Violin Babes

[DavidRoss]

Josefowicz still has a very active career, I'm not sure on what you base your judgment of lack of commercial success. Suwanai had rather limited talent from what I have heard.

Josefowicz has an active and successful career, indeed--but her record sales and the success contingent on that were so poor that her label dropped her.  Her commercial success does not compare to that of the high-profile fiddlers discussed above.

You heard wrong about Suwanai.

Yet, the CD covers invariably feature sexed-up pictures. Why, if, as you say, it's not necessary? And, at the very last Sarge and I would disagree with you on her appeal. I for one prefer natural beauty and mystique, sans make up, to fashion model fakeness.

You really should do something about your chronic habit of putting words into others' mouths.

You're lumping together violinists of several different generations. Zehetmair, Tetzlaff, Shaham, Repin and Vengerov have no business being in that list and Kremer is a senior citizen by now. The fact that you have to include different generations in order to come up with a similar number of males shows that the basic argument has some truth in it. If you add up just the 20-35 year olds that we've been talking about here, then there is a preponderance of attractive women.

And your chronic habit of making statements irrelevant to others' claims while imagining that somehow you're addressing them.

Oh, yes, we are the victims! You poor thing! That's so masculine of you to whine about your "victimization".   

So you do have a sense of humor! 

PS: if you had read what I actually wrote, instead of superimposing your political dogma, you would have seen that I wasn't "beating up men for our hard-wired appreciation of female beauty", but rather was beating up the music industry for focusing on sex appeal rather than musical qualities precisely in order to exploit our "hard-wired" appreciation for their profit.

Whoops, I spoke too soon, again giving you much too much credit.  Sigh. 

[MishaK]

The reason I ask is because it seems like it's just a knee-jerk, superfluous reaction on their part. Yes, sex sells, generally speaking, but not always. I find it hard to believe there are a bunch of us classical fans, no matter how horny , that buy their albums based on the cover.

Yes, but "us classical fans" aren't the ones who make money for the labels. We classical fans buy maybe 3,000-5,000 copies of a given album. What makes an album a best seller is a superstar with appeal to the general population that doesn't regularly buy classical music, people who own one Karajan disc, one Bernstein disc, one Horowitz disc, one Renee Fleming disc, and maybe one Hilary Hahn disc, AT MOST.

Btw, to inject some data (albeit not overly scientific) into the discussion, I browsed through Amazon's returns for "violin concerto," to get discs featuring solo violinists, sorted by release date to move the bias from a handful of big stars that conveniently fit an argument. Of the covers featuring a photo of a female artist, you find:

Only two, maybe three of those are "big stars", the rest are bit players, and of the big stars, Midori's album is quite old and had it been sexed up at that time it would have been child pornography. And Fischer maybe was trying to go for sexy black dress, but mom's shoes, three sizes too big, ruin the picture. 

[karlhenning]

I think only the Benedetti image could reasonably be classified as intentionally sultry or sexy.

Aye, she's pouting in a meaning manner, and that pesky, distracting violin is a good distance away.

[Gurn Blanston]

I think that a percentage of the posters here are unable to consider that

1. Business is about marketing. If they don't sell CD's we aren't going to have the choices that we claim to so enjoy

2. Young women, talented or not, when cleaned up and dressed properly, appear sexy. The push to turn this into exploitation reflects a desperate need to talk about something, whether it is real or not.

3. The need to reject all replies that present opposite evidence as being off point is what people do when they realize that their arguments are weak.

4. WTF is wrong with women looking sexy?  They are.

5. If men (and women too, let's not be too effing naive) respond to that by actually buying the CD, then the terrorists ad-men have won. And a company makes a little bit of money, and a starving artist somewhere gets a chance because classical isn't quite dead yet. This teapot can sustain a real tempest, let alone this one. 

