Open Letter to the American Musicological Society
From Project Spectrum
January 27, 2020
Following the annual meeting of the AMS in Boston, we, the graduate student organizers of Project Spectrum, write to stress that the time is ripe for structural change. More and more folks, particularly graduate students and early-career scholars, are learning through experience that the neoliberalisation in higher education and the precarity this system engenders require organizing at the grassroots and community level in order to bring about a new order—one that is diverse, inclusive, and explicitly committed to equity and access.
If we want our institutions to flourish as ethical and sustainable spaces of knowledge, growth, creativity, and community, then our field’s leaders must value the input and unique wisdom of marginalized scholars, and must enact policies based on that value. We, as junior scholars of color, write to share our experiences of the culture of AMS from such perspectives, and suggest actions that can significantly impact the sustainability and inhabitability of our field’s institutions.
In less than 15 years, the AMS will celebrate its centenary (2034), and we must continue the hard work of assessing whether the Society has made enough progress in that span toward equity and inclusion, toward de-centering hegemonic value systems, and toward drawing the marginalized out of the margins and truly learning from their experiences and scholarship. The eventful decade of the 1990s saw not only the founding of the Gay and Lesbian Study Group (now known as LGBTQ Study Group) together with the organization of the Committee on the Status of Women (now known as the Committee on Women and Gender), but also that of the Eileen Southern Travel Fund, which was coordinated by the Committee on Cultural Diversity. The Society is seeing more sessions and moments of discourse devoted to issues of representation and inclusion, and an ever-diversifying range of scholarship. And the latest demographic statistical analysis (2017) from the AMS reflects a potentially significant shift in the composition of our society’s population: “Younger members are more likely to be female, have higher numbers identifying as non-White and/or Hispanic, and are more likely to identify as LGBTQ than older members.”
In many ways, we are proud and heartened by the changes our society has seen in recent decades. However, statistical shifts are not enough. Representation without structural substantiation will not make our society more inclusive, equitable, or accessible. In the Project Spectrum reception at the 2019 meeting in Boston, we met AMS members from many different places on their career tracks who were willing to learn about organizing to plug the leaks in our pipeline and to bolster diversity and inclusion. However, we also noticed a relative lack of understanding around fundamental issues, such as the importance of minority discourse when “everyone is struggling on the job market,” and even outright, antagonistic doubt about the value of the work that our organization does to strengthen diversity in this field that we love. Thus, it is clear that the field of academic musicology has strides yet to make toward changing its system of shared values. Structural change can happen, and the micropolitics of our everyday life within and outside of the Society have the potential to erode a failing structure. Our society needs its leaders to take ownership of the necessity for sincere cultural transformation.
Facilitating such a shift of values can begin with assessing the culture of the annual and affiliated regional meetings. AMS leadership can workshop and implement guidelines and standard practices for attendees, leadership, and presenters alike.
As founders of Project Spectrum, our commitment to this work is clear. But it should also be clear that the burden of cultural change, though vital to our well-being, cannot fall solely on the shoulders of the marginalized. We stand firm in the conviction that it is the role of elected leaders to guide our society toward equity and inclusion, and that this endeavor requires clear and intentional action. We offer our support and our gratitude as you work toward a sustainable future for AMS.
Sincerely,
The graduate students of Project Spectrum:
Alissandra Reed
Anna Gatdula*
Catrina Kim
Clifton Boyd*
Laurie Lee*
* indicates AMS membership
Below we provide several suggestions for targeted actions that our leaders might take toward this end.
❖ In our experiences working alongside committees and individual members of the AMS, SMT, and SEM, we have learned that minority scholars—people of color, indigenous people, LGBTQ+ people, differently abled people, gender-nonconforming people, and people who are not affiliated with an academic institution—are called upon with increasing frequency to offer their insights into and educate the audience on issues pertaining to their identities. While these scholars are valued for their words in arenas dedicated to diversity and related topics, they often find themselves and their work marginalized in spaces and discussions considered to be more “scholarly.” Committees must take seriously the scholarship and ideas that these individuals bring to the field, and continuously seek out ways to empower them as scholars.
❖ Relatedly, beyond diversifying programmed topics (of panels, talks, and study groups), the Society should also reflect on who is given the space and authority to speak on these topics. Where there are panels pertaining to certain marginalized experiences and identities, we must take every action we can to center people who have lived such experiences or identities. And this commitment to centering such voices applies to all areas of inquiry, not just those classified as subaltern or marginalized histories.
❖ We urge the Society to supplement the growing scholarly focus on decolonial studies, with attention to the ways in which activities and discussions powered by the Society also take place on land stolen from indigenous people. This effort can begin with systematic acknowledgment of this fact, as well as by responding adequately to growing requests that the Society not only accommodate but encourage virtual participation in conferences in order to reduce ecological damage.
❖ The Society can create spaces that are more hospitable to junior and minoritized scholars by reflecting on standard Q&A format and practices. We have found, in organizing our events, that when speakers have the freedom to modify the Q&A format specifically to furnish a more open and mutually respectful discussion, we can minimize the occurrences of unhelpful and hurtful interjections that traditionally target minority and junior scholars.
❖ The Society should commission an equity study: a thorough, interview-based study of the experiences of women, people of color, LGBTQ people, indigenous people, differently-abled people, and immigrants working in the discipline. Such a study should reach out to people who have dropped out of the field. A study recently undertaken at Columbia University might serve as a model. Furthermore, the Society should commit to taking action upon receiving the results of the study.