Diversity of Programming by Race and Gender in College and University Band Concerts

Author

Liz LissFollow

Honors Program

Fine and Performing Arts Honors

Date of Award

5-2023

Thesis Professor(s)

Steph Frye-Clark

Thesis Professor Department

<--College of Arts and Sciences-->

Thesis Reader(s)

Alison Deadman, Scott Contreras-Koterbay

Abstract

While there are many women (and others of non-male genders) as well as people of color who compose for concert bands, they are often not given equitable recognition or representation. Over the past several decades, pushes for diversity within the classical music realm and higher education have sparked numerous discussions surrounding current practices (Bond 2017, 154; Bowman 2020, 10; Cumberledge and Williams 2022, 4; Peters 2016, 22): who are we inviting into our programs, whose music are we playing, and who are we representing? Despite these concerns, there has been very little research to provide answers to these questions within collegiate wind bands. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap in knowledge and discover whether college and university bands are in fact increasing the diversity of programmed composers in their repertoire. This study also identifies trends in the frequency of programming certain demographics of composers and examines whether particular institutional factors have any effect on this diversity. To identify these trends, I gathered concert programs from colleges and universities across the United States for the 2000-2001 through 2020-2021 academic years. This information was catalogued into spreadsheets, along with demographic information about each composer, and were later statistically analyzed to determine (a) the level of diversity in collegiate band concert programming, (b) whether programming has become more diverse over the last two decades, (c) if the institution’s region, size, or affiliation affected how diverse the programmed repertoire was, and (d) the diversity of the composer base from which we draw our repertoire. This study provides a lens into the level of diversity in programmed collegiate wind band concert literature and where that level should be moving forward.

Publisher

East Tennessee State University

Document Type

Honors Thesis - Open Access

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Liss, Liz, "Diversity of Programming by Race and Gender in College and University Band Concerts" (2023). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 805. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/805

Copyright

Copyright by the authors.