Engaging the Community

Classical music is an art form that thrives on new interpretations and cultural influences. Currently, it is thirsting for new oases from which to sustain its artistic vibrancy. The supply of musicians exists, as The Sphinx Organization has learned through direct experience, to attain diversity without any sacrifice of quality. The challenge is to achieve it.

I’m an optimist, and I like to look forward more than to focus on the past or present. But it’s necessary to define our starting point if we are to understand how much commitment it will take to achieve the goal of diversity onstage. We all know that orchestra membership does not reflect the nation’s population.

According to the ASOL’s annual survey of its member orchestras, nearly 90 percent of the players are white, three percent are African-American or Latino, and most of the remaining seven percent are Asian. Compare this to the overall population, of which 25 percent are black or Latino and five percent are Asian.

And, again according to the ASOL, of the ten composers whose works were scheduled most often for the current season, there are, expectedly, no minorities. And if we look at the top ten most-frequently performed American composers, there are still no minorities.

Given this climate as a starting point, one of the most important things orchestras can do in the immediate term is to create an environment that is visibly more inviting for minorities. As an African-American violinist, I can tell you that, on the whole, orchestras seem like uninviting, intimidating, unfriendly, scary places to minority musicians – and that doesn’t even begin to describe playing before an audition committee! Creating an environment that visibly invites diversity will be critical to achieving diversity on stage. This process will require thinking outside the box – and acting outside it as well.

For example, I believe that screened auditions should be rethought. It’s not my intent to cause a great uproar; I only use this as an example of the extent to which I believe structural changes must be made if, ultimately, diversity is to be achieved. As a preliminary step, perhaps orchestras could move towards including race as a criterion during their audition process. Other industries across the board – including Fortune 500 companies and universities – recognize the importance of such changes, and have been working to implement them for years. It is time for the orchestra industry to wage that battle as well.

We should also consider rethinking tenure policies. As currently implemented, it ultimately limits orchestras to hiring a mere handful of new musicians each year. Suppose, hypothetically, that your orchestra decides to institute an absurd, aggressive policy that no one should adopt: that 50 percent of all new hires will be African-American or Latino. Even assuming an orchestra takes this unrealistic posture, it would take more than 20 years just to reach a point where the orchestra minority representation accurately reflects that in the overall population, let alone the minority population in any major urban center.

Any orchestra whose membership and programming does not reflect the community will be hard-pressed to build interest among an audience where there is no precedent for it. But in major cities with large minority populations, if the orchestras reflected that population, I could envision the orchestras’ audiences becoming as diverse as their membership.

We know for a fact, especially since the Sphinx Competition and the Sphinx Symphony have increasingly brought them to the fore, that there is currently a pool of highly-talented minority musicians. We know for a fact, from Sphinx’s programs and from special orchestral concert programs, that diverse audiences will attend concerts. And we know for a fact that there are volumes of high-quality repertoire written by minority composers. Taking these facts into account, we are left only with the actions taken by orchestra boards, administrators, and musicians to develop and implement an appropriate plan to interconnect these realities.