Music Beyond the Canon: Web Resources

...And We Were Here Project gives underrepresented composers a platform to have their music heard by pairing them with top-tier ensembles and promote collaborative recording sessions.

The African Diaspora Music Project was founded as a research tool to help singers find art songs for performance and The George Shirley Vocal Competition. It was released in its vocal format with nearly 4,000 titles in 2019. In 2021, we released a new version that added more than 1,000 orchestral scores in a format usable by conductors and players. Our latest iteration that includes recordings, perusal scores, instrumental and chamber music, and curated lists by trusted orchestral conductors was released in 2022. We have expanded our team to some of the top professionals in each area of expertise. We hear comments from those of you in the field and we continue to grow and become even better as we hear ways that we can assist you. Thank you for using the African Diaspora Music Project and let us hear from you!

American Composers Alliance, established in the 1930s, is a non-profit publisher of American concert music, past and present. With a curated catalog of over 14,000 works from a diverse group of more than 300 American composers of the 20th/21st centuries, ACA preserves historical works, introduces new works, and develops innovative ways to increase awareness, performance opportunities and public engagement with its unique catalog, which is available worldwide in print and other formats.

An open access non-idiomatic spreadsheet of choral music by black composers. Non-idiomatic refers to the original concert music that is not part of the traditional idiomatic canon associated with black musicians. That canon includes spirituals, gospel, jazz, hip-hop, and rap among others.

Designed for everyone – musicians, performers, conductors, students, researchers, educators, artistic administrators, and anyone with a curious mind – this database provides access to thousands of works by women and gender-marginalized composers. By sharing knowledge and resources, the Boulanger Initiative Database (BID) increases access to works by underrepresented composers, empowering all who wish to diversify classical music programming.

This webpage houses resources for music by composers of color. It is not intended to be limited to (a) “traditional” music theory topics or (b) notated music in the Western art music tradition.

The Corelia Project focuses on bringing the compositions of women to the forefront of the classical music world. This database allows you to discover the music of various women my listening to freely available recordings and links to public domain scores or ways to purchase the work. If you find a work you would like to preform please let a Music Librarian know.

Resource list compiled by the League of American Orchestras.

The purpose of this website is simple: to share information about electronic and computer music created by composers of underrepresented groups. The motivation for this information-sharing is to expand the range of electronic music that educators can access as they shape educational experiences. It has been my observation that our field’s engagement with electro-acoustic music repertoire has been focused narrowly on a quite bounded area of the musical literature. Magnificent riches exist outside this well-traversed repertory, and it is my aspiration to bring greater visibility to these electronic music compositions.

Open access sources that provides links to various spreadsheets of music by persons of marginalized communities for various solo instruments and ensembles.

This is an open access curated database of sacred music compiles choral music and voluntaries by women composers ​for the church year, ​with listings for each Sunday and feast days. ​There are also sheets with listings of Mass Settings, Evening Canticles, Responses, and Anglican Chant by women composers.

Indictus Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to amplifying the voices of underrepresented art music composers of all eras. Indictus Project empowers musical artists, sustains the art form with representation and justice, and expands our awareness by collecting, recording, publishing, researching and promoting the staggering amount of art music that remains unexplored by marginalized composers, including but not limited to POC, womxn, LGBTQ+, and religious and ethnic minorities.

In the fall of 2019 Canadian Art Song Project released our podcast discussion with composer Ian Cusson and mezzo-soprano Marion Newman about the appropriation of First Nations, Inuit and Métis songs and stories in Canadian art song and chamber music.

The Institute for Composer Diversity works to encourage the discovery, study, and performance of music written by composers from historically excluded groups.

The Kassia Database is a resource for musicians to aid in the discovery and celebration of art song by women composers. The database includes songs from the Baroque period through the 21st century, and have been categorized by level, voice type, language, composer, and composer dates.

LGBTQ classical music composers have spanned the generations. They include the early Baroque composers of Europe (such as Jean-Baptiste Lully), impressionist classicists (such as Maurice Ravel), mid-nineteen century modernists (such as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Benjamin Britten), and contemporary composers (such as Stephen Hough, Jennifer Higdon, and Gareth Farr). This group of LGBTQ composers has also been active in composing works for many artistic forms. These include ballet, opera, piano, string instruments, and full orchestral movements. Many have had their work generously recognized with awards, such as Pulitzer Prizes, Grammy Awards, and significant national honours.

The main focus of this index is on women making various kinds of experimental/avant garde music. Some of these artists may also work within more mainstream forms, but they are included here because of their other work that is more challenging.

An ongoing commitment to bringing Mexican repertoire to the international stage, providing opportunities for Mexican composers, and combating institutionalized racism in educational and professional performing ensembles.

Music by Black Composers (MBC) was born from the realization that young musicians learning classical music seldom, if ever, have the opportunity to study and perform music written by Black composers. This omission silences a rich vein of musical creation from global cultural consciousness. The effects of this erasure are most serious for aspiring Black classical musicians. Without access to the historic narratives of Black composers, these young musicians struggle to become part of an art form in which they do not appear to belong. Many give up; many more do not even start. The ultimate result is a lack of diversity in our concert halls, both on stage as well as in the audience.

The No Broken Links directories are a starting point for scholars, performers, composers, and teachers to discover minority composers through solo and chamber repertoire for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Saxophone, and Horn. The directories focus specifically on the work of women, transgender & gender non-conforming individuals, and/or Black, Indigenous, or persons of color.

This open-access music data project aims to make works by un(der)-represented people more discoverable, decenter the musical canon, and make data-driven music scholarship more diverse and inclusive. The nature of this project is iterative, because it is being used as a way to teach students about transcription and encoding. The repository contains a growing dataset of music incipits and excerpts from a large historical period by an un(der)-represented group (primarily women and people of color) that has generally been left out of (big) data driven scholarship work.

Resources for teaching early music history more inclusively.

This article appears in the September 2020 issue of EMAg, the Magazine of Early Music America.

Bibliography of Black and Brown composers from Colonial Latin America

The Timeline of African American Music by Portia K. Maultsby, Ph.D. presents the remarkable diversity of African American music, revealing the unique characteristics of each genre and style, from the earliest folk traditions to present-day popular music.

This site contains musical excerpts intended for use in the undergraduate Western tonal music theory core curriculum. Each theoretical concept is illustrated in a series of examples by women and composers of color. I have intentionally chosen examples that are aimed for the pedagogical moment when each concept is introduced in the majority of Western tonal music theory curricula. For example, excerpts demonstrating predominant chords do not contain chords employing secondary function, as most students study predominant function prior to secondary function etc.

“We strive to elevate women composers and theorists by advocating for the study and performance of their works and providing high-quality easily-accessible resources that bring light to the often overshadowed contributions of women in music.”

Spreadsheet containing music theory examples by BIPOC composers.

Bibliography of resources for inclusive music theory pedagogy.