Canadian Orchestra and Opera Repertoire Reports

(jump to “Instructions for submitting data to the report”)

What are these reports?

We are creating the first-ever reports on how both Canada’s orchestras and Canada’s opera companies have programmed works from female, trans, non-binary, and BIPOC creators across several seasons. The reports (one for orchestras and one for opera companies) will take a similar form to this report created in 2022 by the Institute for Composer Diversity. This will set a national baseline, and measure what progress has already been made in diversifying the repertoire on our stages. They will be shared in the late spring of 2023.

This reports are being created in collaboration with:

Association for Opera in Canada

Help us do this work!

These two reports require us to research and process a large amount of data. Submitting data from your present and past seasons, will help us improve the accuracy of our dataset. It will also free up time we would have spent researching to cover more ground!

Please note that all data, whether you submit it or we research it ourselves, will remain anonymous. The reports will present data trends from groups of organizations based on budget size. There will be no way to trace the data in these reports back to any single organization, except if we decide to highlight one or two organizations who are doing exceptionally well at diversifying their repertoire.

Instructions for submitting data to the report:

Please email your 2019/2020, 2020/2021, 2021/2022, and 2022/2023 season programs to Rich Coburn at [email protected].

If you are already submitting detailed repertoire reports to SOCAN or OPAS, you can simple forward a copy of those reports to us. Or, you can send us any spreadsheet (preferred) or text document from your own internal records containing as much of the requested information as you have. For each piece you presented, we are looking for:

  • title
  • composer
  • librettist (if applicable)
  • show dates
  • show location (including whether the show was live, online, or hybrid)
  • whether the work was a part of your “main season” (this means core programming, and excludes educational, civic engagement, special, or fundraising events)

Please send whatever information you have on all works you presented in the requested seasons in whatever form it is in.

N.B.: We are not asking you to do any work identifying the identities of the composers you have programmed. This is nuanced and often challenging work, and we have assembled a diverse team to do this work.

Thank you for helping us! We can’t wait to share these reports with you this spring!

These reports are graciously funded by:

Canada Council for the Arts
Orchestras Canada

Listen to playlists of works from
BIPOC Voices database!

Most of the recordings of works in the BIPOC Voices database that we’ve found are on YouTube or SoundCloud, so we’ve made playlists on each for you to enjoy. You’ll find completely different works on each, so make sure to check them both out!