I really wish you were wrong about this -- but the statistics AFAIK very much support what you're saying... though I can't speak for IRCAM, I mean the contemporary music world as a whole. Just briefly, what can musicians (especially white ones) do, through music, to combat racism? The corrollary to that question is, what do composers do to unwittingly perpetuate racism?

What non-white composers can do is easy to answer: simply compose, and remain true to one's ambitions, stylistic convictions, etc. - though it's not easy to actually do all of that in a system that doesn't recognize you as equal.

What all people can do through other means than music is also easy to answer: speak out as much as possible, don't associate with those who are openly and actively racist, demonstrate against all forms of passive racism, get informed, promote non-whites.

I am starting this new thread not to point fingers or put white people on the defensive (being as white as they come, myself), but as a receptacle for news items, statistics, counter-statistics, and perhaps some answers. If the answer to my main question is "nothing", i.e., if the contemporary music world is inherently racist, then I'm willing to stop composing rather than be associated with it. I know that sounds dramatic, but it's been eating me, honestly, since long before Tantris's post.

I'm aware that my point may seem frivolous or attempting to deviate from the topic - but I assure it's seriously meant.  Although racism in N America or W Europe may frequently turn on the question of skin-colour,  this is a rather simplistic "tell".  Racism (the hatred of a person because of their race - not merely because of skin-colour alone) can be found doing its evil work in other societies in which skin-colour doesn't play a part.  For example, over the weekend I mentioned how Wang Luobin was sent to a "re-education" camp in PRC China, because he refused to stop writing music with Uighur texts, or influenced by the Uighur music he'd spent his lifetime collecting and cataloguing.  Another example, although I won't name the composer, is a Tartar born in the city of Ufa, in the Russian Urals.  Facially he might pass for a Russian.  But he's been the target of institutionalised racist persecution for around 15 years, forced to leave Ufa after his apartment was torn to pieces by skinheads.  He makes a living writing Eurovision-style songs under an assumed name, for a major female artist in the Estrada genre.  He can't get his classical stuff played or published - but his "trashcan music" is on the radio every day.  Tartars are, of course, predominantly muslims, and extremist nationalist groups play on the age-old grievance that the Tartars acted as policemen and tax-collectors when Russia was under Mongolian control...  that's err, until 1480 AD.

Racism can be more than a matter of skin-colour

This is a very difficult question. One thing I feel confident about asserting quite unequivocally is that the near-invisibility of those not of either European or East Asian origin in contemporary music (give or take the odd exception) is not a positive phenomenon. But the music in question has grown most fundamentally out of the traditions of white Western middle/upper class musical high culture (which, at least until very recently, comprise what we now call 'classical' music). There have of course been many attempts to engage with and develop material from other traditions, whether folk musics that are close to home but from clearly distinct social strata, non-Western musics (or, as with the previous case, imaginary renditions thereof), and more recently with jazz, pop and other commercial traditions - but the composers in this field hardly ever produce work that is likely to be heard and experienced in the same social/cultural context as that upon which they draw; rather it is predominantly for the concert hall (or other venues serving a similar function) or recording. So, Haydn or Beethoven might produce folk song arrangements, or Chopin might draw upon the peasant tradition of the mazurka, but they were not contributing to an ongoing folk music tradition (or at least not obviously so); rather they were appropriating (a term I do not mean pejoratively in this context) such work in the context of classical music.

In no sense should these Western classical traditions be viewed as inherently bad or suspect as an inescapable consequence of their social basis (which might be the view of one who adheres to a reductionist theory of culture, whereby culture can do nothing other than reflect the dominant ideology and consciousness of the social group from which it emerges - Cardew's stuff on music and class, or some of the more two-dimensional New Musicologists writing on music and gender, fall into this category). But I would be very surprised if a musical tradition that has developed for centuries as the relatively exclusive preserve of a particular class/race(/gender) would not in some way reflect that fact. Whereas other classes/races have developed their own musical traditions, frequently very different in many respects from the 'classical' one. And - whilst this is not an inevitable consequence for all people - it is hardly surprising if people from other races (or classes) who might produce music are more likely to be drawn towards those musical traditions which seem 'closer to home', more relevant and immediate in terms of their own background and environment. What I'm trying to say here (in what may seem an over-elaborate manner, but I'm trying as hard as I can to avoid any type of easy reductionism) is that the reason a white middle-class person is more likely to be drawn to working within a Western classical tradition than rap, say, is similar to the reason why a black working-class person is more likely to be drawn to producing rap (or other traditions which have involved many black working-class people through their history) than Western contemporary classical music.

