Despite notions of progress in classical music, the conductor’s podium remains largely a man’s world. According to the latest data, as of 2020, only eight of the world’s top 100 conductors were women.
French conductor Claire Gibault has spent her career trying to change that. In 2019, she founded La Maestra, an international competition featuring exclusively female conductors.
That competition is central to the new documentary film, “Maestra,” which made its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film follows five female conductors as they prepare for and compete in La Maestra. It is both an intimate portrait of these women and a look at what it takes to survive and succeed in a male-dominated profession.
Maggie Contreras, the director of “Maestra," joined GBH’s James Bennett II to talk about what it took to make the film.
Contreras is not a classical musician by trade, but she was surrounded by it from an early age. Her father, mother and babysitter would listen to classical music, making it part of her life's landscape.
“Even though I grew up with classical music around me and I was a lover of it, I couldn't tell you what a conductor did, honestly,” she said. “So I also came at this project as someone curious about what the weird job is.”
She said being a conductor is not just keeping time or ensuring musicians play together. She said it's about interpretation.
“Some people ask why is it important to have representation on the podium. And it's like, why is it important to have representation behind the camera as a director? ... If you took 'The Godfather' [and] you give it to five different film directors, you're going to have the same words on screen, but you're going to have five different interpretations of that film,” she said.
As Contreras explains, conductors, like movie directors, ultimately influence the execution of a piece through the lens of their own lived experiences. And because conductors have historically not represented many different identity groups, she said “we have never heard every piece of music interpreted by every type of person. How exciting is that, that we have all of this potential?”
La Maestra, as the documentary explores, is a chance for the stereotype of conductors as older white men to be broken. For example, in 2020, at the first La Maestra, Black conductor Glass Marcano left Venezuela for the first time in her life to compete. This year, while the racial diversity of the participants was less representative, conductors from as far as South Korea and Hong Kong competed. Contreras affirms that gender and racial diversity within the classical music scene cannot be addressed independently from one another: “Representation needs to happen simultaneously.”
Despite deeply ingrained biases that affect both the competition on screen and how the film is perceived by audiences, ultimately, “Maestra” is about human connection.
“Different people connect with each one of these different women for a different reason,” Contreras says. “I knew that it was going to be critical to have a basic knowledge of [the conducting and music that] these women at being judged on, so that you, as the audience member, can sit there in your home or sit there in the theater and feel like you’ve been empowered to also look to see what the judges might be looking for.”
As for how to encourage future conductors, Contreras says that “that all starts on the high school level. We need to start making sure that arts education is being funded, and [that] it starts when kids are young.”
