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For evidence that public institutions can make noteworthy advances toward diversity and inclusion, look no further than the concert hall. Between 2016 and 2023, American orchestras’ programming of music by BIPOC composers rose from 2.6 percent to 18 percent, and for women and non-binary composers the proportion increased from 1.7 percent to 12.3 percent. The Institute for Composer Diversity (ICD), which conducted this research in partnership with the League of American Orchestras, also collects data on choruses. Although ICD has not yet analyzed those numbers, founder and director Rob Deemer says “it's safe to say that everything is definitely improved” for choruses as well.
On the music publishing front, Mark Lawson of ECS Publishing and MorningStar Music says his companies have enjoyed increasing demand for music by African American composers in the last 10 years and have responded by adding “a large number” of their pieces to their catalogs. As an executive editor at GIA Publishing, James Abbington is seeing “a diversity that we never would have imagined possible 10 or 15 years ago.” It was “a daring step” for the company to invite him to develop an African American church music series, he says, and its success led GIA to add a wide array of global music to its catalog in more recent years.
Afa Dworkin has observed similarly positive signs in her role as president and artistic director of the Sphinx Organization, which supports and promotes Black and Latinx classical musicians, including the vocal ensemble EXIGENCE. She’s encouraged to see that commissions and performances of works by BIPOC composers have become a common topic of conversation among choruses and orchestras. Dworkin believes efforts to diversify the repertoire are among the “more notable” ADEI advances orchestras and choruses have made, creating “a different landscape” for American concert music. “Thanks to technology, thanks to brilliant researchers and incredible artists who've been doing this work, there's really not a lack of music. There's plenty to choose from. But just like anything new, it does require work.”
That’s what choral leaders such as Robert Istad are learning as they delve more deeply into this realm, but it’s not stopping them. At every meeting he has with his artistic team at the Pacific Chorale, Istad says “we reaffirm our commitment to highlighting underrepresented composers, whether that makes our job more difficult or not.” ICD and other research initiatives such as New Muses Project that collect, analyze, and share useful information about overlooked composers make it easier to become acquainted with their music, but that is only the first step.
Did we choose this piece for the right reason?
Istad recalls a provocative conversation with a former Pacific Chorale board member that cuts right to the heart of the matter. It started with a question about the chorus’s intensified efforts to diversify its repertoire. “‘If it's diverse,’” the board member asked, “‘is that what we're going to do, whether the music is good or not?’” Istad suggested they sit down for a drink and exchange thoughts about the piece he chose. After hearing why Istad programmed it, the board member “realized that the reason they felt like it wasn’t so good is that it was a difficult piece, and the subject matter made them feel very uncomfortable. But that was the point of the piece itself,” Istad says.
Of course, difficulty is not always a criterion for Istad. “First of all, the piece has to move me,” he says, “and I try to make sure that the repertoire we choose to feature is of great substance.” When he says “we,” he means it: “I don't program in a vacuum, which is fantastic. We have a wonderful artistic team, and I always say to them, ‘I want you to hear this piece first. And then let's talk about it. How does it make you feel?’”
It's important to start the programming process with a sense of curiosity rather than a feeling of obligation, says New Muses Project co-founder Gloria Yin. Accordingly, the project’s website is designed to steer music programmers “away from checklists and away from labels and identity. We felt like that wasn't necessarily a very sustainable approach or a very fun approach.” Throughout the process, it’s essential to examine and re-examine your motives. “People need to constantly ask themselves why they want to do what they do,” says Eugene Rogers, founding conductor of EXIGENCE and artistic director of the Washington Chorus. “Why are you trying to program more of this repertoire? Why are you interested? If you don't know that, you really need to go back to the drawing board, because those of us from minority communities really can tell when people are just checking a box.”
Have we put the right piece in the right place?
For decades, music organizations have commonly considered Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, and Women’s History Month the primary occasions to present the work of Black and women composers. Deemer so often encountered complaints about that practice that he posted this recommendation on the ICD website: “Spread works by women composers, composers of color, and composers identifying with the LGBTQIA2s+ community throughout your concert season rather than only performing them on specially themed concerts.” It’s the first of eight “Suggested Best Practices” that have emerged from his conversations with musicians while building his database for ICD [see more at composerdiversity.com/best-practices]. The idea behind this practice, Deemer says, is to discourage programmers “from thinking of demographics as a theme,” instead creating reasons for newfound audiences to be engaged throughout the year.
