Dear Ms Understanding,
I’m the chair of a large community orchestra. We don’t audition and we are a very welcoming family, from all walks of life. Our set list range is huge: Hendrix, Bowie, Björk, Radiohead. We have played in music festivals and have loads of members in loads of bands all over the city, but there’s no denying we are all white. How can we reassure the audiences who come and see us and obviously enjoy what we do, that they would be so welcome among us as musicians. Our age range is from early 30s to 80. I’d say most of our members are 35 to 40, many with young families, so we are not stuffy. We have tried various outreach things with the Somali and Kurdish residents of our city, but I worry that not enough young people have the opportunity to learn music full stop. There are adults out there who were luckier, yet it seems very difficult to invite them to come, even for a taster. It might be perceived as intimidating, I’m sure. I was very nervous when I joined, to be honest, with hurdles of my own to leap, but I know those bear little comparison. Our city is a magnificent multicultural place and if anywhere could do it, it would be us. Any thoughts? Our histories are complex but our love of music is fundamental. It’s an excellent glue in a fracturing world.
Dear Music Lover,
Lots of organisations are facing the challenge of “diversifying” and many of them have good intentions, just as you do. Having worked for a large city-based arts festival in the past, I am familiar with what it looks like for an organisation that is public-facing to try to diversify both its audience and the people who are on the stages of the performances it presents.
So, first thing’s first. You are clearly starting from the right place: you want to connect with people based on shared passions and a love of music.
Good intentions are a great starting point, but they are insufficient. In fact, all too often, good intentions can be an obstacle to progress. If you are seeking to include people from a range of communities on the basis that it’s a nice thing to do, it’s not always clear to those you want to include why they should join in. Many arts workers I have spoken to are convinced that migrant and refugee communities aren’t interested in the arts because a) they don’t have a culture of attending events and don’t have the money, or b) they are afraid of stepping on stage or worried that they may not be good enough.
Many arts organisations try to demystify their events. I’ve seen initiatives that choose a small group of influencers from a community to work with to ensure that if they have never been to the opera before, they know what to expect – everything from the language to the intermission. In the process, they are helping people to become more familiar with navigating what can be unfamiliar spaces by working through the logistics of public transport or where to park and what to expect. For some people, this will work really well, though of course for some people, the assumption that you need to be mentored to attend a show simply because of your cultural background may come across as patronising. There are pros and cons, but the point is arts organisations and groups like yours are often trying very hard to diversify by addressing what they see as barriers to access, which includes everything from navigating the space to the cost of tickets.
The problem with this approach when it is not combined with other strategies is that it assumes that the problem lies within the communities and people who are being courted, rather than in the institutions that are doing the courting.
I remember interviewing a famous author once at a big cultural venue. Lots of young people came, many of them of African heritage. As I looked out at the audience, I was pleased. It was a great mix of people. Clearly, putting myself and a big-name Black author on the stage had been effective for drawing an audience that typically didn’t turn up at that place.
Afterwards, however, as I spoke to a few young women, they told me how they had been treated with suspicion by the security officers and had their bags searched when white patrons had largely not been subjected to that experience. One of them told me that she had sworn never to come to that venue again because she had been made to stand aside and searched thoroughly the last time she had come. She had enjoyed the conversation on stage but she was angry that she had ignored her own advice. She spent the first 15 minutes trying to calm down and missed a lot of the discussion she had paid good money for.
It was infuriating to hear this and it illustrated the importance of not just dealing with the stage, but ensuring that racism isn’t built into the way the places where you perform and the institutions that support your work do business.
At a more fundamental level, the notion that people are not coming because they don’t have a culture of attending events is often also a way of implying that only some kinds of people (the wealthy or the well-educated) enjoy arts and culture. And of course nothing could be further from the truth. What many people don’t enjoy – as you intimate – is a cultural format that insists only certain places are for “culture”, as though it is disconnected from their lives. Music, in particular, is an important part of the way many communities connect with one another. You can find music in community halls, in people’s back yards and living rooms.
Ultimately then, rather than intimidation, I suspect that for many people, the real barriers may be interest and time. Those who are not in the orchestra but who play and enjoy music from India and play any number of classical Indian instruments may not be drawn to the orchestra because of the types of instruments played. The same may be true of the type of music played – while your set list is broad and clearly aimed at attracting younger people, there are so many forms of music that your orchestra isn’t drawing on. That isn’t a criticism – we play the music we know. Still, if you want to attract a wider set of communities as participants, your orchestra is going to have a plan.
Your current members in their 30s probably learned the trumpet or clarinet in school or from parents. What are the instruments kids in the communities are learning in schools and in their own homes? Are those instruments welcome in your orchestra? Do you like how they sound? Can you imagine your string section playing a Kurdish ballad?
As I have said many times in this column, instead of trying to put together a perfect plan or signalling that you are inclusive, I would begin with curiosity. You already have a sense of your end goal, but it is worth clarifying that a bit. I suspect from what you’ve shared that what you are aiming for is an orchestra that is vibrant, fun, innovative and reflective of the city in which it operates. If this is where you want to end up, then you’ll have to begin by being curious. Be curious about what a community orchestra might be and begin a conversation among your members about what they think. Then, get out there and attend music events, follow local groups and start making connections. You come across as someone who really does love music and so this is a wonderful point of connection – in fact, I would say you should think about this as the only point of connection.
This way, you aren’t leading with ethnicity and trying to make your orchestra “look” a certain way. If you take this approach, you will avoid the cringey situation of introducing yourself as someone trying to recruit for your orchestra and hoping you might interest people from this background or heritage in joining up. That will put people off and won’t get you very far.
Instead, start by going to music events and connecting with musicians from multiple communities. If you can manage this, then your efforts will be driven by a love of music, not a desire to make an all-white space less white. It’s a really important distinction. If you focus on the music, your concern will be about how different your orchestra might sound rather than how different it might look. And in the end, isn’t that what music is about?
Good luck!
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Sisonke Msimang is a Guardian Australia columnist. She is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)
