Public Musicology, Public Radio: Some Approaches to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from Classical Radio

Since 2019, I have served as the music director of Interlochen Public Radio. I oversee everything related to Classical IPR, a 24-hour classical music FM station at Interlochen Center for the Arts. My role involves everything from how we sound on the air to what initiatives we're undertaking in the local community to how on earth our little FM station in the woods of northern Michigan can compete in a crowded field of music services from all over the globe. In this piece, I'll provide an overview of how some American classical music radio stations are approaching diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and then turn to some of the ways my team at Classical IPR addresses DEI on the air.Classical stations around the country have taken different approaches to DEI. Many stations are trying to program more music composed and performed by people from historically underrepresented groups in daily broadcasts. Others have created specific programs focusing on music by and issues pertaining to historically underrepresented groups. Examples of these specific programs include The Sound of 13: Celebrating Black Achievement in Classical Music and Feminine Fusion, the stated goal of which is to “highlight the influence of women in classical music.” These approaches, goals, and outcomes are unique to individual stations, music directors, and even hosts. There are no industry-wide best practices for how classical stations should contend with their exclusionary history when many listeners simply want to keep “their” “musical” “tradition” “intact.”Some services such as Classical 24 (operated by Minnesota Public Radio under the umbrella of YourClassical) have taken explicitly data-driven approaches toward DEI. In a Twitter thread posted in April 2022, Classical 24 music director Joe Goetz outlined his station's current work.1 Goetz and his team went through every piece of music in Classical 24’s broadcast library, approximately 37,000 entries, and labeled each “diverse” or “not.” According to Goetz, that definition of “diverse” is based on one provided by the League of American Orchestras, which he summarized as “any piece of music that is composed/performed/conducted (any combo thereof) by a woman or person or color.” By this definition, Classical 24’s “diverse” selections range from Roderick Cox conducting the Chineke! Orchestra in a Sibelius symphony to pianist Martha Argerich playing a Beethoven sonata. The initial analysis of Classical 24’s music library, according to Goetz, revealed that 21.32 percent of the recordings were “diverse.”Goetz and his team also analyzed what music they had actually broadcast in the past month using the same metrics. (I can confirm that a station's library holdings and its actual broadcast rotation are very different.) In March 2022, 33 percent of the music that Classical 24 broadcast was “diverse” by Goetz's metric. Further, Goetz noted that, thanks in large part to the work of Associate Music Director Jennifer Allen, nearly half (46 percent) of the music being added to their music library is “diverse.”The definition of “diverse” that Classical 24 applies invites further consideration. Although Goetz cited the League of American Orchestras as the source, I have not been able to find this specific definition in the organization's free, public postings on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.2 Perhaps the definition that Goetz cited has been published in what the League calls its “two pioneering diversity studies” about American orchestras, but a $55 individual membership fee to the League is required to view these studies.3 Having to pay almost a day's work at minimum wage to view these studies about equity and inclusion does not seem aligned with either of those principles, and I encourage the League of American Orchestras to make this information available without a paywall.What I find problematic about Classical 24’s analysis is that diversity seems to be defined simply as “not white” and “not male”—that is, “other.” White and male remain the baseline against which all other identities are measured.4 As Baltimore Racial Justice Action (BRJA) notes, this practice equates “diversity” with “non-dominant groups.”5 Anything not White or not male is considered “diverse” and therefore broadly a move in the right direction toward what Classical 24 wants more of in the database.I should note that this binary of “yes/no” “White/male” is not the only approach to data analysis in classical radio. In October 2021, I attended an online workshop entitled “Creating and Managing Diverse and Inclusive Playlists with MusicMaster.” Facilitated by Suzanne Bona, the host of Sunday Baroque, and Jill Sorensen of MusicMaster, participants were shown how to use the music cataloging and scheduling program MusicMaster to create categories to help identify, organize, and analyze the diversity of a station's recorded music. If I or any other music director wanted, I could create checkboxes for gender, nationality, race, sexual orientation, religion, or any other trait in Music Master.But what is the endgame of creating boxes, checking them, and then analyzing what percentage of these boxes are checked? Further, who decides what these boxes are and who goes in them? Since its founding in 1970, Canadian Brass has had only male members apart