Funding and provision

In a review of music education in England, Henley (Reference HENLEY2011) saw provision as a pyramid. Since Henley, there seems to have been an escalating crisis of provision at the bottom of the pyramid (ASCL, 2016; Daubney & Mackrill, Reference DAUBNEY and MACKRILL2018). In a survey of over 650 state secondary schools, Daubney and Mackrill (Reference DAUBNEY and MACKRILL2018) highlighted a series of worrying changes between 2012 and 2016, including reduced teaching hours, falling staffing levels and fewer schools offering General Certificate of Secondary Education Music. But at the top, a space occupied by children ‘who are exceptionally talented’ (Henley, Reference HENLEY2011: 12) provision has flourished.

In spite of a decade of austerity for the arts in England (Ahrens & Ferry, Reference AHRENS and FERRY2015; Abdullah et al., Reference ABDULLAH, KHADAROO and NAPIER2018), the four specialist classical music schools (Purcell, Chetham’s, Yehudi Menuhin and Wells Cathedral Schools) continue to be supported by the UK government’s Music and Dance Scheme (MDS). Fees are means tested and some 25% of the 600 or so pupils pay nothing (DfE, 2014). The MDS also funds 11 Centres for Advanced Training (CATs) including junior conservatoires at The Royal Academy, The Royal College, The Royal Northern College, The Guildhall, Trinity-Laban and The Royal Birmingham Conservatoires. All CATs provide

The National Children’s Orchestra’s of Great Britain (NCO) has an annual income of £1.4 million (Charity Commission, 2017) and runs five age-banded orchestras (under 10s to under 14s). The NCO runs at least 8-week-long residential courses every year. It runs a bursary system for poorer students, as does the National Youth Orchestra (NYO) where:

Indeed, according to the Trustees Report (NYO, 2016), the NYO had an income of £2.1 million in 2016, a rise of nearly £400,000 compared to 2015. There are also high-quality youth orchestras including those of the City of Birmingham Symphony and The Hallé. Furthermore, children reaching the required standard will find generous scholarships at leading independent schools where music provision is lavish (ISC, 2017).

Neelands (Reference NEELANDS2005: 10) highlighted ‘Matthew’s Effect’ suggesting those already well provided for would go on to be given even more. While budgets and provision have shrunk at the bottom of the pyramid, at the top, Matthew’s Effect seems to still operate. The issue is not affordability or provision when reaching the elite level. Rather, it is how children get there in the first place. The many barriers preventing children reaching the top tier – including the lack of provision in state schools, affordability and access and parents simply being unaware of the benefits of an early musical education – are certainly complex and beyond the scope of this study. But, as the figures below will suggest, female and BME students are not under-represented in the highest levels of classical music education. With a growth in the BME middle classes and the cultivated parenting that goes with it (Vincent et al., Reference VINCENT, ROLLOCK, BALL and GILLBORN2013), it should come as no surprise that ambitious BME families, like their white counterparts, are interested in accessing the bounty on offer.

Girls in elite classical music education

Girls are over-represented in the UK’s elite youth orchestras. In 2017, the NCO’s youngest full symphony orchestra (the under 10s) was 61% girls and 39% boys, while the NCO’s eldest orchestra (under 14s) was 62% girls and 38% boys (NCO, 2017). In the NYO, the next tier up, girls remain well represented with roughly equal numbers of girls and boys in the 2017 cohort (NYO, 2018).

Certainly, girls outnumber boys in the four specialist MDS music schools. Recent figures available for three of the four schools are as follows:

• Chetham’s School of Music: 163 girls/137 boys (ISI, 2017)

• The Purcell School: 103 girls/74 boys (ISI, 2018)

• The Yehudi Menuhin School: 38 girls/37 boys (ISI, 2013).

Clearly, then, at the elite level of music education in England, girls form the majority.

