Diversity in the Concert Programme

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Below, you’ll find a blog post that I have just written for the Whittaker Library blog. In my library career, I haven’t changed the world, but I have bought and catalogued quite a lot of music.  (Why be modest? Mountains of it!) In the past five years, I’ve focused particularly on equality and diversity – I put a huge amount of effort into it, and I hope it has made a difference to our users.  Perhaps one day, there will be an event to raise awareness of all this music.  I tried, but I have done all I can.  I wish it had been more, and I wish it could have ended more triumphantly.

In an era that’s all about impact and engagement, it can be an up-hill struggle for a librarian to make a significant difference, and even harder to blow one’s own trumpet metaphorically when surrounded by genuine stars in the making, deservedly blowing their own actual trumpets!

Whilst repertoire lists might not seem the most exciting topic in the world, if they’re important to recitalists and other people planning concert programmes, then they’re important to us. We would like to remind everyone that the Whittaker Library does have a lot of music by women and/or BIPOC composers. We’ve committed a fair chunk […]

Diversity in the Concert Programme

Diversifying Your Repertoire: Music by BIPOC Composers

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

At the Whittaker Library, we use the Portal (a bit like Moodle, it’s a kind of intranet for material shared within the institution) for useful information to help our students and colleagues.

A while ago, I compiled lists of music by women composers, subdivided into categories, such as music for children, music for tuba, music for mixed chamber ensemble – but until now, I hadn’t done much in the way of subdividing the lists of music by BIPOC composers. So, I have been working on it.  Despite having acquired quite a lot of music, I have discovered that the commonest instruments have by far and away the most music. Poor tuba player, if you want to diversify your programme with music by people of other ethnicities.

Some university libraries have put in a lot of effort helping students find this kind of thing – especially in Canada and the USA – and there are some useful databases to help – but I have still been struggling to find materials for some of the more minority instruments. Not a great deal for piccolo, tuba, accordion – or bagpipes! (Well,  there might not be as much pipe music over there – we started the piping tradition here in Scotland. However,  there are plenty of non-Scottish pipe bands. Some international pipers must also compose!)

If you play tuba, trombone, piccolo, oboe, saxophone – you get the picture – and your repertoire includes a fabulous piece of music by a BIPOC composer, PLEASE do recommend your library to get that piece in stock so that other musicians can also find it! It won’t be up to me to continue ordering music at RCS after the end of June – and that’s a strange feeling – but I can, right now, highlight the fact that libraries need to pay attention to the repertoire they buy.

If you’re a librarian – by all means, keep the standard repertoire up to date. Buy what your patrons need and ask for. But if you have a chance to do stock development, please keep the BIPOC composers in mind. They are, after all, the global majority! And I’m ashamed to say, we don’t know enough about them, though I can, hand on heart, say that I’ve been making a determined effort to find out.

I had hoped to do one last workshop about all the exciting new repertoire in the library, before I retired. Sadly, this isn’t going to happen. Never mind – maybe one day, someone will find this blog post and feel inspired to explore it all for themselves.

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

Diversifying the Repertoire

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Choosing more diverse repertoire is challenging for instrumentalists and singers. For four or more years, I’ve been working hard on increasing our stock in this area – music by women, music by BIPOC composers, and, of course, music by women who are BIPOC composers – and I’ve compiled some helpful lists of music in stock at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Whittaker Library. They’re posted on the library WhittakerLive blog.

I intend this to be my legacy when I retire from the Library in July 2024.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay