Blue-Haired Ladies
Throughout my career as a music education student at the University level, I have heard directors and professors often refer to the common or target audiences of concert performances as "the blue-haired ladies." This term is a stereotype that classifies the majority of audience members at concert performances of Western art music as rich, elderly women with hair that has been colored a light blue. Although in modern performance settings, the blue-hair description is not taken literally, it is still evident that performances of high art are dominated by the rich white elite, just as it was during the Baroque and Classical periods. When opera began in the early 1600s, it was an art form that was not meant for the general public. In Europe, crowds of the white rich elite entered newly constructed opera halls to hear the masterworks of the greatest white male composers: Claudio Monteverdi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, etc. As a music educator, I am ashamed to say that I do not think I am able to name a female or non-white composer of Western concert music before 1900. All of the greats of the European musical tradition--J.S. Bach, G.F. Handel, L.V. Beethoven, C. Debussy, F. Liszt, R. Schumann, R. Wagner, and so on--are all white males. Granted that many of these composers were not of the rich elite, their music certainly catered to the preservation of classism in musical performance.
More than a century after the creation of jazz, decades after the recognition of African-American composers by the Pulitzer Prize, and the intense diversification of multicultural composition in America and beyond, why is the term "blue-haired ladies" still used to describe the stereotypical audience of a band or orchestra concert performance?
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Allen (2014) has noted that both performers and attendees of Western classical concerts have remained an "almost exclusively white concern." She further considers that perhaps genres such as jazz and its evolution into pop has furthered the divide between Western art music and diverse crowds. The prolongation of white stereotypes in classical music throughout Media is another target in her argument. She attributes some of the racial separation of musical performance to "television and films, [where] young people interested in classical music are depicted as nerdish beyond redemption, unless the ditch that classical for some form of pop; adults are rich, villainously rich, or pathetically old, and always white."
The uprising of the band movement (the absence of string instruments) in the 19th and 20th centuries received great backlash from the elite crowds that surrounded orchestras. Band music was considered primitive and artless, which perhaps was both a cause and a result for more composers of different races and classes to begin using the band medium. When Frederick Fennell coined the term "wind ensemble" in 1952, his motive was to restore the high art status of "band," which had become a four letter word (Battisti, 2002). Even today, however, composers of band music and orchestra music alike are extraordinarily white and extraordinarily male. Composers and musicians of different cultures and sexes have been praised in the past, but their work has consistently been cast under the shadow of the white male greats of the distant past.
Whether the band medium specifically still remains subject to the "blue-haired" crowds is a difficult question that may differ from school to school and community to community. A large repertoire from non-white and non-male composers exists, but whether these compositions are being well received in comparison to the masterworks of the past is a personal mystery. Either way, despite the diversification of the literature in the band medium, why is the audience stereotype still rich, white, and elite?
What must music educators do in order to highlight the significance of Western art music performance to the entire American community?
In my community, tickets for the performances of the local professional orchestra can (sometimes) be as much as $100 or more. One advantage of school band performances is that they are generally free, which appeals to a larger and more diverse crowd of guests. The first step directors should take, however, is to reflect on the school and band community and analyze the racial and classist constructs that exists within their own programs. Furthermore, directors should aim for a balance between the masterworks of the old white greats and the contemporary, diverse composers of today. Informed education of the salience of these works and their part of comprehensive music education is critical. Similarly, intense seminal works such as Music for Prague, 1968 by Karel Husa (ironically a white, Czech-American male) tend to break down institutional walls by embodying the oppression and struggle of the lower class and racial minority. On another note, the stagnant expensiveness of musical instruments may discourage students from different socio-economic backgrounds from participating in music at school. Directors may also consider scholarships or instrument inventories so any student regardless of race or class can participate in band programs.
Reference List
Allen, C. (2014). Class, race, and classical music. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/apr/04/class-race-and-classical-music-candace-allen
Battisti, F. (2002). The winds of change. Galesville: Meredith Music Publications.
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