I have thought a lot about this, and I putting this out there for two reasons. First, I am very frustrated. Second, because something has to change. I’m trying not to point fingers any individual person for making decisions, but I am observing a cultural problem within the International Double Reed Society that is concerning to me.
I am tired of having to be the adult in the room.
Let’s start at the beginning.
The first time I had to be the adult in the room for the 2025 IDRS conference was in January, in the direct aftermath of the rejection of the concerto premiere I have written for Jennet Ingle. When IDRS rejected All This To Say, the artistic committee made it clear to us that, though they were sorry for it, there was no additional space on evening concerts for the concerto, but that they would reserve a 12 minute slot on another evening concert for Jennet to play whatever she wanted for solo oboe or oboe and piano.
Jennet was devastated, and I can easily understand why: to propose a concerto and have it rejected when the international conference takes place in the state you live in would destroy me. Jennet asked if I would be willing to have a Zoom call to debrief about the decision that had been made, and, in the intervening time between finding out that All This To Say had been rejected by IDRS and that debrief, I had a realization.
IDRS was not rejecting Jennet. They were rejecting me.
When Jennet and I had our debrief, the first thing I did was make it clear that this was my failure, not hers. In fact, I told Jennet that she had been written a blank check, that she had enormous power and autonomy over how she decided to fill that time, and that the IDRS artistic committee had endorsed her with incredible trust and almost unparalleled freedom. I had never heard of any performance organization relinquishing so much control to a performer in this way, and told to take that as a compliment to her and her contributions to IDRS in helping to better center avocational players.
The second thing I did was make it clear that this was her space, not mine. She initially wanted to perform the piano reduction of All This To Say, which I said no to — if a concerto is first premiered in its piano version, it’s significantly more difficult to secure a performance of the orchestral version at all. She then suggested another work of mine, or that I compose a new work, something like a solo de concours — which is something I had wanted to write for a long time. Instead, I told her that this was her spotlight to occupy, and that it was her autonomy to exercise, and that her space did not have to include me if it was not what was right for her. In fact, I remember making the argument that I believed suggesting my music would have been a miscalculation of what I believed to be IDRS’ implication in their artistic direction.
She provided a few options to IDRS, and they selected Alexandra Gardner’s Lantana, which, as a lot more of you now know, is a fantastic work. I’ve known Alexandra for years, and she deserves every ounce of success she can extract from having been platformed by Jennet at IDRS.
But, even at the time, I did not acknowledge the toll it had taken on me to empower Jennet with the artistic freedom she deserves. I knew it was the right thing to do, and I conceptualized that my emotions about it did not matter because it was the right thing to do. But it was the first time over the last few months I was asked to do the right thing at my own expense, and I did not realize how much I would be asked to sacrifice my own inclusion to be the adult in the room.
Around the same time, I received a surprising email asking that I serve on the IDRS Commissioning Committee. I knew that the Commissioning Committee was the body responsible for selected the 50 for 50 commissioning grants recipients, and, while I was honored to have been asked to be included in that selection process, I knew that the 50 for 50 commissioning program was coming to an end, and that the implication of asking me to serve in this capacity would have result of taking me out of consideration for the program.
Last December, I found out that my partner had received one of these grants from Instagram, at the same time as the rest of the world. Privately, I told him that I should not have found out that way, and told him that every single member of that committee had been aware of me and they could not have been unaware of our relationship. It was hard to be the adult in the room that day, especially because we found out about it on the tarmac in San Diego as we prepared to fly to Chicago for the Midwest Clinic.
And so, when I got that committee invitation, the message from IDRS was clear: Kincaid, you are not getting one of those commissioning grants and your work is not deserving of them. But we would love to have your insight into who should have them and include you in conversations about new music and IDRS!
