A Preface, written in 2025
I have worked on this essay primarily in two periods of time. The pedagogical and computational work occurred during the summer of 2020; the preparation for submission for publication occupied the early autumn of the same year. The second period was the final copy editing and the writing of this preface, during the summer of 2025.1 Neither of these are happy eras. Should this somehow be the only surviving document from our generation, future readers should know that the summer of 2020 was an era characterized by pandemic “social distancing measures,” the stress of participating in online learning (as a student, teacher, and/or parent), racially motivated violence of the late spring of 2020 and an enormous response in the form of political protest, and a stark partisanship in how recommended pandemic responses were adopted. In academia, the summer of 2025 is not much better: half a year into the second Trump administration, higher education is facing a variety of serious attacks from the federal government and many states. These attacks include drastically reduced research funding especially in the sciences, possible cancellations of international student visas, measures in the “Big Beautiful Bill” that tax University endowments and limit student borrowers based on post-training salaries, and vague restrictions, through Executive Orders, on programs related to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
What struck me in preparing this essay for final publication is how much more difficult the work described has become. Below, I worry (rightly, I think) that replacing all the White and European and male composers in a theory course with others who aren’t all three of those identity categories is too incrementalist and ignores all the ways in which music theory’s White racial frame shapes our curricula. Yet today, even this incrementalist approach, in some states, might well invite negative attention from legislators, and the consequences of such attention can’t be predicted. What I can report is that efforts I described have worked out rather well. I haven’t taught the work of a “canonical composer” in the 20th-century meaning of that term since 2020. Not only has the sky remained above my head, but my applied music colleagues have frequently commented on how attuned their students have become to matters of composers’ identities in their first couple years of study. Some students have even programmed works by composers they encounter in my course in their recitals. The course described below is part of this shift in student attitudes, along with the vigorous efforts of my colleagues at the University of Denver and beyond.
Since we live in such interesting times, there’s a chance publication will be delayed another 5 years. If so, I hope the next preface I write for this essay describes a world of abundance, equity, and justice.
An Essay, written in 2020
Music-theory instruction is in a period of upheaval. The central event of this upheaval is the 2019 keynote session of the Annual Meeting for the Society for Music Theory, in which Philip Ewell, Ellie Hisama, Yayoi Uno Everett, and Joseph N. Straus described many exclusivities in the field and in its pedagogy with regards to race, gender, ethnicity, and disability.2 The renewed Black Lives Matter protest movement of the spring and summer of 2020 added urgency to efforts to address these exclusivities in what remains a predominantly White field within an often unmarked White racial frame. New initiatives seek to increase dramatically the diversity of the composers that music-theory courses study; as Ewell (2020) points out, only ~50 of ~3000 examples in seven American theory textbooks are by non-White composers. Many groups, including the Institute for Composer Diversity, the Composers of Color Resource Project, the Music by Black Composers site, the Discography of Underrepresented Classical Musicians, and the Music Theory Examples by Women project are actively collecting and analyzing the works of composers from underrepresented groups. These efforts expand on publications recent and not so recent advocating for greater inclusion of women composers (e.g., Killam 1987, Lamb 1987, Citron 2000, Stroud 2018, Malawey 2019), composers of color (e.g., Choi & Keith 2016, Broadbent 2016), and East Asian composers specifically (e.g., Deguchi 2018, Everett 2021).
My own inchoate response to the murder of George Floyd and the killing of Breonna Taylor3 was to commit to teaching my second-year music-theory courses entirely with music by composers who may be White, or European/Anglo-American, or male, but are not all three.4 I began by participating in some of the efforts linked above, and, in particular, browsing the International Music Score Library Project (henceforth “IMSLP”), an online repository of 177,000 works. But I’m of a computational bent, and I’m prone to seeking general solutions to specific problems (for better and worse).
To supplement the efforts linked above, I gleaned the metadata already extant in the IMSLP.5 I then expanded its metadata to include more information pertinent to composers’ gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality, according to the following heuristics:
For gender, I adopted IMSLP’s “Female Composers” category; though I don’t know the category’s origins or methods, I have always seen this label applied to every composer in the repository I believe to self-identify as a woman;
For Blackness, I included any composer found on one of five lists: the Composer Diversity Database (filtered to entries tagged “Deceased” and either “Black” or “African”), the Historic Composers Directory of the Music by Black Composers project, Marques Garrett’s list of Black choral composers, the Wikipedia list of “African American classical composers,” and the Wikipedia list of “Composers of African descent”;
For geographical diversity, I categorized each of the repository’s 93 nationalities as underrepresented or overrepresented based on my experience with music theory textbooks. The following map (see Example 1), made on mapchart.net, is a result of this forced-choice categorization. Blue nations are overrepresented, green nations are underrepresented, and gray nations are not present in the repository.6
Example 1: Map of countries I deem “overrepresented” (blue) and “underrepresented” (green). Countries in gray have no identified composers in the IMSLP.