BME Groups in elite classical music education

There are certainly signs of increased BME representation at the top table of music education. One high-profile example of this was Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s victory in the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition 2016 (BBC, 2016). Decca (Universal Music Group), no doubt sensing a commercial opportunity, signed him up almost immediately. The phenomenal rise of The Chineke! Orchestra, led by the charismatic double bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku, highlights the presence of a number of top-level classical musicians in the BME community (Chineke! Foundation, 2017). In 2017, just 2 years after its formation, The Chineke! Orchestra gave a BBC Proms concert at the Albert Hall (BBC, 2017). It was a huge success and within a few weeks the BBC informed The Chineke! Foundation that the broadcast had been ‘shared’ 59,000 times and had 9.7 million views. But also, as Kettle (Reference KETTLE2017) noted, it brought with it a new and diverse audience, rather than the usual Proms crowd.

Certainly, there is evidence that BME interest in classical music is reflected in elite music education. The NYO stated in its Trustees Report that:

The report goes on to note that 27.6% of its 2016 orchestra came from non-white British backgrounds, a rise of nearly 9% on the previous year. The NYO figures are not broken down into specific ethnic groups. Nevertheless, when compared to figures from the 2011 census, which described the population of England and Wales as 14% non-white, 80.5% white British and 5.5% white other (ONS, 2012), the NYO has a higher than expected number of non-white players.

Non-white representation in the NCO is also higher than the 2011 Census data. In 2013, 29% of the NCO members were described as:

However, these percentages are somewhat problematic to interpret. Certainly Chinese players are over-represented compared to the 0.6% of the population identified as Chinese in the 2011 census, while other Asian groups (3% of the NCO but 6.8% in the census) are underrepresented. On the surface, it would seem that black players are also under-represented (2% of the NCO and 3.4% in the census). But this needs to be taken in conjunction with the large over-representation of Mixed-Heritage children (12% of the NCO and 2.2% in the census). Many of these players may self-identify as black or simultaneously self-identify as both black and mixed heritage (Frazer-Carroll, Reference FRAZER-CARROLL2017), or be externally identified as black (Joseph-Salisbury, Reference JOSEPH-SALISBURY2017). Certainly, well-known mixed-heritage composers are frequently identified as black by wider society – for example, Chevalier Saint-George ‘The Black Mozart’ (Smith, Reference SMITH2004: title page), Florence Price ‘the unknown composer was one Florence Price and she was black’ (Classic FM, 2017) and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor ‘the pioneering 19th-century black composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’ (BBC, 2005). As Joseph-Salisbury (Reference JOSEPH-SALISBURY2017: 451), discussing young mixed-heritage males, observed

So how should we interpret the black and mixed percentages from the NCO? The 9.8% over-representation of mixed-heritage players and the 1.4% under-representation of black players give a combined over-representation of 8.4%. However, we are not given a breakdown of heritages in the mixed group. Nevertheless, some (and possibly most) will be of partial black heritage. Given that mixed heritage musicians and composers (see above) are frequently classified as black, there is some legitimacy in suggesting that the black representation in the NCO may be interpreted as considerably higher than the 2% figure and also considerably higher than the 3.4% census figure. While acknowledging that it is contestable and open to interpretation, it can certainly be suggested that black players are over-represented in the NCO compared to the census data. What is not contestable, however, is that BME players as a whole are over-represented in the NCO and the NYO compared to the 2011 census figures.

Bourdieu’s field and doxa in elite classical music

Terdiman (Reference TERDIMAN1987: 806) summed up Bourdieu’s conception of a field, and the practices within it, as:

For this research, the field was that of ‘elite-level classical music in England’. The choice of ‘elite’ rather than ‘professional’ was deliberate because while the field included professional musicians and organisations, it also included the young people destined to become the professionals of the future (and the elite institutions involved in their education). It made sense to put pupils and professionals into the same field because instrumental music teachers in elite education (conservatoires, specialist music schools, elite youth orchestras) are generally high-ranking professionals who:

The Junior Royal Northern College of Music is typical when it states:

At the Junior RNCM, the tutors are drawn from the three most prestigious professional orchestras in the region.

