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Welcome to The New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to another episode on The New Books Network.
I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Christina Kolbe about her book titled The Sound of Difference, Race, Class, and the Politics of Diversity in Classical Music, published by Manchester University Press in 2024.
which asks a lot of very interesting questions about a particular sector of the cultural industry focusing on classical music and various diversity efforts that have taken place, that have been attempted, that have been developed.
What is actually happening here?What problems are trying to be solved?How much are these efforts doing anything about them?What actually happens when you put these ideas about diversity in practice in these particular environments?
So, lots to get into here.Christina, thank you so much for joining me.Thank you so much for having me.It's a pleasure to be here.
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book and what questions you're asking in it?
Yeah, absolutely.So yeah, I'm Christina.I'm a sociologist who is specifically interested in the relationship between culture, culture production, creative work.
and broader regimes and structures of inequality, specifically inequalities around class, race, and gender.
And yeah, I approach the study of classical music and diversity work within classical music, both from an academic perspective, as indeed a sociologist interested in culture and inequality, but also from a sort of more personal angle as someone who has been involved in classical music since a young age, playing piano, singing in choirs, and so on, on an amateur level, I should add.
So while I've been very much sort of enjoying music making in quite profound ways throughout my youth, and still today, and I really also, I want to stress that, really do believe that music in general does offer a kind of a unique way to connect and express human experiences.
I also came to realize that classical music as a quite specific field has been deeply entangled with a long history of privilege and exclusion. around issues of class, race, and gender.
Questions like who we see as a regular normalized producer or regular normalized audience in the field, who has access to the sector and who does not, how we assign musical value, how
Traditionally, classical music has represented difference both in the music itself, as well as on stage, in case of opera, for instance.
This is really sort of a history that brings to the fore issues of exclusion and issues of representation in many ways.And this history still shapes the ways in which classical music institutions are set up today.
So one of the key motivations for this book grew from this sort of desire to critically examine those legacies and to consider what they mean for classic music today, especially as we find ourselves at a point, as you said already in the introduction, at a point in time where diversity discourses have become quite central discussions in the culture industries, not just in classical music, but also including classical music.
So I wanted to understand how and why diversity in classical music remains a struggle and to address also sort of a conversation that engages honestly with both the music and the institutional structures that uphold the field.
And this is really where I would say my personal motivation linked to an academic interest.As I argue in the book, our contemporary political moment, especially in Europe, is marked by a profound conjuncture between arguably contradictory politics.
So on one hand, we see a reckoning of post-colonial legacies and a sort of critical politics of multiculturalism.On the other hand, we see a strong hardening of ethno-nationalist politics and intensifying inequality.
And I wanted to understand how diversity discourses sit within these dynamics.What work is being done by diversity or in the name of diversity, especially in the cultural sector?
And how does this link to the reproduction of class and racial inequalities today?So these were kind of questions that really motivated this book.
A very interesting collection of questions and ones that could be answered in a whole bunch of different ways, right?There's lots of angles to poke out with these questions.
So can you tell us a bit about the methods that you used for this research and kind of why those were the ones you selected?
Yeah, absolutely.So in the book, I draw from a combination of different qualitative methodologies, specifically qualitative interviewing and ethnographic methods.
And this combination really allowed me to bring together quite specific, detailed information on how diversity is done in practice, and larger reflections around diversity work in the sector, covering a longer period of time.
So in 2016-17, so quite a while back already, I conducted an ethnographic study of a diversity project that took place at an opera house in Germany, which was aimed at diversifying in particular their music production practices, but also their outreach and education programs by working mainly, although not exclusively, I should say, with communities of Turkish and Middle Eastern descent.
So for example, as part of the study, I observed rehearsals and performances.I sat in curatorial meetings and staff meetings.
I interviewed or spoke to staff, to musicians, managerial staff, but also to project participants to kind of find out how diversity discourses were translated into the institutional practices of the opera institution.
So diversity can mean a lot of things, right?It somehow is a sort of a signifier that moves around and that travels.So I was really interested in how it takes shape concretely in institutional practice.