I have created repositories of the metadata in the IMSLP, including the new demographic data. For those who want a quick entry into the data, I’ve placed the metadata for works in which the composer is either a woman, from a non-White nation, or Black into a Google Sheet here. (These criteria identify 16,139 works.) Using Sheet’s filtering capabilities, one can quickly arrive at the sheet shown in Example 2, which identifies all the non-solo-piano works by composers from non-White nations written between 1900 and 1920 that have been downloaded more than 1,000 times.
Example 2: The initial rows of a filtered Google Sheet identifying non-solo-piano works by composers from non-White nations written between 1900 and 1920 that have been downloaded more than 1,000 times.
For those adept at using a data-science-oriented environment like dplyr in R or pandas in Python, the complete metadata is available here. The link includes six versions of the metadata or subsets of the metadata in tabular format, ranging from 4.4 MB to 1.7 GB. I’ve prepared an appendix that defines each column in the spreadsheets and describes the differences among the six files.
Using the metadata, I selected the music of 47 composers for a second-year course, 32 of whom I found through IMSLP.7 (The other 15 are not in the repository, either because of copyright restrictions or because they don’t work in genres that rely on notation.8) The composers included in the course have the following composition in terms of gender, race, and European origin (see Example 3).
| Non-European | European | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Non-White | Women | Men | Women | Men |
| 12 | 17 | 1 | 1 | |
| White | Women | Men | Women | Men |
| 5 | 0 | 10 | 2 | |
Example 3: Identity characteristics of 47 composers used in my second-year theory course.
In the remainder of this essay, I wish to share some lessons learned from dramatically expanding the diversity of the composers I teach by filtering the IMSLP according to these axes of exclusivity.
1. Diversity is not the same as equity.
While the distinction between diversity and equity is often discussed in higher education scholarship (e.g., Jayakumar, Garces, and Park 2018; byrd 2019; Patton et al. 2019), it is all too often absent in discussions of curricular reform in music theory. “Increasing diversity” in this context means enriching the educational experience of all students—including those who already experience privilege in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality—by exposing them to a broader set of viewpoints, styles, and practices. “Increasing equity” in this context means redressing historical injustice and exclusion so that all students have equal access to educational opportunities. One can absolutely increase diversity without increasing equity and, paradoxically, further the White racial frame of music theory in the process (Sanneh 2017). In particular, a project like the one I present can be co-opted to support a claim that because composers of many different races, ethnicities, genders, and nationalities write classical music, the values of classical music are universal. One who buys that argument, which I don’t, might further argue that classical music is divorced from questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and geography, and therefore need not participate in efforts to address institutional inequities.
To forestall such an argument, instructors and administrators must ask questions that pertain specifically to equity, including the following: Can all students leverage their prior musical experience and training equally toward their success in the music theory classroom? Are students enculturated in genres transmitted without Western notation (e.g., conjunto music, electronic dance music, hip-hop) able to build upon and theorize their experiential knowledge? Does a student’s “first acquired analytical language” impact their success in the course? More broadly, do policies regarding admissions, financial aid, and employment have racist impacts? I raise these questions not to diminish the recent enthusiasm for diversifying the composers on our course repertoire lists and in our textbooks, but rather in recognition of the limits of such projects and to forestall my own sense of self-satisfaction.
2. Changing course repertoire is the beginning of addressing the White racial frame, not the end.
In terms of challenging the White racial frame of music theory, it is better, for example, to include Florence Price than to exclude Florence Price. Yet I am acutely aware of how Whiteness continues to structure my teaching even when two-thirds of the composers we study in class are composers of color. One brief example comes from L. Viola Kinney’s “Mother’s Sacrifice,” a piano piece written when she was a student at the now-shuttered Western University, a historically Black university (HBCU) near Kansas City (Walker-Hill 2006). The piece was published by the university as a prize for taking second place in a composition contest in 1908. On the back page of the sheet music, the student-composers were asked, “Why should the music composed by Western University students be purchased?”—to which Ms. Kinney answered, among other responses, “because it shows the Negro in his great Musical Metamorphosis from the rag-time to the nobler, higher tones,” and to which the winner of a “Special Mention,” Fannie Toles, answered, “because it shows to the world our appreciation of classical Music in preference to trashy rag-time Music” (Walker-Hill 2006, 12). As another example, I introduced Eduardo Sanchez de Fuentes’s “Tú” as performed by Barbarito Diez in a session on parallel periods. Sanchez de Fuentes is remembered primarily as a musicologist who frequently traced the development of Cuban music to the indigenous and largely depopulated Taíno as a means of deemphasizing the contributions of Afro-Cubans. He once wrote that Afro-Cuban music “should not, under any circumstances, be shown to foreigners because it is a national shame” (Soto 2018). To add irony to racism, “Tú,” his most well-known piece, written when he was 16, is subtitled “Célebre Habanera,” referencing the Afro-Cuban song and dance form (Fernandez 2006, 73). Both these examples, and many others, show that expanding the compositional diversity of the composers does not automatically challenge White supremacists’ musical ideology.
