Concert Programming ‘Diversity’ Across Locales: a pianist’s autoethnography (conference presentation)

Western classical music is experiencing unpredictable shifts in repertoire selection across concerts, musicology, and pedagogy, shaped by composer anniversaries, sociopolitical movements, and diversity quotas. While recent scholarship has addressed intersectional analysis and global perspectives (Mathias et al., 2022), the field remains largely influenced by contexts in North America, the UK, parts of Europe, and Australia. Practical discourses on inclusion have seen limited development beyond the frameworks of the 1990s (Macarthur et al., 2017). Furthermore, although performers play a central role in programming decisions (Marín, 2018), the literature has focused primarily on organisers (Gotham, 2014; Kouvaras et al., 2022) and audience experience (Pitts and Price, 2021).

In this paper, I examine two approaches to programming ‘diverse’ repertoire in my recent concerts in Manila and London, and how the same work(s) could be framed differently across these locales. The reciprocal relationship between writing and performance is informed by Bartleet’s (2009) model of autoethnography as a method that enables meaningful engagement with a musical tradition fraught with issues. Building on earlier research into performing works by women composers within Eurocentric frameworks, I now reflect on my evolving practices in relation to an ongoing re-rooting in Singapore. Rather than drawing binary comparisons between past and present selves, I approach identity as a process of becoming. In doing so, I interrogate how my working definitions of ‘diversity’ and ‘canon’ shift as situated aspects of practice, and explore how similar contextual framings might offer possibilities for decolonising approaches to pedagogy.