Episode #43
E43: Why We Need To Be Able To Talk About Race And Gender In Classical Music: a Cautionary Tale
An exploration of the challenging but crucial conversations surrounding diversity and representation in classical music education, framed through a personal cautionary experience. Drawing from recent events in the industry, topics discussed include: – The importance of open dialogue about race and gender in music – Challenges in representing diverse composers in educational materials – Navigating sensitive discussions in music education – Lessons learned from attempting to address these issues – Broader implications for inclusivity in classical music Links: This episode is also available with video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UXQ1gPeO9ek White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism- Robin DiAngelo: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/566247/white-fragility-by-dr-robin-diangelo/9780807047415 Useful study notes on ‘White Fragility’: https://library.fiveable.me/key-terms/hs-ethnic-studies/white-fragility A must read extract in The Guardian from Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/30/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race YouTube video Music Theory and White Supremacy by Adam Neely: https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA A talk by Philip Ewell on YouTube- a useful introduction to his work: https://youtu.be/q1yYR-VLpv0 My podcast review of the 2021 Leeds Internation Piano Competition: https://heartofthepiano.com/e21-leeds-international-piano-competition-the-leeds-2021-review/ Fiona Sinclair’s (CEO Leeds International Piano Competition) Leeds University presentation on gender inequality in music competitions and in the profession as a whole: https://www.youtube.com/live/xtdpAVyJzVg?si=sOp3PWG5_T_rCB-R&t=2801 A couple of news links concerning possible preferrential treatment for women in the Leeds International Piano Competition: https://slippedisc.com/2024/09/exclusive-how-the-leeds-piano-competition-is-rigged-for-equality/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/19/female-pianists-favoured-men-major-competition-rules/ The new AI tool which creates incredible podcast episodes- Notebook LM’s new Audio Overview feature: https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/google-s-new-ai-audio-generator-lets-you-make-a-stunningly-real-ai-podcast-without-a-mic-here-s-how-to-try-it The intro/outro music is my jazz arrangement of the Rachmaninov Adagio from Symphony #2, you can watch the whole thing here if you like: https://youtu.be/hMqREAngb4s Transcription: Have you ever found yourself hesitant to discuss issues of race or gender for fear of saying something wrong? When we feel unable to talk about these issues freely, resentments and tensions can build up. Movements like Black Lives Matter, along with recent events in the UK, have highlighted how crucial it is to have these conversations. It’s obviously a contentious topic, but when conversations are stifled—when we’re afraid to discuss racial issues honestly for fear of being ‘cancelled’ or vilified—this creates a pressure cooker environment. As a result, when people of colour speak out about inequalities and push for change, white people can react in exaggerated, overly defensive reactive ways rather than perhaps listening with an open mind. Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility introduces the concept of this knee-jerk defensive response to healthy debate on race, which often serves to quickly shut any conversation down. DiAngelo explains that these defensive reactions—which can include anger, fear, emotional outbursts, and withdrawal—aren’t about being a ‘bad person’ but are ways people can avoid the discomfort that comes with talking about race. This means that often, despite good intentions, these kinds of defensive responses can actually serve to maintain the status quo of racial inequality by shutting down meaningful conversations about race. Another book, Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by UK author Reni Eddo-Lodge, sums up a lot of the frustration that people of colour experience when trying to discuss racial issues… personally, reading these two books in particular have really resonated with many of my experiences. Now, just to give you a little bit of context here, I don’t often talk about this, but I’m basically not white. It doesn’t come up a lot these days because, for many reasons, I don’t seem to stand out as much as ‘different’ anymore. Part of this is because Britain has become much more multicultural, and perhaps some of it is because, for whatever reason, I look more ‘white’ as I get older. So from time to time, when I bring up my ethnicity, people say to me, “I had no idea you weren’t white”. But when I found myself having frustrating conversations about race, the difficulties made so much more sense once I came across the concepts in the books that I just mentioned. I think it’s important to emphasise that the whole point of these books is not to make white people feel more defensive about talking about race, and the point is not to make white people feel attacked. This is the very problem those books are trying to solve, to highlight how we as a society need to be able to have these discussions openly without fear of being judged. Now, the world of classical music and classical music education in particular has been grappling with issues of racial and gender representation in recent years. At one end, there are academics such as Philip Ewell, who talks about a deep-seated ideology of white supremacy within the world of classical music. Adam Neely created a great YouTube video called Music Theory and White Supremacy discussing some of these ideas. I personally disagree with a lot of what Ewell says, but the topic is layered and nuanced, and he does make some valid points that are worth considering if you take the time to read his work carefully. Anybody who goes to classical music concerts will immediately notice the almost total absence of audience-goers who are not white. Could part of the reason for this be that non-white composers are rarely featured in concert programmes? Speaking personally, this absence did bother me when I was young. I was totally unaware that there were plenty of composers who weren’t ‘white’, and the strong perception that the world of classical music was basically for ‘white