Oregon’s most prominent classical music festival hires a performer who it says it later learned had been accused of, though not charged with, serious crimes. After learning of his troubled history, the festival withdraws its offer, and the player won’t be performing in the festival after all. Case closed.

Or is it? In fact, the troubling story of the musician who has been accused of rape, New York Philharmonic trumpeter Michael Muckey, and the Oregon Bach Festival’s conduct before and after hiring and then un-hiring him, raises larger issues about transparency and power in one of Oregon’s most prominent and important artistic institutions.

It’s important to say at the outset that Muckey denies wrongdoing and hasn’t been charged with a crime, and while one investigation from his employer, the New York Philharmonic, resulted in his suspension, a later arbitration procedure, initiated by the musicians union and conducted under a different standard, found insufficient grounds for that suspension. He was then reinstated as a member of the Philharmonic’s trumpet section — only to be “sidelined” (in the word of a New York Times headline story) last week after publication of an incendiary story in New York magazine that seems to cast doubt on his exoneration. Muckey has in turn sued the NY Phil for his current suspension.

That development, in turn, has provoked an uproar in a classical music establishment that regularly endures such abuses of power. Many of Muckey’s own colleagues resist performing with him, and dozens of musicians nationwide — including some from the Oregon Symphony — have signed a petition denouncing his alleged behavior and the orchestra’s response. 

Most of that aspect of the story lies beyond the scope of ArtsWatch’s Oregon focus, and we urgently recommend that you first read the New York story, in all its disturbing detail (we’ll wait), because it’s impossible to understand the Oregon musicians’ reactions, and this story’s significance, without it. But what did happen here deserves at least scrutiny, and may have repercussions beyond the Bach Festival. 

Changing Practices

We’ll pick up the story last October, in Eugene, when Oregon Symphony trumpeter Doug Reneau received a call from a fellow orchestral trumpet player, asking if he was performing at this summer’s Oregon Bach Festival, where he’d performed every season (pandemic pauses excepted) since 2016. His overall experience there had been “strongly positive,” Reneau told ArtsWatch. “I’ve had some terrific artistic and social experiences at the festival. It’s become an important part of my income during the summer when the Oregon Symphony doesn’t pay us. It’s been an important part of my work year and afforded me some musical opportunities I would not have had otherwise.” 

The feeling was apparently mutual. In 2022 and 2023, “Mr. Reneau was a member of the trumpet section and was elevated to principal on a project-by-project interim basis when the first call principal trumpet was not available,” a Bach Festival spokesperson told ArtsWatch. “While filling the role of principal for specific projects, Mr. Reneau was consulted for hiring recommendations in the same manner as every other principal in the orchestra.”

 Although the exact determination process after he made recommendations remained opaque to Reneau, “I tried to hire local players who’d been terrific section members in the past and to reach out to more diverse groups, including women,” he says. “We had two last year.” He says conductors and festival administrators gave him “only positive feedback regarding my playing,” and might be interested “in engaging me in future discussions about the festival as a whole.”

On the other hand, “I’ve also had some frustrating experiences over the years dealing with their hiring practices.”

According to Reneau, the festival has mostly relied on top players from across the Pacific Northwest, which boasts strong players in the Oregon, Seattle and Eugene Symphony orchestras, among others, plus the UO’s own music faculty members. 

“The Bach Festival, like a lot of summer festivals, doesn’t have any kind of audition or tenure process,” Reneau explains. “Players are contracted at will like any other freelance gig. There’s no guarantee of anybody being hired. They clearly have their right to hire whoever they want.”

But beginning last year, according to Reneau, the festival seemed to be changing its hiring practices, without telling the musicians about those changes. Nor had the festival asked Reneau about hiring either Muckey or the trumpet player who surprisingly called him last fall. The latter told Reneau that they’d been hired to play three major programs at this summer’s festival, despite having no previous history with the festival.

