E43: Why We Need To Be Able To Talk About Race And Gender In Classical Music: a Cautionary Tale
An exploration of the challenging but crucial conversations surrounding diversity and representation in classical music education, framed through a personal cautionary experience. Drawing from recent events in the industry, topics discussed include:
– The importance of open dialogue about race and gender in music
– Challenges in representing diverse composers in educational materials
– Navigating sensitive discussions in music education
– Lessons learned from attempting to address these issues
– Broader implications for inclusivity in classical music
Links:
This episode is also available with video on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/UXQ1gPeO9ek
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism- Robin DiAngelo:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/566247/white-fragility-by-dr-robin-diangelo/9780807047415
Useful study notes on ‘White Fragility’:
https://library.fiveable.me/key-terms/hs-ethnic-studies/white-fragility
A must read extract in The Guardian from Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/30/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race
YouTube video Music Theory and White Supremacy by Adam Neely:
https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA
A talk by Philip Ewell on YouTube- a useful introduction to his work:
https://youtu.be/q1yYR-VLpv0
My podcast review of the 2021 Leeds Internation Piano Competition:
https://heartofthepiano.com/e21-leeds-international-piano-competition-the-leeds-2021-review/
Fiona Sinclair’s (CEO Leeds International Piano Competition) Leeds University presentation on gender inequality in music competitions and in the profession as a whole:
https://www.youtube.com/live/xtdpAVyJzVg?si=sOp3PWG5_T_rCB-R&t=2801
A couple of news links concerning possible preferrential treatment for women in the Leeds International Piano Competition:
https://slippedisc.com/2024/09/exclusive-how-the-leeds-piano-competition-is-rigged-for-equality/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/19/female-pianists-favoured-men-major-competition-rules/
The new AI tool which creates incredible podcast episodes- Notebook LM’s new Audio Overview feature:
https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/google-s-new-ai-audio-generator-lets-you-make-a-stunningly-real-ai-podcast-without-a-mic-here-s-how-to-try-it
The intro/outro music is my jazz arrangement of the Rachmaninov Adagio from Symphony #2, you can watch the whole thing here if you like:
https://youtu.be/hMqREAngb4s
Transcription:
Have you ever found yourself hesitant to discuss issues of race or gender for fear of saying something wrong? When we feel unable to talk about these issues freely, resentments and tensions can build up. Movements like Black Lives Matter, along with recent events in the UK, have highlighted how crucial it is to have these conversations.
It’s obviously a contentious topic, but when conversations are stifled—when we’re afraid to discuss racial issues honestly for fear of being ‘cancelled’ or vilified—this creates a pressure cooker environment. As a result, when people of colour speak out about inequalities and push for change, white people can react in exaggerated, overly defensive reactive ways rather than perhaps listening with an open mind.
Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility introduces the concept of this knee-jerk defensive response to healthy debate on race, which often serves to quickly shut any conversation down. DiAngelo explains that these defensive reactions—which can include anger, fear, emotional outbursts, and withdrawal—aren’t about being a ‘bad person’ but are ways people can avoid the discomfort that comes with talking about race. This means that often, despite good intentions, these kinds of defensive responses can actually serve to maintain the status quo of racial inequality by shutting down meaningful conversations about race.
Another book, Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by UK author Reni Eddo-Lodge, sums up a lot of the frustration that people of colour experience when trying to discuss racial issues… personally, reading these two books in particular have really resonated with many of my experiences.
Now, just to give you a little bit of context here, I don’t often talk about this, but I’m basically not white. It doesn’t come up a lot these days because, for many reasons, I don’t seem to stand out as much as ‘different’ anymore. Part of this is because Britain has become much more multicultural, and perhaps some of it is because, for whatever reason, I look more ‘white’ as I get older. So from time to time, when I bring up my ethnicity, people say to me, “I had no idea you weren’t white”. But when I found myself having frustrating conversations about race, the difficulties made so much more sense once I came across the concepts in the books that I just mentioned.
I think it’s important to emphasise that the whole point of these books is not to make white people feel more defensive about talking about race, and the point is not to make white people feel attacked. This is the very problem those books are trying to solve, to highlight how we as a society need to be able to have these discussions openly without fear of being judged.
