Chineke!: What Happens When You Build the Room Yourself

Chi-chi Nwanoku is a double bassist, and by her own account she was often the only Black musician on the stage. In 2015 she stopped waiting for that to change and built a different room. Chineke! Orchestra gave its first concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in September 2015, with an aim that is simple to say and hard to do: career opportunities for Black and ethnically diverse classical musicians in the UK and Europe.

Look at what followed. The Royal Philharmonic Society gave it the first Gamechanger award in 2019. It became a resident orchestra at the Southbank Centre. In 2022 it launched its own record label with Decca, which means it now decides what gets recorded rather than waiting to be asked.

Then look at the music. On 24 August 2021, at the BBC Proms, Chineke! played Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha overture and his first symphony, Fela Sowande’s African Suite, and Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement, with Jeneba Kanneh-Mason as soloist under Kalena Bovell. Both soloist and conductor were making their Proms debuts. The albums followed: Coleridge-Taylor in 2022, and Price in 2023, released to mark seventy years since her death.

Here’s what I can’t tell you: whether it’s working. The most quoted UK figure on orchestral diversity is a 2014 study, and it’s too old to lean on. So here’s a question that matters more, and it’s one for us rather than for orchestras. Chineke! runs a Junior Orchestra for players aged eleven to twenty-two. That’s our age group. Somewhere between a Year 7 first lesson and a conservatoire audition we lose Black musicians. Why? When? Was it already too late for us to change it?

I’ll say what I see from the classroom. GCSE specifications steer us towards knowledge-rich courses built on the Western tradition. World music appears rarely, and when it does it’s usually as “fusion”, a nod towards other traditions rather than the tradition itself. If a student’s own music turns up on the course only as a fusion, what does that tell them about whose music counts? I don’t know that this is where students drift away. I’d rather ask than assume it isn’t.

Something for Monday: play a class Price’s Piano Concerto or Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade in A minor with no name attached, and ask them who wrote it and when. Then tell them. The Chineke! recordings are the easy place to start. And if there’s a piece by a composer your students haven’t met that belongs in the bank, tell me through the contact form on the website.

Track of the Week

James Bond (Main Theme) by John Barry — featuring Brass, Melody and accompaniment, Drum roll, Electric guitar, Chromatic movement

Listen on YouTube

New in the database this week

• Symphony No. 1 (III. Juba Dance) by Florence Price — featuring Pizzicato, Ostinato, Ritardando, Simple Duple (2/4)
• I Get The Sweetest Feeling by Jackie Wilson — featuring Tenor, Octave, Call and response, Triplet, Glissando/slide

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