Anti-racism @ NWC

Many thanks to Cree composer Jessica McMann, and Black Canadian composer Bruce Russell, who provided invaluable emotional labour, multiple reviews, and thoughtful feedback and suggestions during our crafting of this statement.

Approved by NWC Board June 2022.

INTRO

Dear listeners of Calgary, and the wider New and Experimental music communities,

In June of 2020, Black Lives Matter global protests in response to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others spurred a renewed urgency around the need for institutions and organizations to reflect on the roles we play in systems of oppression. These protests began in the United States as a way to push back against police violence in an American context. Canada, as a nation-state founded on Anti-Indigenous Settler-Colonialism, has its own systems of institutionalized racial violence to acknowledge and dismantle. A year later, we began to experience the gradual unveiling and exposure of mass graves of Indigenous children by the hands of Canada’s Residential School System, a process that is ongoing as the number of graves rises with each investigation.

The legacy of British Colonialism, which at its core is a form of White Supremacy, permeates all levels of normative cultural production in Canada, including our own artistic culture within contemporary classical music. This statement addresses the relevancy of Black Lives Matter, Indigenous Lives Matter, and Asian Lives Matter mass movement to our organization and field of practice, and outlines our strategy for moving forward. This is a living document; we began to write it shortly following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 - while we are choosing to go public with this current version, we will continue to update and supplement this document as we learn and grow as an organization.

While we aim to shift our programming to be more inclusive of Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists, we also know that representation is not a comprehensive diagnostic for structural or operational progress. Yet we do think organizations with access to public financial resources can and should acknowledge past and current harms, and model anti-racist practices that we wish to see integrated in Canadian culture at large. We also don’t wish to diminish or invisibilize the work of arts leaders and administrators (particularly the legacy of work done by Women of Colour) at our own or other organizations; we know that maintaining a non-profit organization over many years, amidst competition from commercial art forms, is a challenging and precarious process. That said, in order to foster safer spaces and lasting material support for Black, Indigenous, and other racialized artists, we must sincerely hold ourselves accountable for our own racist and colonial biases and practices, past and present.

While we continue to learn and confront our own biases through discussion and consultation, we have established a set of commitments towards instigating and sustaining change at New Works Calgary, and within the field at large. To read further details surrounding context and concrete actions, please read our full Anti-Racism Statement, linked below.

Finally, we wish to express our deep regret at the ways our field of music has been complicit in upholding harmful systems, and has failed to actively acknowledge the inequities within. As leaders, we also want to express our remorse at ways we have individually contributed to, or failed to contest, the culture of white supremacy around us and within us.

COMMITMENTS

As an organization that holds responsibility for championing skilled performers and composers in our field, New Works Calgary (NWC) has been complicit in upholding a tradition of white supremacy in contemporary classical music, and has failed to acknowledge and challenge the many barriers and biases that keep our work centered around white artists. NWC has done a disservice to its audience by allowing a narrow definition of what constitutes “new music” to guide its programming, and in doing so has excluded the works of many, most obviously that of Black and Indigenous musicians and artists.

We think that reparative action must include a redistribution of resources as well as affirmative action practices, so that more Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists are able to access commission fees, adequate compensation for performances, and equal access to representation within concert seasons. Barriers to access for Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists can begin at a young age, and continue to the professional level. As a result, the Canadian new classical music scene features an overrepresentation of white performers and composers. We believe a first, tangible step in repairing this is to widen our definition of the musical genres that we include within our aesthetic bracket. We aim to welcome musicians working in fields that don’t fit easily on Euro-centric classical programs. We believe this inclusion will have the joint effect of redefining musical value, and also creating safer, more welcoming places for Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists and audience members.
We will track our progress with the first goal by committing to increasing the programming of non-white composers and performers in our seasons, while also fostering interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration in the community, and commissioning new works by non-white artists. In this, we also commit to ongoing transparency in documenting this progress.
We will make this statement easily accessible to the public through our website and at performances, and actively update the resources provided herein. In this way we can measure our work to repair harms against a clearly defined set of principles and values. We invite our publics to hold us accountable to these principles and values.
We will create a Safer Spaces policy and process that is easily accessible to the public through our website and at performances. We invite our publics to hold us accountable to this policy, and aim to have it completed by late 2022.
The leadership at our organization will undergo professional anti-racist and equity training, as well as Indigenous Cultural Awareness Training. We have already begun this learning journey by attending an Anti-Black Racism Workshop with Sankofa, in partnership with Sled Island and the University of Calgary in October of 2021. We have set aside money in our budget to pursue further training in 2022 and 2023.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In Western Canada, institutional violence disproportionately impacts Black and Indigenous lives and communities; we define institutional violence as any form of violence that is perpetuated and normalized by institutions of the state - these include policing, the prison system, the social work and family services sector, public education, the medical system, and others. We are also seeing a rise in hate crimes toward Asian and Muslim Canadians. While the murder of George Floyd brought a renewed focus specifically to police violence in the United States, at New Works Calgary we think it necessary to ground our critique of Canadian racialized violence in the history of colonization within our own city and region.