Now, the world of classical music and classical music education in particular has been grappling with issues of racial and gender representation in recent years. At one end, there are academics such as Philip Ewell, who talks about a deep-seated ideology of white supremacy within the world of classical music. Adam Neely created a great YouTube video called Music Theory and White Supremacy discussing some of these ideas. I personally disagree with a lot of what Ewell says, but the topic is layered and nuanced, and he does make some valid points that are worth considering if you take the time to read his work carefully.
Anybody who goes to classical music concerts will immediately notice the almost total absence of audience-goers who are not white. Could part of the reason for this be that non-white composers are rarely featured in concert programmes? Speaking personally, this absence did bother me when I was young. I was totally unaware that there were plenty of composers who weren’t ‘white’, and the strong perception that the world of classical music was basically for ‘white people’ did unsettle me.
Now, I want to be absolutely clear: this does not mean that I think we should cancel Western classical music—I love it deeply! The Western classical tradition is really important to me. Obviously, the history of classical music does have roots in European composers working within a certain culture, but we now have the power to influence future audiences by taking a more broad and inclusive historical view. If we make an effort to promote more composers of colour and women composers—even if this doesn’t reflect the historical proportions of those composers—it could be key in growing classical music audiences and encouraging more diverse composers in the future.
Long time listeners to my reviews of exam board syllabuses (or syllabi for those who prefer that word!) such as ABRSM, Trinity and LCME know that I have been passionate about the need to represent more women and non-white composers for this reason, and in recent years there has been noticeable pressure for all musical educational establishments including exam boards and music publishers to increase their diversity and address these issues around racial and gender representation.
Some recent piano exam syllabuses—in fact most of them—have been doing an excellent job in discovering and sharing some real gems by hitherto obscure women composers and composers of colour all the way from the Baroque era to the modern age. So it’s not that they didn’t exist– but yes the majority of composers were white men. And it is a very difficult balance to try to decide how much we want to celebrate and honour a deeply valuable tradition with all its biases, and how much we can now selectively highlight the hidden minority women and non-white composers to shape the direction of the future world of classical music.
The issue of positive discrimination surfaced in an interesting way just a few days ago at the concerto finals of the Leeds International Piano Competition, one of the most prestigious events in the classical piano world. It runs every 3 years, and you can listen to a podcast review that I made of the previous competition, the link will be in the shownotes or in the description of the YouTube video below as well as many other links and links to interesting articles on all the things I’ll be covering today.
So, after only men made it through to the finals in 2021, the CEO of the competition Fiona Sinclair set out a series of initiatives to address this gender imbalance. These included training for this year’s jurors, as well as commissioning academic studies into gender imbalances at international piano competitions. She gave a fascinating lecture on this subject at Leeds University which you can find on YouTube, again links will be in the shownotes of the podcast episode or in the description of the YouTube video.
However, there was quite the controversy just before the recent finals when major news sources spotted some clauses in the instructions to the jury members that give women competitors preferential treatment in some circumstances. You know, it’s one thing to try to tackle the problem of what was described as “male dominance” in the world of professional concert pianists, but is giving women pianists preference in a major competition to try to redress this balance going too far?
Now all these issues that I’ve discussed so far intersected a few months ago when I published a podcast review of a set of books called The Joy of Graded Piano. I was asked to review this series of piano anthologies by a future guest who I’d invited to interview on the podcast who’d just authored these new books. He’s a piano educator that I had a huge amount of respect for, and who seemed to have a lot in common with me in terms of educational approaches. I reluctantly agreed to review the books, as it takes a huge amount of my time to review substantial anthologies such as this. Unlike many reviewers, I prefer to read and play every single piece, and really enter into the books deeply before publishing my opinion.
So after a lot of work I uploaded the review, but you won’t be able to find it now for reasons that will become clear as this story unfolds. It was overwhelmingly positive, my review, it was overwhelmingly positive, with only a few minor critiques. Here’s a couple of clips from that original review that I made:
“And I’m going to basically go as far as to say that if you are studying the piano, you pretty much are going to want to own these books. I can absolutely 100% recommend that no matter who you are, if you’re learning the piano, you’re going to want to own these books if you’re at that level”.
“Yeah, I’m basically going to try to, you know, gently say some of the issues that I had with these books. But they’re not massive issues because, like I said, if you’re a learner, I 100% think that this is one of the most important books that you should own. It’s like a no-brainer. You’re learning the piano, you’re somewhere between Grade 1 and Grade 5, you really should own these books. They’re excellent, you know, 100%”.