The expanded repertoire did nevertheless afford opportunities for more authentic discussions of race, nationality, and ideology. As those discussions accrued organically, to the point where they became an integral and expected part of the course, I felt the specter of tokenism less than I have when presenting underrepresented composers in the past. Yet in a larger sense, the topics addressed in the course still had a tokenizing effect. Large-scale formal scripts like rondo, ternary, and sonata loom large at the end of our two-year sequence. While sonata form is relevant to several works of Florence Price, most of the Black American women I would want to celebrate—Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Nina Simone, Beyoncé, Lauryn Hill, etc.—cannot be included in my course as it currently exists. That Florence Price is included and Lauryn Hill is excluded shows the influence of the White racial frame, a frame that tokenizes Price because of the musical idiom in which she chose to work.
Overcoming this tokenization requires making substantial changes, either at the level of the course through changing course outcomes, or at the level of the program by “de-sequencing” (Lavengood 2019, Gades 2019) or otherwise ceding credit space to courses on other musical traditions. Those changes require a more thorough process of curricular revision that must take into account the particularities of each department and institution.9 And that process, especially for those like me, who teach in a conservatory context, requires building a consensus among classroom teachers, studio teachers, ensemble directors, and administrators around the value of decentering Whiteness in the training of “classical” performance majors at the undergraduate and graduate level. Through what I describe here, I believe I am pragmatically addressing a small slice of a large problem, all the while continuing the work of building a consensus towards more global changes.
3. White supremacy is built into the IMSLP, but large numbers offer recourse.
As a user-created repository of notated music, the IMSLP repeats all the biases of its users. The composers of works in the repository are nearly 400 times more likely to be White than Black, 33 times more likely to be men than women, and 23 times more likely to be from an over-represented nation than an under-represented nation. At the same time, the sheer size of the repository means that each of these categories is well-represented in numbers while poorly represented as a proportion; the repository does contain 616 pieces by Black composers, ~7,000 pieces by women composers, and ~10,000 pieces by composers from underrepresented nationalities. This, of course, is more than enough music to fill the lectures, assignments, and textbooks of a typical music-theory sequence in the United States.
Additionally, in examining the metadata, opportunities for further expanding the canon arose. Many works are catalogued by opus number, and therefore one can easily determine the proportion of a composer’s works that are in the repository and identify those that are not. For canonical composers like Franz Schubert or Johannes Brahms, every opus-numbered piece is present. For Teresa Carreño, only about half of the works are in the repository (assuming the highest-numbered work is the last work). This knowledge could springboard a project to identify pieces currently excluded and ascertain whether those pieces are extant, where physical copies reside, and whether they can be scanned and added to the repository.
4. One can address other exclusivities alongside those based on gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality.
While I searched the IMSLP mainly to identify works by underrepresented composers, I’ve also been able to leverage it to address other exclusivities encountered in theory textbooks. Theory textbooks, in my experience, over-emphasize large-scale works and those for piano and bowed strings, and de-emphasize music made for vocalists, harpists, guitarists, wind players, and others. Because the IMSLP metadata includes instrumentation, I was able to track the representation of the major instrument groups in my course and draw on the expertise of students who are not pianists or orchestral string players.
Another exclusivity is a bias for large-scale works. Becoming familiar with symphonic or operatic literature might be a desired though unstated outcome of theory courses, but it is one I find counterproductive. Music analysis shows students what it can mean to understand a piece, to parse how it’s put together, to take it into your mind and make it in some sense a part of you. Furthermore, as an instructor who emphasizes model composition, I want my students to believe that the ability to compose the pieces we discuss is within reach of their own abilities as model composers. Thus, in all topics except large-scale form, a two-page texted work serves my aims better than a 200-page symphony. Fortunately, the repository explicitly represents the length of scores in pages.
Finally, to the extent that vocal music appears in music theory courses at all, the languages students encounter are largely limited to Latin (from earlier sacred music), German (from the Lieder repertoire) or Italian (from the operatic literature), with perhaps French or English art song as well. The IMSLP contains works in 114 languages and students should encounter more of them.
Conclusions and future directions
I hope the data set and my experience with replacing my course repertoire lists with works by underrepresented composers are of use to those making similar changes at the course level. While I view this as important work, it is not a replacement for broader curricular reconsiderations that dismantle or undermine the White racial frame of music theory as it is currently taught and practiced in the United States. That reconsideration would start by considering what constitutes a “theory of music,” who and what counts as worthy of study, and what 21st-century musicians need from their academic training. The wholesale replacement of the music of canonical composers without a wholesale replacement of concepts taught will strike some as disappointingly incrementalist (DeCuir & Dixon 2004, 29) or assimilationist (Kendi 2016, 2). To this critique I can only echo what one of my own coreligionists, Rabbi Tarfon, wrote many centuries before my own ancestors immigrated to America and became White: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it” (Pirkei Avot 2:16).
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