Faculty artist Nina DeCesare says classical music’s gender disparity came into sharp focus for her when she attended the 2017 International Society of Bassists convention in Ithaca, New York. There, faculty artist Ira Gold held a luncheon discussion about the fact that, at the time, only 9.6% of the 229 bassists in the 32 American orchestras with the highest salaries were women (22 total)—and 15 orchestras employed no women in their bass sections.
DeCesare, a Baltimore Symphony Orchestra bassist, launched the Artemis Bass Initiative in February to support the next generation of women and nonbinary bassists when they enter the profession, and for its launch she collaborated with the International Society of Bassists CenterStage Series to present a “Women in Bass” virtual panel. It featured a number of the most acclaimed contemporary women bassist-educators—Nina Bernat, Kristen Bruya, Gaelen McCormick, Tracy Rowell, and Patricia Weitzel.
She was busy in the days leading up to that debut seminar, which took place over Zoom on International Women’s Day, Saturday, March 8, and paused to field a tech-support query mid-interview. Playing and teaching bass, she deadpans, she knows how to do, but “the actual business side of Artemis is a bit new for me.” Fortunately, over the past decade, women and nonbinary bassists built online relationships to support and encourage each other. “Luckily, the network was there.”
That impromptu brainstorming luncheon in 2017 planted a seed in DeCesare’s mind. “We didn’t really come up with any solutions, and at that point I was 25, teaching privately, and by no means a name in the field,” says DeCesare, who studied with pedagogue George Vance before attending Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. In 2014, she won a spot in the Oregon Symphony’s bass section, the first woman hired for the position outside of the one-year contract that Nashville Symphony bassist Kate Munagian had a few years before DeCesare arrived.
A few years later a group of undergraduate bass students collaborated with the ISB to survey its members about issues of gender equity, presenting the results during a panel discussion at the 2019 convention. DeCesare was a panelist, and the disparity was on her mind when the pandemic arrived in 2020, the same year she joined the BSO. She started a book club to sustain and continue discussions that were seeded in that convention panel. She launched a mentorship program in 2022 with about 40 participants, an ad hoc way to provide up-and-coming women bassists with some guidance. Then she started teaching at Peabody and took some time to focus on her students.
Over the past year, DeCesare felt compelled to return to her work on gender disparity, driven at least in part by the data. As discouraging as the 2017 statistics were, the situation since then has worsened. Today at the 32 American orchestras with the highest salaries, only 15 out of 226 bassists (6.6%) are women, and 18 orchestras have no women in their bass sections.
The Artemis Project aims to change those stats through its 12-month mentorship programs, regular professional development seminars, instrument scholarship funds to help address financial barriers to opportunities, and a four-day orchestral training program held at the Symposium for Women and Nonbinary Bassists at the Curtis Institute, which debuts in May.
“In the orchestral world, we still have so much progress to make on being able to hire in a fair, equitable way,” DeCesare says.
“As much as I would love for all of my students to be immediately employed in their dream job when they finish school, that’s just not a reality,” she continues, pointing out that part of her job as an educator is to prepare young musicians “to be really confident and empowered to continue to work through the challenges.”
She says, “My goal is for Artemis to feel like an extension of that [studio situation] where they have mentors and role models they can look up to and go to for help, and a community of like-minded bass players they can trust and lean on for support.”