[MishaK]

Josefowicz has an active and successful career, indeed--but her record sales and the success contingent on that were so poor that her label dropped her.  Her commercial success does not compare to that of the high-profile fiddlers discussed above.

Last I checked she was still putting out records on Warner and Hyperion. Extremely few classical recordings these days can be classified as a "commercial success".

You heard wrong about Suwanai.

Which must be why she's getting invitations left and right to play with major orchestras, right?  These engagements don't exactly look like the schedule of a first tier artist: http://www.akikosuwanai.com/concerts

Compare, by contrast, Leila: http://www.leilajosefowicz.com/Schedule.html
Just last month she played here with the CSO and has a much fuller schedule with more prestigious orchestras and conductors.

You really should do something about your chronic habit of putting words into others' mouths.

Sigh... Let me refresh your memory:

On the other hand, great talent together with adequate drive and preparation for a commercial career will suffice, even if the fiddler in question has no more superficial sex appeal than a tin of biscuits.  Witness Hilary Hahn.

Hence:

Yet, the CD covers invariably feature sexed-up pictures. Why, if, as you say, it's not necessary?

Also:

And your chronic habit of making statements irrelevant to others' claims while imagining that somehow you're addressing them.

Also, the rise of the violin babes has hardly come at the expense of the violin dudes.  Shaham, Tetzlaff, Carmignola, Bell, Kavakos, Repin, Zehetmair, Vengerov, Kremer, Hope, Ehnes, Capuçon, et al have not been handicapped by their lack of feminine sex appeal.

If the "rise of the violin babes" is a recent phenomenon involving the current young generation of artists, then pointing out that:

You're lumping together violinists of several different generations. Zehetmair, Tetzlaff, Shaham, Repin and Vengerov have no business being in that list and Kremer is a senior citizen by now. The fact that you have to include different generations in order to come up with a similar number of males shows that the basic argument has some truth in it. If you add up just the 20-35 year olds that we've been talking about here, then there is a preponderance of attractive women.

is very much relevant and on point. How did you ever get through law school?

3. The need to reject all replies that present opposite evidence as being off point is what people do when they realize that their arguments are weak.

Precisely!

[Grazioso]

Only two, maybe three of those are "big stars", the rest are bit players, and of the big stars, Midori's album is quite old and had it been sexed up at that time it would have been child pornography. And Fischer maybe was trying to go for sexy black dress, but mom's shoes, three sizes too big, ruin the picture. 

That was my point: it was about as random and unbiased a sample as I could find. You end up with a picture of a kid, a bunch of soccer moms with violins , and one textbook hottie. Where's this big marketing drive on the part of classical music to make every young(ish) violinist a tawdry sexpot?

4. WTF is wrong with women looking sexy?  They are.

[MishaK]

That was my point: it was about as random and unbiased a sample as I could find. You end up with a picture of a kid, a bunch of soccer moms with violins , and one textbook hottie. Where's this big marketing drive on the part of classical music to make every young(ish) violinist a tawdry sexpot?

Well, we were only talking about recent years (i.e. not Midori's early childhood albums), and its a phenomenon that seems largely restricted to the big labels (Universal-Polygram, Sony-BMG, etc.).

[Grazioso]

Thread duty:

[Bulldog]

Keep the babes coming!!  A sexy cover is a nice little bonus I always appreciate.

[Gurn Blanston]

Thread duty:

Oh no, wearing white, the whore's color!    

Thanks for that. It's freakin' hilarious.

0:)

[DavidRoss]

blah blah blah

I give up.  Find someone else who understands logic who will explain it to you ... and to whom you will listen.

Cheers!

[MishaK]

I give up.  Find someone else who understands logic who will explain it to you ... and to whom you will listen.

Cheers!

History repeats itself. 

[Scarpia]

Logic has nothing to do with it.  It is statistics.

A while ago the claim was made that there was discrimination against black people in major league baseball, specifically against black pitchers.  The claim was proven using the folling information.

