Female Supremacy Articles - Page 23

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Women have made up at least half of the violin students in music schools for at least 15 years, and the ratio has even reached 80/20 in certain classes, said Fletcher, former head of the school of music and professor of music at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

It doesn't hurt that along with enormous talent these young women possess no shortage of sex appeal, something not lost on market-savvy concert presenters and record companies.

"When you have the combination of a violinist who has incredible ability and the marketability, that's a recipe that has been intriguing to the field," Hwang-Williams.

She points to successful female ensembles套装 — pieces of clothing worn together such as the Eroica and Ahn trios, who have the skills to compete with other groups but don't shy from capitalizing on their pulchritude.

Certainly, there have been noted female violinists in the past, such as the Hungarian soloist Jelly d'Aranyi (1893-1966), who was the dedicatee of Maurice Ravel's famed "Tzigane," but they were typically the odd exception.

More recently, violinists such as Kyung-Wha Chung, who was born in Korea in 1948, and younger artists such as Anne Sophie Mutter, 43, and Midori, 35, have served as trailblazers for this new generation of performers.

Linda Wang, a violinist in her mid-30s who recently joined the music faculty at the University of Denver's Lamont School of Music, said several of these artists, including Chung and Mutter, served as role models for her.