Boulanger Initiative
Boulanger Initiative is an American music organization which supports women and gender-marginalized composers. BI's activities—including commissions, consulting, education, performance and research—aim to diversify the musical canon, particularly within Western classical music.
Founded by scholar-musicians Laura Colgate and Joy-Leilani Garbutt in June 2018, BI operates out of Takoma Park, Maryland as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Their projects include a database of composers and compositions; an annual music festival, WoCo Fest; repertoire consulting for orchestras; and new musicological class curriculums.
Overview
Boulanger Initiative is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Takoma Park, Maryland. BI seeks to support women and gender-marginalized composers, given their historic underrepresentation in music, and classical music in particular. Their mission statement includes the following:The Boulanger Initiative was founded on June 25, 2018 by violinist Laura Colgate and organist Joy-Leilani Garbutt. At the time, both musicians were doctoral students with dissertations on women composers by birth date|women composers]: Colgate authored Half of Humanity Has Something to Say, Also: Works for Violin by Women Composers at the University of Maryland, while organist Garbutt penned Les femmes invisibles: The Education, Careers, and Compositions of French Women Organists, 1872-1954 at Catholic University of America. Together, Colgate and Garbutt inaugurated the Boulanger Initiative, named for Lili and Nadia Boulanger.
BI takes a multifaceted approach, dividing activities into performance, education and commissions, and more recently, research and consulting. Musicologist Chanda VanderHart remarked that BI has "grown at remarkable and lightning speed". Among other virtual events, BI has hosted edit-a-thons to improve Wikipedia articles on gender-marginalized composers
Projects
Boulanger Initiative Database
The Boulanger Initiative Database is an open access database for women and gender-marginalized composers and their compositions. According to The Violin Channel, the BID was published "following years of researching archives, compiling data, and beta testing." At the time of its launch on March 13, 2023, BID included more than 1,200 composers and 8,000 works., this rose to more than 1,600 composers and 15,000 works.Each composer entry provides additional information, including public domain images, lifespan, notes such as pseudonyms or alternate spellings and links to external resources, including Wikipedia articles, relevant websites and their works in the database. According to VanderHart, the BID is primarily aimed at performers and has a particularly strong representation of American composers. She concludes that BID is "an important and ambitious step in a considerably more inclusive direction for classical repertories". Although the database is currently limited to deceased composers, BI intends to expand to living composers and their works in the future. Other future goals include the addition of difficulty labels, orchestral shorthand and various descriptive or thematic composition tags.