When searching for music right now for recitals and other events, it can be an extremely tedious process to find music outside of our purview. There is only so far that music streaming services or deep catalog searches can take us. While we do not deny the enrichment this research brings, they can take a lot of time and finances to do effectively. By creating this database, we hope to provide much-needed organization to those searches and make it easier for anyone to find music outside of their worldview that fit their program’s requirements. 

We try to include a variety of information about the piece, such as composer, composition date, duration, composer identifiers*, etc. This information gives context to the composers and the pieces they write. This context informs our performance practice, helps us represent their music as accurately as possible, and allows for ourselves and our audiences to connect to the music in meaningful ways beyond the music. 

However, we understand that this could run the risk of reducing composers to their surface identity and allow for the potential of tokenization. While we applaud all efforts to include marginalized composers into your programming, reducing people to simple quotas or boxes to check insults their humanity and their artistry. When using this resource, we encourage you to think about the following questions: 

• What are my reasons for searching, sorting, and filtering in a specific way? 

• Do my searches serve a programmatic need or are they performative? Does this piece connect with me and my program or is their inclusion solely to fill some sort of quota? 

A Seat at the Piano provides the following possible guidelines on their database to help guide users when exploring their resource: 

• Avoid programming entire concerts of works by  underrepresented composers for ‘celebration’ programs;

• Form programs that reflect your own geographic area, including composers from where you live (community, city, state/province, for example);

• Communicate with the composers whose music you program to better understand them and their compositional voice.

*We have chosen to use “man” (when composer uses he/him pronouns) and “woman” (she/her) instead of “male” and “female” as the composer gender identifiers. For more information, here is the source we referred to in making this choice: https://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/terms/female.html