While music education in the United States is moving toward a more inclusive and representative medium, our repertoire has long been dominated by the “white European” style of music. The purpose of this study is to analyze two state music lists, and compare the demographic of the composers involved with the demographics of the students we teach. With this data, I hope to urge directors of ensembles, state music associations, and publishing companies to develop explicit plans of action in order to address the gap between our curriculum and our students. Further, I question to what extent this gap in diversity and representation affects the “Double Consciousness” of minority music students, and if music education can address some of its systemic inequalities in participation through a more inclusive repertoire.
In order to begin to assess diversity in our repertoire, I turned to two of the largest and dominating state music associations: the University Interscholastic League in Texas, and the Florida Bandmaster’s Association in Florida. Band contests are the closest musical equivalent of state testing; they provide a regulated assessment with standardized rubrics designed to evaluate the ensemble’s performance of their selected pieces. Both associations provide published lists of “approved” music for competition, from which bands must select if they want to be evaluated. Even for non-evaluated concerts, these lists serve as unofficial curriculum guides for directors, providing what could be seen as an “officially approved” list of repertoire - no different than state organizations selecting specific textbooks for traditional academic subjects.
I then cross-referenced these lists with data from the Institute of Composer Diversity, an online database of works by “diverse” composers. Our definition of “diverse” here means anyone who is not from the majority of white, cis-male, heterosexual composers. As of December 2020, the database contains 2,296 total works for wind band, simplifying down to a total of 459 diverse composers. I was then able to cross-reference the state lists with the diverse composer lists in order to identify which pieces were by composers of diverse subgroups.
Furthermore, I broke down the lists of repertoire into “grade levels” of pieces. While each state has its own grading system of difficulty, in general, grades 1 & 2 are for middle school ensembles; grades 3 & 4 for high schools; and grades 5 & 6 for colleges and professional groups.
In order to assess what standard we should expect if a curriculum truly represents its intended population, I’ve used Elpus & Abril’s 2019 study of music participation in high school ensembles. By comparing their results with the population of the United States, we see that there is an overrepresentation of white students in band, and significant under-representations of Black or Latino students. The division of males and females is roughly equivalent, with a 50/50 split in the overall population, and a 52/48 boy/girl ratio in band. Assuming the gender division is even across ethnic groups, we can extrapolate that only 26% of the population is a white male, or 31% of the band population. However, this is not at all reflected in the repertoire we are told to select.
The UIL list demonstrates this lack of representation quite clearly, with a noticeable drop in diversity around Grades 2 and 3 - the “meat and potatoes” of most pedagogical band programs. The 74% population representation and 69% band representation lines demonstrate the level of diverse repertoire we would need in order to accurately match our student population - a far cry from even our highest percentage in Grade 1.
The FBA list fares no better, also containing the same inverse bell-curve shown in the UIL list. Shockingly, there are no Grade 3 works that were identified as by diverse composers.
Even just sorting works by the gender of the composer demonstrates a startling lack of representation for females in band repertoire; only 35 of the 1,279 total works on the UIL list are by females - a total of just 2.74%.
The FBA list contains only 28 out of 1,603 works composed by females, totaling only 1.74% of the entire repertoire.
Background Music: Omar Thomas, "Of Our New Day Begun"
Performed by the JSU Wind Ensemble
A Composer of Diversity.