Reneau knew the caller to be a fine player — but was puzzled why he hadn’t heard anything about the hiring from the festival itself, inasmuch as he’d been responsible for hiring OBF trumpeters for the preceding two years. Invitations typically wouldn’t go out for months, usually the February or even March preceding each festival.

Reneau emailed the festival to find out what was going on. The administration replied that they were planning to offer him a contract to perform this summer, and enclosed an excerpt of their hiring procedures.

“Beginning with the 2024 season invitation process, OBF began prioritizing contract relationships with performers who were available to participate in a majority, if not all, of OBF’s projects with any given ensemble,” the Festival told ArtsWatch in a statement. “Given the limited availability of the former first call trumpet, OBF decided to recruit a new first call trumpet for the 2024 season.” 

This was the first Reneau had heard about OBF recruiting a new first trumpeter, and the first he’d seen of any formal hiring criteria, even though they’d apparently been issued the preceding January — but not disclosed to Reneau when he was choosing the previous summer’s trumpeters. He was surprised to find other new priorities.

“As an international music festival, OBF further sought to engage orchestral performers from the ranks of the United States’ most esteemed ensembles, with an emphasis on individuals who would also expand diversity, in all its forms, within the OBF Modern Orchestra,” OBF confirmed to ArtsWatch.  

Reneau totally supported the diversity initiative, but wondered about the push to hire musicians holding titled positions (e.g. Principal Trumpet) in the top-ranked American orchestras, like the New York Philharmonic and other familiar big names. (Tiers aren’t necessarily indicative of an individual player’s quality or ability to work with other colleagues, but are determined by factors such as orchestra budget, pay scales, etc.)

This past February, Reneau did receive his promised invitation to perform at the 2024 Oregon Bach Festival. But this time, he wouldn’t be the principal trumpet player. That plum position had been offered to, and accepted by, the New York Philharmonic’s Matthew Muckey.

Serious Accusations

Reneau had actually met the NY Phil trumpeter more than a decade ago, under circumstances similar to those that a few years later would lead to the accusations that resurfaced this month.

Reneau was then a student attending a summer music festival in Colorado, and one of his colleagues knew someone in the trumpet section of the NY Philharmonic — which was engaged in a regular summer residency in nearby Vail. Reneau’s fellow student’s connection got them invited to a small gathering at a rented Vail condo. Reneau doesn’t recall the details of Muckey’s off-putting behavior these many years later, only that Muckey struck him as “very young and very immature to be playing associate principal in the New York Philharmonic,” he recalls.

Two years later, with the orchestra back in Vail on tour, Cara Kizer, then playing horn with the Philharmonic, “told the Vail Police Department at the time that she had been sexually assaulted after spending the evening with the two players [at Muckey’s condo] and was given a drink she came to believe was drugged, according to police records,” the New York Times reported. One of those players was Matthew Muckey. Kizer said she had suddenly passed out and recalled nothing more until awakening, dizzy and ill, the following morning. 

The rest of the sordid details — and, fair warning, they’re hard to read — that led her to believe she had been assaulted are described in this April’s explosive New York magazine story. The Colorado district attorney declined to prosecute.

Despite the lack of legal action, word of the incident spread widely throughout the insular classical music world. “I was aware something had happened with Matt Muckey in 2010 or 2011,” Reneau remembers. “I didn’t know the details then.” 

But by last year, after Muckey’s initial 2018 firing by the NY Phil and then forced reinstatement (all covered by the New York Times and beyond), “I was keenly aware of his termination from the [New York] Philharmonic,” Reneau recalls. “There’s maybe 200 trumpet players among major American orchestras. The orchestral trumpet world is a small group, and word travels fast. I was aware that he’d been fired and reinstated two years later. I still didn’t know a lot of the details. But I knew enough to know that I didn’t want to work with him.”

Reneau said as much to the Oregon Bach Festival in replying to its invitation to engage him for the 2024 festival. “I told them I wouldn’t be participating if [Muckey] were on the roster,” Reneau says. “And I let them know that the New York Times has written about this.” He also emailed the info to other trumpeters who’d worked with OBF in the past.

