For composer and music educator Dr. Erin Busch, entering the world of music composition was an uphill battle.
While attending high school in mid-2000s Philadelphia, she felt discouraged from pursuing a career in composition. She said that there weren’t any spaces that helped her grow as a musician. She was frequently the only woman-identifying person at local events or competitions. When attending Temple University for her bachelor’s degree in music composition, she was the only female member of her class.
“I was pretty discouraged by that just knowing how deeply entrenched that issue was,” Busch said. “I had a conversation in 2017 with some young female composing students who were telling me the same things that I had experienced a decade previously. I got really encouraged to do something about it.”
She created the Wildflower Composers nonprofit — an organization meant to uplift female, trans and nonbinary composers. Since 2018, they’ve worked with young composers from marginalized gender groups to create music and encourage them to pursue composition professionally.
The organization’s two-week-long Wildflower Composers Festival is their biggest annual event. Students who attend are exposed to advice from industry professionals, lessons in composition, and workshops to help improve their work. It ends with a concert that showcases the compositions they’ve put together during the event.
Providing opportunities
The program is meant to promote diversity in a workforce that is dominated by white men. Women made up only 38.3% of all employed composers and music directors in 2022, according to Data USA, a website that compiles and visualizes data from sources like the U.S. Census Bureau. Women of color make up an even smaller percentage of all employed composers.
“I want them to come away from this knowing that the music that they create has inherent worth,” Busch said. “A lot of these students come from places where they’re not supported, or music programs don’t exist in their schools, or [the programs are at] a really low level. So we’re giving them something that they can’t find anywhere else.”
The festival is held every year at Temple University’s main campus in North Philadelphia. The program was shifted to a virtual model in 2020 and 2021 to accommodate COVID-19 restrictions and was temporarily suspended in 2023 as Busch finished her dissertation. She said that, in some ways, this year is the program’s true return after the pandemic.
Among the speakers and events that the students attended while at the festival was a presentation from Nathalie Joachim, an acclaimed composer and performer. She spoke about her music, her composition process, and how her heritage and childhood shaped her current work.
Music, she said, was a method of survival as she grew up — survival of Haitian customs, language, and culture. When she attended the Julliard School in New York City, she said, the music they studied there was completely unlike everything she grew up listening to and writing.
“It never even actually occurred to me to call myself a composer because the people that I studied in school were composers with capital Cs,” Joachim said. “None of those people looked like me or lived like me or wrote music that was like mine. I just didn’t see myself in it.”
She said that she wished a program like Wildflower Composers had existed when she was first composing music so she could have seen more people like herself represented in composition.
“I think I didn’t even know at the time to wish for it,” Joachim said. “But it makes me excited to see it now. If it was me sitting on your side of the table, I would be so excited. I would have been so excited to see me.”
Safe space to thrive
For the students in the program, it’s been an opportunity to compose in a completely safe space.
“I’ve learned so much and I’ve internalized a lot of what I’ve been thinking about becoming a composer and really pursuing that in school in some way,” said Carolyn Eskenazi, a recent high school graduate. “It’s super fun. I’m enjoying myself here. Once I have something concrete, I will have no hesitation to share it because I feel at home with everyone.”
Joachim’s presentation to the group focused on culture and the use of different languages in songwriting, which resonated with Eskenazi. He said that, as a first-generation American, he grew up hearing a lot of different languages in his home. Using those different languages is something he has always wanted to try and incorporate in his music.
For Judas Morrigan, a senior in high school, the experience has offered him an outlet to be himself and improve his musical abilities in a safe space.
“It’s very much a cis-white-male-dominated industry and that’s very hard to get by as a trans composer,” he said. “Just getting a foot in the door is kind of hard. All awards and stuff throughout my high school band career have all been to men because they just get more of the spotlight. It’s like, ‘Oh, they can do more,’ even if it’s not directly said like that. It definitely is like that.”
But beyond all of the practical skills and foot-in-the-door experiences they’ve had at the Wildflower Composers Festival, the experience has also offered them a space to be themselves and find others that are like them.
“I don’t think in the history of meeting [others] I’ve connected with people as quickly as I have here,” Morrigan said. “To be in the company of so many other people that have similar goals as me and have similar passions as me, I don’t have words for it. I’ve never felt so at home in a musical space.”
The program’s concert will premiere 16 students’ final pieces on Friday, July 19, at 2 p.m. The concert will take place at Temple University’s Rock Hall Auditorium. Admission is free and pre-registration is not required.
