Composers of Colour and Music Tech

It seems to me to be the case that a lot of music tech books seem to lag a bit in noting the musical and technological contributions of people of colour. I’m looking for resources that address this and to make up for my knowledge deficit. One obvious location to search for and collect this kind of information is wikipedia.

Therefore, I will post here a list of wikipedia articles for composers of colour who work with music technology for free music, art music, experimental music, creative music or in other genres derived from jazz, classical, noise, etc.

I have a few goals in creating this list here, the most urgent of which is making sure my lectures this term are appropriately diverse. When this list is long enough, of course, I want to move it to wikipedia, but in the mean time, I will edit this list to add names to it as they come up. I will additionally create a second list of people who are not listed on wikipedia.

My starting point for these names is wikipedia itself. I will be going through the List of Composer of African Descent and reading the existing articles. As I go through them, I’ll also look at who these composers collaborated with and trying to discover if these collaborators also belong on the list. I will also go through this list of non-western composers to see who already has wikipedia articles and who needs them. I also intend to go through the lists of past Other Minds fellows. I suspect there may have been a lot of stuff in the 60’s and 70’s and so will be asking around composers I know who were working in that era.

Obviously, these starting points will leave many gaps and so I’d be really happy if this was a collaborative project. (Again, these are my very early working notes and I want to move this to wikipedia very shortly – as soon as I have around 40 names.) This could be a great project for a meetup or a project for students to write short articles for composers who are missing them. Note that the enforcement of wikipedia’s notability guidelines is sexist and racist in practice. Therefore, collaborations are more likely to resist the whitewashing of the site as editors can watch out for spurious deletions.

If you can see missing names, please leave a comment. Or, if this project already exists and I’ve just failed to find it, please do let me know.

Has an article

(this list has no moved to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electroacoustic_composers_of_color)

Needs an article

Published by

Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

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