Artist Rises Above Old, Familiar Tune

In this country, little girls are told they can be whatever they want to be when they grow up.

What they aren't told is that if they elect to play brass instruments professionally, they will face both covert and overt stumbling blocks as they try to enter one of the last bastions of male dominance (especially in Europe).

As Carole Dawn Reinhart built her European performance career, there must have been times when she wondered why she ever decided to become a professional trumpeter.

Critics sniped at her, remarking on her appearance as often as her playing. Impresarios hinted that a woman had no place playing a brass instrument. Directors of European conservatories and symphonies dismissed her as a "beauty queen" and told her, "It's a shame you're a girl."

Welcome to the wonderful world of sexism, which is still openly rampant in the European music community (although it's fortunately on the wane on this side of the Atlantic - most of the time).

Northwest music fans will have a chance to meet a woman who beat all the odds when Reinhart gives a master class next Sunday at the Salvation Army, 9501 Greenwood Ave. N. (call 282-5471 for information). And they can hear her play there March 25, when the trumpeter will be featured in a three-band festival. Reinhart also will be one of the judges for the annual Seattle Young Artists Music Festival, March 21-26 at the University of Washington.

A remarkable career

Reinhart's career has been remarkable enough to produce a biography, "Carole Dawn Reinhart: Aspects of a Career," written by Elena Ostleitner and Ursula Simek, and published in German and English by the WUV Universitatsverlag. The new book, complete with autobiographical sketches by Reinhart and an accompanying CD of imposing quality, leaves no doubt that this isn't the sort of player you'd call "pretty good for a girl."

Reinhart, who grew up in New Jersey and graduated from the University of Miami, also holds diplomas from the Juilliard School and the Vienna Academy of Music, where she has been a professor of music since 1983. She came by her independent spirit naturally: Her mother was a trombonist, and she handed young Reinhart a slide cornet when she was only 2 1/2. That was the start of a concert career that has spanned Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and North America.

Probably Reinhart would be playing and teaching in America if it hadn't been for a crucial Fulbright year in Vienna, where she fell in love with both the city and another young trumpeter. You'd think that when she later married Mannfred Stoppacher and settled in Berlin (later in Vienna) she'd be considered a member of the brass club in Europe. Instead, the reverse happened; in concert reviews, there were hints that her successful husband had something to do with Reinhart's engagement.

Praised, criticized for looks

That wasn't all the European reviewers hinted. She was likened to Marilyn Monroe; one writer suggested male trumpeters were in trouble because Reinhart, "the young lady dressed in flowing green, has, in addition to ability, other attributes to put on the scale."

At the same time they praised her beauty, journalists sniped at her "inferior" size and stature, arguing she was "naturally unable to achieve" the sound of her male colleagues.

Most ludicrous of all was one German review that praised her ability to look pretty even when blowing the instrument: "She never stands like a heavily breathing Brunnhilde on the podium, never does the bodily stress force her face into unattractive wrinkles."

There were many times, beginning with Reinhart's school days, when she wasn't hired for a job or engaged to perform because she was a woman. In Europe, women orchestra players are still rare.

Seattleite Jo-Ann Christen, Reinhart's longtime colleague and a fellow brass player, thinks one reason Reinhart has come so far is that she doesn't waste time in confrontation of bigots, but instead finds a way around them - usually by trying harder, and playing better, than competing trumpeters. Now, as the only woman professor in the Vienna Hochschule's department for brass, woodwind and percussion instruments, she works on instilling those precepts in her students.

In the Reinhart biography, she explains why she wasn't discouraged: "When they tried to hinder me, I simply leaped over the difficulties with my playing, instead of becoming embittered. I knew that somewhere there was a niche for me and thought to myself, if I'm diligent, some day there will be recognition. And so it was."