Despite widespread notoriety in the classical music world, the news about Muckey’s past controversies came as a surprise to the Oregon Bach Festival.

“At the time the contract was executed, OBF was unaware of Mr. Muckey’s 2018 dismissal by the New York Philharmonic, subsequent reinstatement in 2020, and any context surrounding those actions,” the festival told ArtsWatch in a statement. “The festival was informed, via email, about the allegations against Mr. Muckey on February 14, 2024, by Doug Reneau. Prior to February 14, the festival had no knowledge of Mr. Muckey’s history.”

Troubled History

Reneau was surprised to hear that the Oregon Bach Festival hadn’t a clue about Muckey’s history. His hiring didn’t occur in a vacuum.

You don’t need to have read or watched Mozart in the Jungle to know that the hermetic classical establishment has long been beset by harassment scandals. One 2017 study found that six in 10 female classical musicians reported experiencing sexual harassment, and in a 2022 survey from the Independent Society of Musicians, 68% of women working in the orchestral sector reported experiencing sexual harassment.

The list of classical musicians recently accused of misconduct includes such prominent figures as Metropolitan Opera and Boston Symphony conductor James Levine, tenor and Los Angeles Opera general director Placido Domingo, Montreal Symphony conductor Charles Dutoit, and Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster William Preucil. One of the latter’s accusers is Raffaela Kalmar, the violinist wife of Oregon Symphony Music Director Laureate Carlos Kalmar, who, ironically, has himself been subject to accusations of bullying there, and who in turn recently sued his current employer, the Cleveland Institute of Music, after an investigation he claims cleared him of wrongdoing.

Along with CIM, elite academies including the Juilliard School and Berklee College have also faced serious charges of harassment perpetrated by faculty members.  

As if the fraught classical music environment weren’t enough to place festivals on alert in hiring decisions, the Bach Festival itself has had uncomfortable experiences with both accusations of harassment and lack of transparency in addressing complaints. 

In the mid 1990s, rumors swirled about sexual harassment allegations and a confidential legal settlement against a festival administrator (not founders Helmuth Rilling or Royce Saltzman). As recently as 2022, one of the festival’s finalists for its long-open artistic director position was fired from New York’s prestigious Trinity Wall Street Church after accusations of sexual assault, and withdrew from consideration for the Oregon post.

While performing for the first time at the Oregon Bach Festival in 2007, newly hired UO faculty member Lydia Van Dreel “talked to the artistic administrator at the time about the repeated inappropriate behavior” of one of the orchestra’s principal players. “The artistic administrator dismissed me by saying that [Rilling] really valued those players and it wouldn’t do any good to complain because nothing would change,” Van Dreel told ArtsWatch. “If I’d known more about my Title IX rights in 2007, I’d have gone over his head” and taken her complaint to higher University of Oregon levels. After that incident, “I chose to distance myself from the festival by finding other artistic outlets where I felt my contribution and personhood were valued and respected,” Van Dreel says.

Given these experiences at the festival and in the surrounding classical music world, “it is extremely concerning that [administrators] could be unaware of [Muckey’s history], especially given the festival’s history with harassment,” Reneau says. Even though the festival did the right thing in withdrawing its offer to hire him, the fact that it could make the initial mistake at all should concern any Oregon classical music fan.

Other classical music festivals have been far more active in protecting players from predators. Since the #metoo movement emerged, Van Dreel says, things have slowly started to change in at least some corners of the cozy classical miniverse. When Van Dreel played at the Colorado Music Festival, hiring procedures were clearly and transparently spelled out. Oregon’s Britt Festival, where Van Dreel has often performed, “has done a great job in addressing workplace culture and making it clear that workplace harassment is not tolerated,” and tells all musicians exactly how to file complaints and details their rights if they experience harassment. 

