Not long after my arrival in London 13 years ago I had the extraordinary privilege to be sitting second row centre at an evening featuring Cecilia Bartoli singing Haydn concert arias. Being a reasonably "cultured" American, I was of course aware of Bartoli and had heard a few of her recordings on radio while driving the motorways of Southern California, but this in no way prepared me for her emotional and physical conquest of my entire being. Heart racing, eyes moist, arms tingling, one of the first thoughts that streaked through my still quivering synapses that evening was that any South Central LA gang member, Latino, Crip or Blood confronted with Bartoli would feel exactly the same as I did then.

The thought did not burst full-grown out of my head with no context. In the four years prior to my London relocation I had spent one day a week independently counselling a group of African-American girls at a shockingly decrepit South Central high school; so I was familiar with the milieu and I knew these kids, male and female, responded to honest delivery and to respect towards themselves, both of which Bartoli was demonstrating in spades. They would have been on their feet hooping and hollering for this Italian coloratura with her feet planted firmly on the stage, her voice and arms pulling them into her embrace without need of translation of any kind. She is human. They are human. The connection could not be more simple or clear.

Some years after hearing Bartoli, I was back in Los Angeles and invited one of my girls to a concert featuring Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. When I asked her afterwards what she thought, she replied: "In the second song it was just so sad. It was like everything was dying in the whole world and I wanted to cry, but then the third song began and suddenly everything was right again, happiness had come back and it was good to be alive." Without any discussion or preparation from me (we weren't sitting anywhere near one another in the hall) she just got it, a 22-year-old single mother on welfare and struggling to make it through junior college. In the hearing that evening, her difficult life had been given a gift she has cherished to this day.

Art, highbrow, middle and "low", is humanity's way of saying: "I am. We are, and this is what I/we think/feel about this idea/moment/mystery." The possibilities are endless and the commonality of the impulse overwhelming. Far more than procreation, societal organisation and war - examples of which can be seen throughout the animal kingdom - this impulse is what makes us something different; it makes us human.

And yet, all too often concert audiences are almost exclusively white, a fact that the culture minister, Margaret Hodge, criticised in a speech yesterday. Talking about culture's role in engendering common values and a sense of a shared British identity, she said: "The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events - I'm thinking in particular of the Proms - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this."

Classical music itself is not an enemy to common values in a multicultural society. And no one can seriously believe that western classical music is beyond the ken of Britain's ethnic minorities, or that while white Britons are capable of appreciating Balinese gamelan music, jazz and Bollywood pop, Afro-Caribbeans and Asians have no curiosity or capability beyond their own ethnic styles. But in case there are any doubters out there, consider these examples: the Simón Bolìvar Youth Orchestra, a collection of primarily black working-class, street and even ex-criminal young musicians, one of whose number, a bassist, went on to become the youngest member ever voted into the Berlin Philharmonic, and whose present conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, is contracted to replace Esa Pekka Salonen as principal conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (In first meeting Dudamel some years ago, his confident swagger and charm, the way he conducted his rehearsals, reminded me of an admittedly benevolent gangleader I knew, and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud with joy.)

And also, the Soweto String Quartet, and the Sphinx Organisation that encourages string excellence among young African-American musicians. Or, as an example of cross-pollination working in the opposite direction, what about the Scandinavian - extremely white - percussionists I once saw in a serious samba marching band?

And yet the fact remains that it is impossible to ignore the paucity of ethnic diversity in audiences of so-called high culture in this country, and the United States is not much better. Classical music and opera, ballet and challenging theatre are very much part of my life's blood and one of the particular pleasures for me of living in London. I attend often and, all too often, non-white audience members can be counted on one hand. Countless times I have been the only one, and all too frequently I have encountered inquiring eyes: "What's she doing here?"

I grew up around white people. They do not scare me, and I am used to the questioning looks. Anybody who turns up in an unexpected place will get the same response (white, grey-haired and conservatively dressed aficionados of hardcore rap for example). As a constant phenomenon it becomes familiar, not welcomed, but an accepted part of the territory. For me the pleasure of the event is almost always enough to more than counterbalance that outside irritant (not always; in some situations I have had to resist the urge to retort, "Just what are you staring at?"), but for first-time explorers, this could understandably be more than their patience could bear.

