This article was written by a group of concerned musicians who prefer to remain anonymous. Trade Winds Ensemble is publishing the article below on their behalf. TWE’s mission is to create a space for others to tell their story. We are honored to stand by the anonymous authors of this article and to offer our space to the voices which they’ve chosen to amplify.
—Brandon Rumsey, for the Trade Winds Ensemble team
Projects of inclusion don't rupture oppressive structures; instead they uphold and reinforce those structures by showing how they can be kinder and gentler and better without actually changing much at all.
— from Whiteness and Communication by Calvente, Calafell, and Chávez
The Institute for Composer Diversity is well-known in the Classical Music world for creating a database of composers searchable by identity markers including race, gender, and 2SLGBTQIA+ identities, as well as “genre” and location. While presented as a seemingly helpful tool, several members of the classical and contemporary/new music communities have expressed concern and doubt over the behavior and effectiveness of this organization.
On June 11, 2020, ICD tweeted a (since deleted) “spotlight” post on New Renaissance Artist Elizabeth A. Baker, in which her work, image, and name were used without consent; and where she was misidentified as a “composer” rather than a New Renaissance Artist. After Baker explained ICD’s missteps, they issued a blanket apology which did not list her by name. Under further criticism, they issued a second apology, which included Baker’s name, but did not correct their mislabeling of her creative identity as “composer.” On the same day, Baker uploaded a video analyzing these events. We are sharing this transcript with permission:
Normally I don't speak face-front camera to people. I really obviously enjoy writing and I feel that my words on the written pages really connect with people, and I don't necessarily feel the need to talk like this. But something happened today and it was really the final straw. And I feel the need to come on camera in front of everyone and just lay it out on the table.
So today, I was misrepresented in a post by a certain organization, and they issued an apology that didn't even include my name. They referred to me as a composer; we all know that I identify as a New Renaissance Artist, so I took offense to that. In addition to the original post, which was put up without my consent and without checking information with me. And it's just another example of how databases do not represent Black people.
Black artists are humans. We're not just some dead person on a Wikipedia page that you can just do whatever you want with. I'm a human. I have emotions and feelings and opinions about my art, and I deserve to have a voice in any conversation about my art that is being put up to promote me. A lot of people say, "well they're promoting you." No, it's not if they're not promoting you in a way that you've consented to, it's exploitation.
I say it all the time: I am not a data point. I am a human. I have emotions, and I have a right to my ideas on my art and how I feel about the world, being represented properly. And we're all the time about Black Lives Matter, but my art is my life. If I'm being misrepresented, even if it's with the best intentions, it's not okay. It's not fair. The people that are doing this need to stop. Yes, please, amplify Black voices. Let people know that we're out here and we're doing amazing things. But by all means do it in the most humane and respectful manner, remembering that we're people, okay? These are people who made music. And right now, I'm not just speaking for myself that was misrepresented. I'm also speaking for my friends and colleagues who have privately messaged me telling me that they have gone through similar situations... even with this same organization.
I'm at the point where I'm livid. I'm so angry. Black people are not interchangeable on a list. We are humans and our voices matter. We need to be heard and we need to be respected. And if you can't do that, shut your website down and find some other way to interact with the zeitgeist because it's not fair. It's hurting people, and it needs to stop.
Elizabeth A. Baker, via Facebook
As a group of musicians concerned about these allegations and the optics of a white man refusing to step down as director of a proclaimed diversity organization, we created a survey to give artists in our community a safe opportunity and platform to express their true feelings about the Institute of Composer Diversity and its leadership.
Here is what they said.
On Founder and Institute Director Rob Deemer’s leadership:
“I could be mistaken, but I'm fairly certain Rob Deemer has been publicly asked to transfer his director position to somebody not-a-white-man, and he declined.”
“ICD could start with Rob Deemer stepping down. He’s repeatedly shown that he lacks important advocacy skills and his actions are often insensitive.”
“My other experience with them is through Rob Deemer's public face of the ICD on social media. I find that Deemer tends to suck up all the air around the ICD, making its success his personal success and rarely promoting or educating people on the contents of the ICD's database. It feels self-congratulatory and white-savior-y in a way I find disheartening. Furthermore, Deemer uses events like George Floyd's murder to brag about how many more hits the ICD website has gotten which I frankly find offensive.”
“..one readily gets the sense that accolade and adulatory attention for Rob Deemer himself are not just happenstantial "perks" of his ICD directorship but a central motivating factor in his founding and maintaining the Institute, and that those in his "camp" are rewarded with an undue share of promotion, in the false guise of advocacy. Fawning admirers regularly credit and tag Rob for "his" database and the vital importance of “his” work, without mentioning a single composer or piece the ICD led them to. Deemer was the singular recipient of the 2018 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Internet Award, an honor he proudly totes in the introductory sentence of his current bio and that came with a cash award. Rather than humbly deflect praise and redirect attention to those his work ostensibly serves, Deemer evidently enjoys the limelight and constant influx of congratulation, while doing little to elevate discourse on the subject of diversity, equity and inclusion.”