When students reach the elite level of classical music education, they are, then, directly connected to the top professional scene via their teachers who themselves almost certainly had similar connections in their own learning experiences. This form of musical lineage can go back decades, even centuries, as this example from a New York Times music critic illustrates:

This lineage enables the field of elite classical music to operate similarly to Bourdieu’s description of fields in literature, art and philosophy, which are

From an early age (the youngest NCO orchestra is the under 10 age group; the MDS music schools and CATs take children at a similar age), children in elite music education are enrolled into a lineage which, from generation to generation, passes down traditions of technique, repertoire, values and actions which might be termed doxa. The doxa, depicted by Bourdieu (Reference BOURDIEU1996: 306) as an ‘ensemble of assumptions’, leads to a common habitus that is ‘the product of the incorporation of structures of the social world’ (Bourdieu, Reference BOURDIEU1996: 328) within the field. This habitus encompasses a person’s philosophy, senses of identity and belonging, understandings of cultural and social capital and the attribution of value to practices, actions and objects (Bourdieu, Reference BOURDIEU1984), and it is nurtured by the agents in the field. The lineal transmission of values and tradition infuses the habitus into the youngest and newest members of the field and sustains the value of the habitus in its more established agents. Habitus, as Bourdieu (Reference BOURDIEU1996: 179) says,

It is important to appreciate that this structural transmission is more than a single connection with a single teacher. Pupils will be connected with a range of professionals. For example, a viola player at a specialist music school such as The Purcell School might have a viola teacher, a piano teacher, a composition teacher, an academic music teacher, perhaps three conductors (orchestra, string orchestra, choir) and a string quartet tutor. That makes eight connections with classical music professionals within the school alone. Then there are external connections (conductors and sectional tutors in elite youth orchestras such as the NCO or NYO, luthiers, holiday masterclasses, summer schools, etc.). Each professional that connects with the pupil is a component in the pupil’s engagement with the field. If, say, the pupil engages with 10 music professionals over the course of a year, we could assume that each of those professionals has at least a similar number (though probably it would be a lot more) of lineal connections to a previous generation of the field. That would mean the pupil had a many hundreds of lineal musical connections to previous generations, with the number of linear ancestral connections multiplying with each previous generation. If we were to trace the linear connections over a century there would be thousands of agents whose influence might be funnelled through the 10 or so contemporary connections linked to a single pupil. Together, they form the complex and powerful structure that supports and maintains the doxa in the field.

Doxa is sustained by specific components. One of these, nomos, is concerned with ‘trying to impose the boundaries of the field’ (Bourdieu, Reference BOURDIEU1996: 223) in terms of the field’s defining character. This may be partly achieved by controlling the limits of orthodoxy and heterodoxy which co-exist as opinion in a ‘universe of discourse’ (Bourdieu, Reference BOURDIEU1977: 168). Bourdieu sees this universe as a universe within a universe surrounded on all sides by the doxa, which functions as the ‘universe of the un-discussed’. In other words, by allowing discussion and opinion in a restricted universe, the doxa simultaneously creates a legitimising impression (illusio) of free discourse, while certain aspects of the field’s values and character are placed beyond discussion. Bourdieu (Reference BOURDIEU1996: 172) described the illusio as:

So, while the nomos sets the rules and values, the illusio is key to ‘the production of belief’ Bourdieu (Reference BOURDIEU1996: 166). It produces an ‘invisible collusion’ (Bourdieu, Reference BOURDIEU1996: 167) in which all members of the field willingly, though possibly through misrecognition or deception, accept the legitimacy of the ‘game and its stakes’ and the dominant beliefs or values they promote (the ‘ensemble of assumptions’ Bourdieu, Reference BOURDIEU1996: 306).

In younger fields, for example the Public Service Interpreters in Colley and Guéry (Reference COLLEY and GUÉRY2015), the illusio (and therefore the belief it promotes) is less powerful and open to manipulation by agents within the field. However, in more mature fields such as English Schooling (Griffiths, Reference GRIFFITHS2018) resistance is more difficult. Griffiths (Reference GRIFFITHS2018) demonstrated that present-day systemic inequalities in English schools, based on economic and cultural capital, have been structurally sustained in the doxa since before 1870. External organisations and systems have changed, but internal allocations of advantage and disadvantage are maintained with boundaries set by the nomos and legitimacy sustained by the illusio. As suggested above, the field of elite classical music is mature. Its lineally connected structures go back to 1750 and further. We would, then, expect a doxa that is robust, difficult to dislodge, powerful enough to sustain its legitimacy, and able to maintain advantage in its traditional locations, even in a changing world. The purpose of this research was to establish whether this is the case. Particularly, how this affects the nature and scope of inclusion for current female and BME members of the field?

