On Curating / A Multi-Layered Approach to Equity in the New Music Field by Jennifer Kessler

Check out our Executive Director Jennifer Kessler’s essay, published in On Curating!

“For the past ten of my eighteen years as an arts professional, I have sat through a myriad of meetings devoted to the topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion in Western classical music. Until recently, I would see an initial investment in diversity initiatives, but nothing that would fundamentally empower people who have not historically had leadership agency to play a lasting role in deciding what gets performed on our world’s stages. What was lacking was a comprehensive approach to equity by addressing all entry points to an organization. Very few organizations asked: What are all of the ways we uphold the status quo? And what are all of the changes we should consider making if we want to create a truly equitable and diverse future?

“Equity” is often understood in different ways. The Annie E. Casey Foundation defines equity as “giving people what they need to enjoy full, healthy lives, regardless of race.”[1] I once heard philanthropist Ayo Roach say that equity is not just giving a person a seat at the table for decision making, but making the table bigger so that more people can participate and benefit from whatever is being offered. As an extension of his article “A Small Act of Curation,” George Lewis gave a keynote at a Chamber Music America conference, discussing his concept of equity as “investment.” He said:

Decades of curatorial, commissioning, and academic employment decisions proceeding from what bell hooks has called white supremacist capitalist patriarchy amounts to an investment in a certain sector of the society, and a complementary disinvestment in others […].  The complementary disinvestment in other segments of the population expresses itself in the very low number of women and people of color that I find in applications for graduate school, grants, academic employment as a composer, and more.  Despite decades of effort, the system does not allow these people to build up equity, and the myth of absence dovetails with ersatz meritocracy to support the spurious claim that these people, in fact, do not exist. Yes, they do exist—but fixing the problem will take more than just opening the doors and proclaiming, “Y’all come.”[2]

I understand equity as a combination of these things: a commitment to making the proverbial table bigger and fairer to effectively investing in more people who have decision-making agency. It is also a commitment to interrogating and changing the practices around the table that have historically prevented certain people from living their full lives, and making specific choices beyond “just opening the doors.” “

Read the entire article HERE

New Book: Composing While Black by George Lewis

Congratulations to George Lewis & Harald Kisiedu for their book release!

Wolke Verlag has released Composing While Black, a new scholarly publication edited by Harald Kisiedu and George E. Lewis.

Composing While Black presents unique new perspectives on Afrodiasporic contemporary composers active between 1960 and the present, a period that academic inquiry, concert programming, and journalistic accounts have largely ignored up to now, particularly in Europe. This interdisciplinary essay collection engages with opera, orchestral, chamber, instrumental, and electroacoustic music, as well as sound art, conceptual art, and digital intermedia, revealing Afrodiasporic new music as an intercultural, multigenerational space of innovation that offers new subjects, histories, and identities.

Kate Gentile featured on: The Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp (May 2023)

Congratulations to Kate on this feature!

“Kate Gentile is perhaps best known as a drummer on the more experimental end of New York’s improvised music spectrum, where she’s led her own combos and worked closely with the pianist Matt Mitchell—who shares her knack for complex, serpentine writing—for more than a decade. However, she’s simultaneously developed into an assured composer of dauntingly rigorous music. This new suite, performed with International Contemporary Ensemble, represents the most refined and demanding set of music she’s created yet, a 13-part opus of meticulous imagination and wildly galloping rhythms. Gentile goes all in, naming each piece with words invented for their phonetic and visual pleasure, each consistently evoking science fiction, such as “vlimb” and “shorm.” After recording b i o m e i.i she retroactively went back and developed meanings for all of the new vocabulary.” — Peter Margasak