The establishment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is intimately tied to historical and ongoing displacement and genocide of Plains Indigenous peoples. Our home city of Calgary began as a police outpost (Fort Calgary) in 1875. Its explicit purpose was to establish the Canadian government’s presence on the prairies. The stated goals of the newly-established RCMP at this time were to curtail international whiskey trade in the area, and to prepare Indigenous communities for Treaty negotiation. Then Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald held the ultimate goal of ‘clearing the land’ for immigration; the new, militarized police presence in the area played an important role in this process of displacement and assimilation of Indigenous peoples in the area. The early goals of RCMP in this area are reflected to this day in the disproportionate numbers of Indigenous men and women who have been killed and/or experienced violence at the hands of police on the Canadian Prairies.

In addition to police violence against Indigenous communities, we see a disproportionate number of Indigenous individuals incarcerated in Canadian prisons, a disproportionate number of Indigenous children in the foster care system (continuing the legacy of Residential Schools), and disproportionately high numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The Canadian government’s 2019 release of the Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) Final Report reinforced the reality that gender oppression is amplified at the intersection of race. Women, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, non-binary, and two-spirit individuals face a much higher level of of brutality and discrimination than their male counterparts.

At New Works Calgary, we take the position that cultural forms which affirm the historical Canadian nationalist agenda (British Imperialism) are inherently anti-Indigenous, as Canada was founded with the intention of eradicating the ‘Indian Problem’. Much of the history of new classical music in Canada is tied to Canadian nationalism; in attempts to foster a distinctly national art form, Indigenous arts and culture were frequently either appropriated or erased by artists who aimed to solidify the dominant national myths of terra nullius (vacant land) and the Doctrine of Discovery.

Implicit within colonial Anti-Indigeneity is Anti-Blackness. British Imperialism was successful largely due to the success of resource development in the British colonies; cheap human labour via the Transantlantic slave trade was used to cultivate plantations in these areas. Between 1662 and 1807 (when slavery was abolished in Britain), British ships purchased an estimated 3,415,500 Africans, 2, 964,800 of whom survived the ‘middle passage’ and were sold into slavery in the Americas.

While slavery was abolished in Canada much earlier than it was in other British colonies, we have our own history of slavery and consequent Anti-Blacknesss to contend with. This is apparent not only in the cultural invisibilization of the legacy of slavery in Canada - enslaved African and Indigenous slaves were frequently bought and sold as house servants and farm labourers in the early French and British colonies now known as Canada - but also in the ways newly-freed slaves from the United States were marginalized in the country they believed to be a free society. We highly recommend the work of Calgary playwright Cheryl Foggo, and her research into the story of Black cowboy John Ware, as a starting point for learning about the impact of Anti-Black racism in our region.

Although Canadian cultural initiatives have shifted significantly since the early 1900s, and Canadian arts culture en masse reflects an incredibly diverse array of art forms and artists, many implicit and explicit racist practices pervade to this day within organizational structuring and distribution of cultural funds. Our organization wants to be part of a push towards a different kind of future, one where Black, Indigenous, and People Of Colour (BIPOC) can find their art included and celebrated.

