CGF Newsletter 43: A League of Their Own
Lizzo does it again; A new report; A restive conjugation
Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune is a Joey special. Here’s your hint: This composer performed a Chopin concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1885. No rifling through old programs!
As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.
Last Week’s Results
CGF Newsletter 42
Louis Sphor, Clarinet Concerto No. 4, mvmt. 3
I will rescind *part* of my annoyance at Listener Jeremy (which I made abundantly clear in the comments last week) for submitting yet another random early Romantic clarinet concertante piece, because this suggestion gave Listener Eric a chance to shine! Who would ever guess Louis Sphor? Listener Eric, that’s who, and bravo to him for that.
Eric also included Carl Maria von Weber in his basket (natch) and I took a wild stab with Franz Kromer. I think both of those guesses were pretty good, but I have to tip my hat to Eric.
Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!
Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.
You Love to See It
League Report in Review
In a continuation of the CGF’s reviews of large-corpus studies of classical programming in recent years, including as recently as two weeks ago, we are covering a report by the League of American Orchestras, whose membership of over 2000 orchestras includes most or all of the big names.
Covering all seasons from 2013–14 to 2022–23, this report is a National Endowment for the Arts-funded demographic study on representation in various roles of classical performing ensembles, from musicians to staff to boards. Its main focus is figuring out where diversity has improved and where it has not.
Their overall finding? “Inequities persist in overall representation, and also between orchestra roles and budget categories.” Not terribly shocking. However, “from low starting points, some relative progress was made.” Also not surprising, considering the noise American orchestras have made about addressing diversity issues since 2020.
Key representation issues that remain:
The proportion of Black, Hispanic, and Native American people in every orchestral role is lower than in the US population.
The proportion of women and nonbinary people working in conductor / music director roles is lower than in the US population. Only one in nine music directors are women, and this falls to one in eighteen for large budget orchestras ($3 million annual budgets or greater).
Increased representation of women, Black, Hispanic, and multiracial people in all orchestra roles is exclusive to smaller-to-medium budget orchestras (smaller than $3 million budgets).
Little to no progress has been made in the last 10 years in a few categories
Black musician representation has improved only very slightly. In fact, it improved at a slower rate than that of any other racial/ethnic group.
Black and multiracial music director representation has decreased.
Women music director representation in large budget orchestras has decreased.
Intuitive to many music students and concert-goers may be the fact that Asians and Asian-Americans are represented at least as strongly as in the US population. In fact, when counted among a general population of “people of color,” Asians’ and Asian-Americans’ strong increases in representation paint a pretty rosy picture of increased PoC representation.
Less visible, but equally encouraging statistics:
Multiracial people are well represented in artistic roles.
Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders are well represented except as top executives.
Women are well represented as staff members.
The League offers some recommendations to its membership to address representation issues:
Hire more Black, Hispanic, and Native American people in all roles (especially large budget orchestras).
Hire more women in conductor and music director roles (again, especially large budget orchestras).
Put more people of color and women in top executive roles.
Accelerate the moderate recent progress towards improved representation of people of color among orchestra staff.
Two editorial comments from me (Joey):
First, I appreciate the report’s general tone of trying to celebrate specific areas of progress vs. calling out specific areas that need more work. As a good demographic study, it is precise and actionable.
Secondly, its common metric of comparison—proportion of demographic populations in the US population at large—is likely never going to be reached for most categories. I would hazard that most cultural institutions of any size or kind do not mirror the U.S.’s overall demography. That is both an ugly fact of life in America, but also (sometimes) a beautiful representation of the way cultural heritage works. But to be clear about my personal stance: though classical music is primarily of white European heritage, the League is absolutely right in communicating a goal of insistently welcoming all people into the wonderful world of classical music.
