What Happened When an Orchestra Said Goodbye to All-Male Concerts

In 2021, Marlene Brüggen, a concert planner in Germany, was listening to an episode of the podcast “Herrengedeck” and heard about a pop music festival with gender parity woven into its programming. The next day, she looked at her own festival’s planning chart, with some 200 concerts. Women were seriously underrepresented.

“We hadn’t paid attention to that at all,” Brüggen said in an interview. “It was as if the bandages had been taken off my eyes.”

That year, Brüggen applied for a job as director of artistic planning with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Her job interview included questions about the music she would program if hired. With her earlier epiphany in mind, she suggested the orchestra play more music by women. She got the job.

Later, when she and the orchestra’s music director, Robin Ticciati, and its managing director, Thomas Schmidt-Ott, were discussing the 2023-24 season, they decided not just to include more female artists, but also to require every orchestra concert to feature at least one work written by a woman. In the fall, the orchestra plastered Berlin’s walls with posters that read “No concert without a female composer!”

“The most fascinating or innovative thing about her idea wasn’t the fact of performing female composers,” Schmidt-Ott said in an interview. “It was doing it in every concert.”

I went to nine performances during the season, between November and May, and heard 11 pieces by female composers. All the works were new to me, imbuing each concert with a sense of discovery unusual for an orchestra’s subscription series.