Updated April 19
Two members of the New York Philharmonic who were accused of sexual misconduct, dismissed in 2018, then returned to the players’ roster in 2020 after an arbitrator ruled that they were unjustly fired, are not rehearsing and performing with the orchestra following publication of an article in New York magazine recounting the incident.
In the article, by Sammy Sussman, a former philharmonic horn player, Cara Kizer, alleges that she was sexually assaulted, possibly after being drugged, during an evening with the orchestra’s principal oboist, Liang Wang, and associate principal trumpeter, Matthew Muckey, in 2010, while the orchestra was performing in Vail, Colorado. The two men have denied Kizer’s accusation:
(via http://artsjournal.com)
The article “prompted a lot of strong feelings” among the orchestra’s musicians, the philharmonic’s president, Gary Ginstling, told The New York Times’ Javier C. Hernández. “Mr. Ginstling declined to say when they might rejoin the ensemble, or whether the orchestra would once again seek their termination. But he noted that the Philharmonic faced constraints” after the arbitrator ruled against the two men’s termination.
“The Philharmonic decided that it would be best for Liang and the other musician to take a couple of weeks off while the Philharmonic manages the firestorm that the distorted article ignited,” Wang’s lawyer, Alan S. Lewis, said in a statement to The Times.
“The orchestra committee, which represents players, said in a statement that it is ‘the overwhelming sentiment from the orchestra that we believe [Kizer]’ and that ‘we don’t believe these are isolated incidents involving Matt Muckey and Liang Wang,’ ” Hernández reports. “The committee added that the orchestra has a culture of ‘not taking musician complaints seriously so musicians often do not feel safe in raising accusations of sexual harassment and assault’ and called on management to take action to provide a safe workplace.”
Norman Lebrecht, on his Slipped Disc website, reports that Wang has been fired from a faculty position at the Taipei Music Academy and Festival in Taiwan, and that Muckey has been dismissed as principal trumpeter of the Oregon Bach Festival:
UPDATE 1: From Anne Midgette, former music critic of The Washington Post:
“Today, amid the clouds of putative support and ass-covering that are wafting around my social-media feeds in the wake of this story, I am still seeing promotional ads on those very same platforms from leading orchestras featuring the pictures of men whom I have strong reason to believe are sexual harassers, but who haven’t been outed by the press yet. And if I know, you know a lot more. It may be hard for you to believe it, but we journalists are often the last to know . . . because administrations and boards work hard to conceal it, and performers are often too scared to tell us.”
Midgette was the co-author, with Peggy McGlone, of a 2018 Post article exposing sexual harassment in the classical-music industry. Here’s the full blog post that Midgette wrote in the wake of Sussman’s New York magazine piece:
http://annemidgette.com/blog/f/an-open-letter-to-the-classical-music-field?s=03
(via http://artsjournal.com)
UPDATE 2: The Times’ Hernández reports that the New York Philharmonic has hired a lawyer to “launch an independent investigation into the culture of the New York Philharmonic in recent years.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/arts/music/new-york-philharmonic-investigation.html
Letter V 