photos: maestramusic.org

I’m thrilled to have been asked to contribute an update to what is becoming an annual essay celebrating Women’s History Month from my point of view as a proud working musician and member of Local 802 as well as from my point of view as the founder and president of Maestra Music, the nonprofit organization I founded to provide support, visibility, and community to the women and nonbinary musicians who work in musical theatre. Last year Maestra turned five, and I want to reflect a bit on what has happened since we were officially incorporated in 2019.

Many of you will recall participating in a membership survey in 2021. That project came about because at the beginning of the pandemic, Maestra asked Local 802 if there were any demographic statistics they could share about the population of working musicians in the greater NYC area. At the time, we learned that not only were there no demographic questions asked on hiring sheets, but also the archives of hiring sheets were in boxes in deep storage and had never been put into any sort of database. Everyone at both 802 and Maestra agreed that if we wanted information from our members, we should ask for it.

Maestra and Local 802 together hired a data scientist not related to either organization who led us through the process of building a survey, and we signed an MOU agreeing that the raw data would be kept confidential, even from us. That means that the results published in the 90-page analysis revealed a lot of information about what instruments people play, how much of their work is under a union contract, how often they sub, whether or not they teach, how they acquire work, how active they are in union activities, and, perhaps most importantly, how their work was changing because of Covid. What the analysis did not reveal, as promised, were names or identities of the people who participated. Survey results can be viewed here.

Of most interest to those of us at Maestra was this: our data scientist’s presentation of the results revealed that only 29 percent of 802’s membership in July 2021 was female and that the number of female-identifying musicians who work specifically on Broadway was 22 percent. (Only 1 percent of the membership at that time stated they were genderqueer, genderfluid, or nonbinary.) 25 percent of Broadway orchestras had no women or nonbinary pit musicians in them at all. Other data we collected around the same time informed us that between 2010 and 2020, only 8 percent of new Broadway scores were composed by women, and out of 98 available Broadway drum chairs, 96 were held by men.

These statistics gave Maestra a baseline — a place to start the conversation about why we exist.

Since 2021, Maestra’s team has continued collecting data from publicly available sources and cross-referencing the findings with personal verifications from shows’ music departments and the musicians themselves. Based on our study of the 2022-2023 Broadway season, female and nonbinary representation averaged 37 percent in pits and 25 percent on music teams (including composers, lyricists, music supervisors and music directors, conductors, orchestrators, and contractors). 20 percent of that season’s scores were written by female and nonbinary composers. Two new drum chairs went to women during that season alone, and all of the Broadway orchestras had at least one woman or nonbinary player in the pit.

In the 2023-2024 Broadway season, female and nonbinary representation averaged 39 percent in pits and 28 percent on music teams. 24 percent of that season’s scores were written by female and writers but there was no nonbinary representation amongst composers and lyricists.

What does all of this mean? In the five years since Maestra was founded, the number of all-male orchestra pits in new Broadway shows has dropped from 25 percent to 0 percent. The 2022 to 2023 season showed a threefold increase in female and nonbinary composer representation over the previous decade, and the same number of female drummers were hired as chairholders in twelve months as there were in the total ten years prior.

To be clear, gender equity is not the same as gender equality. Our goal is not to “get to 50 percent.” Success, to Maestra, looks like equity of opportunity, and we’re creating programs like mentorship and networking and education to address the issue that though women and nonbinary people often enter the workforce with the same level of talent and education as their male colleagues, they are not often afforded the same opportunities. At the center of our organization is an online directory that expands our workforce by giving visibility to over 2600 women and nonbinary musicians in music and theatre markets around the globe.

In a time that sees Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access work challenged in companies, schools, and courtrooms across America, Maestra insists that you can be pro one group of people without being anti everyone else. We keep bumping into this idea that in order to promote women and nonbinary people we have to put men out of work. It’s just not true. Some of the organization’s greatest allies are the male composers and music directors who have hired a Maestra conductor, orchestrator, sound designer, or music contractor and the male producers who are now using our newest tool, the RISE Directory, to diversify their teams in all hireable areas including directors, designers, front of house staff, marketing and social media teams, ASL interpreters, and so much more.

No one benefits from what’s being called “a DEIA hire.” It doesn’t serve anyone for an unqualified woman to get a job over a qualified man. From Maestra’s perspective, the damage that can be caused when someone says, “I once hired a woman in that chair and she was a disaster” can set this conversation about equity back decades. But how do we set that woman up for success so that she has sufficient opportunity to gain the experience, to learn the ropes, to make the connections? And then when she’s ready to work, how do we make sure the people who are ready to hire her know how to find her? I believe that the answer is that we build community, we provide support and professional development, we give visibility — and that’s the mission of Maestra. I challenge you to observe the ensembles in which you play and consider with intentionality — who is here, and who is not? And what can you do about it?

AMPLIFY 2025, Maestra’s annual concert and community event, will be produced on March 31^st at Sony Hall in New York City. Musicians will be covered under a union contract.