Women take the closing of the Cartagena International Music Festival

Symphonic music has always been a sector “privileged for men”, but for about seven decades women have been gaining more and more spaces and today they even form exclusively female orchestras.

The director of the Colombian Women’s Philharmonic Orchestra, Paola Ávila, who performed during the Cartagena International Music Festival, explains to EFE that “orchestras from the beginning of time were made up of men, only until 1960 did women begin to to be part of the orchestras but as a minority, and in fact that still happens.

As has happened throughout the world, in Colombia, women have also been kept on the sidelines of symphonic music, sometimes due to simple gender exclusion and other times because of the roles imposed on women such as caring for the family and home. They are not allowed the time to dedicate to music.

Ávila says that in general in the world “the maximum presence of women in orchestras is 30 or 40% by far.”

But this inequality in the number of female music performers also occurs because “for a long time the majority of symphonic programming has always been for men.”

«In symphonic music concerts, most of the time one hears works by Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, but rarely by women composers, not because there aren’t any – because there have been even since the time of those composers – but because they are women. They never had the opportunity to be published or for their scores to be edited,” he says.

She adds that “fortunately, orchestra administrations are currently trying to include more and more compositions by women, but they are still a minority.”

EFE

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