Racist barriers to good jobs are bad. Racist barriers to other things are also bad, like, for example, racist barriers to orchestral readings for composers.
There are no racist barriers for a composer to have one instrument, like a guitar or a violin or even a grand piano. But for composers who want to write orchestral music, how do they get their hands on an orchestra?
If you can’t afford to hire an orchestra, your best hope might be to win a composition contest which results in an orchestra reading through your piece.
At the American Composers Orchestra (ACO), with Earshot and the Underwood New Music Readings, they like to give off this vibe of being super-woke and unbiased. A gay left-handed black veteran with dyslexia and PTSD who doesn’t know traditional music notation would theoretically get a fair shot at one of these readings and maybe even a commission.
Look at this, they even put it in bold italic:
We encourage composers of all backgrounds to apply and are interested in supporting voices underrepresented in the orchestral repertoire today.
But most of the winners wind up being white, with a few Asians in there. Except for a few token minority winners, this is nothing but lip service to diversity. Who knows what good underrepresented voices will remain underrepresented and even discouraged by the ACO’s dishonesty and racism.
Some of the program partner orchestras try to provide opportunities for specific demographics, like the Detroit Symphony for black composers and the Houston Symphony for Latino composers.
I have been entering most of these contests, but I’ve come to realize it’s a pointless effort. I do think the winners of the Detroit and Houston contests write music that is more interesting and less pretentious than that of the winners of the other programs.
But if the Detroit and Houston winners try their hand at the other programs, I think they would hit the same racist barriers I’m hitting.
When they eliminated the requirement for letters of recommendation a few years ago, I thought it was part of an honest effort to be more inclusive, to give an opportunity for those composers who would be summarily rejected by the usual gatekeepers.
It took me a while to come to the cynical realization that the letters of recommendation were just a relic from the contest’s pre-Internet days. Now, with Google, it just takes a couple of quick searches to confirm that I can’t get a letter of recommendation from any of the usual gatekeepers.
Each time I lose, it’s never because the same judges who chose the winners carefully considered the score I sent in and decided they didn’t like it. I would have no reason to complain if that was the case. If I lose because I had a fair shot and still fell short, then I lost fair and square.
Instead it was because some barely qualified screening idiot took less than a minute to look at my score and find an alleged fault to justify not even passing my score on to the judges. Because supposedly the quality of the score is the primary judging criterion. Supposedly.
It’s possible, likely even, the judges would still reject my entry. But thanks to the ignorant screeners, that’s just speculation. To prove the screeners’ incompetence, I thought of sending in Albert Roussel’s Symphony No. 3 in G minor under the transparent pseudonym Alberto Russel.
I think it would’ve gotten rejected by the screeners, though I doubt the judges would have recognized what it was either. And the feedback would have been hilariously misguided.
But I have far more respect for Roussel’s publisher’s copyright than I do for the ACO bureaucrats, so I’m not actually going to go through with that stunt. In the extremely unlikely event I had gotten caught, I think I would have been permanently disqualified from the ACO contests.
Or who knows, maybe they would have let me keep entering again and again without ever telling me I’m disqualified. But if I’m never to have a fair shot, what does it matter if I’m officially disqualified or not?
Maybe I’ve broken an unpublished rule. But if the rule is not the published, how can I even know it? I can only guess as to what it might be.
Maybe it’s my failure to include a title page and a list of instruments so that bar 1 doesn’t appear until page 3. But if such a stupid little detail is so damn important, why is it not in the official rules?
Maybe it’s the key signatures in my scores. Maybe they prefer music that is only vaguely tonal. There is more life in a single Symphony in D major by one of Mozart’s contemporaries than in almost all or maybe all of today’s avant-garde music put together.
I didn’t get into music composition to write strange squeaks, hisses and pops (though I do need to figure out a strange howl for my Hound of the Baskervilles music, something like a booming bittern). I write music that I enjoy, and that I think other people would enjoy if they got to hear it played by an actual orchestra.
Or maybe I lose because I won’t do those half-assed C-scores. That’s when you write all the instruments at actual pitch (e.g., no transposition for the clarinets in B-flat) but you still use transposition for the instruments that transpose at octaves. If you’re going to be all gung-ho about that sort of thing, commit to it, don’t be a hypocrite.
It has also occurred to me that maybe I’ve broken a published rule. But if that was the case, why haven’t they told me? When I went past the page limit one year in my Kresge Fellowship application in the screenwriting category, I got a very unfriendly letter telling me in no uncertain terms that I had been disqualified precisely for going over the page limit.