In the end, I chose to accept the invitation. I had heard the message loud and clear, swallowed my disappointment, and recognized the responsibility and trust that IDRS was investing in me by inviting me to the table. Between the way that artistic committee had chosen to handle Jennet’s application for concerto consideration and the pending invitation to be taken out of consideration for commissioning grant opportunities, I came to understand where IDRS stood on including my music, and it seemed more productive to go where I was most needed and where I could be most heard, even if that was my professional insight over my actual creative work.
I chose to join the adults in that room. I’m excited for the work we will do as a commissioning committee in closing out the 50 for 50 commissioning grant project, documenting its legacy, and moving forward with new initiatives centered on IDRS’ relationship with the new music it includes.
When I first had the idea for a composer information booth featuring perusal scores for composers whose works were being performed at the conference, I approached IDRS and told them that I had taken my own money and purchase a table for this purchase. IDRS leadership was made aware of the initiative and I received a very friendly email asking me to reach out sooner to the conference to see how they could support the project and communicate with IDRS members and performers about the opportunity.
When the complete schedule for the conference was made available in April, I went through the entire program and found that it included more that 250 works from more than 200 living composers. When I had initially committed to this project, I had no idea that it was going to be so many people, and, admirable though it may be for the artistic committee to have such a wealth of new work performed at this year’s conference, suddenly there was way more administrative work for me to do.
I reached back out to the organization for support in reaching out the performers for this year’s IDRS conference to let their composers know about this opportunity. In an instant, I was told that they would not shared emails of IDRS member for privacy reasons, nor would they facilitate any communication with performers at their conference, and that they believed that my social media presence would find enough people to stock this table without their help.
Thus began the task of cold emailing nearly 200 composers whose works were being performed at the conference. While the responses I received were immediately supportive and thankful, I was shocked to learn that there were numerous composers who had no idea that their work was being performed at IDRS, asking me to connect them with the performers who had chosen to program them and somehow sourced their music without their knowledge.
I will admit that I was prepared for a lot of things and I thought I knew what I was getting myself into, but this? Not so much.
I never imagined having to do the work of communicating with composers not just about this initiative I was spearheading, but about the conference in general, having to field questions about who was playing their work, where and when it was being played, and why they hadn’t been told by anyone else that this was happening.
In future, it would be my suggestion to include a section in the IDRS conference application for composer contact information, should you be applying with the work of one or more living composers, which would create a pathway for communicating directly with composers and informing them that they will be included. If a conference includes your music as part of their activities, but doesn’t tell you they did, is it still inclusion?
I don’t think this was the intention of the conference, either to create more work for me or to neglect notifying composers that their work was being performed. All thing considered, it is the responsibility of performers to tell living composers that they are performing our works, and that labor should not have come down to conference organizers themselves and it certainly should not have come down on me.
Exhibiting at IDRS is really hard. I didn’t realize just how hard it would be until I was in the thick of it, and juggling Starbucks runs and emails. Kevin ended up printing most of the scores of composers who could not be there, and composers brought many scores to the table when the hall opened. We cobbled together a success and I am sure people feel through the cracks that were created by a lack of institutional support for a project that, we told numerous times by attendees of the IDRS conference, should have always been an IDRS initiative.
As far as my music went for IDRS 2025, I spent last week in such compromised and exhausted state that I believed that, in every way I could have done so, I failed. I failed my collaborators, I failed my commissioners, I lost the plot on what people wanted me to write, and when everything else was fine, I got the short end of the stick as far as the way the conference included my work.
I believe that the collage concerts that were curated for this year’s conference were a smart idea, and a very good way of including many more people who may not have had a complete recital prepared for the conference. I think it’s a good idea going forward, but I was put in a unique position in regards to these that I do not believe any other composer or performer was, which was that my work was programmed last on both of the collage concerts I participated in.
Being programmed last on a concert is an honor I have rarely received (it’s more of a Kevin Day thing than a Kincaid Rabb thing), and there would have been nothing wrong with it if both of the concerts had not run so late, causing people to make calculations on whether or not they would stick around for my work of jet off to another program they had on their radar. While I accept that you can’t be everywhere at conferences, this was not ideal.