“ICD, in my opinion, has a serious image problem. While its board and staff are diverse when it comes to gender, it is currently majority white, with its CEO/President, Dr. Deemer, a white, cis-man. This perpetuates a white savior narrative that significantly undoes a great deal of the good ICD wants to accomplish and that no member of ICD's board or staff has yet to acknowledge publicly. Simply put, ICD would do well to elect and appoint more BIPOC members to its governing bodies, with no more than 50% of seats taken by white members. Dr. Deemer should also resign and take on an emeritus position as founder and let a BIPOC director take the reins of the institution.”
Inherent problems in the ICD’s model:
”While a database of diverse composers’ names, organized by ethnic demographic and genre-sorted works, may be a useful reference tool, it is just that. The “Institute for Composer Diversity,” a formidable name that implies sociologically-informed research and perhaps funding initiatives for diverse composers, might consider calling itself, more truthfully, Diverse Composer Database, dropping the pretense of performing vital work on behalf of marginalized communities, when they, rather, perform the work of self-dealing, to the exclusion rather than inclusion of many who fall "outside” their cult of popularity.”
“I feel that the majority of occasions that a “composer diversity database” is consulted, it is in order to absolve some sort of responsibility on the part of the programmer to truly engage with underrepresented voices, leading to a culture of tokenization and virtue signaling... ...Using these kinds of resources to find a composer from an underrepresented background may satisfy a diversity quota for a concert program, but doing that alone does not truly engage with these marginalized communities. It doesn’t examine the space in which the music is being performed, the standard audience in attendance, the cost to attend or overall financial structure of the event, to what communities this kind of event is promoted, etc. I believe that using these resources often leads to placing anticolonial voices within an inherently white colonialist structure and calling that act “decolonization,” when it is actually the exact opposite and it should be the deconstruction of that structure that is the main focus moving forward.”
“The ICD under Deemer's leadership flags broad categories of identity (Black, women, racially fraught assumptions of Latinx identity on the basis of Spanish-sounding last names, etc.), recommending numerical percentage-oriented quotas to concert presenters, while engaging very little, if at all, with the music and ideals of individual creators, except for those in their own immediate circle.”
“I think we are beyond the point of "diversity and inclusion" and need to be focusing actively on antiracism/anti-oppression. Deemer could step down and be replaced by someone else, but it won't matter unless that person is truly committed to dismantling the racist and oppressive infrastructure of ‘classical music’ as we move forward. And that the ‘institute’ is actually operating as an ‘institute’ should--with resources available, especially to those of who generate the ‘diversity’ in the project, as well as information beyond just data points that seem a bit too dehumanizing for what is a humanist movement.”
“A core problem with the Institute is its self-representation as a foremost player in advancing the cause of diverse concert programming, despite having no mechanism for assessing the real-world efficacy of their work. Moreover and distressingly, recent social media debacles have demonstrated that ICD affiliates are alarmingly recalcitrant in the face of valid critique (see: Alex Shapiro, ICD Executive Council member, who proudly taunted “angry foot-stompers outside the tent,” when the nearly all-white constituency of two webinar panels on diversity she participated in was duly called out)......Because of the large quantity of entries in the database and severe limitations in its search criteria…the likelihood that a given composer will [be] found through a database search is slim-to-none, and those with an alphabetical advantage of a surname beginning with A or B may be favored.”
“I have experienced composers in my social circle "outted" by efforts to include closeted individuals on databases specifically dealing with LGBTQ++ identity, but as a performer, have not made use of the database.”
“Despite being an accomplished lesbian woman composer, I have not experienced any tangible benefit as a product of my inclusion as one of thousands in the ICD's database. As far as I know, my listing in the database has never been supplied or updated with pertinent information about my current body of work or state of residence, despite availability of such information on my professional website – in part because I haven't undertaken the effort to submit this information myself, believing the database to be faulty in its very conception as a tokenizing list, besides that the labor of maintaining the database should fall to those who are credited (and compensated?) as team members.”
“..contrary to what many may think, it actually becomes *less* valuable the more composers it includes; it's a weird pseudo-documentarian numbers game which lacks true analyses/interventions towards communal structures, demographics, racialized gatekeeping, etc.”
“It feels like they are promoting the illusion of diversity more than helping people connect with these composers. I think there are good intentions, but they do not provide any way except for a list to reach some arbitrary number to check a box. Reminds me of a binder full of women.”