CURRENT CONTEXT + PROBLEMS

In the context of new classical music specifically, we can name many of the ways in which Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists have been dehumanized within and/or discouraged entry into a field that continues to venerate canons of primarily-white male composers. Of these, we think it important to note:

Classical music education requires significant financial resources. For example, entry-level violin lessons can cost anywhere between $50 and $200 per hour. In order for a child to achieve a performance level considered adequate for consideration of entry at professional-level institutions, their parents must invest in weekly, year-round lessons, for a minimum of ten years. For weekly lessons at $75 per hour, this turns into $3900 per year. Over ten years that is $39,000. This doesn’t include rental or purchase of instruments, theory lessons, competition entry-fees, tuition for group chamber ensembles, orchestra, and masterclasses. The cost of classical music education presents barriers at the intersection of race and class; while anyone experiencing financial marginalization will have difficulty accessing music education, Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities are statistically more likely to be financially disadvantaged due to multigenerational, systemic racial oppression.
Higher music education (pre-professional/professional training programs within universities and other publicly-funded institutions) continues to centre and prioritize European Art Music (a predominantly white tradition) as the norm against which other musical genres and cultures are valued and assessed. Positions of power in these institutions are occupied predominantly by white men, and there is very little representation of Black or Indigenous perspectives in roles of leadership.
In institutions where non-European Art Music genres are taught, these other genres are usually grouped together in single courses, or degree minors labelled World Music or Popular Music (1), with the exception of institutions hosting Jazz programs, where a Black American art form is venerated. That said, students within Jazz programs frequently must attend compulsory courses on ‘Music History’ (history of European Art Music), rather than Jazz history (offered as an optional course). Alternatively, Jazz History might be compulsory but the focus is on ear training rather than social context (2). One outcome of prioritizing European Art Music history is that Jazz musical practice is taught outside of its social and historical context; subsequently many of its Black, resistant, and subversive roots are effectively erased within institutional transmission.
Overall, the institutional marginalization and/or erasure of Black, Indigenous, and racialized music traditions contributes to a professional arts training culture that erases and minimizes the contributions of Black, Indigenous, and racialized people. The violence of cultural erasure is part and parcel of direct violence committed against primarily-Black and Indigenous persons at the hands of police.
The experience of Indigenous students in Canada’s educational system is particularly fraught with the violent and horrific history of the Residential and Industrial school systems. This history has been brought to the forefront of our cultural consciousness with the unearthing of mass graves filled with Indigenous children in and around these schools, most recently the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia. The deeply-rooted racism toward Indigenous people permeates all levels of Canada’s primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools systems, and the negative effects of those deeply held biases can still be seen by students attending these schools today through harmful and damaging interactions with fellow students, staff, and educators.
Within the field of Ethnomusicology, which venerates and protects non-classical musical traditions, majority white scholars strive to become experts on musical traditions predominantly belonging to Black, Indigenous, and racialized people (3). As Black American Ethnomusicologist Danielle Brown writes,

My first SEM (Society for Ethnomusicology) Conference was a strange and uncomfortable experience. This was not because I was one of the few BIPOC in attendance. What was strange and uncomfortable was the ways that predominantly white scholars in attendance presumed that they understood BIPOC and were authorities on cultures to which they did not belong. Over the years, I have witnessed white ethnomusicologists attempt to dominate and exert power over scholars and artists of color who did not kowtow to their status as an expert. And it is very clear to me that although many white ethnomusicologists understand interpersonal and systemic racism on an intellectual level, they just don’t get it.

Getting it means understanding that an organization, whose predominantly white members by and large research people of color, is and can be nothing other than a colonialist and imperialist enterprise. Period. It is a hard pill to swallow but swallow we must. No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise, until ethnomusicology as a field is dismantled or significantly restructured, so that epistemic violence against BIPOC is not normalized, Black lives do not matter. And that’s real talk (Brown 2020).

The possessive impulse found within Ethnomusicology extends to the field of Art Music composition, wherein non-white traditions have frequently and continuously been tokenized by composers, with the aim of either exotifying or diversifying their own work, or pursuing a nationalist cultural agenda without participation or consent from the Black, Indigenous, or racialized artists and cultural stewards to whom these traditions rightfully belong. Stó:lo scholar Dylan Robinson refers to an ‘insistence on aesthetic assimilation as the end goal’, as he boldly ‘reframes the work of Canadian composers like R. Murray Schafer, Harry Somers, and Ernest MacMillan in light of their complicity in a violent history of extractivism that appropriated Indigenous culture as a kind of national inheritance’ (4).

