Gemma Camps, a baton in a world of men

PalmaGemma Camps (Palma, 1994) will fulfill a dream on April 24 and 25. Or close a circle. Or both at the same time. It will be then when she returns to the Teatre Principal in Palma, where she says she fell in love with opera. Now, with the commission to direct one. “I perfectly remember the first one I saw there, sitting in the stalls at 15 years old. It was La Bohème, and I knew immediately that I wanted to dedicate myself to this,” she admits. Sixteen years later, she will be in charge of the musical direction of La veu humana, a production that is part of the 40th edition of the Principal's Opera Season. With stage direction by Roberto G. Alonso and Marga Cloquell as soprano, it is expected to be one of the premieres of the season. It certainly will be for Camps, who at 31 years old has become one of the prominent figures in musical direction, a field where even now women, and much more so young women, are an exception. According to the most comprehensive study to date on this issue, by the SGAE Foundation, women directors did not reach 8% in 2019.

“Both when I was studying composition in Palma and when I was studying conducting in Madrid, the vast majority of people I dealt with were men,” Camps recalls. “At most, there was a female professor. In the case of the Conservatory, I think of Carme Fernández, who was already a pioneer. In the conducting program, in Madrid, another girl started with me, but she didn't last and, after the first year, she dropped out. In the professional field, I've found that the situation doesn't change much either. In amateur choirs and groups, there are usually more women, because it's like with cooking: at home, women do the cooking, but the professionals, the chefs, are usually men. The vast majority of professional conductors are men who are about ten years older than me,” she confesses. And yet, from a very young age, she was very clear that she wanted to dedicate herself to conducting.

“You'll be the first!”

“50 or 60 years ago, women began to pave the way, but there are still few role models”, she states, pointing to her environment as a determining factor in achieving her goals. “I come from a very cultural family, where there has always been theatre, literature, and music, even though there wasn’t a single professional musician in the family. Music captivated me from a very young age. I don’t remember any moment in my life when I didn’t want to dedicate myself to it, although I didn’t know how until I was older”, she shares. “I am a percussionist, I have studied piano and also singing, but conducting allows me to manipulate music from another perspective, to get involved through all the instruments. Now, I perfectly remember that one day I told my mother that I didn’t know if I could dedicate myself to it because we never saw women conductors anywhere. And she replied that it didn’t matter, that I could be the first. I’ve been fortunate to have this support that not everyone has. And that’s why it’s so important for girls to see us conducting, to normalize it”.

In fact, having become one of the leading figures in musical direction on the national stage – at 25 she was directing the orchestra and choirs of the Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid and has since remained the only woman to direct a university orchestra in the community – is another step on the path she has taken since she was very young to achieve this normalization. She was only ten years old when she became, along with Sònia Aguareles and Helena Dodd, one of the first three girls to join the Escolania dels Blauets de Lluc, in 2005. Twenty years later, however, she still perceives differences due to being a woman dedicated to conducting.

“It doesn't mean it always happens, but it's true that often you realize that the musicians receive things differently because a woman is saying it. Or that they criticize a director they had and remember her precisely because she was a woman. This makes it so that, as a woman, when you reach a position of responsibility, you feel more observed, which forces you to adopt a vigilant stance. You are on alert, you are careful, because women don't have the right to mediocrity when we achieve a job of responsibility. If we do it badly, it's because we are women, and we all have the right to make mistakes, don't we? Men also have bad days.” These differences, Camps clarifies, also extend to more purely aesthetic matters, which may seem anecdotal but are not. “Look, I conduct orchestras and choirs that are part of my daily life, and I see the musicians often. Well, when I go on stage to conduct a concert, someone always tells me I look beautiful. Which is fine, great, but would they say that to a man? It's this constant feeling that everything you do can be commented on and criticized, and that you always have to defend that if you've gotten where you are, it's not because you're a woman, nor to tick a box. That maybe you've earned it, and that's it.”

More women studying music

Who also notes the difficulties women face in accessing certain spaces in professional music is Cristina Martínez, current manager of the Symphony Orchestra of the Balearic Islands. “For many years the world of professional music has been a male-dominated world”, she states, “but little by little I believe it is starting to change. And it happens to me personally now, as manager, that I realize that sometimes it seems I have to do more work, that I have to prove something they don't need to prove. And until I occupied this position, I wasn't really aware of it”. Not only in positions of responsibility, such as direction and management, but also among performers of certain instruments, there is, still today, a greater male presence. However, the manager of the Symphony acknowledges that the only criterion taken into account when selecting performers has always been musical quality. “When we talk about equality plans, I always say that in a place like the Symphony, there are things that are complicated. Because in the auditions, we don't see if they are men or women, we only listen to how the instrument sounds and based on that we evaluate them. In the last auditions we held, one woman and two men obtained a position. And the more women there are studying music, the more there will be who reach these positions. Now there are more women in the Conservatory, and in orchestras, and everywhere. It is known that things are starting to change”.