Symeon Brown’s argument that class is the elephant in the room in conversations about race (Interview, 9 August) is nowhere more visible than in classical music.
Celebrated black classical musicians held up as evidence of progress are very often solidly middle class: children of professionals who could afford the instruments, tuition, exam fees and travel that serious musical training demands. Their success is real, but is mainly evidence that class opens doors.
My son is white, working class, was on free school meals until he was 12, and still lives in one of England’s most deprived areas. He won a scholarship to a specialist music school and went on to a top conservatoire. His closest friend, a black working-class classical musician, followed an almost identical path. Both were judged too privileged for widening-participation support at master’s level because they had attended independent schools, ignoring their bursaries, or that their families could not fund exam entries, let alone two years of postgraduate fees and living costs. In interviews, conservatoires even vigorously disputed the extent of their exclusion.
Reinforcing the class barrier, many UK recital venues insist on conservatoire-trained performers, but refuse to pay them, even declining to share an often substantial retiring collection, claiming that the experience is reward enough – and thus excluding anyone who must work for a living
Diversity schemes that ignore class will keep mistaking a handful of border-crossers for structural change, leaving the poorest musicians of every colour stranded.
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