When Blind is not.

     I learned many years ago in Birmingham how musicians audition for jobs in a professional orchestra.
     I had been exposed to the best classical music in New York City. The small High School level Seminary I attended took students to Lincoln Center, and it was there I experienced opera and the music of a big classical orchestra, visible on stage, or in the well.
     When I moved to Birmingham in 1976, I interviewed the conductor of the Birmingham Symphony, and learned how auditions were conducted from behind a curtain, so the musicians who were hired achieved that honor regardless of their race or gender or any other physical trait.
     Over the years I've used that practice as an example, suggesting all hiring should be done with a curtain of sorts, to block intentional or accidental bias.
     A column in today's N.Y. Times argues against those so-called "bind auditions". It was written by Anthony Tommasini, the paper's chief classical music critic. 
     And he makes some good points:

"This well-intentioned but restrictive practice has prevented substantive action when it comes to the most essential element of maintaining an orchestra: hiring musicians. Musicians’ unions, which have in many ways valiantly worked to protect their members in an economically tenuous industry, have long been tenacious defenders of blind auditions, asserting that they are the best way to ensure fairness."

HERE's the full column. Comments anyone?