But I did include some minor critiques which did not affect my enthusiastic and full endorsement of these books. As you may have guessed, some of these had to do with representation of women and non-white composers. In my review I pointed out that several years ago the author had publicly been quite critical about positive discrimination for women composers, warning against ‘tokenism’. And, you know, this is absolutely fine, nobody is a moral arbiter of these matters! However, in the intervening years the author modified his stance and became a staunch supporter of positive discrimination for both women and non-white composers, in common with most of the examination boards and music publishers, and which I personally thoroughly support.
But when I absorbed myself in these anthologies, I had an uneasy feeling about the way I perceived that women composers were being represented. This was nothing huge, and I applauded—genuinely applauded—the efforts towards diversity, but I did wonder if perhaps things might be moving a little towards tokenism—rather than a more organic balance of representation. Here’s another clip from the review:
“And here’s where I’m just going to be, you know, slightly critical about this, which is that what I notice in Andrew’s books are that the women, not absolutely 100% of the time, but generally, generally the format is that you tend to get all the women and non-white composers—and there are a lot of non-white composers, that’s great—but they tend to all show up near the end of the book in list C pieces, so that’s like, you know, the contemporary pieces. A lot of the pieces by women composers tend to be very sort of atmospheric, sort of more minimalist, more pop-end of the classical spectrum. You don’t tend to get sort of many women or non-white in the more sort of core Romantic and Classical. I mean you do occasionally but not as much as like say you know in recent years ABRSM and LCM have been doing with their syllabuses, and Trinity as well. I’m not really sure about just having this tokenism of, right, we’ve got all these core essential pieces, oh my God, I obviously need to fill my quota for women… Let’s now just find some fun, list C, more lightweight, superficial pieces, and make up our quota of token women, just shoving them in List C… erm, not sure about that…”
Now, I will admit my critique of how women were represented in the anthology was, let’s say, passionate and direct. It was not intended to undermine the efforts towards inclusivity—I genuinely admired those—but I felt it was important to share my perspective on how the representation came across to me. After publishing the review though, I received some messages from the author that led me to consider if my strong feelings might have come across a little bit too sharply. This is from one of the messages I sent to him in an effort to find common ground:
“Listening again to the podcast review, I’m trying to take your comments on board, and I wonder if my passionate feelings on certain topics could be communicated in better ways. I’m going to take down the reviews for the moment while I reflect on it”.
You know, I really didn’t want to cause upset or drama.
Unfortunately, despite my efforts to smooth things over, the author was still very upset. He felt that my use of the word ‘tokenism’ was unfair and that it misrepresented his work. In his view, the positioning of these composers was driven by musical and educational reasons, and not by an attempt to sideline them. He also pointed out all the women he’d included who he considered to be heavyweight composers.
So I revisited the books carefully to consider this, but the author did not react well to my subsequent reply where I respectfully further clarified and explained my opinions on this and other issues concerning objections that he’d raised:
“I’ve taken the time this evening to go and play through all the pieces by women/non-white composers in all the books so I could check if my comments were fair or not, and respond to your points”.
[…]
“earlier this evening when I played through all the pieces, I couldn’t shake the feeling of urgency every time I got near the end of the book caused by more and more women composers being squeezed together in a row, most of them being jazz, or floaty. Not that they weren’t really great pieces, and I really enjoyed them individually, but I couldn’t help but get a strong feeling of tokenism by this increasing urgency to squeeze increasing amounts of women into the end of the book with very similar styles. I would have liked ideally to have spoken about the individual pieces in the review and explained this a bit, but obviously I was ambitious enough! Yes there was Chaminade/Farrenc & Amy Beach in grades 4 & 5 but this didn’t hide the increasing amount of women in very similar styles of jazz or ‘floaty’ suddenly bunching up at the end of the book as if to make the quotas”.
Reading this back several months later, I recognise that the attempt here was clearly—surely—to explain my subjective opinion about the way things came across rather than assume any bad intent behind the choices. It was after this message that communications between us seemed to break down completely.
Now, at this point you might be wondering why I’m starting to go into so much detail concerning the messages between me and the author, and why I need to bring them up here… all should become clear by end of this cautionary tale, but I hope it’ll also be clear that while I stood by my opinions, I consistently offered to compromise so that the author would be happy with my review. How were these conciliatory gestures received? We will find out as the tale unfolds!
