Whether it’s looking at one’s own experiences or looking at the environment, Aurora Beltrán, Izaro Andrés and Miren Narbaiza clearly see the great discrimination of sex and gender in the music scene. The data also confirm the gaps significantly.
It is obvious that in the music scene of the Basque Country there are not only four or five women, and it is quite obvious that there were already more than four or five. The comparisons, however, leave some deep cracks to be seen. For example, the Basque Culture Observatory of the Basque Government, which has not updated the information since then, made a quantitative assessment of the concerts held in Álava, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa in 2022, and reported that two out of ten performers who took the stage were women. They accounted for 18.6 per cent of the total number of interpreters. The difference was also similar when looking at the signatures of the music albums: in the albums released in 2022, 10.9% of the musicians were women. Inevitably, these types of caves have long been the concern of many dissident women and genres that circulate in music in the Basque Country, but there are also many who have pointed out that the cracks do not happen in the same way. Something needs to cause the fissure. Sex and gender discrimination? “Some say no? What’s not there? It’s funny, I say yes.” Aurora Beltrán (Pamplona, 1964), musician, who has been on stage for more than 40 years.
“If the very need to talk about this today is a sign that discrimination still exists,” Beltrán admits, with a point of anger, but without any disappointment. When asked how many women there are in the music scene, he says without a doubt that it’s been a long time since “many”, but he confesses that the environment often brings a very contradictory feeling: “You look at the posters, both in the halls and in the festivals, and you think: where the hell are we?”. These are, in a sense, the two sides of the coin: it says that they have been proclaiming for years that they are frank — “and we are who” — but at the same time they see that this is not reflected in the scenarios and it is necessary to denounce it.
Even without having to go to distant mass festivals, the differences are also seen in the programs of some of the festivals and musical events of this year in the Basque Country. For example, they are made up of only twelve men from the seventeen teams that will perform on December 28 at Hatortxu Rock in Villava, Navarra. For the first time in the month of May, the festival of Reciprocal Movers was organized in Altsasu (Navarre), where women were present in two of the twenty groups that played. On the other hand, it has been announced on the weekends that the groups will perform concerts in the VoiceEnea area of the Durango Fair (Bizkaia). And the organizers recognize that the majority will be male musicians, but they emphasize that the presence of women will increase because, among other things, half of the bands have a female sicilian.
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