As calls go out for greater diversity in concert repertoire, certainly the same call should resound in music classrooms. Every student deserves the opportunity to see themselves as a professional composer, theorist, performer, educator, therapist, etc. as they are, and repertoire is a powerful way to help students feel belonging. Furthermore, the inclusion of composers from a variety of backgrounds tells the truer, more complete story of music.
Yet, we can’t cover everything. An undergraduate curriculum cannot cover every music tradition in the world nor can it even cover every notable genre of music in the United States in depth. It isn’t even possible to capture the Western music tradition from the Medieval period to now without serious omissions due to a student’s already packed schedule. Equally difficult is the race to cover Western concepts of tonality and harmony along with good ear training in 3-5 semesters. So, how do we choose what to cover, and how does this relate to repertoire?
Some might say it has always had to do with repertoire. The reason we study history is to know of the “masters.” The chronological approach to history shows the indubitable influence of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg on where we are today: case closed. The reason we study theory is to better understand the music of the “masters.” The system of tonality as we know it received perfection in their hands, and it’s the portal into their minds. Such veneration of a select few composers is obvious when perusing outdated theory anthologies, and even today’s anthologies still represent Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák far more than anyone else.
To continue in this framework and include a more diverse repertoire, we must expand the list of “masters.” To do so, we must decide on what defines a “master.” Does it come from the number, length, or intricacy of symphonies, operas, or sonatas written? Must the composer have a large output? Does it come from the ability to analyze a piece of music in the same way as the traditional “greats?” But we deal with some realities:
Composers who did not enjoy the same privileges as white men (specifically Austrian or German men) truly did not have the same privileges. They could not get regular orchestral performances unless they had favor of the right people. They did not get patrons as easily as their competitors.
The preservation of repertoire from the composers considered “masters” came from people dedicated to that cause. The lack of preservation of works from underrepresented composers skews our knowledge of their output, which might have been greater than we imagined. Or, records show repertoire that existed, and we have yet to find them. Side note: Many of the original manuscripts from underrepresented composers in the public domain are not on websites like imslp.org and can only be found in expensive Urtext editions. I love the professional editions, but keeping public domain documents out of reach from others does not reflect an inclusive approach to scholarship…
Some composers wrote impressive music that simply does not follow “the rules” as stringently, though many actually do. And every disgruntled composer or theory student has found solace in the fact that “even the masters broke the rules at times.”
So, the expansion of “masters” to fit some standard, or even a focus on showcasing masterpieces at all, might not best solve the repertoire and curricular issues. There might be a better venue for such showcasing (and it need not be showcasing every masterpiece in every 5-year orchestral cycle, though there have been great improvements recently).
So, perhaps there is a more pragmatic approach that puts aside the “master” label. Following the counsel of my dissertation adviser, I did a post-graduation memory dump. Everything that was extraneous to my overall understanding of music was left behind (or at least placed on an external hard drive deep in the back of my mind), and the principles that stuck became my professional foundation. This led me to experiment with core theory curricula. Over the past years, I have learned the following:
Students learn chord progressions faster in groups of 3-4 chords rather than identifying chords individually. These are taught through historic partimento patterns or through Laitz’s harmonic paradigms (which are more focused on just basslines). Such progressions also simplify part-writing, reveal potential harmonic implications in 2-part compositions, and even guide students to improvise over a bass line. The voice-leading rules of four-part writing become more about the natural and instinctive flow of the music.
Students understand tonicizations and modulations better when taught in conjunction with structure. Structural concerns give such deviations from a tonal center purpose.
Chromatic harmony is all about style and character in music. Neapolitan and augmented 6th chords add weight to predominant function harmonies, as do modal mixture passages. Applied chords (secondary dominants) lift into the next chord, as do common tone chords in many settings. A composer’s style in terms of harmony does depend on their use of these chords.
