When you picture a music director in your head, who do you think of?
[music: intro to Overture from On the Town]
Maybe you think of Leonard Bernstein,
[music: intro to Binary Sunset (Force Theme) from Star Wars]
Or John Williams.
[music: 30/90 from Tick, Tick…Boom!]
Musical theater fans might think of Johnathan Larson,
[music: intro to No One is Alone from Into The Woods]
Or Stephen Sondheim.
When you look up “famous music directors” on Google, those are some of the names that come up. Others might be Joe Hishashi, Hans Zimmer, and Simon Rattle, to name a few.
The common denominator between all of them?
[music: out]
They’re all men. Communications Freshman Jordan Klein wants to change that.
A self-proclaimed theater kid, Klein has been playing piano since she was five years old and began to take music directing seriously after music director Anna Ebbeson noticed her talent at a summer program.
KLEIN: Right from the get-go of our relationship and like the advice that she would give me, it was very clear that being a woman in this field is not easy. We are the minority. It’s a male-dominated field, musical theater, music, composition, arranging, orchestrating, music directing is all male-dominated.
Though Klein has been at Northwestern for under a year, she has already been able to work on six shows.
KLEIN: It’s important to me – here at Northwestern – to be a presence and say ‘here we are, there are lots of us.’ It’s not just me, it’s not just one other person, and truthfully we’re not encouraged at a young enough age to pursue this.
Klein’s current project is music directing the musical Rent by Jonathan Larson, which is going up the weekend of week 9 in Shanley Pavilion.
[ piano sounds from rehearsal ]
She’s co-music directing with Communications Junior Sophie Morvillo. Klein says that they instantly felt connected as a team.
[ rehearsal sounds, teaching parts ]
KLEIN: It is quite special to be like, this is the music team and we’re two women and we’re, we’re good at what we do also like, truthfully we’re both queer women and that’s really exciting, especially for this story, which is so centered around a queer community and the right to exist as queer people. So I think to have not only two women but two queer-identifying women is really exciting and not something that you get to see that often.
[ Jordan teaching a harmony in I’ll Cover You: Reprise ]
Music directing is a male-dominated field. In the summer of 2021, the musicians union in NYC surveyed its membership and learned that only 29% of its total membership is female. Three out of four Broadway orchestras are entirely male, only 8% of new Broadway scores in the last ten years were composed by women, and only 4% of the orchestrator jobs on Broadway were held by women. Through her work at Northwestern and beyond, Klein says that she hopes to help make music directing more accessible to women everywhere.
[ Harmonies from I’ll Cover You: Reprise ]
KLEIN: I hope we reach a point in time where it’s a field that it doesn’t matter. So I think in like the composition part of music theater specifically, like we can reach that point, certainly, it just takes a certain amount of encouragement and advocacy.
For WNUR News, I’m Ella Barnes.
[Fade out I’ll Cover You: Reprise ]
