June « 2008 « RogerEvansOnline.com…

I’ve been following your blog for more than a year now and the fidelity a US-American like yourself professes to the Catalan language and culture constantly amazes me, but this last post you have taken the effort to write on the biography of Xavier Montsalvatge’s biography surpasses everything I could have imagined and I really thank you for it, as Catalan was my late father’s mother tongue. On top of that the Table of Contents of your book contained a new reason for me to be amazed, in the Appendices: on page 125 you “dare” to raise the question of “the use of the term America and its derivatives in various languages,” as this use – which I consider imperial misuse – has been one of my longstanding linguistic obsessions in both my professional and activist trajectory as a writer and translator. I don’t know if Pendragon Press is considering the possibility of translating it into Spanish but if they are not, I would like to offer you a free translation in exchange for its open source Copyleft publication on the web.

Their statistics show that female brass players have only recently reached 25% of the pool of graduates; that the percentage of women in major orchestras has been increasing steadily since 1960; and that the orchestras surveyed have been hiring fewer and fewer players. At the time of writing (2000) it had already been fifteen years since one of the Big Five hired more than five players in a season.

They also show that the BSO has not lagged behind other orchestras in the hiring of women.

As Childers herself says: “It seemed that the barrier should’ve been broken awhile ago, but it makes a little sense because there isn’t a lot of turnover here, The gentleman who had the position before me retired, which is the case for most of the open positions here.”