Music education student researches composer representation
Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Media Contact: Sydney Trainor | Communications and Media Relations Specialist | 405-744-9782 | sydney.trainor@okstate.edu
When Katelynn Biggs turns on the car radio, she’s not listening to Beethoven.
Few people are. The German composer and pianist is an all-time great, but there have been composers of all races and genders since then.
People aren’t rushing to the theater to watch Shakespeare anymore. Movies and plays have added newer content over the years. So, why are orchestras stuck in the 1800s?
Biggs, a music education senior, researched that very question this spring at the Michael and Anne Greenwood School of Music.
Biggs’ studies primarily focused on prescribed music lists for high school concert bands in the region. The PMLs are what every student in the state plays when they perform at competitions and, therefore, spend hours and hours with the music. As a French horn player, Biggs narrowed the research down to just that instrument.
What Biggs found was quite revealing. Most PMLs included classics like Beethoven, Mozart and Strauss, but few, if any, included newer compositions or even female-composed pieces.
“In my paper, I found there were 289 solos on the Texas PML, but only two were composed by women,” Biggs said. “And it’s Barbara Aren’s ‘Intro to Scenarios’ and Mary Shindler’s ‘Flee as a Bird.’ So it’s just 0.7% of the list, which was the most extensive. Texas had a lot of pages to click through, but it severely lacked female representation.”
A native of Joshua, Texas, Biggs was familiar with playing the same compositions over and over to prepare for these contests. It became tiring, and when she arrived at Oklahoma State University, she found that playing the same music continuously in high school didn’t adequately prepare her for college.
Dr. Sarah Sarver, assistant professor of music theory, advised Biggs on her research and noted that even the college curriculum is still trying to modernize.
“How can we make our students feel represented, heard and seen? It’s by including different cultures. Everyone wants to see themselves doing what they have always dreamed of doing.”
“One of the criticisms of the music theory field is that historically, when I was a student, it was locked into a particular canon of composers, such as Beethoven and Mozart,” Sarver said. “It would sort of peter out, depending on where you went to school and how far you would get. You would maybe end in the late 1800s and then take an extra course to look at some composers around the beginning of the 1900s.
“... So now there’s been a big push in the field to incorporate music by underrepresented composers, women, people of color, and different styles of music. So it doesn’t just have to be Western European music in terms of popular music. I’m of the mind that if someone’s making music, they’re making music.”
Biggs also studied the PMLs for Arkansas and Oklahoma, finding that Arkansas was also severely lacking in female horn compositions, while Oklahoma hadn’t updated its repertoire since 2001.
“Oklahoma gets around it by saying you can also pick whatever you want,” Biggs said. “But if you have an educator who does not play that instrument, I wouldn’t know what to choose for a saxophone player to add representation to their repertoire. I would go off the list, but the list has not been updated since 2001.
“Many Oklahoma kids play the same solos yearly because they have CD backing tracks, so you don’t have to pay for an accompaniment, which is good, but you play out of the same book every single year. What are they working for?”
Biggs presented her work at three conferences: the Mid-South Horn Conference in Jonesboro, Arkansas; SHE: Festival of Women in Music in Fayetteville, Arkansas; and the College Music Society South Central Conference in Oklahoma City, where she won the second-place student presentation award.
“My research was really about integrating women’s written composition into that list that hits the same technical benchmarks as a solo written by Strauss or Beethoven or the classics, which need to be played,” Biggs said. “But also, you can introduce your students to something new that hopefully they can connect to more on a personal level, because everyone plays Beethoven, everyone plays Strauss.”
Recently, Biggs worked as a marching band technician and hopes to go into the education field, where she can make an impact at an early age.
“How can we make our students feel represented, heard and seen? It’s by including different cultures. Everyone wants to see themselves doing what they have always dreamed of doing,” Biggs said. “If you get that started with students when they’re young, instead of just notes on a page and get them started with feeling connected to the music, it can grow them into such amazing musicians.”
As far as what compositions schools and states can start incorporating, Biggs and Sarver said they are out there, but you just have to look. Music isn’t limited to the classics, with film compositions or pop music being areas students can learn from.
Sarver said women have always been involved in music, like Clara Schumann or Fanny Hensel, but historically, not all female musicians received credit or profited for their work. Nowadays, female composers are everywhere, but their music isn’t being promoted nearly as much as the classics.
“It’s not just about increasing the number of works written by women. It’s about giving students a chance to personally connect to pieces of music,” Biggs said. “Meaningful change starts with educators, adjudicators, music committees and the students themselves advocating for greater representation through intentional programming.”
Sarver said the lack of representation on the PMLs stems from the pieces being familiar items that the people who make the lists grew up with.
“They’re only playing the things that they grew up hearing. And if we’ve only programmed pieces by men, it’s just perpetuating the problem,” Sarver said. “It’s something that we continually need to work on so that performing a piece written by a woman or other underrepresented composer isn’t something that we celebrate because it happens so rarely.”
Biggs will next present at the College Music Society National Conference in Spokane, Washington, in late October. She hopes that someday, people can turn on the radio and hear some newer compositions, perhaps by someone who benefited from playing newer music when they were in high school.
“I’m not trying to diminish what they did in the olden days. They wrote beautiful music,” Biggs said. “But music changes with time, too. … As time goes on, we have to follow along with it.”
Photos By: Ellie Piper
Story By: Jordan Bishop | Research Matters Magazine