The goal then becomes to stimulate the appetite, create a hunger that will defy all obstacles. This is not going to be easy. It is hard to assert the commonality of the grand impulse that lies behind great art when people tiptoe around difference and cordon off one style of expression from another in the name of multicultural respect. When I was a student at Harvard University I wrote a thesis entitled Towards a Black Aesthetic in Visual Communications, in the first draft of which I condemned the western art tradition as bankrupt, bourgeois and racist. Rather than challenge me to defend my arguments in any coherent way, let alone suggest that I was spouting nonsense, my advisor, timidly offered "Aren't you being a bit harsh?" I deemed him a fool.

I learned the error of my ways on my own in the following years, but I would have saved myself a tremendous amount of time if my adviser had not been intimidated by the afro and had instead believed that my brain was worth the effort of argument.

And the intimidation went both ways. Countless times in my 20s and 30s I had been attacked by black cultural nationalists for reading a particular book or listening to the white man's music, to which even my reply "Have I asked you to read/listen? I've read this and jam to that too" would not be enough. In many ways, their doctrinaire approach was understandable - non-European arts were getting no recognition or respect at that time. But the world has become far smaller in the intervening decades, and a celebration of what we all share in how we define and comment on life is an absolutely essential means of bridging our differences.

The exposure of all communities to high-level performance of all kinds is the first step in this cultural cross-pollination - in the manner of the open-air projected performances from Covent Garden. There needs to be an accompanying reintroduction of serious cross-cultural arts participation in schools at all levels, too.

But before this, adjusting the mindset - found at all levels of society - that, save for the educated and privileged few with time and money on their hands, there will be no interest in high culture, must be challenged. When cross-cultural experiences become the norm, the awkward looks will become increasingly a thing of the past, like smallpox or second-hand smoke.

As for the Last Night of the Proms, for all my avid Proms attendance over the years, I have never been. I have never wanted to go, either - all those silly hats, claxons and streamers are not my thing; but I do not see the night as just a jingoistic celebration of Britain. It is a party, a communal revel that makes a tremendous amount of people very, very happy. Open it up to other styles - a Bollywood dance number, a garage anthem chased by Jerusalem and The Lard Ascending. Why not?

Don't blame it on the Proms

The Proms were founded in 1895 by the impresario Robert Newman to encourage non-aficionados to give classical music a go. Ticket prices were low, programming populist and concert-goers were allowed to walk about, eat, drink and smoke during performances. The only injunction was that attendees should not strike matches during vocal numbers.

"I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages," Newman told the conductor Henry Wood, who was to be associated with the Proms for half a century. "Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music." That Margaret Hodge should have turned her fire on this most inclusive of institutions, which has remained true to Newman's vision over the past century, shows how out of touch she is.

The Proms are as all-embracing as they could be. You can get in for a fiver; the atmosphere is easy-going - unless you try to challenge the territorial claims of the crazed career prommers; and there is something for every taste: programmes stuffed with old warhorses, Sunday concerts for kids, late-night outings for Berio fans, excursions into jazz and Indian music, even last year an evening with Michael Ball.

The Proms can make newcomers and sceptics warm to classical music. How often does Hodge go? Does she really think the Last Night reflects the rest of the two-month festival? Didn't she hear about the staggering Prom last year by Gustavo Dudamel and his youthful Venezuelan orchestra, or Daniel Barenboim's visit in 2005 with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a terrific band made up of young musicians from Israel and Arab countries?

Her error may be a common one - to conflate the two-month musical extravaganza with that end-of-term jamboree - and the time may have come when the Proms planners have to recognise that, in terms of media attention and public perception, the Last Night is the tail that wags the musical dog. All the good work of the previous 90 or so concerts, broad-ranging and multi-faceted as they are, is being undermined by this fiesta of flag-waving. I attended the Last Night a few years ago and it's less joyous than it looks on TV: long, tedious, a trial for all concerned. Why not scrap it, and end with a true musical spectacular instead?

That there are few black faces at concerts - even at the Proms - is a source of concern. But it is not the fault of the Proms. The key to the problem is that people are scared of classical music, or "western art music". Because the media is obsessed with pop, sport, trivia, celebrity and instant gratification, opera, lieder, symphonic music and anything that requires more attention than a text message are made to seem bizarre, somehow detached from reality.

The only surefire way to extend the audience is through education: expose children to the sonic wonder of a symphony orchestra and the reaction, as every outreach scheme proves, is instant and overwhelming. Give people a chance to hear this amazing stuff and they will respond.