The other part of the burden of these over-programmed collage concerts fell to the performers. My music is stressful to play, and there’s nowhere to hide in my music while you’re playing it. It is really hard to recover from a mistake made in the performance of my work, and the last thing you need as a performer of my music is some besotted stage manager tapping their wristwatch.
Ask & Answer for English horn and bassoon struggled the most in this case. When it comes to tempo, my music is written at the maximum tempo at which things can realistically be executed. Rushing my music makes my music impossible to play. For both performances that suffered from being programmed last, I wish they had taken more time that was not available to them simply the conference had overloaded the collage concert programs.
I agreed to four projects this IDRS, and I intended on spending March and April exclusively on IDRS projects, make them available to performers at least six weeks prior to travel to Indianapolis.
And then I woke up in terrible pain on March 3, went to the emergency room, stayed overnight, and had my gallbladder removed on March 4. I lost six weeks of composition at the worst possible time.
When I was finally able to get back to writing and commit myself to the focus required to do it, I had to first prioritize the work with piano because we were using an IDRS accompanist, which was Stone Cold for bassoon, mezzo soprano, and piano. Though I completed the work with plenty of time for our accompanist to learn it, I did not anticipate having literally ten mezzo sopranos commit to the project and travel to Indianapolis, then cancel, one after the other. This was hugely stressful, and in the end, we were forced to make a program changed to Breakthrough for bassoon and piano.
I do not think my work on Stone Cold was wasted. It is a wonderful, visceral work that centers the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, and I was really proud of having written it in consultation with its commissioner Erin Gehlbach. But to have it written and then not performed, not due to the fault of myself or Erin in anyway took a huge toll on me creatively.
It took me weeks on end to figure out what to do with Contra Band. I was given a blank slate, and while that works for most composers, it often flummoxes me, because I don’t know what the spirit of writing for any ensemble is until we talk about it. Most of the time, when I’ve been given a blank slate and little direction, I have made appropriate calculations and the work is a success.
For Contra Band, I miscalculated. I wrote a deeply introspective work entitled The Floor about escape and belonging, and how I felt welcomed on the dance floor where nothing else mattered except for the pound of subwoofers and the collective singing of club anthems. I knew it was one of the things that I chose to let go of when I agreed to move from San Diego to Las Vegas, and I was mourning moving on from San Diego’s queer neighborhood Hillcrest through this piece for Contra Band. It centered the layered, complex styles of Avicii and Deadmau5, and I felt condifent upon its completion that I had written something hopeful and unique.
And then it was performed alongside The Munsters Theme and the soon-to-be-classic fanfare The Announcement That the Vampire’s Deliveries of Groceries, Games, Cognac, and Roses Have Indeed Arrived. Horrified that I had so miscalculated the spirit of Contra Band, I sat in stunned silence and, humiliated and exhausted, I left immediately after the performance had concluded. I have never made such a terrible miscalculation about music before, surprising myself and everyone in the room that in fact, Kincaid can write music that is, in fact, too serious.
I apologize profusely to Contra Band. I would like another chance. I hope I get it. I want to write in the spirit of Contra Band, and I feel ashamed that I didn’t.
The work that would eventually become Accounting for Taste was always going to be complicated to write. I had produced several draft designs for a choose your own adventure style score that involved complex dotted lines indicating where on the page one was supposed to cut out tabs and pages in half for maximum efficacy, tried to figure out an app-based solution to the musical indeterminacy problem that automated d20 rolls and took performers directly to the next music to be played, and produced a lot of musical material that ended up going nowhere.
I came back to the commissioners in early May and asked if we could find a different inspiration point, and mercifully, we found one, which was centering the memory of a whiskey tasting they had in Edinburgh on their honeymoon. I had my own experience with whiskey tasting with my partner of the very deep whiskey library at a very good friend’s house on Thanksgiving when Kevin and I both needed a break from my family. I could easily imagine how the experience of a whiskey tasting could be musically realized, and I developed more new musical material for this reframed project.