So, I raised similar concerns regarding how the pieces by non-white composers were represented throughout the anthology. Here’s how I expressed it in the original review…
“And that’s also my point for the non-white composers. You tend not to find so many, if hardly any at all, in the Baroque Classical Romantic end of things. And again, I think that’s a problem because, you know, are we basically saying to students, if you’re a girl or if you’re not white, you can be a composer, but not a serious one. Just fun pieces, just sort of, you know, superficial, more fun stuff. You know, again, sorry if I’m being a little bit critical there, but you know, I have strong feelings about this kind of stuff”.
So, in response, the author explained that the anthology was designed to show how classical music, which originated in Europe, gradually expanded to include contributions from composers around the world. The anthology’s chronological arrangement was designed to trace this progression, illustrating how the repertoire has grown and diversified over time. He also pointed out a couple of times when he’d placed a non-white composer nearer the front of the book.
So, I could see where he was coming from, but I felt I needed to clarify my perspective a little bit more. So I tried to acknowledge his points in a reply, while also explaining why I was still concerned about representation:
“Now I loved the Ignatius Sancho near the beginning of the first book, but was really disappointed that most of the books don’t have similar pieces in the first half of the book (ie not contemporary pieces) or that weren’t jazz, or spirituals, or floaty sugary pieces. Like I said in the review, it seems that you were being very ambitious and trying to juggle a lot of things to balance. It’s just my opinion that I’m not sure about the resulting balance”.
“And I am disappointed by the relative lack of non-white composers in the first half of most (but not all) of the books. I’m sure you’ve seen all the incredible finds of non-white composers in recent syllabuses by LCM, Trinity & ABRSM, these composers so they are definitely out there, but I also remember having a chat with you on Facebook about the incredible neglected repertoire of Latin American classical composers for example who are inexplicably neglected by educators- and a giant treasure trove of incredible educational enjoyable music. Not all non-white composers are American black composers writing music influenced by jazz or spirituals (yes there was some Asian music, but I didn’t get the sense that these were lovingly curated gems like the rest of the repertoire- this is just my opinion). But you did include some gems such as the piece by Gabriel Yared- what a fantastic piece! So my comments are generalisations and strong impressions with a few exceptions- and I think I made this reasonably clear in the review? If not, please let me know where I can make this clearer”.
And this was part of the message that resulted in the author refusing to discuss it any further.
So far, these issues around the representation of women and non-white composers were—I felt—relatively minor points of opinion. But beyond these general concerns about representation, there was one example in particular that struck me as a little more troubling. It was more than just an issue of how pieces were distributed—it raised important questions of cultural sensitivity:
“And it’s great that Andrew does include, try to include pieces from other cultures. Again, the way it’s structured does strike me as a little bit token at times. But, you know, again, why not? Not all music is Western, it’s nice to include music from other cultures, but there does seem to be in places a little bit of insensitivity and lack of awareness about some political topics. So one thing that really massively bothered me, sorry Andrew, is where one piece is listed as a Uyghur folk tune and is also on the same page called traditional Chinese. So I’ve already got myself in a whole load of trouble by a whole load of people thinking I’m pro-Chinese in something. Well here I’m now hanging my hat on the other side of whatever that analogy is… This is like during the Holocaust in Germany. This would be like coming out with a book about music and calling Jewish music traditional German. Because, sorry, sorry if this is going to cause controversy. But, you know, I’m just going to gently put it out there about the overwhelming evidence about what’s going on with Uyghurs in China and to say that a Uyghur folk tune is traditional Chinese is just unbelievably insensitive. That’s all I’m going to say. Now, I’m also going to sort of point out that this sort of problem, I don’t think this is because of the author being pro-Chinese, because in another book, there is a reference, in the Grade two book, there’s a reference to a composer having a Taiwanese nationality, which I think will automatically make that book difficult if not impossible to sell to a Chinese market because that is also a very sensitive topic to the Chinese government, let’s say. So yeah, I’m just going to, because I pointed this out I think as well in one of my previous reviews in another examination board syllabus, that they were obviously making a massive effort to include a whole load of, you know, non-white people. And then when they wrote about that, they just made some very, very uncomfortable things just showing a lack of sensitivity to certain kinds of political things, you know. I’m not going to go into that now, but I’m just going to say in general it’s not enough just to make token efforts to include other nationalities. You’ve also got to kind of be a little bit aware of some of the sensitivities to do with that. So, I’m sorry if this sounds a bit patronising and a bit harsh, but Uyghur folk tune—traditional Chinese—that, I can’t express strongly enough how much that bothers me”.