Of course one hopes (or at least I do) that in Western multicultural society there will be more dialogue between different races and classes, and greater possibilities for cross-fertilisation, not just in the sense of tokenistic employment of musics from the others' traditions, but through new possibilities both for genre and cultural context of performance. But even if this does not happen, or only occasionally, and (for example) there is not any major growth in the number of people of Afro-Caribbean origin engaged in the production of Western contemporary music, that does not in itself make the situation racist, I believe, on account of the factors mentioned above. Rather, there are, as I see it, two fundamental questions to ask in terms of the possibility of racism:

1. Are individuals who wish to work in various musical traditions subject to prejudice and discrimination on grounds of race, especially if their race constitutes a minority presence (if a presence at all) within those traditions? This can equally apply to white people wishing to explore rap as it can to black people wishing to explore post-serial music (just to take two examples). The question of Braxton at IRCAM could conceivably be an issue of the genre in which he is working being perceived as falling outside of their remit rather than anything specifically to do with race - I'm not saying this is true or false (I don't feel qualified to do so), just countenancing it as a possibility. Or it may indeed be about race - to get some idea whether this is the case, at IRCAM or elsewhere, would take some comparative study of various individuals' experiences. To do, and keep doing, such studies in the hope of ensuring that this type of racism (or any other form of discrimination) does not corrupt the institutions in question, is an absolutely vital priority.

2. This is the more difficult and contentious issue - do the ways in which certain musical traditions, predominantly associated with certain racial groups, are funded, institutionalised and supported, themselves entail inherent racial biases? For example, might a centre for the study and development of certain North African musical traditions be likely to receive the same degree of funding and support as IRCAM (maybe there are such centres, and they do - I don't know)? France obviously has a much larger white than North African population; with that in mind it might not be so unreasonable that institutions connected with white musical traditions receive more overall support than North African ones, yet I would hazard a guess that the numbers involved with the specific musical traditions cultivated at IRCAM, whether as producers or consumers, may not be any higher than those associated with some North African ones. But I think it would be hard to deny that the musical traditions associated with the white Western middle classes receive a very significantly higher degree of support in the form of public funding, creation of institutions, canonisation as disseminated through education in particular (how often are black European soul and reggae traditions taught in schools and universities around the continent compared to the music of Stockhausen or Tippett or Shostakovich, say?), and so on. This very fact, the very status accorded to 'classical' music (perhaps somewhat less so in Britain, actually), could in itself be construed as racist. That's a conclusion I'd hope to resist, but I'm not sure if I can.

Apologies for the length of this post.

It's only racist if it stays that way. I see it changing rapidly, and no one can expect it to change overnight. (I'm only speaking of the "canonisation as disseminated through education" part, which is more difficult than redistributing arts funding as it requires new curricula and not just new accounting.)

Am I being racist if I worry about the opposite being true, that people are exposed to so many musical traditions that they don't really become conversant with any single one of them except the one that is most aggressively marketed to them? And even more cynically, isn't it easier and cheaper, from an education professional's perspective, to play the "culture of the week" game in music class rather than teach, for example, advanced sight-singing or thoroughbass?

This is off topic in the sense that it isn't about what artists can do, as artists. Am I to stick with my as yet unripened hypothesis that we can do nothing except avoid being retrogressive, ie. we can't actually compose/perform progressive music because such a thing either doesn't exist, is fake, or in fact backfires by creating an illusory sort of all-inclusiveness by 'framing' and tokenizing the other rather than giving it an actual forum of its own?