Making room for women maestros

"A woman's place is in the kitchen, not in the orchestra." That statement, from none other than legendary orchestra conductor Herbert von Karajan, lays bare just how sexist the world of male-dominated classical music is toward women conductors. Indeed, when women musicians started conducting orchestras, they found themselves harshly targeted by many famous conductors - even though women were already prominent in the orchestra.

Just three years ago, the words of two famous conductors, the Finn Jorma Panula and the Russian Vasily Petrenko, were particularly hurtful. One said that it was useless for women to conduct orchestras, and the other stressed that women had no place in the profession because they could not offer the audience anything but erotic entertainment.

What about the comment of one of today's popular critics? When young American conductor Karina Canellakis won the Georg Solti International Orchestra Conducting Award in 2016, music critic Norman Lebrecht wrote an ill-intentioned article: "Her success comes from the billions of dollars of the classical music industry, which is supported by international public opinion, which we know is only interested in the new and photogenic."

When this is the case, there are only 21 women conductors among 586 male chefs in France, a country with one of the highest number of women conductors. And what about Turkey? Our first women conductors took the stage 25 years ago. And in the last 20 years, we have seen only three women conductors on our stages: the Özdil sisters (İnci and Sıdıka), who were the chief conductor and deputy conductor for many years after the establishment of the Antalya State Symphonic Orchestra, as well as the violin pedagogue Mehpare Karamenderes.

But in recent years,...