Students like to understand how a piece comes together, and this requires a narrative. Basically, an overview of the flow, structure, and stylistic developments in a piece of music ties together the loose ends and makes for a satisfying conclusion to an analysis (it’s what we do in analytical papers, though not necessarily in a start-to-finish manner).
So, my framework became centered on what I call “pillars of craft.” And a focus on craft in this way does not favor one set of rules that best applies to a specific style of music. The parlor music and music published for amateurs can be analyzed for these elements without any need to compare with the three B’s. I also learned that such a focus gave me a way to reduce the Western theory curricula’s length for room to include full units on jazz and on popular idioms. And finally, the tangly issues of analysis in the Romantic era are much easier to comprehend with a solid craft-based framework.
How does one know if they have achieved diversity in their classroom repertoire? One goal is to avoid tokenism. For example, an undisclosed textbook has exactly one women composer at the starting of each workbook chapter. While a great effort, this still ends up being a vast underrepresentation of current student demographics (in which most theory classes are at least half female). Guidance from the Institute for Composer Diversity suggests 24% representation of equity-seeking composers (broken into subcategories). This takes serious effort because, unlike the “masters,” many pieces from the common-practice period by such composers have not been analyzed, do not have a neat score, or do not have a recording. Great work done by Expanding the Music Theory Canon, Music Theory Examples by BI-POC Composers (spreadsheet), and Diverse Music Theory Examples are all helpful in finding historical repertoire for the theory classroom. Part of reaching the 24% is the exclusion of some of the masters. They are so easy to use because they’re prepackaged in anthologies, workbooks, and textbooks and are intimately known by so many professionals, but they are not essential to the theory curriculum.
A careful framework for a course, much like a thesis statement, has further allowed me to craft more diverse repertoire into a curriculum. And what an opportunity educators have in a class like an introductory orchestration class! My orchestration class’s framework relies on the scientific aspects of timbre and how those inform idiomatic writing. So, the goal in the repertoire search is to simply find idiomatic music for each instrument, analyze chamber music with said instruments, and then showcase good orchestration in large ensemble music. It took time, but I am stoked to teach the course with a compelling repertoire list representative of diverse backgrounds and aesthetics among contemporary composers.
Because of the openness of repertoire opportunities for Orchestration, I decided to match the demographics of the United States in terms of representation. So, 50% of the music is from female composers and 42% of the music is from BI-POC composers. This required a few hard decisions to exclude some of my favorite works for various instruments, but the choices made to replace them might become new favorites in a short time (there’s so much great music out there!). Some resources that helped me reach this goal were: the UMKC Music Library’s Shining a Light: 21st Century Music from Underrepresented Composers and lots of instrument-specific lists such as the ones Bret Pimentel’s Woodwind Music by Composers in Underrepresented Groups and Last Row’s Diversity in Brass Music. Unlike historical works, many of these works are not in the public domain. I hope to present these works in a way that is exclusively for educational purposes while encouraging, by virtue of the high quality of music, students and others to perform music from the composers. Curating a class like this also gives impetus to how to better stock a university library.
As musicians strive to seriously and permanently diversify repertoire in the classroom, the next generation of musicians will have a much easier time at programming and championing composers from underrepresented groups. And there will hopefully be an equally robust group of new composers from whom further repertoire can be chosen. But why wait? It’s a great time to be part of something big—something that noticeably does affect people for good, does not take an inordinate amount of time (it’s a summer project), and builds a truer sense of the expansive repertoire choices available to musicians today.
Happy repertoire finding!
*Note: It is difficult to truly ascertain gender identities of many historical composers, especially prior to the 20th century. LGBTQ representation among living composers is easier to identify if a composer chooses to publicly announce sexual orientation in a biography or other public document (a program note or interview), yet many composers who identify as such do not do so professionally. All this being said, about 7.1% of people identify as LGBTQ in the United States and 20.8% of Gen Z identify as such, which offers some benchmarks.