By Michelle Zapf-Belanger, Thunder Bay Symphony Delegate
In 2021, the National Alliance for Audition Support (NAAS), a collaboration of the League of American Orchestras with The Sphinx Organization and the New World Symphony, came out with new guidelines for best practices in orchestra auditions and probationary review. These guidelines were intended to help orchestras remove barriers in hiring and retaining musicians of colour. However, implementing the recommendations in your orchestra can benefit the whole organization by helping to remove bias and add transparency to audition and review policies.
One recommendation which several Canadian orchestras have already implemented is a “Musician Advocate” on review committees. The original wording in the NAAS Guidelines reads:
In the interest of assisting in a positive outcome, the musician committee, in consultation with the candidate, should identify a musician Advocate or Ombudsman, who can guide the candidate through the tenure process and assist in communication with other musicians and management.
I read the NAAS guidelines in 2021 with some interest. For the last decade in my own orchestra, the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra, we have already been assigning a Musician Advocate on review committees. It was a policy established in practice, by laborious trial and error, rather than through negotiating contract language, by a team of musicians on the orchestra committee who wanted to address bias in our review procedure. I was one of those musicians, and have acted as a Musician Advocate for many review committees for years.
I feel that a Musician Advocate is necessary in any review procedure. Many musicians under review, I have found, are bewildered by the process, vulnerable to coercion by tenured musicians or the Music Director, and in danger of being unfairly or carelessly evaluated by a panel that is often able to make discriminatory decisions without any meaningful oversight. The review process in our industry has come under fire in recent years because of several well-publicized instances of alleged abuse of the process, including the denial of tenure to whistleblowers Clara Kizer and Amanda Stewart of the New York Philharmonic. Any musician under review deserves a disinterested, tenured colleague to guide them through their probationary period, and fiercely advocate for a fair and ethical process for them.
I am delighted to see orchestras such as the Regina Symphony Orchestra and the National Ballet Orchestra adopt Musician Advocates formally into their contracts, and I hope that other orchestras will follow, including my own orchestra.
However, the concept of a Musician Advocate is fairly new, and I believe it will take some time and experimentation for an industry standard to develop when it comes to integrating them into every orchestra’s review process. The NAAS Guidelines provide bold big picture ideas for ways to remove barriers for musicians, but they don’t go into detail about implementation. Rochelle Skolnick, AFM Symphonic Services Division Director, has written some excellent boilerplate contract language about the probationary process, which goes into more practical detail, and is worth reviewing for any negotiating team looking at making changes to their next collective agreement. However, probationary processes vary rather widely by orchestra, and modifications to the boilerplate language may be necessary depending on your orchestra’s current procedures, and the response you get at the other side of the table.
Here are two topics I think you should take into consideration when trying to integrate a Musician Advocate into your contract or practices. While I don’t have definitive answers to any of the questions I raise, where I have a recommendation based on my experience and observations, I have included it, in hopes of providing a jumping off point for more exploration.
Duties, Roles, and Authority
Exactly what does your Musician Advocate do? This needs to be spelled out in your contract language.
How the probationary procedure is organized—who calls and presides over the meetings, what representatives are present at what stage of the process, how feedback is collected and delivered—varies from orchestra to orchestra. Because of this, it is impossible to make universal recommendations on how to slot a Musician Advocate in. Instead, look at your own process, and, where possible, ensure roles don’t totally overlap. Imagine the chaos that could ensue if the Personnel Manager, Local Steward, and Musician’s Advocate were all to descend upon a review meeting, tasked with pretty much the exact same duties!
Certainly a Musician Advocate’s duties should include ensuring the candidate under review understands how the probationary process works, including communicating timelines for when and how they should expect to hear feedback. The Musician Advocate should be available through the season to respond promptly to queries or concerns from the candidate under review.
However, I feel strongly that a Musician Advocate should also provide some ethical oversight. Current probationary processes badly need additional impartial observers, who have the authority to intervene if they see something inappropriate happening. Even if the Personnel Manager and/or Local representative is already acting as an arbiter of the process, part of the reason to have a Musician Advocate at all is to add an extra person into the mix who doesn’t have the same interests as a Personnel Manager, Music Director, or Committee. A Musician Advocate can press for fairness from a fresh angle, and their sole interest is ensuring an ethical procedure for the musician under review.
To that end, the Musician Advocate should have enough access to properly observe all parts of the process. It is a good idea for the Musician Advocate to be present at all review meetings. Additionally, the review committee should copy them on any internal electronic communication. The Musician Advocate should have a mechanism to make objections that will be taken seriously when they observe discriminatory behaviour or maladministration.
How far should their oversight go? For example, some orchestras now provide compiled survey data to candidates as feedback. Should the Musician Advocate have the ability to request inappropriate comments be redacted before feedback goes to the candidate? Something to think about.
You may want to consider a merging of roles. In my opinion, a steward or representative of the Local can probably also fulfill the role of a Musician Advocate, without encountering a serious conflict of interest. In my orchestra, one person fulfills both of those roles, and this works well because we have a small core, and therefore a limited pool from which to draw musicians involved in the review process. It should go without saying that the Musician Advocate cannot be on the candidate’s review committee, nor involve themselves in any artistic or job-related evaluation of the candidate whatsoever. They should never make any personal opinions they have about the candidate known to the review committee.
Anti-Bias Training
Review committee members are biased, and it isn’t always easy to pinpoint or prevent their biases from influencing the process. Discrimination in a review meeting can sound like an innocuous comment to someone who is not trained to recognize it. Gendered comments can be veiled in concern for someone’s domestic situation (“They just got married—won’t they want to be taking some time off in the next few years anyway?”) or artistic concerns (“Is she really a big enough person to make a big sound?”). Racial stereotypes can even be disguised as compliments, like “Their playing is too perfect.” Review committees can allow unsubstantiated rumours about the musician, which the committee has no way of verifying and no business investigating, or vague personal beefs unrelated to conduct on the job, to colour their decision-making.
It is vital that Musician Advocates receive anti-bias training so they can learn to recognize biases or discrimination when they crop up in their candidate’s process. If feasible, any musician serving on any review committee should take anti-bias training. Ensuring this happens, or facilitating it some way, may be a role to consider assigning to the Musician Advocate. At the very least, a Musician Advocate should be committed to learning about discrimination themselves, or they won’t be very effective in their role, and there won’t be any point in having one.
Many universities have paid courses in implicit bias, anti-discrimination, and related topics, as do many Human Resources training organizations. If your orchestra is willing to pay for anti-bias training for the whole committee, or just the Musician’s Advocate, that should be added to your collective agreement. If cost is a sticking point, here are some reputable free resources:
- Understanding Unconscious Bias from the British Columbia Institute of Technology
- Unconscious Bias Education Modules from the Toronto Initiative for Diversity and Excellence
Every province has a Human Rights Commission, which has additional resources specific to your province’s legislation, using clear language intended for laypeople. Perusing their website, or giving them a call when in doubt, can also help to educate someone in developing the knowledge and mindset required to be a good Musician Advocate.