people’ did unsettle me. Now, I want to be absolutely clear: this does not mean that I think we should cancel Western classical music—I love it deeply! The Western classical tradition is really important to me. Obviously, the history of classical music does have roots in European composers working within a certain culture, but we now have the power to influence future audiences by taking a more broad and inclusive historical view. If we make an effort to promote more composers of colour and women composers—even if this doesn’t reflect the historical proportions of those composers—it could be key in growing classical music audiences and encouraging more diverse composers in the future. Long time listeners to my reviews of exam board syllabuses (or syllabi for those who prefer that word!) such as ABRSM, Trinity and LCME know that I have been passionate about the need to represent more women and non-white composers for this reason, and in recent years there has been noticeable pressure for all musical educational establishments including exam boards and music publishers to increase their diversity and address these issues around racial and gender representation. Some recent piano exam syllabuses—in fact most of them—have been doing an excellent job in discovering and sharing some real gems by hitherto obscure women composers and composers of colour all the way from the Baroque era to the modern age. So it’s not that they didn’t exist– but yes the majority of composers were white men. And it is a very difficult balance to try to decide how much we want to celebrate and honour a deeply valuable tradition with all its biases, and how much we can now selectively highlight the hidden minority women and non-white composers to shape the direction of the future world of classical music. The issue of positive discrimination surfaced in an interesting way just a few days ago at the concerto finals of the Leeds International Piano Competition, one of the most prestigious events in the classical piano world. It runs every 3 years, and you can listen to a podcast review that I made of the previous competition, the link will be in the shownotes or in the description of the YouTube video below as well as many other links and links to interesting articles on all the things I’ll be covering today. So, after only men made it through to the finals in 2021, the CEO of the competition Fiona Sinclair set out a series of initiatives to address this gender imbalance. These included training for this year’s jurors, as well as commissioning academic studies into gender imbalances at international piano competitions. She gave a fascinating lecture on this subject at Leeds University which you can find on YouTube, again links will be in the shownotes of the podcast episode or in the description of the YouTube video. However, there was quite the controversy just before the recent finals when major news sources spotted some clauses in the instructions to the jury members that give women competitors preferential treatment in some circumstances. You know, it’s one thing to try to tackle the problem of what was described as “male dominance” in the world of professional concert pianists, but is giving women pianists preference in a major competition to try to redress this balance going too far? Now all these issues that I’ve discussed so far intersected a few months ago when I published a podcast review of a set of books called The Joy of Graded Piano. I was asked to review this series of piano anthologies by a future guest who I’d invited to interview on the podcast who’d just authored these new books. He’s a piano educator that I had a huge amount of respect for, and who seemed to have a lot in common with me in terms of educational approaches. I reluctantly agreed to review the books, as it takes a huge amount of my time to review substantial anthologies such as this. Unlike many reviewers, I prefer to read and play every single piece, and really enter into the books deeply before publishing my opinion. So after a lot of work I uploaded the review, but you won’t be able to find it now for reasons that will become clear as this story unfolds. It was overwhelmingly positive, my review, it was overwhelmingly positive, with only a few minor critiques. Here’s a couple of clips from that original review that I made: “And I’m going to basically go as far as to say that if you are studying the piano, you pretty much are going to want to own these books. I can absolutely 100% recommend that no matter who you are, if you’re learning the piano, you’re going to want to own these books if you’re at that level”. “Yeah, I’m basically going to try to, you know, gently say some of the issues that I had with these books. But they’re not massive issues because, like I said, if you’re a learner, I 100% think that this is one of the most important books that you should own. It’s like a no-brainer. You’re learning the piano, you’re somewhere between Grade 1 and Grade 5, you really should own these books. They’re excellent, you know, 100%”. But I did include some minor critiques which did not affect my enthusiastic and full endorsement of these books. As you may have guessed, some of these had to do with representation of women and non-white composers. In my review I pointed out that several years ago the author had publicly been quite critical about positive discrimination for women composers, warning against ‘tokenism’. And, you know, this is absolutely fine, nobody is a moral arbiter of these matters! However, in the intervening years the author modified his stance and became a staunch supporter of positive discrimination for both women and non-white composers, in common with most of the examination boards and music publishers, and which I personally thoroughly support. But when I absorbed myself in these anthologies, I had an uneasy feeling about the way I perceived that women composers were being represented. This was nothing huge, and I applauded—genuinely applauded—the efforts towards diversity, but I did wonder if perhaps things might be moving a little towards tokenism—rather than a more organic balance of representation. Here’s another clip from the review: “And here’s where I’m just going to be, you know, slightly critical about this, which is that what I notice in Andrew’s books are that the women, not absolutely 100% of the time, but generally, generally the format is that you tend