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original works “in the style of ” a culture’s traditional performed at each school prevent any definitive con-
songs are therefore excluded from these categories. A clusions. The total number of Latin-composed works
visualization of this analysis for Black-composed music performed in the dataset increased by more than 50%
can be seen in Figure 2. from 37 to 57, even as the number of those works in the
Several observations can be made from these data. “world” category remained flat at 20 and 19, respec-
First, as discussed above, the overall percentage of tively, suggesting again that the increase was primarily
Black-composed music rose significantly, from 6.6% attributable to non-idiomatic works. Meanwhile, the to-
to 13.1%. However, there was no significant change tal number of Asian-composed works performed near-
in either direction in Black-composed spiritual, gospel, ly tripled from 25 to 68, with the number of those in
and world music programmed as a percentage of the the “world” category only roughly doubling from 10 to
entire repertory, rising only from 4.9% to 5.6%. At the 18. The remaining racial categories amounted to only
same time, the proportion of Black-composed music a few performed works across the entire dataset, but of
performed that was not from one of these non-idiom- the 8 performed works by Pacific Islander, American
atic categories increased dramatically, from 25.8% to Indian, or Other Race composers, all but one were in
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57.4%. In other words, we can conclude that the in- the “world” category.
crease in Black-composed music programmed at these Finally, several notable observations were made re-
schools is almost entirely attributable to increased per- garding other variables tracked in the study that may
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formances of non-idiomatic Black-composed music, correlate with composer race and ethnicity. Firstly, if
but, importantly, that this increase did not occur at the a work was composed by a female-identifying or non-
expense of performances of idiomatic Black-composed binary composer, the odds that it was also composed
music, which remained constant. by a non-White composer increased by 78% from
A similar statistical analysis was attempted for com- the baseline odds. This suggests that conductors may
posers of other minority races and ethnicities, but the choose “two for the price of one” when programming
relatively small number of works by these composers with an eye toward representation by selecting a single

Figure 2. Idiomatic and Non-Idiomatic Black-Composed Music as a Percentage of All Performed Repertoire

2017-2019

2021-2023

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Black-composed spiritual/gospel/world music
Non-idiomatic Black-composed music
Music by other races/ethnicities

CHORAL JOURNAL September 2025 Volume 66 Number 2 15