Now on this point, the author admitted that maybe there was an issue there, but expressed frustration because he had placed his trust in the publisher’s ‘diversity inclusion panel’ to catch things like this. Although it must have been difficult to hear, I did feel it was important to discuss the way the representation choices came across to me. So, in a message to him…
“I’m sorry you’ve been offended by my accusation of tokenism. But let’s take the piece I’m most concerned about- the Uyghur folk tune. Why would we chose (sic) to include a piece such as this which is obviously non-Western and exotic? I’m sure the good reasons to add a piece like this is to be genuinely curious about other cultures, which implies a sense that we care about them as well rather than just appropriate their culture so we can include elements of the ‘other’ without knowing anything about them. So of course I’m concerned in this case that there seems to be a lack of awareness of the context that they are suffering unimaginable suffering at the hands of the Chinese government who use their culture as propaganda in a similar way that the Nazis hid the true situation of the holocaust- and that the Chinese government is doing everything they can to wipe out the Uyghur culture and identity. Like I said, I really don’t want to upset anybody, and I want to be diplomatic and not unnecessarily antagonistic, but in this case I really want to suggest that this is not on a ‘diversity inclusion panel’, but on the author’s decision to include music by an ethnic group they didn’t know anything about- surely this is literally the definition of ‘tokenism’?”
Now, I understood that my comments were strong, but they were meant to encourage thoughtful reflection, and not to attack. Throughout our exchanges, I consistently sought a middle ground, where both my critiques and the author’s intentions could be recognised and valued.
Although I felt it was important to stand by my values and opinions, I had never wanted to do this at the expense of alienating and upsetting a well-respected and popular core member of the piano education community. I will put my hand up and say perhaps I was overly naive in thinking that it would be possible to have these sensitive discussions without it affecting our professional relationship. So as our communications had been deteriorating, I had been reaching out trying to calm things down in every way I could think of, looking for a way to compromise that would pacify the situation. For example, here are some of these attempts from my messages to him:
“I can edit the review where needed…”
“I’m genuinely upset you’re upset, and I do think these are excellent books that I would 100% recommend as must-owns and the first book that students should buy. I tried very hard to make points that were fair and really did not want to make criticisms”.
“There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this- […] It’s just not my personal taste at the lower grades, and I’m sure I worded the review in this way”.
“I like to consider myself as an ethical person- I’m genuinely curious to know how you deal with these kinds of situations as you obviously review a huge amount of books. I don’t know how chatting in advance could have changed most of my opinions though”.
“However, like I said, I did enjoy these pieces, I think these are excellent books, and I 100% recommend them as must-owns. Sadly I have some opinions that I think have upset you, and this absolutely was not my intention. I hope we can get past this, I have so much respect for you and look up to you hugely. I’d still love to have you on the podcast and genuinely apologise if I could have handled it better- and am open to advice on how best to do this in the future”.
“Well that is a shame as I’m willing to have an open discussion and retract anything that is a misrepresentation. I did my best to be as factual as possible in the points I made above, and I would be horrified if I made any kind of review that made misrepresentations”.
“Would you be willing to chat on the phone or on Zoom tomorrow? Perhaps a texted conversation is not the best way to resolve this. I genuinely did not anticipate this reaction. As I said, I’m happy to fix any inaccuracies, and very clearly said in our messages that I don’t think there there (sic) were any bad intentions on your part, and actually talked about what a nice guy you were in the review”.
“Listening again to the podcast review, I’m trying to take your comments on board, and I wonder if my passionate feelings on certain topics could be communicated in better ways- I’m going to take down the reviews for the moment while I reflect on it”.
So, as you can hear, I genuinely wanted to find a way to move forward constructively. It wasn’t about ‘being right’ or forcing my perspective, but about ensuring that we could both express our views in a respectful way. Sadly, the conversation continued to deteriorate.
As the conversation about representation had been intensifying, the author had also been increasingly focusing on smaller details of my review—what he perceived as factual inaccuracies. This included disputes about the size of the musical typesetting, fingering suggestions, and several other elements of the editorial process. It was clear that the conversation was shifting away from the core issue of representation and towards these smaller, more technical points.
