It is a moment that may not be as celebrated, or as headline-grabbing, as Frances McDormand’s Oscar speech urging Hollywood A-listers to consider “inclusion riders” – contractual clauses insisting that certain proportions of black and minority ethnic, disabled, women and LGBT workers be employed on their film projects. But in its own, much less glitzy and high-profile way, Britain’s classical music world is making strides towards unravelling a situation that has seen a centuries-long dominance of its ranks of musicians, conductors and composers by one particular group: white men.
In 2015 Chineke!, Europe’s first majority black and minority ethnic orchestra, made its debut. Founded by British double bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku, it joyfully celebrates BME classical virtuosity and stands as a challenge for the industry to do better in terms of nurturing, recognising and hiring diverse talent. In 2017, Sound and Music, the national charity for new music, promised that it would work with equal numbers of male and female composers by 2020. Last week, the Proms, Cheltenham music festival, Aldeburgh festival and Huddersfield contemporary music festival announced they would achieve a 50-50 gender balance across composers commissioned, and performers and speakers booked, by 2022 – just some of the 45 European music festivals and conferences signing up to an initiative begun by Britain’s Performing Right Society Foundation. This week an important conservatoire, Trinity Laban in London, announced its Venus Blazing project. Music by women, from all eras, will make up more than 50% of concert programmes in its 2018/19 academic year, and it is pledging to grow its library to include more scores by historically overlooked women composers. This kind of move is especially important. The canon is currently overwhelmingly male – but, as scholarly work has made abundantly clear over the past several decades, there are legions of women composers whose work is rarely performed: this needs to change.
To many, this insistence on fairness will seem utterly logical. However, such moves have met with opposition from some in the industry. They see attending to diversity as imperilling a culture of excellence in which the only criterion for inclusion ought to be quality. Others argue that, while British women composers have only recently gained a foothold in mainstream composing careers, there is, now, a level playing field. By imposing targets on equality, goes the argument, these younger women will be advantaged at the expense of older men.
These arguments hold little water. Attending to diversity does not quash quality but increases it, widening the pool of talent rather than reducing it to a small, historically privileged group. And, by boldly looking outwards at the world around it – in all its richness – British classical music stands a greater chance of flourishing and growing as it should, rather than withering as so many fear. Naturally, it would be preferable if equality could be achieved without targets imposed and commitments signed up to – but Thursday’s International Women’s Day will be a fitting moment to recall that shifting traditional inequalities is a struggle, and takes more than a vague sense of optimism. The power of unconscious bias – the unreflecting process by which racism and sexism are perpetuated even by decent and fair-minded people – demands to be combated with something stronger than good intentions. A healthy cultural world is one in which all kinds of voices are heard and enjoyed. A healthy cultural world is one that honours the moral imperative to be fair.