What is the average ERA for black pitchers in MLB? about 3.
what is the average ERA for white pitchers in MLB? about 4.

So, on average a black pitcher has to maintain an ERA a full point better than a white pitcher to stay in MLB.

No amount of anecdotes will prove this question, we need analogous statistics.  We need to assemble photographs of all violinists to get recording contracts in the last 5 years, I would say non-HIP performers on major labels.  Then we need to compare with photographs people hired in the violin sections of major orchestras.  If the contract awardees are cuter, on average, that would prove that there is significant bias.

This may not be scientific, but I'm doing an informal poll of the images that float by in the Amazon banner at the top of the forum.  I don't see any homely violinists. 

[DavidRoss]

Logic has nothing to do with it.  It is statistics.

Logic has everything to do with that fellow's inability to understand what I say and insistence that what he imputes to me can be deduced from it.  But this is commonplace among those seeking to score points rather than to understand.  Not a game I'm interested in pursuing.

[Scarpia]

Logic has everything to do with that fellow's inability to understand what I say and insistence that what he imputes to me can be deduced from it.  But this is commonplace among those seeking to score points rather than to understand.  Not a game I'm interested in pursuing.

Be that as it may, logic has nothing to do with the question at hand.  The issue is whether violinists offered a contract are, on average, cuter than the pool from which they are drawn.  If so you must accept one of two conclusions, good violin playing is correlated with being cure, or cute violinists have an advantage unrelated to their talent.

Since we do not have that data before us, what do we have here but scoring points?

[MishaK]

Be that as it may, logic has nothing to do with the question at hand.  The issue is whether violinists offered a contract are, on average, cuter than the pool from which they are drawn.  If so you must accept one of two conclusions, good violin playing is correlated with being cure, or cute violinists have an advantage unrelated to their talent.

That empirical analysis you propose is in fact very logical, so logic does have a lot to do with it.  But in this age of small independent and in-house labels, I think one ought to distinguish between violinists who have a contract with a major label (i.e. BMG-Sony, Universal-Polygram, EMI) and perhaps support from a major agent (IMG or Askonas Holt) vs. those who record with smaller labels and work with lesser agents etc.

[Scarpia]

That empirical analysis you propose is in fact very logical, so logic does have a lot to do with it.  But in this age of small independent and in-house labels, I think one ought to distinguish between violinists who have a contract with a major label (i.e. BMG-Sony, Universal-Polygram, EMI) and perhaps support from a major agent (IMG or Askonas Holt) vs. those who record with smaller labels and work with lesser agents etc.

The logic is (I would hope) obvious, the statistics anything but.  The key question is, what is the control group, violinists who didn't get a contract?  How to you identify them? 

[MishaK]

The key question is, what is the control group, violinists who didn't get a contract? 

Less attractive violinists?

[Conor71]

Kyung-Wha Chung - Rachael Podger
Vanessa Mae - Janine Jansen

[Sid]

MishaK has made some good points. But as I said earlier, maybe I was taking this too seriously.  I was basically questioning the fact that people don't think of a guy's looks the way they think of a woman's. I think when women are in professional roles, sometimes a lot of time is spent on irrelevant things like what they're wearing, whether they're married, whether they have children, etc. We tend not to do this with men. That's a point kind of related to this thread.

5. If men (and women too, let's not be too effing naive) respond to that by actually buying the CD, then the terrorists ad-men have won. And a company makes a little bit of money, and a starving artist somewhere gets a chance because classical isn't quite dead yet. This teapot can sustain a real tempest, let alone this one. 

Well I also agree with this, maybe it's good to make Classical a bit "sexy" but it doesn't stop me from thinking that this is still the old paradigm. The advertising/marketing world is probably still dominated by white middle aged males, and most of the things we get is from their 'world view.' I'm not advocating that classical covers should have a mugshot of the performing artist, of course it has to look enticing. I'm just questioning where we get these images from, and from whose point of view they're from...