This article is in partnership with the Boulanger Initiative. Boulanger Initiative advocates for women and all gender-marginalized composers.
“I don’t care who wrote it, I just want to hear good music!” is an all too common response I hear from the public when telling them about the work I do supporting women composers.
The fact is, I agree, but what this sentiment misses is the crucial context of how women and gender-marginalized composers have been disempowered, excluded, and invalidated in this art form for centuries. The impact this has had on women having a seat at the table and the public having equal access to their music cannot be understated; it’s that very impact that is at the heart of the work we do here at Boulanger Initiative. Boulanger Initiative is a non-profit dedicated to championing the work of women and gender-marginalized composers, past, present, and future.
We take a multipronged approach, attacking the enculturated bias against women composers head on through education, performance, research, commissioning, and more. Our incredible Boulanger Initiative Database—the only one of its kind in the world—is free, open to the public, and dedicated solely to women and gender-marginalized composers and their works. Users can search by many criteria including instrumentation, date range of composition, composer name, birth region, and more. If scores, recordings, and other resources are available, they are linked right there in the database so any and all barriers to access are removed. At the time of this blog, it has 14,878 works from 1,590 composers from around the world and it’s no hyperbole to say we are constantly adding to it, with a dedicated team of research interns (think Keebler elves with MENSA memberships) headed by our incredible Research Manager, Dr. Caiti Beth McKinney. We’ve created a classroom curricula collection called “Beyond the Box, Into the Barlines” (a nod to the egregious marginalization—quite literally relegated to the margins—of women composers in music history textbooks) all about women composers and their music, featuring composers from different eras or genres, like the Baroque Era, or women orchestral composers. We partner with major US symphonies like Dallas Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, and Richmond Symphony to update their orchestral audition repertoire to include works by underrepresented composers in an initiative called Redefining the Canon. These are but a few of the many programs we utilize to disrupt the canon, educate the world at large about these composers and their works, and alert the world of music not only to their presence, but their prowess.
I frequently get asked, “What is the end goal?” and the running in-house joke is that our end goal is to be obsolete. There’s a kernel of truth in that, though, as we dream of a world in which we don’t need to fight tooth and nail to ensure students are learning names like Florence Price or Julia Perry, the concert hall regularly and organically incorporates music by women outside the month of March, and the music-loving world might remark that a Benjamin Britten work reminds them of Ethel Smyth and not the other way around.
-Kathryn Cruz
Director of Learning and Engagement, Boulanger Initiative