We absolutely encourage you to sign the Pledge once for yourself and once for each of your ensembles that is willing to commit to the work! We want to emphasize that the Pledge is intended as a tool for engendering anti-racist thought and action, not a box to check to signal virtue. We therefore ask each entity signing the Pledge to develop and make public its own comprehensive five-year cultural equity plan by the end of the 2020-21 season. We expect your individual plan will differ from your ensemble’s plan, and no two ensemble plans will be identical. Each entity likely has unique issues relating to personnel, community, and access to resources and may be at different stages of self-education regarding racism and inequity. If you have further questions about how to respond to the Pledge as an individual, small ensemble, or large ensemble, be sure to check out the how-to section of this site.

New Music Equity Action does not have an official membership. Signing the Pledge simply means you agree with its precepts and have committed to carrying out the actions it outlines. If you are a member of the new music community and would like to be a more active participant in New Music Equity Action’s work, write us a message (newmusicequityaction at gmail) or sign up for our mailing list, and we’ll tell you how to join our Zoom meetings or our Slack channel.

The Pledge was created by New Music Equity Action’s Dismantle Task Force in late 2020. Dismantle meetings on the Pledge took place on Zoom and tended to include about 4-8 attendees. Many of the attendees were White, with people of color occasionally participating. All attendees were active participants in the US new music community, mostly from the Northeast, the West Coast, and Chicago. The Pledge was officially adopted in a general meeting of New Music Equity Action on December 3, 2020.

Many people reading the Pledge for the first time, especially those interested in signing as individuals or on behalf of small ensembles, have found the five-year plan its most daunting component. “How can I plan five years out? I can barely plan for the next five weeks,” one person told us. Our response is that you don’t need to anticipate everything that will happen to you or your ensemble over the next five years. Going point by point through the Pledge and considering how you might address each of the issues it covers should provide enough structure. You might make goals for what you want your ensemble’s programming, commissioning, or artistic collaborations to look like five years from now. You might plan to meet quarterly each year to brainstorm repertoire by underrepresented composers. You might plan to immediately collect data on the demographics of commissioning from all your past seasons. What you commit to is up to you, so long as you consider the Pledge comprehensively.

The problem of systemic racism isn’t necessarily that people have bad intentions, it’s that the current system makes it easier to take actions that continue to exclude marginalized people. For example, a member of a new music ensemble programming an upcoming season, who has neither studied the work of Black composers in their schooling nor on their own, might omit Black composers from their programming entirely. Or, realizing there is a gap in their knowledge and short on time, they might Google a list of music by Black composers and choose a piece solely because it’s the right length and instrumentation to fill a gap in their programming. This tokenistic latter approach strikes us as nearly as problematic as the former one. The only way to adequately address systemic racism in this instance is to make time to study the work of Black composers in advance of programming the season. This type of work does not happen overnight.

The Pledge rises out of a cultural moment in the US where considerable momentum exists to address systemic racism in our communities, particularly anti-Black racism. We have written a document that we believe provides both a low bar to entry and a high potential ceiling for accomplishment. In other words, we don’t believe what the Pledge asks for is too controversial, so we hope a wide range of people will sign it and commit to the work; at the same time, we believe that if the signatories carry out the actions in the Pledge seriously, we can create significant change in our community. We absolutely believe that racism, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and the capitalist system are deeply interwoven, and we encourage you to address these issues intersectionally in your five-year cultural equity plan. However, if you prefer to focus most of your efforts around this Pledge specifically on racial equity, we appreciate that too.