New Music from Diverse Voices!

This guide highlights the new music purchased as part of the St. Olaf Libraries' Diversifying the Music Collection effort in 2022.

• Use the menu on the left to find music for your instrument. Each instrument's page includes both solo and chamber repertoire featuring that instrument. The pieces are alphabetized by composers' surnames.
• The titles link to the pieces' Catalyst records. If the score is showing as unavailable, that probably means that it is still in the processing queue, so it is not yet on the shelf.
• The composers' names link to biographical material, either from their websites, from Oxford Music Online, or from another source. The few composers without links did not have readily available biographies.
• Most pieces also include links to performances, either in Naxos Music Library or Music Online. Occasionally I have linked to performances posted on YouTube and Soundcloud. If the piece is labeled "no recording available," that does not mean that it has never been recorded. It means that St. Olaf College does not have access to it via streaming, and it does not appear to be legally available on other online platforms.

Please let Karen Olson know if any of the links are broken!

A word about identities and demographic characteristics: people's identities are complicated and a single person can obviously claim multiple traits. Moreover, some composers choose to emphasize the demographic identities they claim, while others downplay those identities in order to be known simply as a musician.

If you are looking for composers from a particular demographic group, demographic characteristics are provided after each composer's name. In the case of deceased composers, these traits are established by existing biographies. In the case of living composers, these traits are established by the composer's listing in the Composer Diversity Database, by information acknowledged on the composer's websites, or information the composer has acknowledged in publicly available interviews.

People from Africa or who are part of the African diaspora are listed as Black, the term used by the Composer Diversity Database. If they have ties to countries other than the United States, those countries are listed as well, even if they currently reside in the USA. See the examples below, where Still's American nationality is implied.

• Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (Black, England)
• William Grant Still (Black) 

Latinx composers are usually tagged with their country, unless they are from the United States, in which case they are tagged as Latinx. In the examples below, Alice Gomez's American nationality is implied.

• Carlos Chávez (Mexico)
• Alice Gomez (woman, Latinx)
• Lin-Manuel Miranda (Latinx, Puerto Rico) 

If composers are very specific about their birthplace or the place where their family comes from, that place is also given. For example, even though Puerto Rico is part of the USA, it is listed for Lin-Manuel Miranda's name because he is quite specific about his Puerto Rican ties.

If you believe a composer's demographic characteristics should be adjusted, please notify Karen Olson.