So rather than addressing the sensitivities around diversity, it started to feel to me as though the focus had shifted towards derailing the broader discussion and shutting down the review. Refusing to engage with the broader critique, the author instead concentrated on defending the details of the anthology—such as whether the font was really as large as I had described, or how the fingerings had been selected.
Now these could perhaps have been fair and important points, if not for something important that I’ll get to soon.
So anyway, this all reached a head after I sent the detailed message I’ve been quoting from, where I addressed the Author’s objections to my review point by point and clarified my opinions. The conversation was shut down, he involved the publisher, and I received a message informing me that the publisher had instructed the author to cancel a Zoom call that we’d arranged to try to resolve things. This message came with a list of ‘corrections’ to what was referred to as ‘the weight of misinformation’ and misrepresentations in my review.
I would transparently share with you the full list of corrections to all my supposed inaccuracies, but I have been instructed by the author that I am prohibited from publishing any of the messages that he sent to me.
So, as you already heard, I’d decided to temporarily take the review down to prevent further conflict, and decide how to proceed. The author had actually asked me to take it down as a show of good faith just after I’d made this decision, so I was especially shocked at the sudden dramatic escalation of the situation.
Now, because of the litigious nature of some of the author’s messages to me, I’m aware that I need to be as factual and transparent as I can when discussing this here, which is why I’m erring on the side of a little too much information rather than too little. I do not want to be accused of misrepresenting anything. I also want to emphasise that the reason I’m sharing this story here and now is not to rehash past disagreements or point fingers at anybody—it’s because I think that we all need to be more open to discussing how we handle diversity and inclusion, especially when things go wrong.
Now, I do feel I need to refer to some of the accusations that were made against me concerning misinformation, and show proof that references to my ‘factual inaccuracies’ were probably attempts to derail and shut down the review- whether this was done consciously or not.
So, just a couple of days later, the author made a public post on social media praising another review of The Joy of Graded Piano as a lovely, fair, and factual review. Hmm, I wonder what his choice of words could be referring to there?! So, what was really jarring for me was that this extremely short review that he was referring to had included some very similar observations about the music font size and editorial fingering which the author had sharply criticised in my review. Yet, these same details were publicly appreciated as ‘factual’ by the author in this other review while being labelled as ‘misinformation’ in mine.
Let me play you a couple of clips from my review so you can hear this for yourself:
“For me personally, this is not necessarily a criticism, this could be a really good thing for a lot of people. The typesetting, the layout—I’m just flicking through it at the moment—the layout of the music on the page is enormous. It’s so big. If you’re half blind, you’re gonna love these books because they’re so easy to read. If you like having absolutely giant notes and unbelievably clear formatting, you’re gonna really enjoy these. For me personally, it’s too big. And the problem with that is, as a teacher, I’m trying to encourage my students out of a state of narrow focus because I find that basically one of the most common problems I find when people are learning and they’re feeling a bit, you know, insecure about themselves and they just sort of get a really… their posture rounds, their shoulders go forwards, their neck goes forwards, they stare at the music and feel that they have to just work really hard to stare and focus at everything. Personally, my concern is that the bigger the music appears to… I mean, it’s not just a little bigger, this is huge. It’s huge. And my concern is that it sort of makes it more difficult to have a more sort of holistic, more sort of being able to just take in a whole line of music in one go. So, you know, if you imagine what a good sight reader is like when we’re sight reading, we don’t want to stare at one note at a time or even one bar at a time. We want to just take in a whole load of stuff. Now, if you just magnify everything, I wonder if it actually makes it more difficult to have that more sort of- just taking in a lot of information all at the same time. It is like really huge. But if your eyesight isn’t very good, you’ll love this. You’ll love this layout. I’m just not sure. But that’s just personally my taste. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy it. It’s still excellent. Everything that I said before still stands. So having said, you know, some of my criticisms, I still absolutely stand by that if you are learning the piano and you’re at this level, you really absolutely should own these books”.
And I also had a minor criticism in my original review of some of the fingering choices:
“However, I’m not sure about Andrew’s choices for fingerings. They don’t work for me. I’m quite shocked in places, that’s all I’ll say. There’s also some odd choices with hand distributions, you know, what to put in the right hand, what to put in the left hand. I’m personally, as a teacher, just really not sure about this. So if you are a piano student, I would say take some of the editing, particularly to do with fingerings and hand distributions, with a pinch of salt”.