This research focused on two aspects of inclusion: participation as players and the nature of cultural value. The first, as discussed above, was assessed by examining participation in elite classical music education. The nature of cultural value was measured by examining the outputs of high-profile professional classical music organisations. The public performance of music is the defining function of professional musicians. Composers, past and present, gain kudos within the field by having their music aired by the best known players and respected programmers and broadcasters. But by comparing the two chosen aspects of inclusion, the research sought to explore their location. While participatory inclusion would seem to feature prominently in the universe of discourse, does inclusion in terms of cultural value remain firmly in the universe of the un-discussed?

By studying the professional repertoire, this research sought to examine how the cultural value in the field is (or is not) adapting to changes in its membership and, in particular, in its newest membership (as seen at an elite music education level). The professional repertoire was used as a depiction of the current classical music canon. As outlined above, girls outnumber boys in elite music education, and BME groups (non-Chinese Asian groups excepted) are over-represented in the top national youth and children’s orchestras. Three key questions were explored. Has the canon changed to reflect these changes in the field’s membership? Who is, and who is not, admitted to the canon? And what is the dominant character of the canon?

The data

All data for this research came from publicly available sources: the Internet and printed publicity material. In total, 4897 played pieces by 681 composers were collected and categorised. Table 1 shows the number of pieces from each organisation/season. The data tables recorded the number of pieces played for each composer. If the same piece was played three times, it was recorded as three pieces played. No account was taken of the length of the pieces played. This was partly practical; it was simply beyond the scope of this project. However, it was also because the project was concerned with visibility and representation – the number of times composers appeared on programmes, schedules, posters, and in the media. Certainly, it could be argued that some composers of longer pieces, such as Mahler, might not be fairly represented. However, as longer pieces in the survey were written predominantly by white males, not recording the length of pieces was likely to lead to an over-estimate, rather than an under-estimate, of the presence of music by BME or female composers.

Table 1.

Organisations and Numbers of Pieces

The broadcast media consisted of all relevant pieces broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM for a complete week (9th–15th October 2017). With the exception of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, data from the major orchestras included all the pieces from their 2017/18 concert seasons. The BBC Symphony pieces were recorded from the end of the 2017 Proms season (27th September) until 19th May 2018. The Promenade Seasons included all the relevant pieces played over the last 4 years.

The organisations surveyed predominantly programmed classical music. But there were grey areas. Film music, for instance, was included if it was presented in the classical style – particularly if, like much music by John Williams, it has entered the mainstream classical repertoire. Pieces from genres such as Jazz, Musicals, or World Music and Christmas spectaculars, Disney Celebrations or Music from the Movies (clearly money-spinners not aimed at a classical audience) were not included. Some pieces, such as West side Story, posed problems. Clearly Bernstein, with pieces such as The Chichester Psalms, was a top-ranking composer, but West side Story is labelled a musical. Here an individual judgement was made. So an Orchestral Suite or the Symphonic Dances from West Side story would be included, but the Broadway cast singing Gee, Officer Krupke would not. This was, inevitably, a subjective process. However, given the large number of pieces surveyed, it was felt that these marginal decisions did not have a noticeable effect on the overall trends.