The issue is as much about class as race. Living on a council estate, offered only the most rudimentary music education, I was exposed to virtually no classical music in my childhood. One memory that has stayed with me is of standing on a street corner once with a group of my friends - we'd have been about 14 - and hearing strange music coming from an elderly woman's flat (I think it might have been the Blue Danube waltz). We always thought this old woman was mad, and this music just proved it. What on earth would we have thought if she'd been playing Schnittke?
Stephen Moss

How the arts world sees its audiences

Ninja

Singer with the Go! Team

Our audience used to be aged 24-35, now it's 11-60. I get excited when I see a black person in the crowd - I'm like, yes, we've attracted one more! We have more black people in our audiences in America than anywhere else in the world. The audiences in England are mainly white but that's because we're not labelled as rap music. My dream crowd is a Michael Jackson crowd - all ages and races.

I loved seeing an eight-year-old, pensioners, too. If there's anyone out of the norm there, I know I'm doing my job.
Anita Sethi

Kay Mellor

Playwright

The issue is as much about class as race; the two go hand in hand. My work is about working-class people. And I believe in integrated casting [using actors from diverse backgrounds]. This affects the kind of audience who come to see the plays. After performances of A Passionate Woman, we were mobbed at the stage door. People were shouting, "That's my story." That's because their story hadn't been told before.
AS

Michael Craig-Martin

Artist

From a visual arts point of view, the size of the audience has increased dramatically. There has been a big shift. In the visual arts, few people are in a position to buy work, but a great number of people go to exhibitions now. There's an obsession in the Labour party that arts are fundamentally a branch of education and that view is philistine. The way to have an appreciation with any of the arts is to go frequently - the more regularly audiences go, the more sophisticated they will become.
AS

David Lan

Artistic director, Young Vic

Theatre is a way of bringing people together but it's not just about community and cohesion. There's a tendency to think that the arts can clear up the mess of society. I don't know what British identity is - it's a complicated thing. The job of producing is trying to feel what work will appeal to people living complicated lives - excite them, provoke them intellectually.
AS

Jude Kelly

Director, South Bank Centre

The arts are not monocultural, but there are cultural forms such as classical music, where [because of] the whole journey of learning instruments, choice of western repertoire, role models, etc, there are a huge number of reasons why the orchestra appears monocultural. There is no hierachy of culture, but in the end all these things are about respect and sharing the space together.
Hannah Pool

Patricia Cumper

Talawa theatre company

Things are getting better, but they are not yet good enough. Talawa has a goal to develop black audiences and audiences for black work and if it wasn't for companies like us, the arts world would certainly be less diverse. Class is as important as race here, but it needs commitment and involves the empowering of all those who have a contribution to make. Everyone should feel that they are in an audience by right. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this debate is the fact that very few organisations know how diverse their audience is. Culture forges and questions identity - for this reason it is important to know who is watching.
HP

John McGrath

Artistic director, Contact theatre, Manchester

Often it seems to me that theatres and arts organisations are places where a certain class of people go to hide from the chaos and challenge of daily life. But they should be places where we grab hold of that chaos and start to make sense of it - together. Too often in mainstream arts, people stick with the familiar. Real creativity is about daring to enter into the unexpected.
HP

Samenua Sesher

Director, Decibel

Change takes time, resources and commitment and should be a pleasure not a pressure. We are so culturally rich in this country and any organisation that wants to be a 21stcentury concern will want to be part of that. The McMaster report saw diversity as an output of exellence. Ergo, any venue gatekeepers wishing to be seen as excellent will embrace change and difference and take chances to create that. The changing face of Britain should be visible.
HP

· Decibel is an Arts Council initiative designed to raise the profile of African, Asian and Caribbean artists in England.

Kerry Michael

Artistic director, Theatre Royal, Stratford East

Diverse audiences give a better experience for all audiences and make better art. It raises the bar for us creatively. Some institutions have picked up on that, others haven't yet. Diversity creates better work. We have 160 languages spoken in our schools in Stratford. If we're going to be an institution serving the nation we need to serve all constituences or we risk ghettoising audiences - having white venues for white audiences, black venues for black audiences. That doesn't lead to cohesive societies, which is what Margaret Hodge was talking about and she's right in that sense."
HP

Kwame Kwei-Armah

Playwright and actor

The arts are monocultural, but far more importantly, the overwhelming majority of people who are buying art seem to have monocultural tastes. It's incumbent on ethnic minorities to claim institutions as their own. It has taken me years of confidence building to be in an audience that is exclusively white and not feel alien.
HP