So, here’s the thing—after my review, the author argued, providing information about how the music font was actually average or smaller than usual, and he also said that my comments on the editorial fingerings were misrepresenting the facts—he pointed out that very few of the fingerings were his, he’d tried to stick to the composers’ original fingerings with minimal editorial fingerings. Now this does open up another can of worms, but let’s just, you know, put that to the side for now…
Yet, the review that he had praised had this to say about these same points:
“The size of the musical text in the first four books is relatively large and more spaced out than normal”
Wait, what? So now the author agrees that it is larger than usual? I’m really confused here!
“and useful editorial fingering has been added”
Woah, did I read that right? Remember that editorial means added by the author. So “useful editorial fingering has been added”. So when I was berated for saying I didn’t like the author’s fingerings, suddenly it’s ‘factual’ when another review says the author added fingerings?
So, you know, I can’t help but wonder whether the real problem here was my critique of the representation of women and non-white composers rather than the ‘weight of misinformation’.
Again, I am not bringing this up here to point fingers or prolong any conflict, but because some of the author’s messages to me had strong undertones of legal threat, and I need to be careful and clear in substantiating everything that I say.
Anyway, several months passed while I considered what to do with the review that I’d taken down. I would have preferred to not lose all the time and effort that I’d invested into it, but I also really wanted to avoid further upset. More importantly though, I felt that these issues surrounding representation in music education deserved broader discussion.
If only there was a way to present the events objectively, it might create space for an open dialogue instead of further conflict. So when I came across a cutting-edge AI tool released just a week ago which creates interesting high-quality and engaging podcast episodes, I thought this could be a great opportunity!
So you don’t give this particular AI tool any prompts which could influence it; it just simply analyses whatever you give it. It simply analyses the material and produces its own output. So, I had the idea of feeding it both the original review and all the messages between me and the author. The AI—I thought—could act as an impartial mediator, processing the information and presenting the facts without any personal bias.
Since all our messages had been in the context of discussing a public review, and nothing—nothing—had been said about requiring privacy, this seemed ethically and legally above board to share this AI-generated episode. So, out of courtesy, I sent the author a preview of what I intended to publish, explaining my intentions to publish it as part of a broader discussion on these important issues.
The response that I received back was… not what I had hoped for, warning of defamation, misrepresentation, and inaccuracies. Despite carefully reviewing the AI’s output, I struggled to see what exactly was ‘defamatory’ or where the supposed inaccuracies lay.
So, as far as I could see, the only possible source of defamation and misrepresentation might be, at a stretch, an accusation of not giving the full facts and context- which just wasn’t in the scope of a short AI-created podcast episode. I did personally feel it had given a fair synopsis though.
So anyway, at this point, having exhausted all other options, I decided to make this podcast episode to be able to open this conversation about diversity and representation in our field, while at the same time doing my best to avoid accusations of defamation or misrepresentation. This meant I had to go into much more detail than I’d have preferred, so thank you for having the patience to stay with me till the end!
Anyway, to come back full circle, what can we learn from all of this? Firstly, it’s okay to disagree publicly about issues to do with race and gender. Going back to the beginning of this podcast episode and referring to this topic as a whole–if we have good intentions about helping to open up what have been overwhelmingly white male spaces to allow for more inclusive and diverse participation–it’s essential that we are willing to engage in these conversations openly and honestly, without allowing our own discomfort or anxieties to derail any discussions.
As I’ve hopefully made clear, it’s my view that nobody has the moral authority to definitively say who is right or who is wrong on these issues. These conversations are complex, and it’s okay for us to disagree and reflect on our own biases. What matters most is that we continue to engage in these discussions with an open mind and a willingness to learn from one another. Like with so much in life, it’s all about finding a balance. Where my balance lies will not be the same as with somebody else. But if we all cooperate openly, hopefully we can find the best balance as a whole culture, together.
And what should I be taking away from all of this? Well, as I said, these are not conversations I have that often these days, so perhaps it’s useful for me to recognise that these topics can still be explosive. As the two books on race which I referred to at the beginning of this podcast episode often point out with a dark humour, it really can be impossible much of the time to have these discussions at all without ‘strong reactions’, so maybe it would be best for me to be a little more careful before I naively wade in expecting open conversations.
So thank you for joining me for this sensitive discussion, and if you’d like to contribute to this open dialogue, please do feel free to share an opinion in the comments–but please let’s keep it respectful and avoid turning it into a war zone! Let’s do our best together to help open up the world of classical music to all people from all backgrounds!
