Chi-chi Nwanoku
(Courtesy Photo)
Four Ways of Looking at the Music Academy
From Conferences to Concerts and More
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
This
Music Academy of the West season, off to an exciting start, can be
appreciated from more angles than ever before. Here are four ways of
looking at the Music Academy, or MAW, suggested by events held thus far this summer.
The
season began with the academy serving as a site for cultural leaders to
meet and discuss the future of music. Now in its second year, the MAW’s
Classical Evolution/Revolution conference on June 22 addressed the
theme of the “arts as the cultural fabric of society.” To explore the
challenging terrain of access and diversity, organizers invited a range
of experts, from Los Angeles community theater makers to State
Department officials. The presence and involvement of the winners of the
academy’s inaugural round of Alumni Enterprise Awards showed that this
was more than just talk about change.
In
addition to the summer’s major announcement of a new four-year
partnership between the Music Academy and the London Symphony Orchestra,
there were other voices and perspectives from around the world present
at Evolution/Revolution. Gillian Moore, director of music for London’s
Southbank Centre, moderated the panel on Gender and Power Dynamics in
Classical Music, and Chi-chi Nwanoku, the founder and executive director
of Chineke! and a professor of double bass at the Royal Academy of
Music, provided valuable insight into the blind spots within existing
classical music organizations.
Chineke!
is a British group that has the distinction of being the first
professional orchestra in Europe to be made up of black and minority
ethnic musicians. It has only been around since 2015, and already one of
the group’s young members, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, has become an
international sensation, winning the BBC Young Musician award in 2016, going viral with a video of his performance at the 2017 BBC Proms,
and eventually earning an invitation from Meghan Markle to perform at
the recent royal wedding. Nwanoku’s extraordinary personal story and her
tough-minded, honest critique of contemporary attitudes within the
classical music establishment elicited heartfelt witness from several of
the Music Academy fellows in the audience.
No comments:
Post a Comment