MSA Diversity Resource List

Resources for Diversifying Music Curriculum, Concert Programming, and Music Research

The Musicological Society of Australia is collecting links to web resources that will be useful to those wanting to strengthen the inclusivity of their research, teaching, and concert programming.

Below you will find links to repertoire lists, co-design protocols, discussion groups, sample syllabi, databases and more. There are many similar lists online, and with this there is always a risk of information overload, so please do simply treat this list as a starting point in a larger process of engagement with the possibilities of genuine structural change.

If you come across a web resource not listed here that you think would be useful to others, or would like to provide an annotation for a resource listed here to contribute to the page, please let us know (email [email protected]).

Thank you to those who have contributed to the list already (named below)!

Curriculum Resources

• Diverse Music Theory Examples
  • A collection of scores and sound examples by “composers who have worked within the common practice who are not normally encountered in music theory courses. These composers include: women composers, LGBTQ composers, composers of color, and non-Western European composers.”
• Music Theory Examples by Women
  • Database of “high-quality easily-accessible materials striving to elevate the visibility of women composers and theorists.” Contains scores, recordings, short biographies, and links to scholarly literature and other resources. 
• Many Many Women
  • Index of women making various kinds of experimental/avant-garde music.
• Listening to Ladies
  • Podcast of interviews with composers who identify as women, interwoven with samples of their work.
• Oxford Music Online
  • A useful timeline of women composers by time period
• Analytical approaches to world music (open access journal)
• Art Song Augmented
  • “An online forum devoted to art songs by underrepresented composers whose music has been marginalized”
• Creadoras 
  • An interactive map of female composers worldwide
• Resources for Diversifying Music Theory 
  • Compiled by the Society for Music Theory’s Committee on Race and Ethnicity. Organised in categories: “Broader Themes and Philosophies,” “Specific Methods and Musical Genres,” Journals, and “Other Resources on Race and Ethnicity in Music Theory.”
• Global musical modernisms
• Composers of Colour Resource Project
• Inclusive Early Music
• Black Central Europe 
• Engaged Music Theory
• Beyond Tokenism
• World Music Textbook
• The Global Jukebox
• Resources on Ukraine (Society for Ethnomusicology)
• Music and Society Justice Resources Project (Society for Ethnomusicology)
• Gavin Lee’s ‘Global Music History Microlessons’
• Project Spectrum 
• Faculty for a Future
• Global Musicology 

Undergraduate Course Syllabi

• Chris Stover, ‘Global Musical Modernisms’, Griffith University, Australia
• Michael Hooper, ‘Critical Investigations in Music’, UNSW, Australia
• Emily Dolan, ‘1000 Years of Listening’, Brown University, USA
• Mark Seto, ‘Orchestra’, Brown University, USA
• John Gabriel, ‘Music and Politics’; ‘Music and Gender’; and ‘Western Music History 2: the Long 19^th Century, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Society for American Music, Course Syllabi List
• Course Syllabi in Music Theory:
  • “These undergraduate syllabi are the winners of the SMT’s Diversity Course Design award and together serve as a model for other instructors of music theory in implementing an inclusive music theory curriculum.”
• CUNY Graduate Centre Music Department Teaching Hub

Concert/Recital Programming (some of these databases are organised by instrument)

