“Music after DEI,” by Don Baton

The adage that “the death of classical music is its oldest living tradition” is a cliché for a reason. In 1600, the theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi publicly condemned the madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi, one of music history’s great innovators. The composer’s crime? His outlandish belief that the strict rules of harmony and part-writing might sometimes be set aside in order to express the psycho-emotional content of the text being set to music. Artusi worried that Monteverdi’s heresies were setting the compositional craft on a slippery slope from which it might never recover. As it turned out, those heresies proved foundational to the Classical and Romantic styles. The vast majority of what we today call “classical music” might never have happened without them.

Over the ensuing centuries, musicians, critics, and tastemakers have periodically followed in Artusi’s footsteps, forecasting doom for our industry—degradation of artistic quality, loss of funding, dwindling audiences. Again and again, they’ve been proven wrong. Many of the changes most feared while they were occurring turned out, in hindsight, to be blessings. In cases when the prognosticators had legitimate concerns, the classical-music industry turned out to be more durable and adaptable than they had feared.

It is my belief that a few decades from now, this is how we will think about the strange period starting around 2015 and reaching its regrettable zenith in 2023, when the classical-music industry in North America (and to a lesser extent, the world) grew obsessed with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our industry is now showing early signs of awakening from its DEI fever dream. But for classical music to regain its health fully and avoid a relapse, it needs to make a thorough accounting of what went wrong.

I believe that the mistakes made over the last decade fall into five major categories. As I discuss them, I will link to longer treatments I have done on each subject.

What went wrong:

1. We allowed the average quality of the compositions we perform to decline by prioritizing DEI criteria in our selection of repertoire. Many orchestras set unofficial quotas on the number of works written by women or racial minorities to be performed per concert and per season. Therefore, the compositional archives needed to be combed to identify the few composers and works from the periods audiences most appreciated (the Classical and Romantic) that fit the bill. Occasionally, these findings were neglected gems (do yourself a favor and listen to William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony), but typically—as in the cases of exhumed “forgotten geniuses” like the French Caribbean Chevalier de Saint-Georges or the black American Florence Price—they were not. Knowing the relative underrepresentation of non-Europeans and women in classical composition before the twentieth century, this is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the degree to which performers have sought to ignore the obvious compositional shortcomings of composers like Saint-Georges or Price, programming them incessantly while seeming to dare listening audiences to respond with anything but unqualified, astonished praise. Inasmuch as we have elevated these weaker works, we have blunted classical music’s strongest intrinsic sales pitch to audiences both new and old: the soul-satisfying power and clarity of our greatest compositions.
2. In our hiring and guest-artist-selection processes, we have allowed race- and sex-based criteria to replace meritocracy. In many orchestras, the famously equitable blind-audition process, in which musicians audition without being seen, has been altered to ensure that candidates from favored groups advance in the process. In their collaborations with living composers, guest artists, and conductors, organizations have likewise prioritized race and sex. Young composers who hail from minority backgrounds find themselves buried under more commissions and performance requests than most composers field in a lifetime, while equally talented composers of different backgrounds go mostly ignored. Women conductors are prioritized to the point that at America’s top ten orchestras during the 2023–24 season, a female conductor had twice the probability of being invited to guest-conduct as did a male conductor. This erosion of meritocracy has resulted in four unfortunate outcomes: first, young artists are thrust under the most glaring spotlights too early because they fulfill a racial or gender quota; second, we miss artistic talent by casting our net too narrowly; third, young musicians of disfavored racial or gender backgrounds survey the contorted musical landscape and are discouraged from pursuing music professionally; and fourth, talented musicians of favored backgrounds can’t help but go through their careers wondering if their professional success is due primarily to their talents, or to their race or sex.
3. We have funneled money that we don’t have into useless race and gender initiatives. One would be hard-pressed to find an orchestra in America that has not hired (and kept on) a “Chief Diversity Officer” in recent years. Meanwhile, many of those same orchestras are stuck in contract negotiations with musicians that they claim they can’t afford to compensate fairly. The League of American Orchestras, which is funded in part through orchestra-administrator membership fees paid by member orchestras, continues to spend much of its resources on DEI. In its steady stream of case-study and best-practices reports, it has still failed to identify a link between diversity initiatives and their stated goal: a durable, diverse audience. Indeed, about a data release from 2024, the LOA admitted: “The proportion of tickets sold to Asian, Black and Hispanic audience members in 2023 only slightly surpassed that of 2019.” And that is a time period over which the proportion of Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics in the overall population increased, meaning that DEI efforts cannot even claim any positive correlation to minority representation in audiences and have likely had zero impact with regard to their stated goal.
4. We have patronized minority audiences. The reasons why classical music’s audiences remain on average whiter and more Asian than America at large are multifaceted, and we are right to seek to understand them. But after several years of failure, we can say quite conclusively that those reasons do not include an excess of Beethoven or paucity of Price on concert programs, orchestras’ failure to publish diversity statements or land acknowledgements, or their decision not to program academic lectures about the evils of slavery before concerts. While programs or activities pandering to minority audiences will occasionally attract diverse audiences, those audiences typically do not return. The world of classical music once believed that our greatest music is for everyone. Through our self-flagellating programming, we have in effect told minority audience members that this is no longer true. Why would they willingly subscribe to racist institutions in a racist industry?
5. We have criminalized the cultural curiosity, mixing, and borrowing that, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, built classical music into an emotional lingua franca for the whole world. By making cultural identity proprietary, we have insisted that composers cannot “borrow” any idea from cultures more deeply “oppressed” than their own; to do so would be “cultural appropriation.” The inevitable result of this proscription has been siloing—composers writing music only in their own languages, only about their own countries, their own people, themselves. If musicians had thought this way in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the oeuvres of Gottschalk, Debussy, Bartók, Britten, Milhaud, Tippett, and Stravinsky, among many others, would have changed the world far less than they did. And with today’s composers forced to stay in their own cultural lanes to avoid accusations of “appropriation,” their oeuvres are less innovative and less likely to be remembered one hundred years from now than those of their pathbreaking forebears.

