I recently posted an article about the dangers in having ambiguous EDI institutional statements and the harm that these do to marginalised artists (https://diazsounds.wixsite.com/my-site/post/constructive-ambiguity-in-edi-statements-of-western-european-classical-music-organisations). What is most harmful about ambiguous EDI statements is that there is no way to have accountability within an institution if there are no set goals which admit where an institution is and where it wants to go. Ambiguous EDI statements let institutions continue to seem like allies publicly while not committing to structural changes that undo the damage caused by systemic issues in race, colonialism, misogyny, and anti-disability. What this leads to is funds being appropriated in the name of EDI to continue to support the white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy—for today, this will be the Beethoven industrial complex. This means less opportunities for BIPOC, LGTBQ+, and disabled artists.
Today, though, I am focusing on the Scottish International Piano Competition. The competition was established in 1986 as a memorial to Frederic Lamond (https://www.scotpianocomp.com/about). Lamond was a Scottish pianist and composer born in 1868 and died in 1948 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Lamond_(pianist). The competition will begin later this week and will feature a total of 25 pianist competing for the prize. There is no publicly available EDI statement from the competition and it is no surprise that the jury (https://www.scotpianocomp.com/jury), composers featured, and competitors (https://www.scotpianocomp.com/competitors) are very white and overwhelmingly male.
Bit of a detour... Other piano competitions are notoriously fraught with white supremacy at many levels. The juries tend to be dominated by majority white, cis, men. The programs of the participants are dominated by canon fundamentalism. And the competitors themselves also tend to be majority male. Examples include the Cliburn International Piano Competition where no black or composers of color have yet to be commissioned to write for the event (https://twitter.com/DutchOven969/status/1477770803987025924?t=a08olldiLN-Tnur1a-49CQ&s=19). The gender of the composers is also overwhelmingly male (https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/composers-in-cowtown-new-music-at-the-12th-van-cliburn-international-piano-competition/). In 2001, at the suggestion of John Corigliano the competition began using a blind, invite only, call for scores of which an all-male jury (in 2001 at least) chose the winning scores. Considering the competition was founded in the US, it is amazing to me that in 2022 a white British male composer was commissioned by the competition to write a piece before any BIPOC American composer had a chance.
At the 2023 Scottish International Piano Competition of the 47 composers, only one is a woman and only one is non-white. The graph below shows how many pieces were on the programs by composer. I counted each separate movement of a larger work as one piece (e.g. a sonata of four movements gets represented in the data as four single pieces by one composer). I did this because I wanted to show just how much time and resources canon fundamentalism takes up. Additionally, in our sort of contemporary moment, one movement pieces are more in vogue, so I wanted to account for this change in our composition and performance practices. Because of eliminations, not all of this music will be heard, but nonetheless I thought it important to really see the statistics of every single program laid out.
Of the 623 seperate pieces and movements chosen by the pianists, I'll say it again, only one is by a woman. Rachmaninoff got chosen 67 times. Beethoven was chosen 53 times. Önaç, the only non-white composer, was chosen 50 times. I'm guessing Önaç was the composer whose piece is compulsory given that each pianist is performing two of his etudes (https://www.scotpianocomp.com/2023). Only concertos by white men are on the list of options!! Although one of the points about repertoire reads 'The Competition Jury will take particular account of the breadth and depth of the repertoire offered by a competitor, and of the design of the programmes as a whole.' there is very little breadth or depth. How does the competition define this because I bet however they define breadth and depth is steeped in white supremacy.
This is how canon fundamentalism works; this is how white supremacy shows its face; this is how capitalism affects our industry; this is cis, het, white, male privilege. Worst of all, we’re all complicit!! From the jurist, the pianists, the competition organisers, the pianists’ teachers, the pianists’ schools, the audience members, etc. We are all to blame for this and for letting it happen over and over again. An all white program, is a racist choice. An all male program, is misogyny. I don't know what else to say aside from, damn!
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