And yet I still kept coming up short and failing to produce a score. Finally, at the suggestion of writing the score entirely by hand, I produced the score in two days, delivering the work on June 7.
Writing for Stuart Breczinski and Nanci Belmont is an honor that should be afforded to as many composers as possible and I am very lucky. They are, in every sense of the term, dream collaborators, and their musical sensitivity and willingness to experiment provides to a composer anything that we would need. Watching the performance of Accounting for Taste from the audience was one of the highlights of my musical career, and, though I thought the performance was a tremendous success and I wouldn’t have changed a thing, I still knew I had failed.
The way that I failed Nanci and Stuart is, by far, that which I feel the most shame for. I was late — quite late — on delivering that score, and it required many rehearsals to get right, which is how Stuart and Nanci spent a great amount of their time at IDRS 2025. Had I not been so late and so inconsiderate in my lateness, they would have been able to better enjoy their conference. I felt that I had taken that away from them, and I have relentless beat myself up for it. I deserve that.
I will never, ever put anyone else through what I put Stuart and Nanci through by delivering a score to performers a mere week before it was performed. Mozart may have pulled it off, but I can’t, and don’t want to. I want people to have time with my music, and it is my fault that Nanci and Stuart did not have that time.
In order to make it so that I never put anyone else in the position I put them, I am instituting a new rule for my music at conferences, which is that I would like to request that, if I am so lucky for you to include my work as part of a performance proposal, you apply with a work completed prior to submitting your application. This will create infrastructure for you to have ample time to work on my music before the conference, and it will almost untether me from structuring my entire life around artistic inclusion around IDRS conferences.
I am sorry to IDRS, my performance collaborators, and the audiences who experiences for failing to deliver. That’s on me. Part of being the adult in the room is asking for forgiveness when you screw up, and knowing when and how bad it was. It was really bad this year.
I hope that I soften on my music soon. I don’t think it was all bad. I’m still recovering physically from last week and I think I’m still too close to evaluate whether or not I am good, or if my music is good.
When I was asked to co-facilitate the 2025 IDRS 2SLGBTQIA+ Affinity Mixer, I hesitated. I could have said no, simply for the reason that I was already too busy. I could have also said no because I am neither an oboist nor a bassoonist, and it has been pointed out numerous times to me that I am lucky to be included at all in the double reed world despite not playing one of the instruments.
But I weighed it across the potential to do good work through it, and I was touched and felt complimented by the offer, so, in the end, I agreed. I attended a meeting before the conference and shared ideas, some of which were implemented — another compliment.
My co-facilitator was not at that meeting, and we had very limited conversations prior to our arrival in Indianapolis about the mixer. I had been to last year’s queer affinity mixer, and found it to be surprisingly structured for a mixed, with too many awkward icebreaking activities and not enough milling throughout the room trying to get to know everyone in a conversational environment akin to every other mixer to which I had ever been. And after the icebreakers, we shared trauma in small groups, an experience that, after what had transpired the week before I traveled for IDRS, I was committed to avoiding at all costs.
When we actually got to Butler, a conversation emerged about whether or not to include allies, brought up to me by someone who I do actually believe is an ally to queer liberation. I told them I would check in with the reset of the affinity mixer hosts and get back to them with an answer. I was told that it would be up to the hosts to include allies or not, and, after asking my co-host, they said the would not be okay with allies in the space.
I mulled this over for a few hours, talking about it casually with a few people who brought some very good points about how they would be excluded, about how policing queerness is problematic, about how policing allyship would itself be problematic, about how allyship to the queer community can be a holding space for people who are not ready to come out, and about how allyship includes people who have queer family the love and support. Having surrounded myself with a variety of opinion, I found myself in stark disagreement with my co-host, and I made it clear I was not going to tolerate excluding anybody.
