Racism is a white issue; it festers inside those of us who benefitted by being raised with unearned privilege. When I cause harm to others, I apologize without defending my ignorance and bias. I commit to honestly self-examining my white fragility and unconscious racism. When teaching and performing, I consciously choose to widen the canon by including music composed, performed, and analyzed by non-white artists and scholars.
I am committed to fairness, diversity, and inclusion within the historically elitist, sexist, and racist microcosm of Western Classical Music. Representation matters.
Black Lives Matter.
Here are some resources to help us diversify our classical music community. Please help me expand this list!
This google spreadsheet is co-created by composers and theorists around the world. This resource list can help you add music by BIPOC composers into your musical life: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1CMnSjvraO1Ho68XUrPpmegBhVmD0pSaQkj17T7MPA6w
Diverse Music Theory Examples https://diversemusictheoryexamples.com/
Diverse Music Theory Examples by Women https://musictheoryexamplesbywomen.com/
Project Spectrum is a graduate student-led coalition of music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists with a two-fold mission. One part of the mission is to shift the large-scale culture of U.S. American and Canadian music academia toward equity by confronting racism, sexism, ableism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, settler-colonialism, and other forms of discrimination and injustice. The other is to bolster community, share resources, and hold space for those academics who are marginalized by the academy. These missions are fundamentally intertwined, and taken together, they serve to diversify and strengthen music academia. https://www.projectspectrummusic.com/resources
Arts Administrators of Color (AAC) is an arts service network that focuses on networking and community building through the arts. We are advocates and continue to fight for equity in the arts through collaboration, forums, and outlets that provide a voice for arts administrators and artists of color where there may not be one. https://aacnetwork.org/about-us/
National Alliance for Audition Support (NAAS): Use this resource to invite Black and Latino classical artists to your auditions, stages and communities. If you or your students are Black or Latinx, please register! https://www.sphinxmusic.org/naas-musician-database/
Sphinx Composer Resources Directory: a link to many useful repertoire links https://www.sphinxmusic.org/composer-resource-directory/
Violinist Rachel Barton Pine has long been committed to playing and cataloging works by Black composers. https://www.rbpfoundation.org/black-composers/
Michigan based cellist/composer Jeremy Crosmer offers some free arrangements of string quartets by Black composers: https://www.jeremycrosmer.com/black-composers
Flute Music by African American Composers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VQCMq7k_IaGEKkscPjhBeGsjvkW-1NfIrLR_-5KnvFg/htmlview#gid=0
National Alliance for Audition Support – Committment between three organizations to increase diversity of US Orchestras: https://www.sphinxmusic.org/attachments/Three-National-Organizations-Partner-to-Create-National-Alliance-for-Audition-Support.pdf
Institute for Composer Diversity – ongoing compilation of composers, instrumental and choral repertoire. https://www.composerdiversity.com
The Queer Songbook Orchestra are a Toronto based 13-piece chamber pop ensemble, dedicated to exploring and uplifting queer narrative in pop music. With the queer lens intact they are looking through the last century of popular music and bringing forward obscured 2SLGBTQ historical narratives, as well as the personal stories of members of the community and the songs most deeply connected to them. http://www.queersongbook.com/about