I joked that I’ve gotten friendlier letters from the IRS. But, as unfriendly as the Kresge letter was, it was also honest. I had been disqualified because I had failed to observe one of the published rules of the contest and the Kresge staff weren’t going to entertain excuses.
If I’ve broken one of the published rules of the ACO contests, no one has informed me. They hope that I believe that my score got all the way to the judges and was rejected due to an actual deficiency of talent or skill on my part.
And the losers can supposedly ask for feedback from the judges. The feedback that I’ve gotten has usually been vague and inactionable, totally useless. One time they said the piece I sent in “could use more complex orchestration.” I honestly don’t know if they were being sarcastic. I could probably get more useful orchestration advice in a horoscope.
In my latest time losing, it seemed that they had actually given useful, actionable feedback. Or, for all I know, someone invented the feedback after the fact.
- Not idiomatic writing (no breaths in winds, large leaps without enough time in strings)
- A page with parts instead of full score with unclear explanation (trying to write aleatoric music?)
- Needs more work before it's ready for a reading; good idea but need work with orchestration mentor
Okay, I could use a mentor. But the arrogance of saying my piece is not ready for a reading! We’re talking about a damn read-through here, not the New York Philharmonic season opener. No orchestral piece is ever completely ready for a first reading. The best way to prepare for a reading is with a prior reading.
The second point about a “page with parts” is referring to page 8 of the score I sent in. Yeah, I could have explained that better. It was part judge-bait, part test of seeing how far they would read to. Page 8 of 62. I should’ve put it on page 58, that would have been a more meaningful test.
The first point, about idiomatic writing, sounds like mistakes I might have actually made. In my hurry to make the deadline, I may have failed to review the score for passages in which wind instruments play for too long without breaks.
So I pulled up the score in order to spot and correct those mistakes. That’s when I started to get really angry. What the hell are these people talking about? “No breath in winds” makes it sound like I treat the woodwind instruments as if they were organ pipes: press the key and hold indefinitely.
During this review, I remembered that I had expressly decided to split off the woodwind pairs to separate staves (e.g., one staff for first flute and a separate staff for second flute) precisely so that the screening idiots could clearly see that each woodwind player gets plenty of breaks.
All the trouble of separating the woodwinds and carefully distributing the parts so that both first and second of each woodwind would have something interesting to play, with plenty of breaks to catch their breath, that was all wasted.
What did they do, have the score scanned into MIDI and then make their decisions off the MIDI playback? But even that seems like way more effort than they would actually put in.
I complained to the contest administrator, a super-woke bleeding heart, who said I came across a bit combative. How exactly is one supposed to react to this type of gas-lighting anyway? Thank you for telling me I have completely disregarded the very things I spent a lot of time working on.
The super-woke bleeding heart contest administrator provided me with a list of three potential orchestration mentors. The list of three people was almost as diverse as is mathematically possible for a list of three people to be.
Before I got in touch with any of them, I had to check out their music. They all seem to be very competent composers who have a lot to teach me about music in general. And maybe also about orchestral music, even though they don’t seem to have had much more success getting their orchestral music played than I have. Who’s to say I’m not qualified to mentor them?
Could it be that those potential mentors have instead decided they’re tired of the racist barriers to orchestral readings? They’ll just write music for small instrumental ensembles and for choirs, as they can actually get that music played.
Maybe the whole reason for the ACO contests is so that a few predetermined white composers can feel good about having beat out several others in a contest. Then the losers have to be told that they just weren’t as objectively good as the winners.
But the screeners and judges can’t afford to spend too much time giving real, honest feedback to the losers. So usually they keep it vague and brief. There’s just no arguing with vague feedback. If there is ever a need to give feedback that seems actionable and specific, just pick something from the first few pages. Surely some fault is to be found in the first few pages.
We’re talking about musical compositions here, not computer programs. A C++ compiler will stop on the first error found in a source file. But should a judge of orchestral music stop on the first mistake found? No, of course not, and certainly not if it’s already been decided that the particular entrant will be allowed through anyway.
If we’re going to play that game of rejecting upon first fault found, I can find reasons why composers who did win should have been rejected at an early stage.
For the following, I only looked at the first two or three pages (generally ignoring front matter), because that’s the spirit in which my scores have always gotten rejected.
- Like the one who had a trumpet come in on a high B (ledger line) on the very first measure. Kent Kennan advises in The Technique of Orchestration to not start off trumpets higher than the C on the staff. Players can pull it off… sometimes, “when the wind is right.” In fact, Kennan says high brass entrances are a common mistake for beginning orchestrators.