And I was specifically or especially interested in zooming into moments of creative and organizational decision making. that occur within the diversity project and with music production at large.
So I was specifically interested in how concepts of difference and diversity were sort of negotiated in these processes of music production.What kinds of challenges or tensions come up here or came up here?
And how did these dynamics re-inscribe or potentially also refract from wider structures of race and class?
So these concerns were central to my ethnographic observations and also allowed me to bring into dialogue a sort of a close analysis of music production with these broader inequalities and structures of inequalities that we see play out in all sorts of social domains today and in politics more widely.
And then the second data set the book draws from relates to an interview series that I carried out a few years later between 2020 and 2022, to be specific, with diversity managers and musicians.
I call them activist musicians in the book who've been involved in diversity work in classical music in different forms.The interview series focuses also on Germany, but also, although to a lesser extent, on the UK.
And this interview series really allowed me to gain a broader understanding of how practitioners in the field reflect on how diversity is dealt with in classical music institutions.
And it also helped me understand how structures of elitism and of whiteness still operate in the field. So I basically mapped how people in the field expressed a need and a hope for change.
But I also showed how they reflected critically on diversity work, its failures even, or its drawbacks.So, and this all took place during the COVID pandemic.
It wasn't really my main hook to begin with, but it coincided with the COVID pandemic, of course.So the interviews also speak to how diversity discourses have changed.
or arguably sometimes disappeared from the institutional agenda throughout this moment of crisis.
And I think by bringing these different data sets together, it made it possible for me to generate quite specific, grounded insights into how diversity is done in practice, but also to situate these findings, these kind of fear-specific findings within broader reflections around diversity work in the sector.
All right, so the combination of why you're interested in this, the questions you're investigating, and the methods through which you achieved this give us a lot of things, I think, to talk about as a foundation for our discussion.
So let's start, I suppose, with kind of some key definitional questions, right?Because diversity is not – it's very easy to say the word, but it can mean so many different things, especially in this context.
So instead of asking you to say kind of what is the one definition, it's probably not that helpful.Instead, can you map out for us maybe the various different ways that diversity should be understood in this context?
Yeah, absolutely.As you said already, diversity really can mean sort of everything and nothing, which is also a problem with diversity when it's to be translated into institutional practice.
It's not quite clear what is always meant by it and people can have different understandings of it and these understandings can be in tension even with one another.
And here in my own conceptualization of diversity, I built on sort of a growing body of work on diversity discourses specifically.And this body of work especially stems from critical race scholarship, feminist and post-colonial literature.
So scholars like Sarah Ahmed, Anamik Saha, Sarita Malik or Clive Nuwanka, for instance, are important examples to mention.
And building on the Scott Adichie strand, I understand diversity, yeah, as you said, not as a given a priori thing, but as a form of discourse that can mean different things and affect the social world differently, depending on what people and what institutions do with the word.
So I therefore ask how diversity is actually enacted and implemented. and then probe the sort of social effects that these practices have.
In regards to classical music specifically, maybe also arguably with regards to the culture industries more widely, I argue that diversity is often merely approached as a matter of demographic inclusion and not so much as a fundamental reconsideration of institutional logics and norms.
I hear built on scholars like Christina Schaaf, Annabelle, Phil Ebel or Sandeep Bhagwati who document how classical music continues to be implicated in systems of elitism and whiteness and for diversity to actually affect change here.
I argue that this must involve not only a question of access for different people, but must also entail a critical reflection of how processes of music production and institutional labor relations, for instance, establish creative hierarchies that, and that's important, are not socially neutral, but very much enmeshed with broader structures of class and race and gender.
So how cultural hierarchies in the field tie in with social hierarchies, basically.And for diversity to sort of mean anything, it's about changing the institutional practices and norms, not just the representation.
It's not just a representational concern.
Yeah, that's definitely helpful to clarify, because as you said, it can mean everything and nothing.What exactly is being talked about here?
