{"id":307263,"date":"2018-01-24T08:45:13","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T13:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newmusicusa.wpengine.com\/?p=307263"},"modified":"2022-01-13T13:05:30","modified_gmt":"2022-01-13T18:05:30","slug":"a-tool-for-change-the-women-composers-database","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/nmbx\/a-tool-for-change-the-women-composers-database\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tool For Change: The Women Composers Database"},"content":{"rendered":"

PRELUDE<\/h3>\n

Sitting at her desk at the Stamford Symphony offices, Barbara Soroca is quiet, yet she is smiling as her eyes scroll down the page. A yellow legal pad of handwritten notes is tucked under her elbow.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The book she holds is Orchestral Music: A Handbook<\/em> by David Daniels, a resource known to anyone who programs concerts, such as conductors, music directors, orchestra managers and music librarians. Soroca, CEO and president of the Stamford Symphony Orchestra, and her soon-to-be-successor, Russell Jones, have been using it to plan the orchestra\u2019s 2018-19 season, hence the notes.<\/p>\n

“I think it is important for American orchestras to play American music,” she says, placing the book off to one side. “We don\u2019t do enough of that. At the Stamford Symphony, we certainly don\u2019t do enough of that.”<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

A new endowed fund will help with that quest. The Soroca Fund for American Music, which has already raised about $150,000, will bring works by Leonard Bernstein, Copland, Charles Ives, and other contemporary composers to the stage.<\/p>\n

\u2014”Outgoing Stamford Symphony chief Barbara Soroca champions U.S. composers<\/a>” by Christina Hennessy (Connecticut Post<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Beyond the leadership, Midwest Clinic\u2019s programming is equally in need of modernization. After my second day at the conference, I realized that not a single one of the concerts I had attended included a female composer. Now, it would be impossible to see every concert at Midwest, and I had experienced just a handful of the performances. Was it a fluke that I had missed the pieces by women? To be certain, I pored through the festival program and found that of the 500 pieces performed at the Midwest Clinic by 51 different ensembles (including bands, orchestras, jazz bands, and chamber groups), only 23 pieces (4.6%) were composed by women, and just 71 (14.2%) were written by composers of color.<\/p>\n

But what about the band concerts on their own? With such enthusiasm for new music, surely the wind ensemble programming would be more diverse than that of the orchestras, right? Alas, of the 212 pieces performed by bands during the Midwest Clinic, only seven (a measly 3.3%) were written by women, and 26 (12.3%) by people of color.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u201cStepping Forward at the Midwest Clinic<\/a>\u201d by Katherine Bergman (NewMusicBox<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The excerpts above are examples of how programming decisions are being made and the ramifications of not considering diversity throughout the programming process. Administrators such as Soroca and Jones are selecting their 2018-2019 season from a reference book that, while it is the best resource of its kind for traditional orchestral repertoire, is sorely lacking in its coverage of demographic diversity. It is unclear in this particular anecdote which hardcover edition they are perusing, but even if they were using the latest update of the online version of Daniels’s compendium, they would only be able to find 87 female composers out of 1,211 total names (only 16 of whom were born in 1960 or later) or 29 black composers (only four of whom were born in or after 1960).<\/p>\n

On the bright side, they seem quite pleased with their “contemporary” programming of Ives, Copland, and Bernstein.<\/p>\n

In the example of the Midwest Clinic, one\u2019s disappointment with the lack of diversity is further enhanced by the fact that the Clinic has so many stringent limitations<\/a> already in place for ensemble performances. In addition to mandates about the published status of the works in every program (each program is allowed only one self-published work), for example, the Clinic requires programs to balance their repertoire insofar as \u201cfor every grade 4, 5, or 6 an equal number of grade 1, 2, or 3 music must be played.\u201d It would not be hard, therefore, to include a statement encouraging a demographically diverse program as well.<\/p>\n

Over the years, there have been a great many calls for diversification within the concert music community, and one of the most prevalent responses from decision-makers is that they don’t know where to find under-represented composers. Inspired to address this issue and informed by the basic construct of Daniels’s book, I took the names that were included in the comments section of my NewMusicBox column “A Helpful List<\/a>” and, in 2016, began to organize them. A few weeks ago, I announced that the Women Composers Database<\/a> was fully operational and ready for public inspection. Using a simple Google Sheets spreadsheet, I and a team of students at the State University of New York at Fredonia had compiled a searchable and browsable database of more than 3,000 women composers that conductors, performers, educators, and researchers can use (along with a related “composers of color” database that is currently being built) to aid in their pursuit of more diverse performance programming and academic curricula.<\/p>\n

\"WDP-Database\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As this project has evolved, I’ve received quite a bit of feedback and questions concerning the database. A few of the more common replies to this project that I will address in this essay are as follows:<\/p>\n