- Or the one who had three trumpets start off above the advisable range. However, props for using tenor clef for the bassoons, even though the clefs are kinda tiny (most of the other composers seem to think all those ledger lines above the bass clef are a good thing).
- Or the one who has cellos divided “a 3” (“dreifach,” threefold) but specifies only one cello in the instrument list. Yeah, this one is being extremely nitpicky, but it’s consistent with the attitude of the screening idiots.
- Another composer had cellos divisi in one measure and presumably double basses also divisi in the same measure, but neglected to write “div” for the basses. But, even after forgiving the missing divisi direction, what kind of different effect do they even think this overly fussy distribution of parts is going to have compared to a simple doubling written as a unison?
And what is the point of crossing the first and second flutes? To avoid the break, maybe? Does that composer even know what a fingering break is? Do the screeners? Do the judges?
Also, one of these pieces was missing the harp diagram, quite necessary given the complex D♯ C B♭ | E♭ F G♯ A♭ pedaling pattern.
For all these winning composers writing high brass entrances, are they honest enough to admit the effect is not quite what they hoped for? As Gunther Schuller observed, composers since Robert Schumann and earlier have been pushing brass instruments to play higher and higher. And many brass players are stepping up to the challenge.
But you can’t change the nature of the instrument, unless maybe you make a new instrument. James Horner wrote high horns in his music for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and they sound strained and aggressive. Exactly what he was going for. Probably not what these ACO winning composers were going for. I think if I look hard enough, I’ll find one of these winners writing a high trumpet entrance and marking it “dolce.”
You can find these examples on the American Composers Orchestra archive page. For some of these, there’s a link to the score on Issuu and you can hear a 3-minute excerpt, of what is presumably the best part of the piece.
I’m not listing names because I’m not interested in begrudging these composers their wins, nor “trashing” them, as the ACO people like to say, so as to dismiss the complaints of losers as merely the rantings of sore losers. My complaint is not with the winning composers, it’s not their fault they were born white or Asian.
And in any case, their struggle to get their music to exist outside of their minds is just beginning. World class orchestras probably don’t care if you’ve won one composition contest until you’ve won a few of them, and even then they might not be all that interested.
And local amateur orchestras are in any case more interested in playing the same few acknowledged “masterpieces” of the core repertoire that the world class orchestras have already covered so well. These composition contest winners have a long way to go and I don’t resent them for winning.
Though not listing their names could still be sour grapes on my part, not wanting to give these competent but unremarkable composers any further notoriety or publicity. I’ll spend more mental energy on colorful incompetents like Hermann Nitsch and Richard Nanes instead. As horrifyingly bad as you might find the music of those two, I doubt you’ll forget them. I’ve already forgotten which ACO contest winning pieces I drew the examples of orchestration mistakes from.
My complaint is with the screeners, who pretend to be objective and unbiased, and not racist. And yet, while keeping up this dishonest pretense, they reinforce the very biases they claim to avoid.
At the ACO, they need to come clean about the fact that race, credentials and musical style (in that order) are far more important than score quality, and that the process is arbitrary and subjective, not objective. Most contests are arbitrary and subjective. They should not pretend this one is not.
Three weeks ago, the ACO sent me an e-mail about the Cone Institute Readings in New Jersey. The deadline was February 14. I decided I wasn’t gonna bother with it. Even if I put in the effort to make the deadline, it would be for naught. Even without the ACO, I’ve got quite enough things on my plate that might get me results but probably won’t.
What I’d like to see happen
The ACO readings are not solving the problem they pretend to solve. I think this is a problem that needs to be solved on a more local basis.
What does it hurt us to hear the orchestral music of a few composers who might not be as “good” by some supposedly objective standard?
I think orchestras should reach out to composers in their area. Get a few scores together, don’t apply aggressive faultfinding. If the score is not obviously bad, give it a chance.
All the “great” composers revised their orchestral scores after hearing them played by an actual orchestra. Even with the help of a computer, you can’t accurately calculate any orchestral effect. Getting a reading shouldn’t feel like the do-or-die thing the ACO wants to make it out to be.
With the kinds of readings I’m proposing, I think we would discover a lot of very good composers who may still have to do something non-musical for a living, but the experience of their music existing outside of their minds would enrich the lives of everyone involved.
And there might also be composers who would be grateful to have had their music heard and then decide they’re more interested in other avenues of endeavor. And even in such a case, wouldn’t our culture be all the richer for that?
There are obstacles to what I’m proposing. And most of them are reinforced by the status quo, which the ACO is playing right into.