This decade is redistributing many of cards in the world of concert music, reflecting sociological considerations. The pandemic has a lot to do with it. But a real fundamental movement affects programming musical. An institute has just quantified for the first time the phenomenon.
The Holy Trinity of any self-respecting cultural — at least musical — institution is now: diversity, representativeness, inclusion. What we will call, here, for convenience the “DRI” is a very legitimate concern and a necessity, a natural evolution of things in the whole of the musical ecosystem.
When we consider, for example, the presence of women on the catwalks, we observe that the wave that began several years ago (our first article on the phenomenon dates from the beginning of 2016) is growing by bringing us more talents more interesting.
But in terms of programming, wouldn’t DRI suddenly become a dogma?
A tipping point
Flashback brings us to March 2020 and the shutdown of music seasons due to the pandemic. On this desert, an apparently unrelated event, the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, seems to have triggered, in the wake of Black Lives Matter, a veritable tsunami.
Obviously the atrocious and revolting murder of George Floyd has led us all to question the place and consideration of each other in the mosaic of our societies. These reflections have sometimes taken very unexpected directions. A current of thought will thus lead the University of Oxford, in March 2021, to imagine reconsidering “white hegemony”, even the “colonialist notation” of classical music. The duty dealt with the various excesses of this movement in an article entitled “The classical musical canon in the sights of decolonizers”.
In the United States, within cultural and musical institutions, the reaction was very rapid in the spring of 2020. The institutions depend on private sponsors, and the sponsors cannot lend themselves to any association with which does not advocate a policy clearly based on “diversity, representativeness, inclusion”, there was a great risk of seeing sponsorships from private companies in the music sector shift towards those in health or sports. In the absence of being able to reformat the composition and the representativeness of the orchestras, it is the lever of the programming which served to testify to an awakening of consciences.
Programmatic reconfiguration in the music world was miraculously enabled by the pandemic. The latter had turned the relationship to time and planning upside down in the profession: everything that was planned and scheduled for the long term (two or three years) could now be modified with two or three weeks’ notice. This is how Florence Price and William Grant Still quickly appeared in programs, webcasts among others.
numbers and names
Professors Rob Deemer and Cory Meals, from the State University of New York at Fredonia and the University of Houston, carried out for the Institute for Composer Diversity (ICD) a study on the repertoire of American professional orchestras in 2022, published on May 31.
They have studied the repertoire of dozens of orchestras since 2015 to gauge developments. Their findings are that: “works by composers of color increased overall from 4.5% in 2015 to 22.6% in 2022”, and that “scheduled works by living composers increased overall by 11 .7% to 21.9%. »
At the same time, works by deceased white males have increased from 86.4% in 2015 to 69.6% in 2022. The researchers conclude that “there have been significant proportional increases in works programmed by living composers [en particulier des femmes compositrices vivantes] and by composers of color, and this, in a uniform way in all the orchestras”.
A more detailed analysis of the results shows that the trend which increased in 2021-2022 had already begun, but that the Black Lives Matter effect is striking. If we add “Composers and composers of color”, we go from 12% in 2019 to 22.6% in 2021-2022, with an almost tripling for “Composers of color” and a 50% increase for women .
By crossing the two criteria, the ICD counts a 1425% increase in the programming of music by women of color between 2015 and 2022! This increase is 1050% for Living Composers of Color.
Interestingly, the share of white contemporary composers was 8.7% in 2015. It is 7.5%. Deemer and Meals deem it “stable”. We can also consider, more mathematically, that it is a fall of 14%. When it comes to a financial portfolio, a 14% decline counts!
Last percentages that seem relevant to us: the way in which the 21.9% of works by living composers are distributed: white men 34%; men of color 25%, women of color 21%, women white 20%.
If Joseph Bologne, “knight of Saint-Georges”, and Lili Boulanger have experienced a notable resurgence of interest, the four names that dominate the new programmatic deal head and shoulders are Florence Price and Jessie Montgomery among women, William Grant Still and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor for the men. Among the names still unknown here dominate Gabriela Lena Frank and Anna Clyne.
Florence Price, of whom Yannick Nézet-Séguin is the great defender, is the first great black American composer; Jessie Montgomery, 40, from New York, who mixes all musical influences, is the phenomenon of the year 2021, especially since she was named composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Gabriela Lena Frank, a 49-year-old Californian of Chinese-Peruvian-Lithuanian and Jewish descent, incorporates Latin American influences into her music, while Anna Clyne, 42, an Englishwoman living in the United States, composes in an idiom modern more traditional.
William Grant Still and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor are to male composers what Florence Price is to women: pioneers introducing African-American idioms into their music. Coleridge-Taylor was a Briton, but his work was well known in the United States.
Towards dogma?
Is this trend made to last? In any case, it is endorsed by the Orchester Métropolitain’s program for 2022-2023. The duty had also discussed it with Yannick Nézet-Séguin earlier this year. It is true that in North America, all the musical institutions talk to each other and meet, with the result that in the end, everyone ends up doing pretty much the same thing.
As such, the Institute for Composer Diversity (ICD) does not content itself with counting things, but dogmatically enacts its suggestions of “good practices” and, to facilitate the work of orchestras, publishes an exhaustive list of works in the appendix. composers of color.
The lobbying work is explicit: “The ICD has been thinking for several years about appropriate minimum benchmarks for programming. With regard to proportions considered as “minimum objectives in the annual programming of orchestras”, the “model” of the ICD “sets 24% as the minimum objective for works by composers from historically excluded groups and 16% for female composers and composers of color. And the ICD ruled that “in addition to these broader categories, orchestras should strive to achieve a minimum balance in the works of women of color, men of color and white women, living or dead, as well as living white male composers.
Among the questions that are not asked, we will list: for whom are the concerts programmed? Does Canada need to copy the United States? Do these revaluations of African-American composers and female composers bring a new audience, once supposedly “excluded”, to feel concerned by classical music? Perhaps these questions are not entirely incidental.