A very common defense of ICD is that “BIPOC and other marginalized groups shouldn’t have to do all the advocacy labor themselves!” However, in practice ICD has actively excluded marginalized people from helping to inform their own advocacy, and sometimes co-opted their work without consent:
“I volunteered for the Diversity Composers Database when they wanted to make a Spanish version of it. I brought up serious issues of terms that would be inappropriate to use outside of the United States. They failed to acknowledge any of my feedback, after repeated attempts that went from subtle to straight forward. In my last exchange, I told them that using those terms and pretending that Spanish-speaking Latin America would have to adapt to them was racist, and it was then when they dismissed me from the project. No apology, nor acknowledgement for my work, nor further communication at all was ever attempted.”
“Having worked as a researcher in Black classical music the world over, I offered to help with the ICD in whatever capacity they saw fit. I got no response from a FB DM to Rob Deemer...there are other white people on their advisors list who definitely have less experience or knowledge on the subject than I, or any number of others do. It felt like they were picking their friends over people who've done work in promoting BIPOC music.”
“I sent Rob Deemer an email with the suggestion that they make their links lead to specific pieces rather than just [a] website homepage...He never responded, but a month or two later, that change was made. I asked if he had compensated or credited the SUNY Fredonia TAs who did much of the grunt work building the database, and he said no (and that he had no plans to do so). I sent him another email asking if he was willing to publicly release a budget and an overview of successes…he responded saying he would release a budget (hasn't done that yet) along with site viewing statistics.”
“I’m disabled and have repeatedly tried to engage ICD team members about the Institute’s lack of disability advocacy and inclusion. ICD lists disability advocacy in their mission statements and in their fundraising campaigns, and then does legitimately nothing to advocate for us.”
“I am a Black artist who was added to the ICD database. As a result, during the month of June (2020) I was bombarded with messages from many people, most of whom I didn't know or had only heard of/met in passing who found my information from the ICD website. While this time should be spent learning about and focusing energy towards Black artists, I often felt that the way the database is set up [led] people to think of those of us on the spreadsheet as data points to be tokenized. I am glad that people want to amplify my work, but I can't help to feel that some of these interactions were disingenuous/part of a one-time engagement with me. I was also harassed by someone who contacted me [c]iting ICD who messaged me incessantly on multiple platforms, crossing my personal boundaries at a time where too many white and non-Black people have been suddenly reaching out to support Black people when we are living through an extremely traumatizing time. It seems as though ICD is ill-equipped to offer much support to those of us actually on their spreadsheet beyond just "awareness."
“While I have not had a direct experience with ICD, I have had many experiences with similar initiatives (composer diversity spreadsheets and programming). My typical experience, and more importantly the experiences communicated to me by the BIPOC artists with which I work closely, is that the results of these kinds of initiatives are most often questionable at best, and harmful at worst. My response here is not definitive and does not speak for every equity-focused initiative or every artist that uses a resource like this, and I must also state that I firmly believe in the necessity for representation in all the work we do, but I also believe that more often than not these kinds of initiatives do not contribute to any sort of real change for what is an inherently oppressive structure, let alone work towards the goal of equity within the classical/new music scene or the decolonization of our creative spheres. Most often these resources are used by performers/curators to satisfy a diversity statement, or to “box check” an inclusion mandate, without recognizing the space into which they are bringing marginalized voices or without engaging with the communities from which those voice[s] originate. I feel that the majority of occasions that a “composer diversity database” is consulted, it is in order to absolve some sort of responsibility on the part of the programmer to truly engage with underrepresented voices, leading to a culture of tokenization and virtue signaling.
My first-hand experience of this phenomenon (especially recently), usually consists of being contacted by white male performers/conductors/programmers and being asked to provide names or work by the BIPOC artists with which I have deeply collaborated with for years, as if I am some sort of expert on their community or experience, or as if I am the link to engage with them rather than the programmer reaching out directly. This is typically paired with other indicators of obviously insidious motives (ignorant language, lack of sustainable commitment, etc.). Using these kinds of resources to find a composer from an underrepresented background may satisfy a diversity quota for a concert program, but doing that alone does not truly engage with these marginalized communities. It doesn’t examine the space in which the music is being performed, the standard audience in attendance, the cost to attend or overall financial structure of the event, to what communities this kind of event is promoted, etc. I believe that using these resources often leads to placing anticolonial voices within an inherently white colonialist structure and calling that act “decolonization,” when it is actually the exact opposite and it should be the deconstruction of that structure that is the main focus moving forward.”
What other changes would you like ICD to make?
“Listen, for once, to the criticism you're receiving through this survey so that your team can rebuild trust with oppressed artists with a marginalized identity. It may be best to dismantle into much smaller pieces so that you can dedicate your time and energy to learning and prioritizing relationships with the communities you want to help. Give up the big name and the accolades for doing the bare minimum. Diversity work is about quality over quantity.”
