What Happened When an Orchestra Said Goodbye to All-Male Concerts

In 2021, Marlene Brüggen, a concert planner in Germany, was listening to an episode of the podcast “Herrengedeck” and heard about a pop music festival with gender parity woven into its programming. The next day, she looked at her own festival’s planning chart, with some 200 concerts. Women were seriously underrepresented.

“We hadn’t paid attention to that at all,” Brüggen said in an interview. “It was as if the bandages had been taken off my eyes.”

That year, Brüggen applied for a job as director of artistic planning with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Her job interview included questions about the music she would program if hired. With her earlier epiphany in mind, she suggested the orchestra play more music by women. She got the job.

Later, when she and the orchestra’s music director, Robin Ticciati, and its managing director, Thomas Schmidt-Ott, were discussing the 2023-24 season, they decided not just to include more female artists, but also to require every orchestra concert to feature at least one work written by a woman. In the fall, the orchestra plastered Berlin’s walls with posters that read “No concert without a female composer!”

“The most fascinating or innovative thing about her idea wasn’t the fact of performing female composers,” Schmidt-Ott said in an interview. “It was doing it in every concert.”

I went to nine performances during the season, between November and May, and heard 11 pieces by female composers. All the works were new to me, imbuing each concert with a sense of discovery unusual for an orchestra’s subscription series.

Many of those compositions — especially the ones written before the 20th century — are unlikely to find their way into the standard repertoire, which Brüggen acknowledges. But that isn’t her goal. “What we’re doing is a journey of discovery,” she said. “The selection process that happened with men throughout the centuries didn’t happen with women. It’s our social responsibility to make that happen now.”

The orchestra’s season was still dominated by men who lived in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although every program booklet had a portrait of a female composer on its cover, her piece was usually a small fraction of the total running time: Unfamiliar works by women were often eclipsed by large-scale, crowd-pleasing compositions by men.

A January concert was a particularly stark example. The program consisted of Hildegard of Bingen’s ravishing choral work “O vis eternitatis,” a work from the Middle Ages that lasted nine minutes, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 7, which runs well over an hour.

“The idea is to implement and expand everything step by step,” Brüggen said. “We can’t put our fist through the concert programming and suddenly perform a big symphony by an unknown person every other concert. We have to make sure that we fill the hall.”

Beyond pragmatic considerations, the brevity of many pieces written by women — both in the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester’s season and in the canon — reflects centuries of sexism. For most of classical music history, women were not allowed to devote themselves fully to artistic creation; even when they could, peers, critics and audiences derided their works as either too feminine and slight, or inauthentically masculine and virile.

“We know that Gustav Mahler commanded his wife to throw her works into the fire and destroy them,” Schmidt-Ott said. “But there are also many works that simply disappeared because they weren’t taken seriously.”

While researching works by women, Brüggen often had little more than a name and a title to go on. Well-edited scores and recordings were either hard to obtain or completely unavailable, making it difficult for her to persuade guest conductors and soloists to add pieces by women to their repertoire.

Grappling with this history of discrimination has put the orchestra in an unusually political position. Schmidt-Ott began studying feminist ideas: Henriette Kupke, a marketing employee and outspoken feminist, explained to him “that there are three waves and we’re in the most current one, which brings in intersectionality,” he said.

On June 2, the orchestra hosted a symposium on “feminist music politics” — a reference to the “feminist foreign policy” guidelines from the office of Germany’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Annalena Baerbock — with the State Institute for Music Research in Berlin. “We’re making ourselves into a political mouthpiece,” Schmidt-Ott said.

Perhaps predictably, the season has been polarizing. Among the orchestra’s musicians, reactions have ranged “from enthusiasm to skepticism,” Brüggen said. A Facebook post about the policy attracted some 1,500 comments, and a subsequent article on a right-wing blog described Schmidt-Ott and Brüggen as “social engineers” who “pose a threat to society at large.”

The season sold exceptionally well, though the orchestra has not collected data to show whether ticket sales are related to the initiative. At a performance of Elizabeth Ogonek’s “Ringing the Quiet” and Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in November, several audience members said they were unaware of the quota but were curious to hear the pieces. At a concert in May, Margarete Herrmann, a member of the orchestra’s Supporters Circle, said she supported the initiative: “It’s important that one finally got there. I don’t think women compose differently from men.”

Some musicians who deeply value the orchestra’s work have doubts about the effectiveness of strict gender requirements in programming. The composer Unsuk Chin, whose Clarinet Concerto the ensemble performed in January, said in a phone interview that, “for me, it doesn’t play a role at all whether the composer is a man or a woman or what country she comes from. The only criteria is quality. And if a piece has quality, you should play it.”

Chin’s Clarinet Concerto, with the soloist Boglarka Pecze, was one of the standout works of the season, alongside Olga Neuwirth’s “…miramondo multiplo…” for trumpet and orchestra, and featuring Hakan Hardenberger. In both, the solo instruments were spliced with their orchestral counterparts, creating subtly beautiful aural illusions. Chin’s piece generated strange melismas and rubbings; Neuwirth’s refracted jazzlike melodies through austere, icy harmonies. Both re-conceived the concerto form so that the soloists’ virtuosity was shown by the gradations of sounds they produced, not by the number of notes they crammed in. With running times of 25 and 19 minutes, these works were also among the longest by women this season.

Lili Boulanger’s “D’un Soir Triste,” from 1918, was another revelation. Though composed in a late Romantic style, the piece’s main preoccupation was texture and mass. It had an appealingly rich, dark amber color and terrifyingly visceral climaxes. Her “D’un Matin de Printemps” was less radical but showed a greater mastery of orchestration in its five minutes than Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 27-minute Piano Concerto No. 1, which followed it on a March program.

Works by Ogonek, Charlotte Bray and Ina Boyle were also well orchestrated, with striking individual moments, but lacked convincing musical arguments — something difficult to achieve with limited time. Because pieces by women on the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester’s programs were so much shorter than the pieces by men, they were at a disadvantage. Compared with long, ambitious pieces like Mahler’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, Act II of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” they were unable to unfurl completely, and were blocked from imprinting themselves on the senses.

At almost every concert I went to this season, I wanted the women composers to have more time. I rooted for them to musically manspread.

That will happen more next season. The orchestra plans to present longer works by women, including Ethel Smyth’s Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra; Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 1; and Amy Beach’s “Gaelic Symphony.” It will also perform more works by Black women composers, including Tania León and Jessie Montgomery.

The past season’s approach will shape the orchestra’s programming for years to come. For example, Schmidt-Ott said, it could try a “No Concert Without Africa” philosophy of including a work related to Africa in every concert.

“We want to show classical music to as many people as possible,” Brüggen said. “Everybody’s been talking for years about how classical music is losing its audience. Our approach is to use these dogmas or themes to reach new audiences. For God’s sake, not to alienate old ones, but simply to expand.”