After my co-host made it clear that, as a member of the IDRS DEIA committee, they had much more authority than I did in facilitating the space, and that they would not tolerate my disagreement in the way they chose to enforce their boundary around having allies, I realized there was nothing more I could do. It is true that I am not a member of the IDRS DEIA committee and this was not my space to curate, and in the end, I chose to back out because I was being asked to do something that had caused me a lot of pain, humiliation, and suffering.
In order to understand why I had such a specific and direct response to the enforcement of a boundary that I found to be exclusionary, I am going to share some of my own trauma around exclusion.
In February 2020, my family took a vacation to London. While my parents were on their way back from a fabulous safari in Kenya, the entire family got to experience everything London had to offer, from spectacular museums to parks, from gardens to churches and markets and monuments.
And when my mother returned to the states, she called me up and said “ Kincaid, you would have loved it.”
I was in grad school at the time. They chose to make the most of their trip and invite my siblings, both of whom could pay their way at the time. I could not go, not because I was living on a pre-pandemic graduate student stipend at the time, but because they knew I could not abandon my education in the middle of a semester, and yet I was needlessly, unnecessarily, and hurtfully excluded from family activities for reasons that I had little control over.
A few years later, my mother reached out around the time of her 60th birthday party, specifically to make it absolutely clear that I was not invited. This somewhat surprised me, having only been excluded up this point by circumstantial omission. My father spent the evening of this year’s Father’s Day explaining to me that, after having vented some of the hurt that had bubbled to the surface and start the healing process with my family, I will not be invited to any further family events, holidays, or vacations because of the risk of disturbing their peace with an autistic meltdown and because any therapy I have done in recent months (until recently, I was going twice a week) was without merit because it had not resulted in a medication-based solution to “ the Kincaid problem.”
I have been excluded in every stage of my life as a result of ableism and homophobia. It is not my fault that people refuse to communicate with me. It is not my fault that people refuse reasonable accommodations, or that they set traps for me to fall into, or that they create situations that disenfranchise or belittle me. It is not my fault that I have never had a time in my life in which people have not wanted to play Heathers and call me the booger (which has, regrettably, literally happened). And it is certainly not my fault that I have been told, in almost all of these situations, most often by people in positions that benefit most from my exclusion, that it is my fault that I have been harassed into submission, and that everything would change if I simply became the adult in the room, only to discover that, after becoming the adult in the room in exactly the way they described, the horrors still persist.
I bring all this up to establish why I do not think it is appropriate for someone who is representing an organization to unleash the potential trauma and pain found in the experience of exclusion onto membership of that organize by litigating who and who should be included in spaces for marginalized people. It is not up to us as facilitators to force people to qualify their identities enough for admission into our spaces. It is our responsibility to welcome everyone, regardless of how they identify with our community or contribute to the goal of queer liberation, and when I took the responsibility on, I did it in spirit of inclusion, believing that was what IDRS intended to do.
We need allies. As I am writing this, the U.S. Supreme Court has just upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care of trans youth. We are living in dark times in which cruelty is the point. I needed people last week who saw hatred unleashed upon me and stood up to fight back on my behalf. I was in a compromised position and I needed support. Because of the way that family treats me, I don’t have allies in the same way that other queer people do, and there were people at IDRS this who behaved like the allies I wish had. When I was misgendered in the introduction to my music during Contra Band’s performance, Cassandra Bendickson made direct eye contact with me and her apologetic expression almost broke me. Jillian Camwell absorbed most of the emotional output I experienced in the immediate aftermath of Kevin and Ari’s performance. We are lucky in the double reed world to have model allies to queer liberation, people want to stand up and say to our opponents so we don’t have to, and we want to exclude those people? Really?
I do not understand the instinct to watch people get hurt, watching other people pull them up out that world of hurt, and then say that the people who helped the hurt person do not deserve visibility, access, or inclusion in our space. If I agree to exclude people, I become part of the problem. I know too well what it like to be excluded. I will not put anyone else through it.
That’s being the adult in the room.