But don’t make your corrective measure a half-measure, Dworkin cautions, by relocating the home for diverse repertoire from February or March to parts of the season where you anticipate low demand for tickets. For similar reasons, Istad avoids “programming a concert “that consists mostly of repertoire written by Eurocentric men and throwing in a five-minute piece by a contemporary female composer. To me, that is insincere,” he says. “That feels too perfunctory.”
The hard work involved here, says Dworkin, is reaching “the intentionality of truly committing to program these works on the main series, next to the quote, unquote, beloved classics. It’s important to really examine where that hesitation comes from,” she says. By remaining hesitant, “we're not really, truly showing our commitment to our audiences and to the artists who are creating this work.”
Are we making enough effort to be respectful?
When people in the choral field talk with Mark Lawson about diversifying their repertoire, he often notices “a fear of cultural appropriation. Are they doing it right? Are they honoring the work? If they are a predominantly white choir, can they sing something that uses dialect appropriately?” That fear was the first issue to come up in a MorningStar Music YouTube video on African American spirituals, a roundtable in which Lawson interviewed conductors André Thomas and Anton Armstrong, and Eileen Gunther, author of Slave Life and the Power of Spirituals. As Armstrong says in the video, concern over cultural appropriation stems largely from a desire not to perpetuate historic “abuse of and lack of respect, especially, for music of the folk idiom.”
Wendy Moy has dealt with this concern as co-artistic director of Chorosynthesis Singers, a Seattle-based ensemble that performs and fosters new music on issues of social consciousness. To assist other choruses looking for that kind of repertoire, the group has created an online resource similar to ICD’s: the Empowering Silenced Voices Choral Database. Moy (who is on ICD’s choral advisory board) frequently finds herself helping fellow conductors whose organizations “are dealing with some personal discomfort over singing stories that do not reflect their own lived experience.” In addition to thoroughly researching the music and establishing new and respectful relationships across cultures, she tells choral leaders, “We need to provide conversation space.” At Chorosynthesis, “our presentations have shifted toward how to have meaningful conversations in our rehearsals and concerts on socially conscious themes,” she says. “We are putting together performance and conversation guides for some of the pieces we have commissioned.”
Moy and her colleagues in her other position, as a conductor and music professor at Syracuse University, “purposely invite guests with strengths different from ours to collaborate in rehearsal and performance.” Her students aren’t the only ones who benefit. “For me, that is my professional development,” she says. “Because we've all been taught in a certain way and we feel pretty confident about certain things,” it becomes even more important to identify and learn from “culture bearers” and then “bring our singers into that learning experience, too. We don't know everything, right?”
In that spirit, Abbington and Rogers encourage singers not to let their concerns about cultural appropriation turn into fear. “There is no shame for anyone not knowing something or not understanding something,” Rogers says. As he introduces members of his choruses to music from outside their own cultures, “there is space for people to explore, honestly, and for me to give them honest feedback.” Look at it as an opportunity to learn and grow, says Abbington, who, in addition to his work at GIA, teaches at Emory University and Morehouse College in Atlanta. “I am always delighted and warmed by predominantly white groups that really want to sing the [African American spirituals] repertoire,” he says.
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Can I manage the work of reviving an old score?
One especially positive result of the new commitment to diverse repertoire is the attention performers have been paying to composers such as Florence Price, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Amy Beach, who were active in the 19th or early 20th century but were largely neglected after their deaths. Now, says Istad, “people are rushing to bring some of these historic works to the public.” He is one of them, and he believes the effort is important, but he says it’s also important to go into it with eyes open: “One of the problems is that there hasn't been enough scholarly work done on some of these pieces.” Deemer has been hearing the same thing from his colleagues: “A real challenge is finding clean, well edited scores of music by those composers.” In some cases, “no one has actually gone to the trouble of cleaning those scores up,” he says.
That was the situation Rogers faced with Undine Smith Moore’s oratorio Scenes from the Life of a Martyr. Rogers says Moore turned over the manuscript to her publisher not long after she completed it in 1981. While preparing the piece for the Washington Chorus’s 2023 season, Rogers discovered the publisher had only just begun to engrave it; the score was “basically in manuscript print,” he says, leaving him with the time-consuming task of “trying to get a legible score so that we could have an authentic, accurate performance.” If a score in that condition were to come from a far less familiar composer, it would be even more concerning, says Istad, because it could leave him or any conductor with an unfair impression. “The legacy of that composer is at stake,” he says.