Another example can be found in the works of the American Indianist era, which Composer Brett Michael Davids explains:

One historical co-optation of Native American song-ing in Western music was the American Indianist era, where Native American songs were codified and assimilated into written compositions by non-indigenous composers. Non-Indians composed hordes of pseudo-Indian operas, lieder, piano pieces, and all manner of musical works. Further, the American Indianist appropriations were plagued by an error of reasoning—a kind of musical Darwinism. Rather than attempting to meet indigenous people on equal terms with genuine collaboration, the Indianist composers mistook their poaching of Indian life as the discovery of a ‘primitive’ precursor to their own ‘civilization.’ Spurred on by the written transcriptions of Alice Fletcher, Ruth Underhill, Frances Densmore, and others from the late 1800s into the early 1900s, Indianists were busy gathering Indian songs (as one might pick a bushel of apples), codifying what they thought was true Indian music, and grossly misunderstanding what Indians were really doing. Therefore, we should never consider, for example, Charles Wakefield Cadman’s famous work “From the Land of Sky Blue Waters” (with an Omaha tune transcribed by Fletcher) as an indigenous song—it is not. “Sky Blue Waters” is a Cadman song.

Though American Indianists are of the past, the systemic erasure of indigenous life and music continues today. Minute cultural awarenesses break through sometimes, but often the positive changes we are desperate for are obstructed—innocently or intentionally—by the numerous gatekeepers of Western classical music. Those who share the gatekeeping power to allow-or-block indigenous participation are the consorting composers, conductors, ensembles, financial supporters, marketing executives, performers, producers, reviewers, soloists, theorists, venues, and anyone else swimming in that sizable pool. What’s more, also considering art forms adjacent to Western music, such as modern dance, ballet, theater, movies, and the like, that pool becomes an ocean.

Historically these appropriations have occurred co-determinously with other forms of colonial violence; for example the Harry Somers’ 1967 opera ‘Louis Riel,’ which features a song that under Nisga'a law should only be sung by a specific person under specific circumstances (5) was written in the midst of the ‘Sixties Scoop’, a period in Canadian history during which approximately 20,000 Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and raised by white families. In this setting, Nisga’a song is simultaneously venerated, exotified, and dishonoured, while being separated from the actual people experiencing the violence. The latter continue to experience profound intergenerational traumatic impacts.

While many Indigenous artists are working to repatriate their own cultural traditions from the legacy of appropriation in both Ethnomusicology and Art Music Composition, there continues to be widespread acceptance within non-Indigenous Canadian society that the relationship between appropriated materials and national cultural identity is a benign one.

5. Finally, within the field of classical music, there is a pervasive pressure on Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists/students to learn to perform whiteness in order to find some level of safety in classical music spaces (6). Within diversity initiatives, cultural organizations and institutions seek to recruit Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists/students (often following a public murder of a Black person at the hands of police)(7), but often fail to provide the necessary support that would provide both emotional and physical safety, such as the presence of Black, Indigenous, or racialized mediators, as well as a transparent system of agreements and processes to deal with issues of harm caused by whiteness and other systemic power imbalances.

Footnotes

1 - Kajikawa, Loren (2019). 157-58. The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting Legacies of White Supremacy in U.S. Schools and Departments of Music.

2 - Story, Colin. ‘Back to the Future: The Struggle for Equity in Jazz Studies Programs’. September 2020. https://www.thewholenote.com/index.php/newsroom/feature-stories/30323-back-to-the-future-the-struggle-for-equity-in-jazz-studies-programs

3 - Brown, Danielle. ‘An Open Letter on Racism in Music Studies (Particularly Ethnomusicology and Music Education)’. June 2020. https://www.mypeopletellstories.com/blog/open-letter

4 - Sensate Sovereignty: A Dialogue on Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening. May 2020, Multiple Authors. https://amodern.net/article/sensate-sovereignty/

5 - Rowat, Robert. ‘This Podcast Looks at Indigenous Appropriation in Canadian Art Music’. Sept. 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/music/this-podcast-episode-looks-at-indigenous-appropriation-in-canadian-art-music-1.5293938

6 - Grier, Chaka V. ‘The Glittery World of Olivia Shortt: A Safe Place To Play’. Musicworks Issue 138 (Winter 2020-21).

7 - Grier, Chaka V. ‘Canadian artists and activists on their experiences of altruistic violence’. April 2021. https://nowtoronto.com/culture/canadian-artists-activists-on-their-experiences-of-altruistic-violence

further resources

In our journey of ongoing learning around issues of systemic racism and oppression in Canada and beyond, we have begun to compile a list of resources that we have found informative and useful. We welcome you readers, and members of our musical audience, to share with us readings that you have found useful in your personal journeys at artisticdirector@newworkscalgary.com.