After months of uncertainty, the Emerging Black Composers Project (EBCP), launched in 2020 by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Symphony, is back on track.

In early March 2025, SFCM and the SF Symphony announced the program was paused, citing a memo from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that instructed schools to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts or face the possibility of losing their federal funding.

Side-stepping that memo, the SF Symphony — not an educational institution — is now the sole administrator of the project, with the SFCM in a supporting role.

Created in the wake of the George Floyd protests, the EBCP was established as a 10-year commissioning project meant to lower some of the barriers Black composers fa

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