Composers were placed into one of four eras:

1. 1. Pre-1750

2. 2. 1750–1900

3. 3. 1900–Present (deceased)

4. 4. Living composers (on 1st December 2017)

Although there is some alignment with musical periods, these periods were chosen on the basis of the likelihood, or expectation, of female and/or BME composers being represented. The hypothesis applied was that the more recent the era, the higher the likelihood of female and BME representation. Where composers crossed an era, two criteria were used in deciding where to place them: when most of their pieces were composed and where they were perceived to have been most visible. Again, there were some difficult decisions. Elgar was placed in category 3, while Debussy was placed in category 2. Some people may have a different view on this, particularly if they are basing their judgements on stylistic musical criteria. But this study focused on sociological, and particularly chronological, criteria. Debussy won the Prix de Rome in 1884 and could, therefore, be considered to have been publicly recognised and prominent well before the end of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the majority of Elgar’s most famous works (including his three symphonies, the cello and violin concertos, Flastaff, Cockaigne, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, Introduction and Allegro for Strings, The Apostles and The Kingdom) were composed in the twentieth century.

The 681 composers were categorised as follows:

1. 1. Non-white – yes/no

2. 2. African Heritage – yes/no

3. 3. European – yes/no

4. 4. Gender – male/female

Non-white, which could be labelled other-than-white, included black, mixed heritage, Indian and Asian groups. Where known, a composer’s ethnicity/nationality was recorded (e.g., Japanese Heritage, Chinese, African Cuban etc.). African heritage covered black and mixed-heritage people who could trace some or all of their ethnicity to Africa and/or the African diaspora. European was defined as continental Europe. A rough guide was a country’s eligibility to enter competitions such as European football tournaments (though the exception to this was Israel, which is in Union of European Football Associations for security rather than geographical reasons).

The current canon

Table 2 is clear: over 99% of pieces played were by white composers, 98% were by male composers and nearly 94% were by Europeans. The 28 non-white composers had a mean of less than 2 pieces played, for white composers the mean was 7.4 pieces [t(679) = 6.76, p < .001]. Similarly, male composers had a mean of 7.7 pieces, compared to just 1.6 pieces for the 60 females [t(668) = 6.74, p < .001] and the 103 non-Europeans had a mean of marginally over three pieces, compared to nearly eight for Europeans [t(654) = 4.58, p < .001]. Without doubt, the current classical music canon remains predominantly white, male and European.

Table 2.

All Pieces and Composers

Table 3 emphasises this domination. Just 27 composers (under 4%) account for over half of the entire output. These composers, in order of the number of pieces played, were Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, = Elgar, = J. S. Bach, Brahms, Dvorak, Debussy, Sibelius, Ravel, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, Haydn, Stravinsky, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Vaughan-Williams, Vivaldi, Handel, Prokofiev, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Grieg, = Saint-Seans, = R. Strauss, = Wagner. All were European white males.

Table 3.

All Composers Ranked by Number of Pieces Played

The highest ranked non-European, equal 32nd with Walton, was Leonard Bernstein. The highest ranked woman (=79th) was Lilli Boulanger (and perhaps she would not have been this high if 2018 was not the anniversary of her death). The highest ranked BME composers (=133rd) were Chen Gang and He Zhanhao whose Butterfly Concerto was played five times. However, it should be noted that all five performances were given by the Royal Philharmonic during their Chinese tour and not played in England. The highest ranking African heritage composer was George Walker (=134th), with just three pieces played.

When comparing the current canon to the canons of previous generations, it becomes apparent that there are fixed pillars, immovable dominating figures, that maintain the status quo. Kremp (Reference KREMP2010: 1052) noted that:

Twelve of the 13 (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Ravel, Schubert, Schumann, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner) feature in the list of 27 composers that made up over half of the pieces in this study. The 13th, Berlioz, was ranked 41^st.

Kremp’s analysis used data collected by John Henry Mueller and, after his death, collated by his wife Kate (Mueller, Reference MUELLER1973). Mueller includes a list of 29 composers (all white, male, Europeans) who, at various times between 1890 and 1970, have been frequently played over a specific five-year period (Mueller, Reference MUELLER1973: xliv–xlv). Of these, 22 appear in the list of 27 most played composers in this study. Only 2 of the 29 are outside the top 50 (Bruckner =54th and Franck =73rd). Kremp (Reference KREMP2010: 1052), using Mueller’s data, also found:

And this study found that the profile of dominant composers identified by Kremp in the 1880s and 1950s remains in place as we move towards the 2020s. The canon remains stubbornly male, white and Eurocentric, with a guild of 20–30 dead white men who have dominated the repertoire of the past and continue that domination in the present.

