Our History:

CIMusED (Culturally Inclusive Music Database) was developed in 2023 by four Massachusetts-based music educators in partnership with the Mass Cultural Council and the Music Educator Teaching Artist Fellowship. Throughout the course of the two-year program, our fellows bonded over a passion for DEI work and a desire to expand access to culturally inclusive music education resources. We felt that many music educators, including ourselves, acknowledge the need to expand the inclusivity of our curriculums, but we didn’t quite know where to begin. Barriers included a lack of diversity in our own musical training, the lack of time to research, study, and adapt diverse resources for our own unique classrooms, and accessibility.

Our Mission:

CIMusED seeks to create a forum for music teachers, students, performers, composers, and publishers to share resources from artists who have been historically underrepresented in music performance and music education. 

We therefore set out to create a platform for music educators that will allow users to:

• Search for culturally inclusive musical resources that already exist
• Search for culturally inclusive musical resources that have already been assessed by a music educator and cataloged by genre, ensemble, instrument, difficulty, composer identity, etc.
• Upload and share lesson plans or arrangements that music educators have developed to utilize in their own classrooms that other teachers would benefit from
• Upload and share (either for sale or free) newly written or created works by composers of color and other historically underrepresented artists