Thinking then about the problems that diversity with any of these meanings is kind of trying to tackle, can you help us understand some of the key ways that classical music specifically has been tangled up with structures of inequity?
Yeah, absolutely.Yeah, I would say that classical music's evolution
has been shaped by quite specific cultural and social conventions, as well as institutional framework that have historically privileged Western Eurocentric value norms and discourses.
Classical music, for instance, has been ascribed a sort of universal or transcendent value, while other musical genres were seen as less sophisticated or even as banal. So there's a hierarchy around cultural value that's been established here.
These cultural hierarchies also extend into who is seen as a sort of natural inhabitant of the field, which compositions, performers or audiences are recognized as part of the field and which have been cast as outsiders.
So that is like institutions such as orchestras, music conservatories or concert halls also kind of have long held particular standards of quote unquote accidents or authenticity also in quotes.
Standards that have often excluded musicians and composers of color, for instance, of working class backgrounds or from outside Europe or mainland Europe also.
And importantly, and even though people in the field are of course more and more aware of these critical legacies, these fault lines still operate in the sector today.
From funding disparities in cultural policy, for instance, that still often favor Western or
I'm using a term coined by the scholar Sandy Bhagwati here, urological music, but also if you look at sort of educational gatekeeping within the field of music generally, these structures continue to reflect a legacy of inequality, at least that's what I'm arguing in the book.
And even today, I would say that we see these issues manifest in who receives commissions, who has access to advanced training, which composers are deemed worthy of inclusion in the repertoire, et cetera, et cetera.
So that would be one way in which inequality and classical music are entangled.In parallel, there's also something important to note about operatic history specifically and the way in which the opera history sort of has played its own part in
colonial and racial knowledge production.For instance, often using orientalist tropes to demarcate otherness on stage or using blackface, for instance.
So these are just a few examples of how classical music has been implicated in wider structures of inequality that still live on today in a way. at least its legacies.
And the book argues here that classic music presents a particularly pertinent but arguably also quite a burden side for diversity discourses.
And yeah, so I'm trying to trace here how diversity is actually negotiated against this compounded backdrop of inequality.
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Yeah, it's a lot of things there in classical music that, as you said, have been compounding for quite some time.It's not a question of years or decades really, but much longer than that.
So to what extent were the people you spoke to, who are literally like diversity practitioners in this space, like that's their whole thing is to fight against these structures, were they hopeful? full about it?
I mean, what kinds of strategies were they trying to use?Did they find them as being effective?What was going on?
process there.And yeah, the people that are engaged with approach their work, I would say, with a sort of temperate optimism, or, you know, hopeful skepticism, to put it differently.
So they absolutely recognize the deeply embedded challenges that the sector presents when everything when it comes to diversity, and to just general social and creative openness.
But nevertheless, they also saw significant potential for meaningful change, particularly And that's really dependent on if institutions committed to longer-term structural approaches.
So these effective strategies that people mentioned included, for instance, mentor programs or building alternative networks, creating partnerships with community-based organizations, kind of thinking, rethinking repertoire in more inclusive ways, as well as commissioning practices.
Sort of just trying to commission pieces that favor musical collaboration across genres, not just sticking to sort of standardized ideas of genre within the classical field.
So these were all things that people mentioned as rather effective, but interviewees also cautioned that all of those things
might run a risk being reduced to sort of one-offs, rather than being implemented into the regular workings of classical music institutions.
So while they said that these things might affect change, only sort of on the precondition that these are not just tokenistic kind of little gestures, but actually that, yeah, they must really rework the structure and the core of institutional thinking.
Also, practitioners here emphasize the importance of structural change through hiring practices, to re-evaluating, for instance, artistic criteria and production norms, to open institutions for other musical genres beyond a classical Eurocentric idea of classical music.
So to really open up the space to invite people of very different backgrounds, but also very different musical practices in.
Another central aspect raised that, yeah, by actually the vast majority of people and related to something quite, well, mundane, but very material, things like labor specifically, and how work around diversity would be organized and funded within institutions.
So that was really a main concern for a lot of people.
