Against Anonymity
Anonymous submission and selection seems a straightforward way to minimise bias in composer competitions. For this reason, it is often recommended and in fact very many composer competitions have already used anonymous submission and selection for some time. However, earlier this year, the organisation Sound and Music launched their Fair Access Principles in which they do not advocate for anonymity. Their CEO, Susanna Eastburn, recently wrote a blog post explaining why these are now of increasing importance as people become more aware of inequalities and seek to change them. As yet, no large-scale stratified study of anonymous selection in composer competitions exists for me to point to, but it is known that this doesn’t improve the diversity of composers who are selected. Here, I want to describe some of the reasons that that could be the case, and give some reasons that organisations should move away from anonymity (and what else they need to do as well). (I am aware that a lot of the examples I cite are drawn from research about gender. This reflects my background in that area, but also the fact that in classical music there has been more work on gender than on race. Racial diversity in classical music is an equally - if not more - urgent question than gender diversity at present).
One can read many studies and reports (such as this one and this one) that give evidence for the positive impact of blind auditions on hiring orchestral musicians, and the subsequent positive impact this has on women (most studied) and people of colour (less studied). However, even this is known to be fallible: some studies showed that if juries could see or even hear shoes that they associated with women performers they were less likely to select those candidates (such as described here). As a result, many auditions are now conducted without shoes.
But while this good evidence exists for orchestra performers, it doesn’t exist for composer competitions. Many anonymous competitions still select primarily white, male, composers. Here’s a blog post I wrote in 2012 about exactly this situation in the Gaudeamus competition, where a member of the jury - Annie Gosfield - replied to say that because anonymous selection was used this was not unequal and the problem could be lack of diversity in the entries. In 2018 the OPUS Competition run by the Britten Sinfonia was criticised for selecting only male composers, and they similarly responded citing anonymity as evidence of fairness. In many similar examples, organisations point to anonymous selection as evidence of their diversity work and commitments: it becomes a reason that they cannot be - and should not be - accused of bias, and where the results of such selection are not diverse this is held up as evidence either of the lack of self-selecting entrants from diverse backgrounds, or a product of unequal access to music and composition, about which the juries themselves can do nothing. It is this situation that I believe creates the justification for the criticism of anonymous selection as a method of increasing composer diversity. This method has not yet been shown to work. In fact, on rare occasions where the split of applicants (usually only the gender split) is revealed by an organisation, anonymous selection rarely even reproduces these ratios. I am sure that there will be some competitions that will be able to show that a larger ratio of women to men, or composers of colour to white composers, were selected, but overall this isn’t the case for such competitions. Thus: where blind auditions can increase diversity for orchestral musicians, for composers the same effect is not observed.
Of course, questions of how to encourage or enable more women, and composers of colour, and composers with disabilities, to apply to competitions is an important one, and the Sound and Music Fair Access Principles go some way to helping organisations to do that. However, consider the orchestral musicians’ shoes: where auditions are not held bare-foot, some women musicians wear men’s shoes as a way to minimise potential bias. Indeed, lack of diversity is such a problem that even the sound of a musician’s footsteps or the appearance of their toes beneath a curtain could lead to (unconcious) bias. In composer competitions, how do composers ‘remove their shoes’?
Even where names are removed from scores, there are many aspects of an entry to a composer competition that may be affected by the circumstances of the composer. For example, whether the work has been performed, who by, and how recently are all likely to better represent white male composers who perhaps are in higher education: more works by male composers are performed by professional ensembles, and composers in higher education are more likely to have access to opportunities to do this. This report by BASCA highlights this lack of diversity, and shows that if you are selecting from music that has already been performed and/or commissioned you are also not selecting from the most diverse pool of applicants. It also mentions lack of equality and diversity in numbers of composition students. Juries may also be impressed by music for larger ensembles, or music that has been completed more recently: again, this can select against diversity since people who have had recent parental leave are less likely to have newer works, and music for larger ensembles reflects inequalities in classical music composition even more so than other types of ensemble. Finally, the presentation of materials can also influence outcomes. In this post on tacit criteria I recounted an experience where I heard in a workshop that a certain score would definitely be selected based on its outside cover presentation. This is an example of a subtle cue that is learned by some composers as part of their education—or because they have studied with a composer who sits on a lot of juries—and not by others.
In the case of women composers, these are all examples of what Adrienne Rich would term ‘patriochialism’[1]: that, in order to gain acceptance, women’s contributions must become like those of their male counterparts to gain acceptance, what Diane Elam calls ‘the struggle for women’s rights to be men’.[2] It is easy to see how the same argument can be made for race, and for dis/ability: where Black or minority ethnic composers wish to participate they may be selected for their ability to produce work similar to that of their white counterparts; where disabled composers wish to do so, they are selected to produce work as if they were abled. This doesn’t mean that there is an essentialism to the music of any of these groups, but rather that people with the same backgrounds, reference points and experiences can produce work that easily speaks to each other and is recognisable as subscribing to the same aesthetic criteria that they have been taught denotes ‘quality’. All this says is that the classical music world is very unequal, and that it continues to reproduce its inequalities: on one hand this point is self-evident and well accepted, but on the other it is one that is often skirted around in order to deny that more work needs to be done to change this fact.
In order to maintain anonymity, an organisation could try to remove those opportunities for bias. They could ask for a brand new, unperformed, piece for an ensemble they select, and require it to be type-set in a certain music software. The problems with this are also obvious: it reproduces all of the circumstances that can lead to a lack of diversity in composer competitions by drawing on unpaid time and access to specific software, creating financial barriers to entry. Indeed, if an organisation were to do this—aside from the barriers to entry it would create—this would signal their value of anonymity over equality. In this respect, one can see anonymous selection in composer competitions as what Sara Ahmed has described as ‘non-performative’. She defines as non-performative ‘institutional speech acts that do not bring into effect what they name’ [her italics]. By using anonymous selection, institutions can claim inclusivity. By using anonymous selection to select composers to those who are similar to those already represented by those institutions, they indicate their commitment to diversity without actually creating diversity.
I am sure in response to this post I will receive many messages that tell me that anonymity is in fact very good, actually. Or that it is all of the other systems and institutions of classical music that need to change in order to make it work, but not composer competitions. These responses can be countered by Susanna Eastburn’s statement (in her blog post, referenced above), that,
‘all too often the arts, including our corner of them in new music, can think of diversity as a series of external shortcomings to be solved’.
Rather, if institutions wish to diversify the composers they work with, then they should actively select for these composers rather than waiting for them to be ‘revealed’ through anonymous selection. If institutions are committed to change, they must make changes. It is tempting to write something along the lines of, ‘this is important now more than ever’, but in fact I do not believe that is true: the lack of diversity in classical music is as urgent as it has ever been, yet more recently people have taken more time and energy to call for change. It is therefore important that change be real and meaningful: pointing to existing initiatives such as anonymous selection for composers is simply to point to the mechanisms that have not yet worked to achieve this.
[1] Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Insitution (New York: Norton, 1976), p.16. [2] Diane Elam, Feminisim and Deconstruction, (London: Routledge, 2003), p.60