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    29 October 2020

    On Black History Month 2020

    This is the third consecutive year that Sound and Music has released data regarding applicants to our programmes from backgrounds who have experienced racism. It is still surprisingly rare for organisations to be open about such data. Which is a shame, since an honest acknowledgement about where we are as organisations, and where we are […]

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    5 June 2020

    We paused, we must now act – how fair access has to be at the heart of the new normal

    On 25 February 2020, Sound and Music launched our Fair Access Principles. Developed and tested over many months with composers and partner organisations, their aim is to remove the many non-musical barriers that can prevent composers from fairly accessing artist development opportunities and programmes. Less than a month later, the UK went into lockdown, causing […]

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    6 March 2020

    Where Next for Gender Equality?

    Every year since 2016, Sound and Music has marked International Women’s Day and the month of March by using it as a springboard to showcase the work and lives of ground-breaking, inspiring and significant composers past and present across our programmes, websites and in our communications. These composers are women (we’ve had an interesting discussion […]

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    8 March 2019

    On International Women’s Day 2019

    By Susanna Eastburn, Chief Executive, Sound and Music A version of this blog also appeared in the Guardian on the 8 March 2019. Two years ago today, Sound and Music (the UK’s national organisation for new music) made a public pledge to achieve gender equality across all of our work with composers and artists, under […]

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    10 April 2018

    New Voices 2018 – Reflections On Applicant Data

    Followers of Sound and Music’s activity, artists and talent development work will know that, over the last year or so, we have been working on some quite major developments and changes in the way that we recruit composers. We’ve wanted to move away from the partnership-led opportunity model of our previous programmes, Embedded and Portfolio, […]