Because often people critically sort of highlighted that in practice, it would often be the cultural producers of already marginalized backgrounds that have to push for change or are tasked with the responsibility to push for change without receiving proper institutional support all the way.
So in this way, for instance, diversity work itself, but that's also argued in the book, really reproduces and actually reinscribes race and class hierarchies and allows institutions to benefit from the labor of those who are actually often forced to operate from the institutional margins.
So this really was a key concern. that I try to kind of unpack a little bit more in the book as well.
So relationships of labor within institutions specifically around diversity and how and who is tasked with the responsibility of institutional change.All right.
I think we want to keep talking about exactly these questions, but through a particular example that I think will bring a lot of these things kind of to life.
Can you tell us about kind of what happened when there was a reform effort, a diversity effort for a specific children's choir?
Yeah, and so the children's choir reform, so to say, it has been one of the projects of this overarching opera diversity program that I was able to observe.
And within this kind of children's choir context, diversity discourses became tangible through efforts to broaden while the membership of the choir so they really wanted to reach
Again, children mainly of Turkish and Middle Eastern background, and also to broaden the repertoire and the pedagogical approach of the choir.
For instance, the diversity team worked together with the choir team to incorporate music from different cultural traditions into their program.
to collaborate with different civil society organizations, to even reach people, to tell them about what the choir is doing, that it is actually for free to partake and things like that.
And really also the choir leadership tried to create a more inclusive and representative space there.They, for instance, adjusted the audition criteria in ways that would no longer
presuppose a very specific knowledge of classical music as such, but rather just test generally your musicality and your voice really.
So in many ways, they really tried to go against very established standardized ways in which the choir was run before that.And it was also successful.So they had a lot of new members join.I really should stress that.
And a lot of people were reflecting really positively on that development, both within the opera institution as such, but also the people who joined the choir more recently.
Yet, and that's an important yet also, the choir reform also showed sort of how diversity efforts can fall short.
For instance, I was able to trace how concepts of musical excellence nonetheless resisted change and how this became yet another barrier for social exclusion.
The choir, for instance, is quite a, well, it's a very sort of embedded activity within the opera.There's a lot of scheduling.They play a lot of important roles for performances.They have a lot of rehearsals.
It's actually asking quite a lot to partake from people. which a lot of people were very happy to do and to give, but it was also a challenge for a lot of families to incorporate the choir schedule into their family schedule.
And not everybody had the social or the economic means to do that.So, there were also barriers still in place that basically didn't allow everyone to partake in the choir either.
And also in addition, you could see how sort of critical diversity efforts were, yeah, somewhat turned into a form of capital that was mainly harnessed by the institution, and I would argue to legitimize itself in a way.
So having a more diverse children's choir, for instance, was seen and presented as an institutional merit, which is also is certainly, but actually most of the critical work behind the scene was done by a rather small diversity team.
And if we want to argue sort of from a symbolic standpoint by the new members of the choir, especially the members of Turkish descent joining the choir.So their work, their presence was really something to be harnessed by the institution.
And that is not necessarily intention, right?You can do something that's effective, but also makes the institution look good.But it can also exist in tension.Yeah, these are sort of dynamics I'm trying to tease out in the book.
Yeah, it's certainly not as straightforward as perhaps the institutional press release would have one to believe.And that's not just in the process of kind of adding new people to the children's choir.
I'd love to pick up on some of the things you've mentioned earlier around the processes of commissioning work, of composing work, of rehearsing work, and then, of course, of critiquing it.
What are the inequalities that are still showing up there, even amongst diversity pushes to make changes?
Yeah.So this was something that I found both in my ethnographic work, but also through interviews.
And genuinely, people were sort of saying that processes like commissioning and programming more widely still would frequently privilege established, predominantly white composers and sort of have limited opportunities for composers of color.
Or as also quite a few participants of Color of Mind mentioned, when they were hired for musical projects, it was often explicitly for diversity projects.So they had to sort of turn themselves over.
They were turned into sort of a diversity hire being niched as such, in a way, instead of being independently recognized for their talent and their work.