from the four years trumpeter Manon Lafrance spent in the ensemble. Does one woman member make the quintet “diverse”? And does it only count as “diverse” for the recordings made during the four years Lafrance was a member? Similarly, the Juilliard String Quartet had only male members for its first 70 years, until cellist Astrid Schween joined the ensemble in 2016. As of 2022, three of the four members of the quartet are women. So, is the Juilliard Quartet diverse from 2016 onward? Come to think of it, Joseph Lin was the first violinist of the quartet from 2011 to 2018, and since he is the son of Taiwanese immigrants, would the quartet have been considered diverse once he joined? There seems to be a need for a more nuanced approach to these types of analysis than simply “diverse” or “not diverse” (i.e., White and male).It's not my intention to trivialize the very real problems with regard to DEI in the classical music industry and in American culture more broadly. My point here is that I am not sure how this binary box-checking approach toward diversity creates any type of real effects on people's lived experience of music. As BRJA notes, “diversity” means only the statistical presence of various identities; it does not have anything to do with either equity or inclusion.6 Goetz understands this issue, too; he offered the caveat that this box-checking work at Classical 24 is a beginning and not an end result: “There is lots more work to do, but I'm committed to getting us to a place where every day you're hearing something new and exciting, or something you already know and love performed by a new and exciting musician from a previously underrepresented community.”In July 2018, Aiden Feltkamp was named the inaugural Director of Emerging Composers & Diversity for the American Composers Orchestra. When asked in an interview what the future of classical music should look like, they said: Everyone should be able to walk into a concert venue for any given performance and see themselves represented in some combination of the music being played, the musicians onstage, the audience around them, and/or the conductor. For me, that's the future of classical music—it's bright, it's welcoming, and it's abundantly diverse.7Feltkamp's assessment is, to me, one of the clearest and most succinct summaries of how classical music organizations can work on their own DEI efforts. Their description is not just data-driven but also experiential: does the person hearing the music feel like it represents them in some way?My approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion at Classical IPR is far more organic and gut-driven than the data-driven approaches I have cited above. When programming music and when deciding what we're going to say about the music we program, we think not about what percentage of the music is “diverse” but instead consider how our listeners might hear and experience the music and the information we provide about that music. I'll share examples of three specific approaches that my team and I have taken to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion on our radio station in the last few years. I am speaking only about programming that occurs during our daily radio broadcasts—this does not include podcasts or other exclusively digital content.First, like Goetz and many other music directors, I have worked tirelessly to increase the number of albums in our broadcast library that feature music composed, conducted, and performed by women, people of color, people with disabilities, gender variant and non-conforming people, and many other identities. I have no “diverse” or “not diverse” checkboxes in my catalog at present. Classical IPR is a small shop with only two full-time hosts and one part-time host in addition to me. We simply do not have the resources to devote hundreds of hours to creating and checking boxes. For the most part, my goal was to increase the likelihood that if a host wanted to program a Sibelius symphony on a Tuesday afternoon, they were just as likely to grab a recording conducted by James DePreist or JoAnn Falletta as by Herbert Blomstedt.We rely primarily on our own individual knowledge within our shared set of goals and priorities as opposed to a system of checkboxes. We do have a very unscientific shared Google doc called “Show and Tell,” which includes our team's collective knowledge of composers and music of note. This doc includes not only rough chronological lists of composers and conductors who are women and people of color but also music from our own areas of expertise that the other hosts are less familiar with (i.e., video game music, show tunes, concert band music, music composed after 2000 that isn't by Eric Whitacre, and so on).Second, we strive to present information to our listeners that may conflict with what they already know or think they know. It is a priority that hosts actually host, telling the listener something about the piece or the person playing it (as opposed to what we affectionately term the “that was that, this is this” approach). Sometimes it's a fun fact about how cellist Lynn Harrell would buy his cello its own seat on airplanes under the name of Cello Harrell, and sometimes it's an uncomfortable fact about the history of the music they're about to hear.In 2020, for example, we presented Aaron Copland's two sets of Old American Songs on our daily children's program Kids Commute. For the songs in the collection