The Curious Case of the Wandering “And”
Over the past few years I (Will) have noticed a consistent misuse of one of American society’s favorite neologisms, and since it came up in the League report, I thought I’d expound on it here:
We all (one presumes) have grown accustomed to seeing and hearing the acronym “BIPOC.” I think I probably first encountered it in 2018. At that point, I learned its meaning as “Black and Indigenous People of Color.”
But if you read the above paragraph, the little “and” seems to have wandered east, and that makes a ton of difference, so you get people reporting things like this:
According to the original “&” placement, people of Asian backgrounds would NOT be included among BIPOC groups. In fact, that’s the whole point of adding “BI” to “POC”.
Just think about it for a second: “POC” is an abbreviation for “People of Color.” This would presumably include anyone of a non-white ethnicity: Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, East Asian, South Asian, etc. So why would it make sense to say “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color” when Black and Indigenous groups are clearly covered under the term “People of Color”?
The fact of the matter is: it doesn’t. The “BI” in “BIPOC” is supposed to be a specifier. Put another way, it is meant to exclude People of Color who happen not to be Black or Indigenous. You can see the reasoning here: in many ways that matter, Black people and Indigenous people have suffered similar fates in American history that lend a greater political and moral valence to their minority status. When you compare them to East Asians, South/Southeast Asians or Pacific Islanders, say, many of whom came to this country in much later waves of migration. These groups undoubtedly faced their own challenges, but they were not brought to America’s shores on slave ships, nor did they see their populations ravaged by disease and white expansionist colonialism. (And of course, here I don’t mean to erase the experience of the Chinese folks who came here to “build the railroads” or Filipinos whose lands were colonized by the US independently.)
All I’m saying is, it’s easy to see how a term like BIPOC is quite useful, especially in the context of classical music, where Asians and Asian Americans tend to thrive. If you put the “and” in the wrong place and you get to count Asians among BIPOC populations, it sure makes your BIPOC statistics look a lot better!
I should say, this is not just some random writer at the League who’s gotten mixed up here: I see this *everywhere*. And yes, I get that it’s maybe not the best look to be a white dude calling out the misuse of a term that refers to People of Color. But it just doesn’t make any sense.
Classical Mixtape
Villa-Lobos, A prole do bebê: 1. “Branquinha”
I (Will) have just finished composing a piece for Joseph, a set of 11 bagatelles (short works for piano). As is his wont, Joey provided me with a list of listening research to get my juices flowing. It wasn’t until I was very far into composing my own set that I got around to listening to the Villa-Lobos A prole do bebê (“The baby’s family”) and I found it simply delightful.
The Classical Gabfest Newsletter is a spin-off of the now-defunct Classical Gabfest Podcast. It is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)
Another stumper in the NTT department, though I know that Joey is trying to make these not-too-hard, so I'll keep that as an extra bit of info.
I was slightly thrown by the clue, since I figured we'd hear a piano solo/concerto of some variety, but then we got an art song (?). And I couldn't suss out the language for the life of me.
A pianist-composer who played Chopin in Boston in 1885? Hmm... I feel like Saint-Saëns has to be a contender just on historical grounds (and it didn't sound like something that Saint-Saëns *couldn't* have written.)
The language might have been Russian, and I know that a lot of Russian musicians were coming over to the States to concertize in the late 19th century. Of them, I'm going to go a tad random with Anton Rubenstein.
I can't say I'm getting too too much from the musical content itself. A bit of modal mixture, which would point me again towards Russia, but it's not so much that I'd say I'm confident. It could be a different Eastern European, who may have had a penchant for the music of Chopin.
But perhaps—just maybe—this pianist composer in Boston was an American. I read Doug Shadle's book on 19th century American composers, but the only one I think of as a real possibility here would be Edward MacDowell.
Anyway, I'm probably wrong, but at least I showed my work. Saint-Saëns, Rubinstein, MacDowell.
NTT: Because stylistically I don't think I could pinpoint this to any one location, I'll stick with a couple of Boston-based composers for my guesses: Amy Beach and Charles Griffes, both of whom I could see writing in this style, though I'm not sure about their dates.