My own cultural competency is built on a lifetime of international experiences. I was born in Greece, grew up in Cyprus, and learned foreign languages from a young age. Cyprus is small, with a population of one million people and a very small arts scene, and it is ridden by political instability, but I had the privilege of traveling frequently and of being supported by my family and teachers in my endeavors abroad. As a high school student, I participated in language and music exchange programs in France, Belgium and Hungary. I then attended universities in the United Kingdom and United States; worked in Cyprus, the UK, US, China, and Ecuador; and learned how to play traditional instruments from Greece, Cyprus, Indonesia, Italy, Cuba, Ecuador and Colombia, and that practice deeply influenced my compositions. During my studies, I was surrounded by people from cultures, backgrounds and identities different from my own and became captivated by both our differences and commonalities and inspired by the diverse stories of everyone around me. As a teacher, I use my own past experiences and challenge—as the daughter of a refugee, an international student, a non-native English speaker and an immigrant, as well as a woman in a male-dominated field—to remain understanding, empathetic and perceptive of my students’ individual strengths and challenges. I understand that I will not always be able to relate to or fully comprehend my students’ circumstances, but I know that it is imperative to make each student feel accepted and valued.
It is my goal to make the new music scene as diverse and inviting as possible. Along with two other composers from my collective, Kinds of Kings, in 2017 I co-founded Bouman Fellowship, an annual commission for composers with historically marginalized identities in the early stages of their composing careers. Every year, we offer at least two $1000 commissions that allow the selected fellows to compose a new work for a chamber ensemble. The fellows have frequent workshops with the ensembles, and receive continuous mentorship and unlimited private lessons from us. Finally, they have their new works premiered and recorded near the end of their fellowship. We made sure that the application is free and simple, and we expanded our promotion and outreach to communities besides academic institutions in order to give opportunities to composers regardless of their financial circumstances and of their ability to attend college. It was humbling to receive more than 200 applications in our fellowship’s second year, and it is exhilarating to support our fellows as they grow and flourish, and to watch them obtain new, exciting career opportunities after they complete our fellowship.
In the classroom, I strive to be as inclusive as possible and to include material that will resonate with my students. Growing up, I struggled to relate to the figure of a composer and to find role models, and I was unable to envision how I would “fit in” in the classical music scene, and I want to ensure that my students do not have similar experiences. In my syllabi, I strive to include a diverse range of composers and writers and I encourage my students to rethink and challenge the classical music “canon.” In all my courses, we discuss when, where and by whom the “canon” was created, along with the reasons why certain types of music have been championed by academic institutions and the prevailing orchestras in Europe and the US. I enhance such discussions by first inviting a range of young, diverse and successful composers to talk to my students about their work, which has proven to be a successful way of introducing diverse role models and types of music in the classroom. Second, I create short video montages of numerous composers sharing their ideas on different musical topics to demonstrate a small part of the multitude of opinions and perspectives that comprise our field. Furthermore, my ethnomusicological research in the US on international composers showed a prevailing Eurocentricity in arts education systems around the world, as well as the expectations that artists from historically underrepresented communities confront when they create their work. I find it productive, therefore, to discuss issues such authenticity, belonging, identity and the burden of representation with my students, and I encourage them to question their own potential preconceptions and prejudices.
I understand that classrooms are diverse spaces, and I believe that this is something to celebrate and to take advantage of. Several of my students who grew up abroad or were children of immigrants showed an interest in exploring local traditions of their countries of origin. I helped them find appropriate resources and guided them through the learning process as they explored, analyzed and experimented with those new sounds and concepts creatively but respectfully. Additionally, I find that varied backgrounds in the classroom create wonderful opportunities for students to learn from each other and to share what they are passionate about while realizing that their interests and preferences are valuable. All my students have been very keen to share the music that they enjoy with their peers, either in class or in our online playlists. Their choices were, in most instances, works by artists that the students identified with; this made our class material much more varied and relatable, while allowing us to discuss, analyze, criticize, appreciate and learn together. Through my students, I have discovered, among others, a fantastic Mongolian rock band (The Hu!), an incredible gender-fluid experimental pop artist who plays with symbolism (Dorian Electra) and an amazing synth pop band from Mexico City (Plastic Revolution).
My awareness and appreciation of cross-cultural understanding and underrepresented communities grows continually. I work to maintain my fluency in Spanish and my comprehension in French because such efforts remind me of the challenges faced by students who are non-native English speakers, challenges that I also faced in the past. As a mentor and teacher, I try to carefully listen to my students, and I constantly remind myself that my assumptions about which concepts are easy, hard or most important are based on my cultural and educational background and not that of my students. As a result, I try not to take any knowledge for granted in my classroom, without ever underestimating my students’ abilities and intelligence. I plan to continue using the aforementioned techniques to maintain an inclusive classroom, and to keep syllabi and assignments flexible in order to ensure that every student receives what they need in order to progress and excel on their own terms.