Comparing the different eras

Pre-1750 and 1750–1900: As Table 4 shows, there were no BME composers played from the pre-1750 and the 1750–1900 eras. While the former might be expected, there were certainly non-white composers after 1750. Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–1799) composed exceptional string quartets, violin concertos and symphonies. Jose Silvestre White Lafitte (1836–1918) wrote a superb violin concerto. Edmund Dede (1827–1901), who wrote several ballets, operas and orchestral works, is among several nineteenth-century New Orleans Creole composers discussed in Sullivan (Reference SULLIVAN1988). Nevertheless, of the 2252 pieces played from the 1750–1900 era, not a single one was composed by a non-white composer (Table 5).

Table 4.

Composers Ranked by Number of Pieces Played

Table 5.

Comparing the Eras

Grove (2018) lists 37 female composers in the pre-1750 era, including 26 from the baroque period. For the 1750–1900 era, Grove lists 148 female composers (21 classical, 42 early romantic and 85 late romantic). There are, then, enough female composers from both periods to enable programmers to raise the profile of women. Table 4 shows that for the pre-1750 and the 1750–1900 eras combined only 9 (<4%) of the 240 composers were female. They accounted for just 9 (0.3%) of the 2728 pieces played. Interestingly, Table 5 shows that the percentage of female-composed music from 1750 to 1900 (0.2% of pieces) was smaller than pre-1750 (0.8%), even though Grove (2018) suggests a much higher number of known female composers from the 1750–1900 period. Female composers from 1750 to 1900 are, it seems, largely ignored.

One example is Louise Farrenc (1804–1875). She was an important member of the French nineteenth-century music scene. Friedland (Reference FRIEDLAND1974: 274) described her as ‘a forerunner of the epoch-making French musical renaissance of the 1870s’. Her opuses number over 50, she composed chamber, choral and symphonic works, and for over 30 years she was a professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire. At least one of her works was premiered to great acclaim by no less than the violinist Joseph Joachim (Friedland, Reference FRIEDLAND1974). And yet, she had just one piece broadcast on Classic FM and not a single piece in any live concert in the survey.

1900–2017 (non-living): Given the march of the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage and the evolution of feminism, and a raft of equalities legislation and reform, one might expect the 1900–2017 (non-living) section to represent BME and female composers in higher numbers than previous eras. However, the figures suggest that for BME groups, progress is slow. Just 7 (3.3%) of the 215 non-living 1900–2017 composers were non-white and just 4 (1.9%) were of African heritage. BME composers accounted for just 11 (0.7%) out of 1689 pieces (with 5 of these coming from African heritage composers). The African heritage composers (Coleridge-Taylor, Scott Joplin, William Grant Still and Florence Price) were on the radio only and did not feature in any of the orchestral or Proms seasons surveyed. None of their five pieces was programmed in a prime concert slot. Coleridge-Taylor’s two pieces were played in BBC R3’s breakfast programme and at 11.50 pm on Classic FM (together lasting less than 15 min). Florence Price had a 4-min piece on an afternoon miscellany programme, while Still had a piece of similar length in a breakfast show. Finally, Scott Joplin was represented with a 2-min performance of the Fig Leaf Rag. Twentieth-century African heritage composers were both poorly represented and marginalised in terms of programming slots.

The case of Samuel-Taylor deserves further comment. McGinty (Reference MCGINTY2001: 197), describing Coleridge-Taylor’s visit to America, stated:

Coleridge-Taylor had an international reputation. As Richards (Reference RICHARDS2001) noted, Elgar was recommending Coleridge-Taylor for commissions (including a prestigious commission for the Three Choirs Festival for which Elgar had been too busy). Stanford, the pre-eminent composition teacher at the time, had taken him on as a pupil at the Royal College of Music (RCM) where his fellow composition students included Vaughan-Williams and Holst. In fact, Holst and Coleridge-Taylor applied for the same RCM composition scholarship and it was awarded to Coleridge-Taylor (Holst, Reference HOLST1969). The esteem in which he was held is illustrated by the fact that Stanford himself conducted the first performance of Coleridge-Taylor’s early masterpiece, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (Richards, Reference RICHARDS2001). By the time Coleridge-Taylor died at the age of 37 he had toured America three times and composed 82 opus-numbered works (Tortolano, Reference TORTOLANO2012). He was a major English composer.

