What I want is a society where everyone can fulfill his/her potential. By sharing my own stories of #MeToo, I wish to contribute one small step toward that ideal. Judgements based on gender, sexual orientation, the way we look, and our sexual desirability often make us undermine our confidence and abilities. I suffered from debilitating chronic stage fright for fifteen years. I vomited and had diarrhea before performances. My hands and knees shook to the extent that I could no longer control the keys or the pedals. No matter how hard I practiced. Despite the world-class education I was privileged to receive. After much research, I have come to attribute a part of its cause to multiple cases of sexual harassment that I experienced.
I had not yet had my first kiss, when an audience member told me that he found the sight of my performing arousing: I looked like I was orgasming as I played, he told me. I was seventeen. At a meeting with a prospective manager when I was twenty-two, he told me what “blue balls” meant, after popping countless Tylenols in front of me. I’ve been offered money, concerts, “secrets” to better musicianship, a “big” career, etc. by various people in music education, management, administration and sponsorship in exchange for sexual relationships. I’ve been threatened to have my concerts cancelled, contracts terminated, to be reported to have my immigration status re-examined, etc. by my manager and concert presenters, if I wouldn’t comply to their advances.
These incidences distracted me from what I really wanted to focus on – like my art and career. It made me wonder where my value lies to the people in the profession, and in the audience. I started to wonder if the concert engagements, and any aid for professional advancements, had strings attached. If the attention from the audience was really for my musicianship, years of training and my artistic devotion and vision. Just a few years ago, an audience member came up to me to apologize after having heard me play. “I didn’t realize how serious an artist you were,” he said. “I had thought that you were someone who’d gotten her career because she was sort of cute.” I wonder how many people have dismissed me for the same reason, without even having heard me play. I have nothing to do with the shape of my eyes, breasts, butt, facial features, my height, gender or ethnicity.  These things have nothing to do with the choices I make in life, or in music. I don’t care about how I look.
My experience turned out not to be unique, unfortunately. According to a survey conducted by Music Industry Research Association last year, 67.1% of female musicians experience sexual harassment in the workplace. The experience of discrimination based on gender is higher, at 71.8%. The numbers are even higher than the national sample panel. 42% of women in general have experienced sexual harassment, and 27.8% gender discrimination, according to the 2017 Gallup survey.
Why is sexual harassment more pervasive in the music industry? First, there is the conditions of our work environment. Music necessitates soundproof rooms. Lessons and rehearsals are often one-to-one. Concerts take place in the evenings, and post-concert celebrations often involve late night alcohol consumption. Also, the market condition puts freelancing musicians in vulnerable positions. We are the prototype of “gig economy.” We often have no protection in the midst of an extreme competition. Then, there is the Romantic notion of “the artists.” We are supposed to be beyond the social constraints, exploring the limits of our perceptions, emotions and psyche, including – or especially – the dark side.
Finally, misogyny is inherent to the history of music. There is the Bible: “women should be silent in the church, for they are not permitted to speak,” (Corinthians 14:34) resulting in boy sopranos, and even castorati (400AD to the 19th C). The emergence of professional female performers in the nineteenth century Europe coincided in timing with several other notable changes in instrumental performance practice: decline of public improvisation (thus making performing less creative – supposedly), the rise of scrupulous recreation of written scores, the establishment of canons (canonization of dead white male composers and their scores), and the propagation of anti-virtuoso rhetoric. Music has been idealized since the ancient Greece as a way to transcend corporeal needs and weaknesses. That ideal ignores music’s inherent need for realization by the physical act of performing. Instrumental players were penalized for this contradiction. Anti-virtuoso rhetoric circulated in the nineteenth century as a consequence, criticizing virtuosos for their displays of physical abilities, and for the subsequent material rewards. Educators and intellectuals have issued warnings against these instrumentalists as socially and morally corrupt, comparing their shows to circus acts, sexual displays and freak shows. Female instrumentalists, when properly presented in their strict recreation of the canonized scores in ritualized concert settings, were seen as conduits to the great. However, they were not considered capable of understanding the great arts. Music conservatories banned women from taking classes such as advanced music theory, counterpoint, composition, conducting, etc. until the early twentieth century. This is a part of the music history that is often overlooked. And because it is neglected, we are still under its influence. Women are far fewer than their counterparts in composition, conducting and the advanced education.
As social animals, I believe that we are at our happiest and best, when we are helping each other and contributing to our communities. I have a strong desire to be helpful. I believe that I can offer healing through my music to this increasingly divisive world. I deeply regret that my confidence to deliver my music to the best of my ability had to be undermined by those who essentially told me that I was worth more to them as a sexual being than a devoted artist and a humanitarian.
I consider myself to be lucky, despite these past experiences. With the love and support I received from many of my mentors and friends, I was able to regain my confidence. I feel that I am fully back on track, ready to pick up my mission where I left it off. A part of my mission now is to join the #MeToo movement and inform people of the negative impact of sexual harassment to the society at large. By oppressing a half of the population by misogyny, robbing many women of their confidence to see themselves as more than just the sexual objects some men want to treat them as, the world looses on benefiting from what we have to offer this world. Let’s change it, together. #MeToo
