Boulanger Initiative Wikithon with ChamberQUEER

Join Boulanger Initiative and ChamberQUEER for a co-hosted, virtual Wikithon editing party! Whether you’re a seasoned editor or a first-timer, help expand and improve Wikipedia entries highlighting women’s achievements across history, culture, and the arts. Bring your curiosity, your keyboard, and your love for stories that deserve to be told.

Expanding the collective understanding of the contributions and impact of gender-marginalized composers is integral to cultivating inclusivity and representation in music. Wikipedia is one of the most accessible platforms when it comes to raising awareness; however, many of the articles present overstate the family and relationships of gender-marginalized composers while severely understating their professional achievements.

This month, we will focus on LGBTQ+ composers like Ethel Smyth and Ruth Anderson, working to organize their articles, update citations, and more! Open to all experience levels, training included. 

ChamberQUEER: Hailed as “a utopian dream… [at] the cutting-edge of classical music” (The Nation), ChamberQUEER highlights LGBTQ+ voices in contemporary & historical music and reimagines the classical concert experience as a radically inclusive gathering space & musical community for the 21st century. Founded in 2018 by Jules Biber (cello), Danielle Buonaiuto (soprano), Brian Mummert (baritone), and Andrew Yee (cello), CQ operates as a collective of performers, composers, and creators. Our flagship annual Pride festival, staged in Brooklyn each June, has been commended by The New Yorker and listed by The New York Times as a 2022 “Best of Pride” event; 2024’s fringe-style festival, Constellation, featured twenty-one events over six days, showcasing the voices of dozens of LGBTQ+ musicians from around the globe.

ChamberQUEER interrogates and experiments with, or “queers,” European art music’s presumed necessities and existing norms. By crafting new narratives from the canon, democratizing performance etiquette and dress, and shattering the performer-audience binary, we create a fresh and inviting environment for a new generation of music lovers. Recent projects emphasizing these values have included collaboratively-curated concerts with alumnae of Luna Composition Lab; a concert and talk-back with LGBTQ+ students at Boston College; presentations on equity and belonging at Chamber Music America and Early Music America’s national conferences; and shows presented by National Sawdust, WQXR at the Greene Space, Death of Classical at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn Pride, Trinity Wall Street, the Boulanger Initiative, Classical Uprising, and Westerlies Fest. Our founders and members regularly represent ChamberQUEER as ambassadors at chamber music festivals, podcasts, public radio broadcasts, and residencies across the country.