When James Boyd became the Bach Festival’s acting director in 2022,  he told  Van Dreel “that he was planning to put together a committee to address workplace culture and invited me to be on it, but that task force never materialized,” Van Dreel recalls. “In this same [December 2022] meeting, I expressly requested that harassment be taken very seriously by OBF, that all staffers be trained in how to respond to any concerns about harassment, and that musicians are given clear information about what to do in the event they feel they are being harassed or made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome.”

Months later, when Van Dreel eagerly opened the packet of information supplied to performers for last summer’s festival, the UO hornist was disappointed to see no mention of anti-harassment policies.

“When I couldn’t find anything in the paperwork about it, I was heartbroken,” Van Dreel says. “We do have a pervasive problem in this culture. I was deeply disappointed to not have this addressed.” When Van Dreel brought those concerns to Boyd this winter after finding out OBF had hired Muckey, he explained “that they had decided not to put any supplementary information about harassment in the musician packets so as not to duplicate information available on the UO websites.”

“OBF abides by the contracting policies and procedures of the University of Oregon,” the festival told ArtsWatch in a statement. “The festival’s unique structure does not allow for the flexibility afforded to other arts organizations around the country.”

That’s not good enough, Van Dreel says. Most festival players are occasional visitors to campus and are unlikely to know UO policy or track it down “on an obscure website,” Van Dreel says, unlike the strong, clear zero-tolerance policies announced and enforced at other festivals. 

Moreover, Reneau points out, the Bach Festival can indeed create its own, stronger policies than its UO host’s when it wants to — it did exactly that in crafting new policies about increasing diversity and quality among festival players by changing its recruiting approach last year. 

Speaking of which, Van Dreel says, the notion of recruiting titled players from major orchestras “perpetuates the sense of entitlement and power” that underlies some workplace abuses. “It’s a culture that disrespects UO faculty and Oregon Symphony musicians. Creating a collaborative environment where people feel valued and their ideas are brought forward and taken seriously is really important, and that is not the current culture of the Bach Festival.” 

Rejection or Retaliation?

However lax Bach Festival officials might have been in scrutinizing its hires, they undeniably moved swiftly to rectify their blunder in inviting Muckey to perform this summer after learning his history from Reneau. Within a week, the festival told ArtsWatch, “on February 21, 2024, OBF terminated its contract with Mr. Muckey in its entirety in accordance with section 17(b) of the University of Oregon Standard Terms and Conditions,” which allowed UO to, “at its sole discretion, terminate this Contract in whole or in part upon 30-days’ written notice to Contractor.” 

The festival says Muckey did not perform any services for OBF during the 17 days he was under contract (which wouldn’t have taken effect until this June), and received no compensation from the university. 

However, the festival did not tell Reneau of Muckey’s removal. “OBF never informed me that Mr. Muckey’s contract was subsequently terminated,” Reneau told ArtsWatch. “If they had, I would very likely have considered accepting the offer of work. I only found out on March 13th, when another colleague presented a similar refusal to work to OBF, that, ‘Matthew Muckey is not a participant in the 2024 orchestra.’ So as far as I knew, up until March 13, Mr. Muckey was still on contract.”

Instead of telling Reneau that the condition that had precluded him from playing in this summer’s festival was now removed, so that he could accept its invitation to perform this summer, OBF went ahead and hired the rest of the trumpet section. The festival says the new roster will be posted in June, but Reneau has learned that the new principal trumpeter turns out to be the Japanese musician Hayato Tanaka, whom Reneau calls “a terrific trumpet player… who expands the diversity of the orchestra, but his current position is Principal Trumpet of the Tucson Symphony, a smaller, regional orchestra,” not in the top tier the festival was aiming for. 

Another name was missing from the OBF Modern Orchestra trumpet section: Doug Reneau’s, leaving him out for the first time since 2016.

“It feels like a slap in the face to be demoted after all these years, and [especially] after a conversation the previous year about my being more involved in the festival,” he says. “They just cut me loose.”

Why did OBF fail to honor its initial invitation to Reneau after he told it about Muckey’s past?

