Artist Managers: Rachel Van Walsum on working with Maestro Arts and World Heart Beat

‘It’s such an honour for us to have Rachel as our chair of trustees. We’re so grateful for the incredible support, love and dedication that she’s given us all at World Heart Beat.’

These are the words of Sahana Gero MBE, inspirational founder and artistic director of the World Heart Beat Academy, an organisation which has been working to bring musical opportunities in the shape of tuition, performances and more to deprived London youngsters since 2009. The object of Gero’s praise? Rachel van Walsum, co-founder and director of the Maestro Arts artist management office.

A heart-warming story to lighten the midwinter gloom as this column sets sail into the threatening waters of 2022. Van Walsum’s continuing involvement with World Heart Beat while coping with Covid’s impact on Maestro Arts has had a significant impact on plans for the Academy’s major leap forward this coming year — the opening of an exciting additional home at Embassy Gardens, a Manhattan-style development in London’s Nine Elms regeneration zone. In her role as chair of trustees, Van Walsum has been in the thick of the campaign to raise the £3.2m required to underpin this project. Significant amounts have been raised, but more is still needed for the campaign.

Handling the Covid fallout at Maestro Arts has been ‘exhausting…simply exhausting,’ says Van Walsum. ‘Our resilience has really been tested, but we have a great team. It’s been all hands on deck, with hours and hours spent on every detail relating to the latest Covid restrictions and requirements which affect artists’ work at home and abroad.’ The effect of the crisis on income demanded that Maestro Arts vacate its elegant Thames-side offices in Putney. It’s been a matter of mixing working from home with hot-desking at the management’s new official address in the cultural colony at Somerset House.

Despite this, Rachel Van Walsum’s work with World Heart Beat has continued unabated. Her association with the Academy goes back to 2015, kick-started by the hanging of new art in the gallery space at the then Maestro Arts HQ. ‘We wanted live music at the opening of an exhibition featuring the works of an African artist, Charles Sekano, who’s also a jazz pianist,’ Van Walsum recalls. ‘A colleague knew Julian Joseph, who wasn’t available to perform but steered us towards the Academy, based close-by on Kimber Road in Wandsworth. They were preparing a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela in Westminster Abbey and were pleased to have the opportunity to give an advance performance.

‘So that’s how I got to know the extraordinary Sahana Gero. Her vision back in 2009 had been to provide a musical education for disadvantaged youngsters in the Wandsworth area — a part of London where substantial wealth sits alongside serious poverty. Witnessing the fulfilment of that dream has been an amazing learning experience for me. I’d done a music degree, played the flute and sang — trained in a narrow way in terms of technique and what’s required in classical music performance. The Academy takes youngsters into so many other areas — improvisation, world music, folk, classical jazz and much more. The training they receive makes them so versatile. If I’d been asked to improvise at that age, I’d simply have frozen!’

‘Learning instruments and singing instils discipline in these young people…gives them a sense of self-worth. Life-skills are being acquired which make it more possible for them to move from personal circumstances which seem to offer limited choices for the future to a position where they can elevate themselves.’

Van Walsum accepted the invitation to head up the Academy’s board of trustees at a time when the organisation was bursting out of its Kimber Road premises. The reason she became involved was her ‘belief in the power of music to transform lives. Making investments — in the broadest sense — in children is crucial to our future society.’

The fitting-out of the new Embassy Gardens centre, recently begun, includes the provision not just of tuition and performance space but also of state-of-the-art recording studios and broadcast facilities, with the training on offer extending as far as studio and lighting management. Helping to pay for it all has required Van Walsum to galvanise her fellow trustees and think creatively. ‘One early idea I came up with in the pre-lockdown period had the kids flash-mobbing the Southside Shopping Centre in Wandsworth. They did things like playing music on the escalators. The whole shopping centre seemed to come to a halt!! We videoed the whole thing and posted highlights on social media…which went viral, had an enormous reach and clearly benefited our profile.’

Van Walsum and her fellow trustees pored over their individual contacts lists to explore every fundraising possibility. She was also an integral part of the effort to establish the Academy as one of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio Organisations for the period 2018 to 2022. Success here, she says ‘was an amazing achievement, guaranteeing us a significant level of annual funding for four years.’

More recently, the Academy has successfully bid for assistance from the government’s Cultural Recovery Fund, with active support from the Borough of Wandsworth. Van Walsum pays tribute to the Academy’s ‘amazing executive team, who got across the necessary detail incredibly swiftly. It’s been a strange experience seeing the Academy benefit from access to such funding at a time when Maestro Arts hasn’t been able to rely on emergency government support through the Covid crisis.’

Van Walsum pays tribute to Sahana Gero’s ‘dedication, inspiration and enormous talent for music, justly rewarded in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours List’. For her part, Gero praises Van Walsum’s ‘fantastic guidance and leadership which has supported brave decisions in the unknown world of Covid-19. It’s been an honour and a joy to work alongside her.’

Van Walsum claims her engagement with the Academy ‘has stimulated such positive energy in me during a time when my professional music experience at Maestro Arts has been in turmoil thanks to Covid. Working with World Heart Beat keeps your feet on the ground. Time and again it reminds you that music-making can keep communities working positively together.’

You can find out more about World Heart Beat here.

You can find out more about Maestro Arts here.