About a year after he began working at Harvard University, pianist/composer Vijay Iyer was in a faculty meeting. A visiting committee—a group of academics from peer institutions—had studied and issued a report on the Harvard music department. Among its findings was that there was a diversity problem among music majors; the overwhelming majority of them were White men.
At the time, the curriculum was also overwhelmingly centered on the European classical tradition. Its repertoire, music theory, and music history all leaned hard on the so-called “Western canon.” When the department chair asked the faculty to respond to the report, Iyer—the only non-White person present—watched as silence filled the room.
He finally blurted out his thoughts. “Well, if students don’t see themselves reflected in our curriculum,” he asked, “why should they come to us?”
“People just let it sit for a while,” Iyer recalls today. “Afterwards, some of my colleagues texted me and said, ‘I’m so glad that you said that.’ And I was like, ‘Well, why didn’t you say it? Why are you just sitting on this obvious truth?’”
It took a while for his observation to take hold. “But after that,” he adds, “the entire curriculum was unmade and remade. Now it’s very much a work in progress, but there are now many different ways to be a music concentrator at Harvard. It’s not only the old-fashioned way; that still exists but there are other ways. So if you’re in the room, you can sometimes make a small amount of difference that matters.”
Terri Lyne Carrington, the drummer/composer who is also the founder and director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, agrees. Being there, and being ready to take the initiative, is the most important part of addressing race and gender inequity (in jazz education or anywhere else).
“The very fact that the Institute exists forces other entities at the college to look at their practices,” she says.