“At the time of the offer, Mr. Reneau informed OBF administration about his concerns surrounding the hiring of Mr. Muckey and indicated multiple times that he would not participate in the festival this summer,” the festival told ArtsWatch. “Festival administration responded to Mr. Reneau’s concerns by thanking him for coming forward and assuring Mr. Reneau that the festival takes these matters seriously. Mr. Reneau did not respond to that communication, nor a prior response offering to speak on the phone, and has not been in contact with OBF administration since. He never accepted the invitation that was extended to him. At this time, all positions have been filled for the trumpet section in the 2024 season.”

Reneau supports his colleagues who are playing OBF this summer. “Many of these musicians rely heavily on freelance work like this, and do not have the luxury of being able to stand on principle and refuse this work,” he says. “I have communicated that sentiment to past OBF trumpeters as I have updated them. (I emailed them as soon as I found out Muckey was hired.) I truly hope players who are participating in the festival this year have positive experiences.”

But Reneau adds that “it is disingenuous at best and misleading at worst for OBF to imply that I flatly refused to participate in OBF no matter what.” He believes his February 14 email made it clear that his refusal to perform was clearly conditional: 

“Just wanted to let you know I won’t be playing OBF this summer, due to the appointment of Matthew Muckey as principal trumpet for 2024,” he wrote upon receiving the initial offer. “[A]s long as OBF continues to hire [Muckey] to play in the trumpet section, I will respectfully decline to participate in the festival.” 

Once he learned about the festival’s “un-hiring” of Muckey, why didn’t Reneau contact the festival again himself? “If they had informed me of Mr. Muckey’s contract termination directly, making it clear that they would still honor my initial contract, I might have agreed to play the festival,” he explains. But “I had experienced enough frustration with OBF in the past year that Mr. Muckey’s involvement, however short-lived, really was the last straw,” Reneau says. “It took a week for them to respond to my email, and when they did, there was no apology for having hired Mr. Muckey and there was no ownership of having made a serious mistake, even if an honest one, made out of ignorance. Their handling of the situation— mostly silence and continued lack of transparency — dissuaded me from reaching out.”

It’s not enough for the festival to withdraw its invitation to Muckey, Reneau says. To prevent similar incidents in future, it should reveal exactly how it made the mistake in the first place — and redress the process deficiencies that allowed it to happen, in case next time it’s not lucky enough to have a player who knew of a hiree’s problematic past.

“People have the right to know how a festival with as strong a reputation as the Oregon Bach Festival could have hired someone with this kind of history without knowing something about it,” Reneau says. “How could you be an administrator in classical music and not have any awareness of [Muckey’s] past? And if they did know, and hired him anyway, that’s troubling too. That level of ignorance and incompetence needs to be addressed. The classical music community deserves that.”

The festival’s lack of transparency, he says, extends beyond this incident, to the festival’s failure to explain to its musicians (or anyone else) why it forced out previous artistic director Matthew Halls in 2017, why it took seven years to finally name a new artistic leadership team despite several summers of inconclusive audition concerts, why it failed to clearly enunciate hiring criteria and harassment policies, and more. “We still don’t know who’s in charge of the [OBF] Modern Orchestra,” Van Dreel says.

Even if OBF had reached out to him, Reneau isn’t sure he wants to play there again. “For an organization with so many years of harassment debacles and Title IX violations behind them not to perform the most basic due diligence in hiring truly was astounding,” he says. “I don’t want to work in an environment where the staff issues vague, corporate-style promises about safe, inclusive workplaces but doesn’t take contractor vetting or victim reporting seriously. It just wasn’t worth fighting for.”

Response and Reform

However slow major classical institutions have been to respond to the abuses identified by journalists and courts, outrage has been growing against classical music institutions’ culture of sexism, bullying, and abuse of power — and pushback has followed. Dozens of classical musicians, composers, administrators, and faculty members from around the country have signed an online petition decrying the orchestra’s actions and calling for the investigation into Muckey and another NY Philharmonic player also accused in the Kizer case to be reopened and the players again suspended. ArtsWatch readers will recognize the names of many world-famous composers and performers whose music has graced our pages and Oregon stages in recent years. Oregon signees include Oregon Symphony/45^th Parallel violist and occasional ArtsWatch contributor Charles Noble, composers Andrea Reinkemeyer and Kirsten Volness, Lydia Van Dreel, Doug Reneau, Alicia Michele Waite, Heather Blackburn, and probably others I’ve missed — it’s a long  and ever-growing list. 

