News and music to start your week!
Hugely important piece by composer and musician Elizabeth Baker at New Music Box. In part:
Elizabeth A. Baker, photo from https://soundcloud.com/elizabethabakermusic
The problem continues when organizations promote “diversity initiatives” using only images of cisgender white women. What these actions and inactions tell women who look like me—women of color, and individuals for whom I am an ally, including non-binary and queer women—is that our voices and, more poignantly, our faces are not welcome in this conversation. Personally, it has the effect of taking my agency as a woman away from me. When people mention the breakthroughs of women composers, I do not identify with these achievements as a part of the evolution that paves my path in the music industry. The more I talk to other women of color hailing from nations across the globe, the more I understand how the subconscious presentation of diversity framed exclusively as a “middle-class white cisgender woman’s problem” has the ripple effect of silencing women of varied ethnic backgrounds and gender identities.
Samson Baughman writes at I Care if You Listen about representation matters on the concert stage even outside program choices. Speaking from personal experience, Baughman offers perspective as “the” black musician in an ensemble, and offers readers ways to support diverse musicians and ensembles moving forward.
Lisa Houston writes in The San Francisco Classical Voice about the work of Missy Mazzoli and, specifically, her ventures into opera. Learn more about Mazzoli’s performing career, including with her own ensembles, and her influences for operatic writing.
The Egyptian orchestra made up entirely of blind women is continuing to impress. Read more, and watch a video of the Light and Hope Orchestra, at TRTWorld.
BBC 3 and the Ulster Orchestra (in Belfast) continue with a series of free concerts featuring major works by women, including Jessie Montgomery, Nina C. Young, Roxanna Panufnik and Clara Schumann.
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