A daunting list. It’s almost enough to make one wonder whether, after so many false cries over the centuries, the wolf of classical music’s decline and fall may finally be at the door. At the very least, it is a sobering reminder of just how much damage can be done in a few short years by the forcible insertion of political ideology into art.

But ever the optimist, I believe that correcting the missteps on the foregoing list can form the foundation for a post-DEI agenda for classical music. In that spirit, I am setting forth eight agenda items that I believe our industry should pursue to heal its self-inflicted DEI injuries and return to health and relevance. C. S. Lewis famously wrote that “if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” For that reason, I am dividing the list into two categories: the things our industry is still doing that are still harming us and that we must stop doing, and the things we must start doing to meaningfully move forward.

First, the things we must stop doing:

1. Entirely end the selection of concert repertoire based on the race or sex of the composer. Frequently, DEI pushers in orchestra administrations justified their repertoire picks by claiming that they were offering audiences something new. In fact, they were usually offering audiences derivative compositions that simply sounded like less-deftly-composed versions of music they already knew. Orchestras should expose audiences both to new and unfamiliar old musical ideas by seeking diversity within the music itself. Minority and female composers that have something fresh and interesting to say will rise to the top naturally on their own merits. We do not need to go searching for them on any basis other than their music.
2. End the selection of musicians based on race and sex. On this matter in particular, all ensembles must do is turn back the clock about fifteen years. Blind auditions should be used whenever possible, and all avenues for allowing applicants with preferred identities to circumvent the blind-audition process should be closed. Orchestras should drop all official or unofficial quota systems for guest artists and ensure that, on average, hired guest conductors of both sexes and all racial backgrounds are similarly credentialed and experienced. It is likely that this return to genuine fairness will result in a near-term decline in the number of female and minority musicians serving as guest artists. At some organizations, this is already happening. That is an acceptable outcome. The long-term goal of our industry should be to pitch a wide tent and invite new communities into it, not to engage in tugs-of-war over the services of a small group of female and minority musicians while their equally qualified peers get ignored.
3. End the tacit assumption that the canon of traditional classical music is something only white audiences (or perhaps white and Asian audiences) can appreciate. It’s patronizing, counterproductive, and false.
4. Stop relying upon ideologically captured organizations like the League of American Orchestras and OPERA America for ideas and guidance. In a recent piece for The New Criterion, I argued that the Kennedy Center can help fill this vacuum by starting a council that helps musical organizations transition into life after DEI.