So that's one way in which diversity can actually sort of play into inequality rather than tackle it.
Other ways in which sort of inequalities of race and ethnicity were reproduced relates precisely to the implementation of diversity projects within commissioning and production processes that I was also able to observe as part of the ethnographic study of the opera project.
For instance, rehearsals, performances, but also sort of critique, so aesthetic judgment, I guess, can also reveal subtle biases right so assumptions about what constitutes quality quote unquote or authenticity quote unquote in compositions.
These are all questions that shape how works by diverse composers are received, for example.
So, for instance, an observation that I made is that while the awareness of diversity has grown and the industry really kind of reaches out to kind of change their core practices and their metrics of success, they also often still remain in place.
In my feedback, for instance, I was able to see how the frame of diversity itself, when it came to commissioning practices, risks playing into Orientalist notions of difference.
For example, when commissioning new opera works, that was also part of this wider diversity project, they really tried to make the new opera works something else that goes beyond sort of classical music genre ideas.
And they wanted it to be Turkish-German.This is how they framed it.And here, really, the opera diversity team had to find a balance between
presupposing what such a Turkish-German sound would mean and what it would look like and really truly opening spaces for musical collaborations.
And this can be a tricky thing and sometimes risks re-inscribing reductive ideas of difference into the music itself or in terms of stage decor and costume designs.
So really trying to not fall into this orientalist themes and tropes that especially opera has been entangled with historically.And these questions can also extend into the realm of working conditions.
That's another thing that really came out through my ethnographic fieldwork, such as contracts, for instance, and therefore can have really very real material consequences for people.
That is, as I said before, diversity work at big institutions often happens on a project basis only, meaning that whoever is considered as bringing diversity or adding diversity to an institution is often only hired on a temporary basis.
And that also means that freelancers are pressured into aligning themselves with whatever the institution wants them to do, how they should make music, what kind of music they should make, how should it sound.
as they may otherwise lose out on this engagement.So here again, sort of aesthetic and creative conditions and power relations act as boundary work that can become conditions for employment even.
So it's in all these kind of compounded ways that the underlying economic inequality or inequalities around race and ethnicity come to light. in processes of commissioning on production.
Yeah, it's important to, as we mentioned earlier, there's some specific ways in which classical music has histories of inequality.
But of course, there's the general society that we live in that has histories of inequality, and those things can very much compound each other, as you've just helpfully explained.
And of course, the book goes into more detail, but we will continue our sort of highlights tour of some of the main points that you're making. The next one I'd love to pick up on is this idea of the critique of it, the audience reception to the work.
If we wave a magic wand and the commissioning process is magically improved, the content is made more diverse, there's of course still the playing into audiences and how that goes and what the system or environment is for the reception of those works.
I was fascinated to read in the book that you talked about different ways of bringing audiences in, different ways of framing kind of what the role of an audience is, thinking about what feedback is, what critique is or criticism is.
Those are not necessarily areas I necessarily thought of as being, well, either things you could kind of play with in the ways that you found, or that ways could make a difference in terms of these diversity questions.
So I wonder if you can tell us about that side of the process.
Yeah, it's really something that I also didn't necessarily have had a sort of a conception of going in because I really wanted to kind of focus on the production side.
And then the audiences came in really as active audiences often and not just as sort of people that look and engage with, that look at or engage with the final product of the performance, but actually
as active people that in a way co-produce, I guess, the performances also.And that really is insights that come again out of my historiographic work mainly.
And in the book, I'm detailing sort of the kind of feedback mechanisms that audiences can play in the development of critical diversity work.So, you know, things like audience discussions, Q&A, but also sort of digital platforms for response.
I found that these can really open a dialogue between institutions and the communities they serve or they seek to serve, trying to make the process of music production more inclusive and especially more reflexive.
And such mechanisms, I would say, encourage transparency actually and allow audiences to shape in part the performances that they experience.And this has really been one of the successes of the opera project I was looking at.
