Institute for Composer Diversity

The Institute for Composer Diversity, winner of the 2018 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Media/Internet Award, recipient of a 2020 Sphinx Venture Fund Grant, and housed at the State University of New York at Fredonia, is dedicated to the celebration, education, and advocacy of music created by composers from historically underrepresented groups through database resources and programming analysis.

Our Composer Diversity Database is a resource for the musical community through which composers from underrepresented groups can be discovered. Composers can be found through several different search filters including gender, racial/ethnic demographics, sexual/romantic identity, residence, and various large ensemble and chamber ensemble genres. All composers have provided their consent and have confirmed the information included in the Composer Diversity Database. The ICD recognizes, and urges all users to recognize, that every person represented by a series of labels in this database is a creator with a story and a unique body of work.