Greg Stepanich

Hot classical babes: Site points way to glam trend

I had been meaning to write about this, having mentioned something similar in a post a few months back, but The New York Times beat me to it on Sunday.

While doing the Web research for a post on pianist/composer Lera Auerbach, I came upon beautyinmusic.com, billed as a site featuring "the hottest women in classical music.� The NYT blurb says the site is run by an orchestra manager named Steven Ray Liedlich, who's 38 and who began the site in 2002 while he was unemployed.

As cheesecake sites go — not that I know all that much about any of them — there's really nothing here that's shocking or lewd or even particularly hot. It's mostly a collection of more or less nice-looking faces, followed by links to their home pages or related sites. It's more like a classical music Facebook than something ogle-licious. (And some of these people are dead: One of the composers is Hildegard of Bingen, who died in 1179.)

Nevertheless, it raises interesting questions, some of which I've written about in my violinists post and another one about freelance musicians in Los Angeles who are finding that their pulchritude and their musical versatility are paying double dividends.

I guess what it comes down to for me is the relationship all of us have to our corporal selves. I'm writing a review of a novel by Susan Swan (What Casanova Told Me) in which one of the main characters, an 18th-century New Englander named Asked For Adams, refers to her body as My Poor Friend. Later in the book, she understands her body better and the uses it can be put to, but her feeling of estrangement from the housing of her mind and soul is quite familiar to a lot of us.

And I think it's getting tougher out there for those of who aren't glorious to look at, or are quite overweight, both of which apply to me. If we celebrate the beauty of classical players as well as the sounds they make, we are again bringing theatrical standards to bear on the art of sound production.

The ramifications could be important. If you want to be an oboist, for example, will it be more difficult to get a job in an orchestra, or as a freelancer, or anywhere you need to make some cash doing your double-reed thing, if you're not dishy? Will classical musicians be even more pressed than they are now by the added pressure of needing to bring in the audiences with a glam headshot?

Hypocrite auteur! some will cry, with apologies, if they're polite, to Baudelaire. And that's true, to some extent: It's enjoyable to look at someone attractive, no doubt about it, so it's a bit dishonest of me to then turn around and then self-piteously speak of my bulbous frame and how the shallow world is harsh to bearded fatties.

Still, I'm a bit troubled by this trend, because I think it does force musicians to think more about their looks, and someday that could keep a talented person away from the field. If the conception a young player has of the world of classical music is that in order to turn professional, you need to be beautiful as well as skilled, then that's a problem.

I don't know that we're anywhere near there yet, but I do notice quite a bit more attention paid in marketing to how musicians look (men as well as women), and that's a consequence of business-related pressures as well as the entertainment ethos that saturates our country. I would think we're heading further in that direction rather than away from it, and we're doing it more quickly.

Besides, talented artists of many different pursuits are quite beautiful when they're in their element, soaring on their achievements, no matter how unconventionally attractive they might be (here's a philosophy-oriented blog entry that touches on some of these ideas.)

I've often had the experience of seeing a person of indifferent physical attributes turn into a swan as they play or sing something wonderful. In those instances, drawbacks become attributes — a crooked mouth holds a bassoon just so; a big, ungainly man summons forth ravishing notes — and we understand the splendid meritocracy that the arts provide.

It doesn't count, at those times, that the meritocrats don't look so good in short skirts or tuxedos.