And second, the things we must start doing:

• In programming, prioritize the “forgotten middle.” By and large, the steady diet of DEI-selected repertoire did not crowd out the masterpieces of Beethoven, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky—the godlike composers who keep classical music’s more conservative audiences coming to the concert hall. Instead, it choked out any sort of creative programming that lacked a racial or gender angle. This often meant the exclusion of high-quality music that introduced audiences to unfamiliar sounds, whether by forgotten old masters or new ones. It is a common pitfall for musical groups moving on from DEI to program only the warhorses. For its first post-DEI season, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra announced last month that it would be programming one of its most boring concert seasons in memory—hardly an unfamiliar work in sight. In an extended screed blasting the symphony’s “bland and shapeless” upcoming season, the San Francisco music critic Joshua Kosman asked for more female and black composers. He has the right diagnosis but the wrong prescription. The symphony needs new sounds, but not at the price of weaker music. Otherwise it simply substitutes one “bland and shapeless” season for another. This will always be the result if we select on the basis of race and sex rather than the music itself.
• Encourage the composition and performance of new music, particularly the composition of approachable new music that audiences are interested in listening to. In the process, we should remove the DEI-fueled taboos around “cultural appropriation,” allowing composers to absorb influences wherever they can in order to create new sounds reflecting our complex, globalized world. There is nothing wrong with a composer turning inward for inspiration from time to time, but how much greater is his potential when the whole world is his canvas!
• Celebrate and promote new settings for musical performances and creative collaborations with other art forms or cultural institutions. Many arts organizations have long realized that the traditional evening-length concert format appeals less to today’s young audiences than those of the past. But during the DEI era, many had difficulty conceiving of new concert concepts or settings that were not somehow informed by DEI. Indeed, I recall a discussion of artistic collaborations at a League of American Orchestras conference in which no one could think of a collaboration they had done that did not involve the legacy of slavery, the death of George Floyd, or the oppression of women. Over the coming decades, arts organizations that can creatively collaborate on venues and content with visual artists, writers, cultural and historical sites, the food and beverage industries, and other institutions, and that can do so in ways audiences enjoy, will come out on top. Those that collaborate only for the purpose of self- or audience-flagellation won’t.
• Close all DEI offices and eliminate all vice presidencies for DEI. Reallocate that funding to music education and orchestral outreach programs. The lack of diverse audiences and diverse player bases in classical music is due mainly to two factors: poor music education in majority-minority areas and the invisibility of classical-music organizations in those communities. Since cash-strapped school systems typically cut the arts first, orchestras and other classical-music organizations have a vital role to play in filling the gap. Classical-music organizations should ensure, through music-in-schools and mentorship programs, that no student in their city comes of age without having heard classical music live, and that no student interested in pursuing a musical education is unable to do so due to lack of access or funding. Likewise, ensembles must market in low-income communities and lower the financial barriers for such audiences to attend concerts. The pursuit of these two highly ambitious goals is far likelier to deliver diverse player bases and audiences in the future than DEI. Further, it does not require any racial criteria to be used at all. If orchestras simply target neighborhoods where the financial resources are weakest, other forms of diversity will follow.