• The Philomel Project
  • “A database of solo and chamber works by women composers, searchable by type, instrumentation, language, and more”.
• Chineke!
• Curating Musical Practices
• Hensel Songs Online
  • Scores for all of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s songs, including many in various transpositions.
• Tenth Muse Initiative
  • Repertoire guides arranged by instrument and period, with links to sheet music
• African Diaspora Music Project
  • List of more resources for BIPOC especially African Diaspora Music Project
• More BIPOC Voices
  • Music by BIPOC composers with works for voice and orchestra or vocal chamber music.
• Works with Horn by Female Composers Catalogue
• A Repertoire Database for Flute
• Corelia Project
  • Works by women and gender-marginalised composers. Includes information about the pieces of music, how to listen and how to get the music/how to contact the composer. Can filter by score availability.
• A Repertoire Database for Clarinet
• Graded Anthologies for Violin and Viola
• Repertoire for Percussion
• Hildegard Publishing
  • Founded by Sylvia Glickman in 1988 – catalogue of over 400 works by women composers and the complete works of Hildegard of Bingen.
• Kassia Database 
  • A database of Art Songs by women, voice orientated. Their resource page also has links to smaller publishers who produce a large amount of score by women.
• Institute for Composer Diversity 
  • Originally a crowd sources database, now a search able website that is being added to constantly. 
• Archiv Frau Musik
  • An International Alliance for Women in Music, the archive has a large collection representing over 1900 female composers, as well as conductors. Collection includes sheet music, recordings, historical documents, and also includes popular music and jazz.
• Illuminate Women’s Music
• Women Composers Database: Adaptistration
• A crowd-sourced and still growing list of works by women composers, listed and searchable by instrumentation.
• Essential Women Composers 
  • A list of 30 essential recordings of music by women composers, most of whom have been hiding in plain sight for centuries.
• Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy 
  • A list of all repertoire performed by the US based Women’s Philharmonic between 1980 and 2004.
• Women Composers Database 
  • Only composers of classical music, whose works have been released by a recognized label (self-publishing excluded), have been included in this database.
• Kassia Database: Art songs by women composers
  • Their resource page also has links to smaller publishers who produce lots of scores by women
• Works for band by female composers
• Audible Women
  • An online directory for contemporary female-identifying, trans and non-binary artists who make experimental art that is audible: sound, sound art, noise and music (acoustic or electronic).
• 1200 years of women composers: Spotify playlist
  • historical and contemporary music by women 
• Canadian Women Composers Project
  • A focus on raising awareness of vocal music by Canadian women composers. Biographies of featured Canadian women composers, repertoire list and link to some recordings.  Has not been updated since 2018, but still useful.

School Resources (K-12)

• Smithsonian Folkways
  • Includes Lesson Plans and other useful resources
• Classroom Resources for Music By Women
  • This one is great for teachers who want resources to teach about specific composers. The author also produces colouring books, 2 piano volumes, and listening guides.
• #Decolonise Music Ed Blog
• ASME Indigenous Resource Page
• Music Constructed
• The Playful Piano, Female Composer Club
• Women in Music Resources

Co-Design Protocols for Music Research and Cultural Collections

• National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia (NRPIPA) 
  • NRPIPA vision is to foster a supportive network of performers, scholars, allied professionals and community stakeholders who are committed to assisting Indigenous Australians to record, document and securely archive their endangered traditions of music and dance, and to apply these unique resources to strategic innovations in business, information technologies, the arts, education, research, governance, health and beyond.
• Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)
  • PARADISEC digitises and archives records of the many small languages of the world, working to ensure that the archive can provide access to interested communities and conforms to international standards for digital archiving. PARADISEC holds 15,700 hours of audio recordings and 2,600 hours of video recordings that might otherwise have been lost. These recordings are of performance, narrative, singing, and other oral tradition. This amounts to over 200 terabytes, and represents 1,350 languages, mainly from the Pacific region.

Research Resources

• Ngara – listen here – hear, learn
  • Ngara is a resource created for HDR students at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music at the University of Sydney. Structured around six interconnected themes, it invites students to listen to Indigenous ways of thinking, learning and understanding culture. It introduces the ideas of key Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars and their Indigenous research methodologies; understanding of Country; how to position oneself in research; the “cultural interface” (Nakata 2007); cultural protocols; and the “right of reply” to archives holding records of Indigenous peoples and cultures.
• Reclaiming Performance Under Assimilation
  • Reclaiming Performance Under Assimilation is a collaborative project funded as an Australian Research Council Discovery Project. It has uncovered a largely hidden and dispersed history of ongoing Aboriginal cultural engagement, political mobilisation, and reclamation through performance. Explore visualisations of our research on these pages, including network maps showing the interconnectedness of performance networks, timelines, and mapping of events and places. The visualisations show networks of events and Indigenous performers in the southeast of Australia, and also show how these groups were connected with Aboriginal performers in the continent’s far north.
• True Echoes:
  • True Echoes is a research project that is reconnecting a rich archive of early sound recordings of Oceanic cultures with the communities from which they originate. True Echoes is working with cultural and research institutions in the region and in the UK to enhance the visibility and accessibility of these collections, ensuring that they are catalogued in ways that are accessible to the communities whose heritage they represent. This website aims to showcase the recordings and the research that has been undertaken between 2019 and 2022.
• Australharmony
  • An online resource toward the early history of music in colonial Australia

List Contributors:

John Gabriel

Emily Dolan

Amanda Hsieh

Louise Devenish

Cecilia Sun

Amanda Harris

Michael Hooper

Sarah Collins

Hannah Lee Tungate

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

Chris Stover

Cathy Grant

Denis Collins