They really did open up the notion of performance altogether. They didn't see performance as sort of final or as a finished product, but really sort of as a continuous reflection.
And so they adjusted what stories they were putting on stage and how they were doing that, especially in response to audience engagements.
So this practice, I argue, can gradually shift institutional priorities towards more diverse programming and engagement, because it actually invites people to also make a kind of critical points on how institutions are approaching diversity.
So when cultural works, I guess, are staged within these more open processes, they can actually provide feedback loops that inform future performances also, but maybe even reach into broader institutional practices.
Having said that, this is indeed a sort of a positive or an effective tool that I mentioned in the book that the OPERA project indeed kind of creates and opens up.But it is, of course, to be questioned to what extent these feedback loops are
a persisting kind of instrument, you know?Will people actually engage with that on the longer term?Will there be multiple moments where audiences can actually give feedback?Or is this something that's, again, sort of a one-off, right?
So it does mean that the institution needs to be quite flexible and that producers have to be quite open about receiving feedback, which is not an easy thing, right?
It's sometimes tough to be also critiqued and critiqued head on, especially in sort of personal audience discussions and Q&As, right?It's not just, I don't know, a critique you read in a newspaper in the end, but it's actually quite direct.
But I also really found that these moments were the most fruitful, and I think helped both the producers, but also, yeah, the institution more widely, I think, to reflect on their practices and how they approach diversity.
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Yeah, this was really interesting to read about.One of the phrases that you deploy in this section of the book is around the idea of performance as being liminal sites of encounter.
Obviously, with feedback in some ways in which that was formally solicited, that's one aspect, but is there anything further we should understand about performances as liminal sites of encounter?
Yeah, so let me start by saying that much of the book is actually sort of focusing on how diversity work in classic music falls short and how it actually reproduces inequality rather than tackle it.
However, I also found that music performances can indeed act as constructive, what I call limited encounters indeed.
where audiences and performers come together and where they can engage in social and cultural, across social and cultural boundaries, I should say, in ways that might potentially disrupt traditional hierarchies.
In fact, actually that make those very hierarchies a critical point of discussion.I guess that's the main thing.So these encounters channel through music, framed by music,
provide an opportunity for different identities and histories and social positions to be recognized and valued and discussed head on.
So in the case I studied, these discussions centered very often around migratory politics or around urban inequality, around relationships between Turkish migration histories and German politics around the border and around citizenship, et cetera, et cetera.
So being able to address these issues, not in a very remote or removed way, but really through the connection that the music performance created.
So here, in the cases of the opera project, there were really instances of musical performances becoming sort of a site of lift multicultural, where you could kind of build grounds for solidarity and also discuss on how
discuss how sort of inequalities still are enshrined within, let's say, classical music institutions.
I would say that by incorporating sort of diverse voices and musical perspectives also, performances can really facilitate a shared experience there, but also really debate
inequality, which offers, I would say, both the artists as well as the audience a space for connection and especially again for reflection, which might then also point beyond the specific performance itself.
And again, I need to say that this, of course, presupposes that the culture producers who organize and who take part in these performances actually allow for such discussion and for such critique to emerge as part of this performance, because the liminality of this is all
that you can't quite control what the outcome of it is.So you will need to be quite open-minded and you need to be willing to let different discussions and topics kind of come out of the music performance.
So again, it requires flexibility and the willingness to self-reflect, especially on parts of the producers, I'd say.
Yeah, really interesting kind of thinking about those encounters and liminal can mean change and it can also mean constraints.It means, you know, so many different things that very much, I think, exemplifies a lot of what you found.
And I wonder if we can, in fact, extend that to talk about something else you mentioned earlier that, without meaning to, this research ended up overlapping with COVID.
And so I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about what you found in talking with people about the impact of the pandemic on what was happening in the classical music sector and how this was impacting these diversity efforts.
Yeah, yeah, indeed.That wasn't really my starting point, but yeah, it was a necessity to reflect on.And it was also, of course, at times of upheaval for society as a whole, clearly, but also for the cultural industries.
