Institute for Composer Diversity, https://www.composerdiversity.com/

Abstract

Launched in 2018, the Institute for Composer Diversity (ICD) emerged as an initiative that aimed to challenge the canonical repertoire, advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in Western-composed classical music. Although the ICD is housed by the School of Music at the State University of New York at Fredonia, the enterprise is funded by individual and institutional contributors, among them the Sphinx Organization through the 2020 Sphinx Venture Fund and New Music USA through its 2022 Organizational Development Fund. The ICD’s website, however, is not just an online platform for the ICD; instead, it is the Institute itself—together with the people that make it possible. Although offering a large variety of resources, the ICD’s sitemap is well-designed and easy to navigate. It requires a minimum of web browsing knowledge, which facilitates the initiative’s aim of diversity through accessibility. The ICD’s motto “Search. Program. Perform. Repeat.” gives a hint of the Institute’s purpose: “To encourage the discovery, study, and performance of music written by composers from historically excluded groups.” To that end, the ICD offers five databases: the Composer Diversity Database, the Art Song Database, the Choral Works Database, the Orchestra Database, and the Wind Band Database. Inclusion of composers and works are suggested by the public (which includes the composers themselves and third-party submitters) via an online form. To be included, two requirements should be met: Positive consent for inclusion by the composer (including verification of the information) and completeness. The Composer Diversity Database is oriented to display individual composers filtered by five advanced criteria: Gender identity and sexual/romantic orientation, demographics (ethnicities), genre (i.e., orchestra, wind band, etc.), subgenre, and the composer’s location. The other four databases revolve around works. However, the search tool combines works’ specificities criteria (for instance, the Art Song Database has as a filter for the vocal register) and composers’ identities criteria. These powerful databases include more than 2,200 composers and almost 10,000 individual works (as stated in the 2021 annual report). Nonetheless, they are far from complete, which is not necessarily undesirable. On the one hand, there are still many composers missing, especially historical composers from outside the United States that have had a presence in North America (e.g., Asian or Latin American composers). On the other, the ICD acknowledges that its databases are in permanent construction. There are always fresh composers developing their catalogs who are yet to join. This is the principle that the ICD articulates as “there is more to come!” (as stated at the top of each database webpage). Such a principle resonates well with the fact that DEI is also always under construction: As peoples and their conditions change, DEI strategies should adapt—a characteristic that is antithetical to the dogmatic and exclusive nature of the Western-composed classical music canon. Although databases are the ICD’s main asset, the Institute also offers other useful resources. I want to highlight three of them: The analytical report, the best practices guidelines, and the “Outside Resources” page. The analytical report is dedicated to orchestral repertoire performed in the United States. It is comprehensive (as it analyzes and compares the programming data of 2015–18 to the 2019–22 data with an average sample of 106 professional orchestras in the United States), intelligible, and equally important, open access (no subscription or payment is required). The ICD’s data visualization is effective and neatly demonstrates through quantitative means that the canon is not only a discursive formation but an actual statistical reality. Moreover, the best practice guidelines for improving