to get all the women and non-white composers—and there are a lot of non-white composers, that’s great—but they tend to all show up near the end of the book in list C pieces, so that’s like, you know, the contemporary pieces. A lot of the pieces by women composers tend to be very sort of atmospheric, sort of more minimalist, more pop-end of the classical spectrum. You don’t tend to get sort of many women or non-white in the more sort of core Romantic and Classical. I mean you do occasionally but not as much as like say you know in recent years ABRSM and LCM have been doing with their syllabuses, and Trinity as well. I’m not really sure about just having this tokenism of, right, we’ve got all these core essential pieces, oh my God, I obviously need to fill my quota for women… Let’s now just find some fun, list C, more lightweight, superficial pieces, and make up our quota of token women, just shoving them in List C… erm, not sure about that…” Now, I will admit my critique of how women were represented in the anthology was, let’s say, passionate and direct. It was not intended to undermine the efforts towards inclusivity—I genuinely admired those—but I felt it was important to share my perspective on how the representation came across to me. After publishing the review though, I received some messages from the author that led me to consider if my strong feelings might have come across a little bit too sharply. This is from one of the messages I sent to him in an effort to find common ground: “Listening again to the podcast review, I’m trying to take your comments on board, and I wonder if my passionate feelings on certain topics could be communicated in better ways. I’m going to take down the reviews for the moment while I reflect on it”. You know, I really didn’t want to cause upset or drama. Unfortunately, despite my efforts to smooth things over, the author was still very upset. He felt that my use of the word ‘tokenism’ was unfair and that it misrepresented his work. In his view, the positioning of these composers was driven by musical and educational reasons, and not by an attempt to sideline them. He also pointed out all the women he’d included who he considered to be heavyweight composers. So I revisited the books carefully to consider this, but the author did not react well to my subsequent reply where I respectfully further clarified and explained my opinions on this and other issues concerning objections that he’d raised: “I’ve taken the time this evening to go and play through all the pieces by women/non-white composers in all the books so I could check if my comments were fair or not, and respond to your points”. […] “earlier this evening when I played through all the pieces, I couldn’t shake the feeling of urgency every time I got near the end of the book caused by more and more women composers being squeezed together in a row, most of them being jazz, or floaty. Not that they weren’t really great pieces, and I really enjoyed them individually, but I couldn’t help but get a strong feeling of tokenism by this increasing urgency to squeeze increasing amounts of women into the end of the book with very similar styles. I would have liked ideally to have spoken about the individual pieces in the review and explained this a bit, but obviously I was ambitious enough! Yes there was Chaminade/Farrenc & Amy Beach in grades 4 & 5 but this didn’t hide the increasing amount of women in very similar styles of jazz or ‘floaty’ suddenly bunching up at the end of the book as if to make the quotas”. Reading this back several months later, I recognise that the attempt here was clearly—surely—to explain my subjective opinion about the way things came across rather than assume any bad intent behind the choices. It was after this message that communications between us seemed to break down completely. Now, at this point you might be wondering why I’m starting to go into so much detail concerning the messages between me and the author, and why I need to bring them up here… all should become clear by end of this cautionary tale, but I hope it’ll also be clear that while I stood by my opinions, I consistently offered to compromise so that the author would be happy with my review. How were these conciliatory gestures received? We will find out as the tale unfolds! So, I raised similar concerns regarding how the pieces by non-white composers were represented throughout the anthology. Here’s how I expressed it in the original review… “And that’s also my point for the non-white composers. You tend not to find so many, if hardly any at all, in the Baroque Classical Romantic end of things. And again, I think that’s a problem because, you know, are we basically saying to students, if you’re a girl or if you’re not white, you can be a composer, but not a serious one. Just fun pieces, just sort of, you know, superficial, more fun stuff. You know, again, sorry if I’m being a little bit critical there, but you know, I have strong feelings about this kind of stuff”. So, in response, the author explained that the anthology was designed to show how classical music, which originated in Europe, gradually expanded to include contributions from composers around the world. The anthology’s chronological arrangement was designed to trace this progression, illustrating how the repertoire has grown and diversified over time. He also pointed out a couple of times when he’d placed a non-white composer nearer the front of the book. So, I could see where he was coming from, but I felt I needed to clarify my perspective a little bit more. So I tried to acknowledge his points in a reply, while also explaining why I was still concerned about representation: “Now I loved the Ignatius Sancho near the beginning of the first book, but was really disappointed that most of the books don’t have similar pieces in the first half of the book (ie not contemporary pieces) or that weren’t jazz, or spirituals, or floaty sugary pieces. Like I said in the review, it seems that you were being very ambitious and trying to juggle a lot of things to balance. It’s just my opinion that I’m not sure about the resulting balance”. “And I am disappointed by the relative lack of non-white composers in the first half of most (but not all) of the books. I’m sure you’ve seen all the incredible finds of non-white composers in recent syllabuses by LCM, Trinity & ABRSM, these composers so they are definitely out there,