And I guess as we were also able to see, as we were also seeing with society as a whole, the COVID pandemic brought pre-existing inequalities to the forefront.So it didn't affect everybody in the same way.
The social and the economic repercussions that came out of that crisis did not affect everyone to the same extent.And we can also see that in the field of music.
So I found, for instance, that freelance musicians, often from historically marginalized backgrounds, faced heightened economic precarity in contrast to those musicians who were seen as core to the classical music institution.
That is also something that I have to put within the context of Germany specifically, where a lot of these bigger music institutions actually have better contractual labor agreements with the people, for instance, who play in their orchestra.
So they're fully and permanently employed.They're not on zero hour contracts, which is something that's different to the UK.So in the UK, also people working in classical music often work on zero hour contracts, which makes them
much more prone to precariousness, of course, in the moment that performance falls away, or like performance opportunities are reduced at least.
And yeah, so what we can also see is that, so that's on an individual level, I would say, you know, people being more prone to precariousness, because very often the labor relations around music and music making are quite project based.
And that is a difficulty for many freelance people, especially.
What I was also able to see is that cultural institutions, especially those with greater resources, were able, for instance, to pivot towards digital spaces where smaller independent collectives or freelance musicians had less access to these alternative platforms, which also opened up alternative performance spaces.
So again, we can see how pre-existing inequalities were kind of reinforced here.
But I would also say that the impact of COVID was reflected quite ambivalently by the people I talked to, because some of the big institutions, of course, also upheld their contractual commitment to freelance staff.
And even if, you know, scheduled performances would not go ahead, because they rendered themselves especially conscious of the inbuilt inequalities of the sector.It was basically a time where it was very difficult to ignore
that inequality exists in the field because it was so pronounced.That also made it difficult for institutions to scrape the whole discussion around inequality and diversity off the agenda because it was such a heavily debated topic.
Another thing, maybe what was important here to say is that with less resources assigned to cultural institutions, they had to repractice the ways in which they work.
They had to work across hierarchies, they had to work with less staff, they had to be generally more flexible, which for quite rigid big institutions, that's already kind of a new experience.
So in a way, they had to experiment with different forms of collaboration, which maybe goes to really changing the heart of how institutions are run, not just with regards to anything with regards to diversity, but in general.
And I argue that this is actually a good opportunity for institutions to see that they can indeed open up, right? that they can change the way in which they work.
And in that sense, maybe make them more prone to a more fundamental change in the name of diversity also.However, you know, these are sort of the optimistic or the hopeful notes on how the pandemic has changed debates and workings in the sector.
But it's also quite important to say that a few people that I talked to also just said, look, actually, we can see how diversity now it comes out sort of that diversity has always only been an add on and has always been relegated to the kind of
institutional margins, because now that actually costs need to be saved, people would stop investing in diversity programs altogether.
So people also really cautioned that many institutions basically put all diversity efforts to a halt because they were saying, well, we need to kind of focus on the core. you know, the core program, the core audience, etc.
And within these kind of claims, who is the core?What is the core?A lot of questions of diversity, again, kind of, you know, coming out.
So we can really see how both at the same time, diversity was sort of exposed as a second order problem for institutions.But then also others really had to reflect on issues of inequality in a more sustainable way.And we're thinking about
how actually to better offer resilient models of creative work that supports musicians of all backgrounds, particularly during times of upheaval.
So yeah, in a way, I guess the COVID pandemic has had quite ambivalent effects on diversity in the sector.
Having said that also I of course you know couldn't really speak to the long-term effects of the crisis as this was really sort of a momentary check-in with people being involved in the sector and at the same time grappling with COVID and its repercussions really at the same time as we talk to one another.
So yeah many of those statements again were hopeful or skeptical, but sort of pointed towards the future, right?There needs to be another study, I guess, which looks into the long term profound changes that COVID might have brought about.
Yeah, it might be too early to tell, but at least we have for now some amount of what people's initial responses were, which is quite helpful to have.
But I'm sure we both would love to read the book 15 years from now, what the longer term effects are.