So how has the canon chosen to remember Coleridge-Taylor in comparison to his fellow pupils? Vaughan-Williams was the 17th most played composer out of all 681, with 71 pieces performed. Holst was 34th with 34 pieces played. Both Holst and Vaughan-Williams were well represented across radio, orchestral seasons and Promenade concerts. Elgar ranked fifth with 128 pieces played. But Coleridge-Taylor had just two plays (ranking = 223–335 out of 681) in spite of the fact that Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast was performed hundreds of times in the early decades of the twentieth century. One has to ask why Coleridge-Taylor slipped from the canon? Could it be down to the colour of his skin?

Women from this period fared only marginally better than BME composers. Grove (2018) lists 200 female composers working between 1900 and 1960 alone, and more than 460 are listed in the 1960–present category. Some of the latter are still living, but nevertheless, Grove’s list suggests many female composers are available from this period to programmers. However, just nine female composers were represented and their 21 pieces accounted for only 1.2% of those played. Women made up only 4.2% of composers played from this section. This is a smaller percentage than in the pre-1750 section and only 1% more than the 1750–1900 era.

The data threw up an interesting comparison between Debussy and Lilli Boulanger. Both were French, both had their death centenary in 2018, both were highly celebrated in their lifetimes and both won the prestigious Prix de Rome for musical composition (Boulanger being the first woman to do so). Boulanger had just 10 pieces played, while Debussy had 104.

Living composers: There has been some improvement in representation for female and BME composers in the current generation, but progress is limited. Over 85% of pieces played by living composers were composed by men, over 92% were by white composers and nearly 70% were from Europeans. The largest increase from pre-1750 levels was for non-Europeans who made up 26% of the living composers. However, the majority were white (68%) and/or male (80%). We see, then, that as programmers open their doors to composers from outside Europe, those allowed through continue to reflect classical music’s traditional gender and ethnic majorities.

Although the representation of women has improved, it remains woefully low. Less than one in five of living composers programmed were female and they accounted for less than one in seven pieces played. No women featured in the top 10 composers for the number of pieces played, and while 14 men had over five pieces played, only 2 women were in this position. Eleven white men, seven from Europe and four from the USA, had more than seven pieces played. No woman had more than six plays. Just 12% of the top 50 ranked composers were female.

Only four BME composers, and just one of African heritage, featured in the top 50 ranked by pieces played. Just 21 composers, some 9%, were non-white, with only 6 (less than 3%) of African heritage. BME composers accounted for just 7.3% of pieces played. For African heritage composers, it was less than 2%. While Chen Gang and He Zhanhao’s Butterfly Concerto was played five times, all these performances were on a Chinese tour. No other BME composers had more than three plays. Even George Walker (George Walker sadly died in 2018, but he was still living at the time of this research), the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Musical Composition, had only three pieces played. One of these performances was the British Premiere of his Pulitzer winning composition. Walker won the prize in 1996. The British Premiere took 22 years to appear.

BME, and particularly African heritage composers, were often excluded from prime slots. Leo Brower’s two plays, both just 3 min long, were in BBC Radio 3’s Breakfast miscellany. Valerie Capers’ single piece was also in the Breakfast miscellany. Two living African heritage composers featured in the 2017 BBC Proms. One of these, Hannah Kendall, was played in a late night prom by the Chineke! Orchestra whose mission is to promote BME composers. The other, a 6-min piece by Roderick Williams, was in a lunchtime prom in the Cadogan Hall. Why did no living African heritage composers feature in any proms in the prime evening slots? The long overdue programming of George Walker apart, no African heritage composers featured in the programmes of the 10 orchestras surveyed.