Thanks to social media and the way things were handled the week prior to IDRS, the death threats issued to me and my partner by Philip Rugel are well-documented. If you would like to review all of the documentation about that traumatizing week of my life, you are more that welcome to do so. I would like to reiterate that I don’t believe that threats of any kind are appropriate, to myself or my partner, and that that situation was blow out of proportion.
What you do not know, because very few people do, is that Rugel continued to email me quite a bit after I sent the open letter I issued to him and the double reed community at large. At first, it was hostile, but it became less so, and he shared some harrowing anecdotes about growing up in the 70s and 80s as a gay man that I have no business sharing here, but that I found alarming enough to have to sit with for a while before responding, never mind that I had musical projects I urgently needed to complete.
However, I did not respond fast enough for Rugel, and he sent me several more messages that I took as threatening in nature about not responding and how I was done with him. Every day or so, I would get a new email asking me to do the emotional labor he needed more realistically from a therapist, and, finally, when I told my partner what was happening, I was able to set aside the time to respond with kindness and grace.
I haven’t heard from Philip since responding that final time, but that did not make the fear go away. Here was someone who I knew felt excluded from space allotted to queer voices in new music in the double reed world, despite having endured relevant and complex trauma related to queer identity. Here was someone who lived within driving distance of Indianapolis, who knew where I would be and when I would be there, and would have ample opportunity to unleash the violence he had already threatened if he wanted to.
Though IDRS made it perfectly clear that Butler was safe and that Kevin and I would be safe on campus, that did not alleviate my fears, which had doubled in the past week since having received more harassment from Rugel. I had managed to deescalate this situation as much as possible, even going as far as to call Norman Lebrecht’s journalistic integrity into question to the degree that he did actually issue at retraction, only for people on social media to inform me that he had also included information about where and when the conference would be held. You know, just in case anyone wanted to know. This did not help assuage my stress.
So I walked into IDRS 2025 with my nerves completely fried, unable to manage my own stress levels. I started drinking and overcaffienating immediately. I am flexible though functional vegan, and I struggled to find a vegetable that was not battered and deep-fried. I settled for hibachi grilled vegetables during my only complete meal at IDRS 2025, but everything else was a snack here or there. I could not find the time to eat once I was in the thick of it.
This led me to the point at which the performance of Kevin Day’s Vortex, featuring Ari Cohen Mann happened. I was so stressed out that I spilled moscato all over my leg in and ended up pacing the lobby until the performance began. As they walked out on stage, I felt my begin to pound, as if danger was imminent, and this would be the last thing I experienced. Going out with a bang.
And though I may disagree with Ari Cohen Mann on the most fundamental level about inclusion and allyship, they are one of the best oboists I’ve ever heard in my life.
After screaming myself hoarse and applauding their performance, I finally broke down. The performance happened, and no one had gotten hurt, except for me hurting myself. All the anguish and worry and terror I had internalized, even with the assurances of safety and security from the conference organizers, turned out unfounded and therefore went unnoticed. All the alcohol I consumed in order to pretend that fear was not present took over, and I blacked out. We left at intermission and continued to drink and celebrate at the rental house.
I don’t know how much alcohol I drank. There gets to a point when you are so drunk that you lose count, and I definitely reached that point. I don’t remember much from that night, and people around me just let pass out on the couch.
And so, in my moment of weakness and drunken vulnerability, instead of taking care of me and centering my pain and trauma, we opened a bottle of gin with a reed knife, and I drank myself into enough of a stupor in order for someone to come over and take a selfie with my unconscious body, a picture of me that I could not have consented to, only for me to receive it the next day, when I woke up alone and unable to recover enough to meet some really wonderful people who I knew actually did want to include me.
I wasn’t able to be the adult in the room, so no one was.
IDRS conferences are widely acknowledged to be exhausting. Towards end of the conference, I kept hearing the same mantra of exhaustion parroted with the idea that “ that’s just how conferences are” , with no acknowledgement that when something is exhausting for able-bodied, allistic people, that exhaustion is ten-fold and a barrier for entry for neurodivergent people and disabled people. The reality is, as neurodivergent, developmentally disabled person, I was exhausted halfway through day one, and the rest of the conference was spent oscillating between caffeine and alcohol simply to manage my energy levels so I could pretend to be me enough to fool everyone else into thinking I was fine.