But of course, there are still things that can be determined from all of this analysis that you've done, obviously in terms of academic contributions, in terms of theoretical understanding.
But maybe you could tell us about some practical steps that could be taken from this work?
Yeah, so if I would sort of try to summarize some of the most practical things that stood out to me throughout the ethnographic work, but also talking to people in these interviews, I guess to put it in a nutshell, for diversity to bring about real institutional change, the classical music industry needs to address issues of production just as much as issues of representation.
So barriers to access need to be addressed in ways that go beyond tokenistic forms of inclusion.That's very clear.That also needs to involve broadening music education pathways.
It needs to reconsider the way in which people are hired and hiring practices that perpetuate sort of the middle classes and the whiteness of institutions. It needs to focus on including diverse works and repertoires.
I mean here diversity also in terms of different musical genres and traditions and in creating sort of collaborative open-ended creative encounters here that can't be sort of predetermined by what the institution thinks of as diversity.
And it's also crucial to think about, as I kind of pointed to before, to think about really quite mundane things that shape working conditions behind the scenes in very real ways, like contracts, labor agreements, visa regulations, all of these sort of administrative things that can act as important sites through which either inequality can endure in the sector, but also really that can be resolved and repracticed through the name of diversity.
So meaningful change here also means opening up institutions for different genres and musical forms, as I said, that kind of go beyond classical music.
Proper, sustained funding needs to be given to diversity work so that it is no longer, you know, as I said, sort of an add-on that's placed at the institutional margin, but really something that changes the core of how institutions are run, and that needs proper funding.
And importantly, these steps must be taken with transparency and with ongoing self-reflection and with accountability.
All these things that are quite hard to put into practice, of course, because, yeah, it's definitely difficult to be open to critique in these ways.
But yeah, I think, you know, with these kind of things in mind, institutions can indeed commit to not just temporary reforms, but really to sort of foundational change in how they operate and how they engage with the public, really.
Yeah, these would be pretty big changes, but hopefully ones that we will see.And I wonder if this is the sort of thing you're going to continue to work on and look at as well, or if you've got a different project in mind next?
Is the plan to sleep for six months?What might be on your horizon?
Yeah, I mean, I'm still very much interested in, I guess, the key concern that I've also dealt with in the book, which is, you know, the relationship between culture production, creative work and inequality.
So how can culture reproduce inequality, but also how can it help undo those structures of inequality? And yeah, I focused on it first in the classical music realm because that's something that I was personally involved in.
But now I'm sort of switching the focus away from those bigger institutions and towards more independent grassroots music collectives.So now I'm kind of more and more concerned with how
grassroots collectives can actually challenge the ways in which creative work is done.Because a lot of the stuff that came out of my classical music study really related to organizations of work, which I maybe naively didn't quite expect.
So now I'm really interested in how we need to change the notion of creative work and the way in which we practice it. in order to also make the connection between culture and social change more explicit and more fruitful.
So I'm collaborating now with grassroots collectives that work in different countries, for instance, the UK, but also Germany, the Netherlands, France. And yeah, so I'm still kind of in the process of maybe even broadening that scope.
So it's still very much work in progress.And I'm here mainly working with people who connect their music making to different forms of politics, quite specifically.
So migration, activism or citizenship discussions or housing issues, even gender, feminist politics, really.
So I'm interested here in seeing how sort of these grassroots movements can help us reimagine and especially repractice cultural production in sort of less precarious and exclusionary ways.
And also in ways that situate culture more consciously and more kind of practically in broader politics and political struggles.So yeah, I guess at the same time, culture and inequality is still, you know, the main thing.
But now I'm sort of switching my empirical focus.
Well, that sounds very good.So best of luck with that project.And of course, while you are pursuing it, who knows, expanding the scope, we shall see what comes from it.
But of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled The Sound of Deference, Race, Class, and the Politics of Diversity in Classical Music, published by Manchester University Press in 2024.
Christina, thank you so much for being with me on the podcast.Thank you so much.It's been a pleasure talking to you.
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