Are there opportunities to collaborate?
The good news about these older scores, says Dworkin, is that “an incredible array” of scholars is actively working to find and vet them, and she’s aware of several music organizations invested in locating critical editions. Others in the field can benefit, she says, by “reaching out and saying, ‘We want to do something similar. How can we collaborate?’” While she notes that Sphinx does not function as a clearinghouse for hard-to-find scores, the organization can provide referrals to musicians searching for critical editions. “I'd love to see better, stronger collaborative efforts,” she says.
Some choruses have found that joint initiatives to create new music are an effective way to broaden opportunity and exposure for contemporary BIPOC and women composers. Chorosynthesis created a consortium of 13 choruses around a piece they commissioned from composer Melissa Dunphy, premiered in 2020, that juxtaposed the words of the Founding Fathers against BIPOC activists’ statements about universal voting rights. “We specifically asked Melissa not to make it full of lots of divisi,” Moy says. “We wanted it to, of course, be high quality and still represent her voice, but we wanted a piece that a community choir could present or a high school.” MorningStar is partnering with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra to publish a number of pieces the orchestra has commissioned over the past three decades for its IN UNISON Chorus, a resident ensemble that performs and preserves music from the African diaspora. Many orchestras around the country work with similar choruses, Lawson says, “but there's not enough music for them, and so this will hopefully expand that repertoire.”
Approaching the challenge of diversifying repertoire requires commitment and integrity. Choruses that have started on this path are finding a way forward and are enjoying rewards, but risk is involved. Will your longtime patrons buy tickets to hear unfamiliar repertoire? “Sometimes those concerts do not sell as well,” Rogers admits, and he says that has proven to be the main challenge to the direction he’s taking with the Washington Chorus. But it’s not a deterrent, he quickly adds. Like many colleagues in the field, Rogers looks for creative ways to pair little-known and well-known repertoire, and he says the organization as a whole is working to forge authentic connections with communities whose cultures are inspiring the chorus’s programming. Before any of that happens, there must be buy-in from the board on down, he says. “The board has been very, very deliberate with their strategic plan. They have clearly outlined their commitment to this.”
At the Pacific Chorale, Robert Istad found that his singers were “more than excited” about delving into new, more diverse repertoire. In preparing the professional premiere of Florence Price's Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight last season, “many of them became great advocates for her, and they were inspired to do research on their own,” he says. “It's been really fun to watch them embrace this repertoire and become curious themselves.”
For Moy’s students at Syracuse, a culture shift felt like a prerequisite. “They came in with the desire for more diverse repertoire,” she says. “They realized that we have not been singing music that represents their friends or even themselves.” Her program has begun moving more intentionally in that direction, she says, embracing choral literature beyond the Western canon and exploring how diverse music should be rehearsed and performed. “My choir is now more diverse,” she notes, and the same can be said for the Washington Chorus. The changing makeup of the ensemble is the strongest indicator of a culture shift, Rogers says. “We have more diversity and buy-in than I think we've ever had. It's a tangible difference that we are seeing.” And that, says Dworkin, is the reason to do this work. The music choruses and orchestras perform “ceases to become sustainable if it's not relevant. If it's not relevant to a whole slew of communities that do not see or feel or hear themselves represented on stage, then the whole field becomes irrelevant.”
Rogers and Istad agree a culture shift of this kind cannot happen without trust. As Rogers puts it, his colleagues at the Washington Chorus “know that I am not pushing an agenda. They know that this is coming from a belief, a truly lived belief, that we are better the more we understand and appreciate each other and the different backgrounds musically that we can bring.” Istad’s recent experience at the Pacific Chorale has him dreaming of a future for choral repertoire that manifests Rogers’s belief: “I hope that at the end of my career, these composers will no longer be considered diverse or underrepresented. Wouldn't that be fabulous? That because of what we're doing now, people will see that that choral music and classical music is for everyone.”
Don Lee is a media producer, editor, writer, and amateur choral singer who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. At NPR in Washington DC, he was the executive producer of Performance Today.
