It wasn’t too long ago that the orchestral world recognized that it might have a race and gender problem, largely because symphonic orchestras were pretty much all white and all male. It’s not that they weren’t great, but they weren’t diverse. And there was a solution that would not only serve to eradicate bias in the audition process with almost no pain required, but would enhance the quality of music. Blind auditions were born.

Blind auditions, as they became known, proved transformative. The percentage of women in orchestras, which hovered under 6 percent in 1970, grew. Today, women make up a third of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and they are half the New York Philharmonic. Blind auditions changed the face of American orchestras.

Problem solved? So everyone thought at the time. But no more.

But not enough.

American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions, especially in regard to Black and Latino artists. In a 2014 study, only 1.8 percent of the players in top ensembles were Black; just 2.5 percent were Latino. At the time of the Philharmonic’s 1969 discrimination case, it had one Black player, the first it ever hired: Sanford Allen, a violinist. Today, in a city that is a quarter Black, just one out of 106 full-time players is Black: Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet.

It’s unclear what the racial makeup of a city has to do with the number of black musicians in its symphony. Orchestral musicians aren’t quite the same demographic as the general public. That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of black musicians who want to join the symphony, and ignores that musicians at that level aren’t necessarily drawn from the community but from the world, but it also doesn’t prove a disparity. How many black oboe players are there with the chops to play for the Philharmonic? Beats me, but that’s the universe that would matter.

The status quo is not working. If things are to change, ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.

While there is no evidence as to whether a racial imbalance exists, or doesn’t, it’s hard to complain about disparate impact when the audition is blind. The musician’s race, gender and any other characteristic that juices you up, are wholly unknown. There’s just music coming from behind the curtain, a pure meritocracy.

How can the complete elimination of consideration of irrelevant characteristics in favor of the one, and only, criterion that matters, be “untenable”?

If the musicians onstage are going to better reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, the audition process has to be altered to take into fuller account artists’ backgrounds and experiences. Removing the screen is a crucial step.

This is the trick question, whether the musicians onstage should “better reflect the diversity of the communities they serve” or be the best musicians. Are we to be serenaded by the Harrison Bergeron Symphony Orchestra? The argument isn’t quite to so cynical.

Blind auditions are based on an appealing premise of pure meritocracy: An orchestra should be built from the very best players, period. But ask anyone in the field, and you’ll learn that over the past century of increasingly professionalized training, there has come to be remarkably little difference between players at the top tier.

If the musicians are essentially indistinguishable at that very top level, then replacing a white one for a black one will result in no loss of quality, but only greater diversity. But does diversity matter in the symphony? Is it just their ability to play or is there something more involved?

It’s like an elite college facing a sea of applicants with straight A’s and perfect test scores. Such a school can move past those marks, embrace diversity as a social virtue and assemble a freshman class that advances other values along with academic achievement. For orchestras, the qualities of an ideal player might well include talent as an educator, interest in unusual repertoire or willingness to program innovative chamber events as well as pure musicianship. American orchestras should be able to foster these values, and a diverse complement of musicians, rather than passively waiting for representation to emerge from behind the audition screen.

Is the person playing timpani* also an educator or community role model, or is this the way to have the brass section demand that the orchestra play Václav Nelhýbel instead of Beethoven?

But the one question that appears to have flown under the rhetorical radar is why, given blind auditions, the racial mix of musicians hasn’t aligned with the proportion of any given race in a community. If it’s a pure meritocracy, and it is, then it will pan out however it pans out without regard to race. If it’s going from bias in favor of white musicians to bias in favor of black musicians for reasons having nothing to do with their ability play the violin, will that enhance our night at the opera?

*I left high school with the dream of playing timpani for the Berliner Philharmoniker under that anti-semite, Von Karajan. My conductor informed me that for a timpanist, I’d make a good lawyer.