with roots in blackface minstrelsy, host Kate Botello told the listeners the truth. She explained (in third-grader-friendly parlance) what blackface minstrelsy was and why it was so terrible. She encouraged the young listeners to think about what we should do with a beautiful song that has, in her words, a really yucky history. In less than three minutes, she shared an ugly part of American history, presented a musical legacy from that ugly history, and asked listeners to think about what it meant. Several parents who listen to Kids Commute with their children have praised Kate for her ability to present difficult topics in an accessible way that encourages kids to ask questions and think about tough issues.Finally, we make every effort to use musicians’ own voices and let them tell their own stories. This is to avoid overgeneralizing or misconstruing meaning, or trying to create meaning and symbolism where there is none. In 2021, we participated in a workshop with members of Sphinx LEAD (Leaders in Excellence, Arts, and Diversity), a program from the Sphinx Organization that provides training, mentorship, and networking opportunities for rising Black and Latinx leaders in the arts. We asked six members of the cohort to choose a piece of music that was meaningful to them in some way, and I recorded each of them introducing the piece and explaining its significance.8Their musical selections and explanations for their choices were wide-ranging. One participant picked a piece conducted by Gustavo Dudamel because watching Dudamel conduct was the first time she had ever seen another Latino person leading an orchestra. Another person chose a band piece by Frank Ticheli in which he had played a very difficult solo during high school, and he noted with a laugh how that experience made him realize he was not cut out to be a performer. On this program, we gave these six arts leaders a platform to speak directly to our audience about music that had moved them in some way. I would argue that this was far more inclusive than if I had simply tried to summarize their biographies.How does a classical radio station measure success in its efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion? Whether we take a data-driven or experiential approach, we always have to look at the results. Does it mean that more people listen? (That can be hard to measure, especially for a very small and rural station like Classical IPR because our Nielsen ratings data is unreliable at best and useless at worst.) To return to Aiden Feltkamp's assessment quoted earlier, do our listeners hear themselves represented in what we broadcast? Are people choosing our station over others because they are more likely to find themselves represented? And how do we measure those responses?Another crucial metric is how much financial support we're receiving from listeners. In June 2022, Minnesota Public Radio announced that it had received an anonymous $56 million gift, the single largest in the station's history. In a press release, MPR reported that, per the donor's explicit request, the funds will be used exclusively for YourClassical (the brand that operates Classical 24) and for digital and new media related to YourClassical.9 Senior vice president Duchesne Drew also noted that more than one-fourth of the music currently played on YourClassical is “diverse” and that the gift would allow the station to continue to increase representation in its playlists.We had nearly the opposite kind of situation happen at Interlochen Public Radio a few years ago. A person changed their will to remove a (sizeable, but likely not multimillion-dollar) planned gift to Interlochen Public Radio for two reasons: first, the music that we were playing on the air had become too “diverse” (their term), and second, management would not fire one of the hosts, who is the only person of color on the entire staff. Although we regularly receive all kinds of complaints from listeners along with threats to stop their donations until we fix whatever issue they're having (from bad FM reception in their particular hamlet to playing too much flute music before 8 a.m.), this was the only time in my work at the station that a major gift was revoked for the specific complaint of “excess diversity.”For a small organization like ours with strong dependence on individual donor support, there is certainly concern about our financial future. Do we need to keep our content a specific way out of fear that a few large donors will hate it enough that they withdraw their support? Or do we go with our collective gut and make sure as many musical experiences and perspectives and histories as possible are represented in our broadcasts every day? The cancellation of that gift didn't spell financial ruin for the station, by the way. In fact, the last three years fiscal years have been the first time in decades that we have not run a deficit. Plus, just last week I received an email from a person who listened to Classical IPR when they were a student at Interlochen in the 1980s and recently began listening again online from their home in Maine. “The programming is so different and much better than when I was a student,” they wrote. “Thank you for your terrific work.” To be clear, it's not my work that sounds terrific—all I have done is create a platform for listeners to hear the terrific work of many different musicians.

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