And it doesn’t have to be this way, conferences just refuse to change. I have already written about this in the context of attending The Midwest Clinic, and was delighted to hear that what I said about that conference did cause organizations such as NASA and ICA to reevaluate how their conferences are managed and make positive changes. Those changes have not been made for IDRS conferences, and IDRS conferences are still planned with basic line items for international conferences not incorporated, things like adequate time to eat, food accessibility, rest areas, quiet rooms, and more. As it currently stands, between IDRS and Midwest, the more difficult conference to attend is absolutely IDRS.
At this point, what has to start being acknowledged in the way IDRS conducts business and its conference is the way that exclusion is trickling down through the entire organization and becoming institutionalized. I have been artistically excluded over collaborators who have been explicitly included, myself and over 200 other composers have been excluded because of a lack of institutional support for initiatives that should have been managed by the organization all along, queer voices have been excluded from their own communities for suggesting a greater vision of inclusion itself, and disabled people have been excluded because the organization has inexplicably decided to prioritize visibility over intersectionality in their work towards a more diverse IDRS. That is my experience of IDRS’ impact, and I bore a lot of that impact last week, and it ruined my brain’s capacity to process information and mangled my body’s response to trauma.
IDRS has to accept that decisions about inclusivity are being made at every level that are not inclusive. They have moved the goal posts around inclusivity at the last possible minute that people are falling through the cracks and becoming excluded. And the worst part is, they don’t really seem like they know that they’re doing it.
If this is the future IDRS wants, I have to set some boundaries. It has to be done. I can’t do another conference like this, and things have got to change about the way I give and give and give and give to IDRS without the same energy returned. Or IDRS has to change the way it does things. We’ll see.
I am unlikely to suggest to a future collaborator apply to an IDRS conference with a concerto of mine again if I run the risk of it being implicitly demanded that I accept that my work has been rejected but that a blank check has been issued to the concerto applicant who wanted to center my work. That emotional labor should not have been mine to navigate and I’d like to kindly ask the organization to never ask any other composer to make that ethical calculation.
I am absolutely never again individually emailing 200 living composers about their works being performed at IDRS conferences, asking if they want to be more meaningfully included, only to discover that some of them had no idea their works were being performed at this year’s conference at all. If IDRS wants to take over that initiative and divide the work more evenly among a group of people, perhaps, say, the already existing Commissioning Committee, I am happy to help and provide insight on how it was done the first time as a current member of that committee, but my partner and I are unwilling to bear the financial cost, emotional burden, and physical labor of a purely informational booth that enjoyed universal popularity and acclaim.
I will absolutely not be writing music weeks before it will be performed, creating hostile work environments for people who do not deserve it because I have been encouraged to juggle too many other voluntary initiatives for the organization.
I am unlikely to facilitate structured mixers that suggest they are both convivial and informal but often transform into sessions of sharing trauma and become a breeding ground for semantic debates on who will be included and who will be excluded. Everyone should be included, full stop.
I will not tolerate receiving threats and living in fear because of them, forcing myself to do all the emotional labor of perpetrators as their victim of harassment.
I will no longer justify sacrificing my physical wellbeing to make sure everyone else is taken care of ahead of me, or because other people refuse to be the adult in the room when it is their turn. I will not tolerate another violation of my consent at an IDRS conference. I cannot compromise my own ability to function, and I will not needlessly spread myself too thin because the organization asks me to.
And I will kindly request that — please, for the love of God and all that is good: please stop asking the developmentally disabled person to constantly be the adult in the room. So I can protect my peace, write the best music I can, contribute to the double reed community when appropriate, and continue to enjoy being a living composer instead of almost literally killing myself bending over backwards for everyone else’s benefit, I want someone else to take their goddamn turn being the adult in the room.