Orchestra musicians are donning teal ribbons — April was Sexual Assault Awareness Month — in support of female survivors of workplace abuse in classical music. Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, whose Mass for the Endangered is being performed at this summer’s Bach Festival, eloquently denounced classical music’s long-standing sexist culture, receiving hundreds of likes, including from some prominent Oregon musicians. Baltimore Symphony principal oboist Katherine Needleman, whose Facebook page has become a hub of conversation about sexism in classical music in general and the NY Philharmonic case in particular, has offered pointed suggestions to other orchestras and organizations that want to support – or at least be perceived as supporting – harassment survivors and other women in the field. 

The New York Philharmonic just commissioned an independent investigation of its “culture,” but the orchestra’s actions so far seem to focus only on itself and its present and future — not on making reparations to the women whose lives and careers were damaged by the alleged behavior of its employees. Nor has the union, which now says it supports the investigation, said anything about making amends to the women for its role in pushing back against their charges. Nor has the Philharmonic released Kizer from the nondisclosure agreement she signed with the orchestra after the arbitration hearing, which prevents her from telling her story publicly. 

As for the Oregon Bach Festival, “Festival administration is actively discussing the future vetting of new contractors,” according to a statement the festival sent to ArtsWatch. “OBF administration realizes that, even in cases like the current one, a criminal background check would not suffice in discovering information that could affect decision making. OBF leadership is committed to an ongoing process of reviewing and refining its hiring processes.” And Van Dreel reports that, for this upcoming season, OBF has changed course, and sent out information on harassment policies to the musicians. 

These, and speedily withdrawing Muckey’s invitation, are all welcome and commendable responses to this incident. But Reneau and others believe more needs to be done to make the festival’s culture more transparent to and supportive of its musicians.

This issue transcends the Oregon Bach Festival and even Oregon. As more accusations surface, any festival or classical orchestra that invites guest performers is on notice that they’re going to have to step up scrutiny to protect their other performers. Some musicians accused of assault have performed in Oregon before, and might be invited again. If so, new, transparent vetting processes may be needed to protect other players. Who will devise those? How will musicians be involved in creating them?  What if a future organization isn’t so fortunate to have a Doug Reneau to sound the alarm, hires someone with a history of abuse – and then that person goes on to harass another Oregon performer while here?

Reneau notes that he’s a trumpet player, not a lawyer, and in no position to devise a policy that protects innocent-till-proven-guilty accusees, while also protecting musicians from predators. “The obvious first step is when people tell you something awful has happened to them, we should assume they’re telling the truth, and act accordingly,” he says. He recommends truly independent third party investigations to in-house inquiries in which investigators have neither the expertise nor incentive to determine possibly unpleasant truths. 

“I think, not just structurally but culturally, when we become aware of anybody — musicians, staff, administrators — having a history of abusing other people, they need to be categorically shunned,” Reneau says. “We have to call it out. Otherwise it doesn’t stop.”

Van Dreel still holds out hope for change. “I even have hope current management will do the right thing. I have had productive conversations with James Boyd. But I feel like if change can’t happen from within, it has to happen from without.”

For all his continuing concerns about the Oregon Bach Festival’s lack of transparency and inadequate protection for its players, Reneau says his fellow musicians’ response to his own raising of the alert about the Bach Festival’s hiring of Muckey has been “largely positive. It’s a complex issue, with different root causes and potential solutions. Certainly reasonable people can disagree about how we go about changing the culture in our industry, but there’s widespread agreement that people like this should not have a place in our industry. A lot of people share the anger.”

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Thanks to Amy Adams for research assistance on this story.