Boulanger Initiative’s Annual Festival for Women and Gender-Marginalized Composers

In Thursday’s (4/4) Washington Post, Michael Andor Brodeur writes, “An increase in the presence of both women and living composers signals an orchestra updating its proverbial firmware, living up to all those diversity initiatives and audience strategies pitched during the pandemic. But it also points blankly backward at an incorrect history lesson … that music from women is something categorically new…. Boulanger Initiative co-founders Laura Colgate and Joy-Leilani Garbutt are hoping to change this state of affairs with WoCo Festival, an annual multiday festival co-presented by the Boulanger Initiative and Strathmore that assembles a pop-up community of women composers for three days of performances, workshops, discussions, musical exhibitions and installations. The festival takes place at … Strathmore from April 12 to 14. Colgate and Garbutt have observed more work by living women composers finding its way onto programs since the pandemic but insist the scope of the problem demands more sweeping corrective action—along with a grander historical perspective…. The most recent report on repertoire diversity from the League of American Orchestras [in partnership with the Institute for Composer Diversity] shows slight improvement. Of 5,407 pieces programmed in the 2022-2023 season, only 12.2 percent were composed by women, living or dead (the number split about evenly between white women and women of color)…. The mission of the Boulanger Initiative, which Colgate co-founded with Garbutt in 2019, is the promotion of music composed by ‘women and all gender-marginalized composers.’ ”