluated in terms of their sex appeal, but the
violinists Joshua Bell and James Ehnes do not seem to be relegated to
bimbo status because of their pinup images.

Not that Ms. St. John is complaining. She seems rather to enjoy playing
with her image and dealing with the attention it gets her.

"It's always the first thing people hear about me," she said wryly of
the nude cover. "I did an interview for U.S. News & World Report after
it came out. The guy said, `Why did you do this?' I said, `Well, listen,
hon, if I didn't, you wouldn't be talking to me.' "