“Cut ties with racist members of the board. Hold everyone accountable to a much higher standard if they want to be labelled as allies. Pay PoC who make you uncomfortable because right now the white men and white women are much too comfortable. Donate all money the white individuals gained from this initiative, especially Rob Deemer, to initiatives that support the right for PoC to have the tools and training they need to become artists. Rob Deemer needs to step down and the new director needs to be a paid QTPOC with a record of anti-racist and anti-institutional activism.”
“..they could host a series of community discussions where marginalized composers can discuss the actual, systemic barriers they face and come up with work that ICD could do to begin to dismantle those barriers. Listening is crucial, and ICD has been ignoring and talking over the people they “advocate for” since its inception. Not necessarily inclusivity-related, but I think financial transparency is also important for ICD’s general accountability.”
“[The Institute should] dissolve and reconstitute their leadership with a greater presence of BIPOC, intersectional and other underrepresented identities. Name an equally empowered co-director or abdicate directorship entirely, ceding it to a person of "diverse" background. Appoint people with sociological expertise and racial awareness. Offer a formal avenue for presenting complaint and critique, rather than balking at it on social media. Initiate self-reflexive data analysis of the real-world efficacy of the ICD in practice. Initiate programs that direct funding resources and commissioning opportunities to composers of diverse backgrounds. Cease participating in social media pile-ons, bullying naysayers while amplifying White neoliberal "feminist" perspectives on diversity. Disavow, rather than bolster, ICD representatives who behave reprehensibly on social media. Acknowledge and respond to, rather than ignore, well-researched, eloquently written, personally vulnerable contrary opinions (such as Chris Mena's recent online publication). Refuse personal credit in media coverage. Stop playing favorites. Lead with composers and their works, by running a daily "Spotlight" series, not just when expedient during BLM uprisings, that focuses on each individual, granting them autonomy of self-representation if living, with video /audio of pieces more immediately playable, rather than a montage of faces accompanied by links leading to more links emphasizing categories (e.g. Saxophone, Violin) emblazoned with ICD's colorized font stylings and logo.”
“[T]he organization [should] be led by women/trans/nb/BIPOC, [who] have a greater awareness of and interest in the specific composers and pieces they are promoting.”
“Be respectful to people of color by listening to them when they express discomfort or inappropriateness in their approaches. List all of the people of color collaborations, and compensate them for their work. Recognize mistakes publicly, apologize directly, and take the right steps to correct them the mistakes that reinforce white supremacy.”
“Revamp their social media presence to give voice to their stakeholders rather than their leadership. More initiatives focused on education so that the database isn't just a list of names but a directory of people and their lives' work. Get out of the way of BIPOC voices!”
“Direct communication with any living composer requesting permission for inclusion in the database. If that answer is yes, further discourse regarding the use of their name, how they choose to identify (professionally as well as all personal identifiers), descriptions of compositional output, etc.”
“ICD should also take a far more active role, under this leadership, in working to change attitudes and practices in our field WELL BEYOND the simple maintenance of databases. Change requires real action. Databases of underrepresented composers' work are just a basic beginning step (and to have that database largely updated by the composers themselves strikes me as counterproductive, although this may not be entirely how ICD maintains it). And while I know Dr. Deemer and other members of his team actively participate in conferences and other events to spread the work of the ICD, these actions are simply not enough to affect long term change , and, again, the racial makeup of the team presents a problematic narrative that should be painfully obvious to all but the most naive or willingly blinded observer.
After this, more proactive action through performance, [commissioning] and educational initiatives must be taken by ICD UNDER THE LEADERSHIP of BIPOC, LGBTQI and, yes, white cis teams that are fully representative of the racial, gender and ethnic makeup of our community.”
Every individual makes a choice regarding how to engage with organizations like ICD. So often, these institutes claim to center diversity but in actuality align themselves with the repressive institutions they claim to fight against.
ICD is well aware of these complaints. Many artists and academics have made similar concerns in public. Yet this survey continues to provide value as a means for anonymous sources to share their honest thoughts without fear of retribution. We hope that this article provides additional pressure to convince ICD that the changes outlined in this survey must be made in order to reestablish trust in our communities.
Having compassion for the individuals who responded to this survey, we are left with one question: what do we do next?
Here are three options:
Share this article to hold ICD accountable.
Uplift the voices of our survey participants by calling for the same or similar demands as laid out above.
Use your privilege to transfer power, access, and funding to BIPoC, particularly those who are LGBTQIA+ and/or neurodivergent.
While changing, in this case, the responsibility of ICD, we still encourage our readers to continue uplifting the voices of BIPoC, 2SLGBTQIA+, and disabled artists who continually put their careers at risk for requesting accountability. Everyone has a responsibility to use their power to uplift the voices of those institutionally marginalized.