The Long View | Whose responsibility is diversity?

When we look back on our industry’s struggles with diversity in a decade’s time, the decision by English Touring Opera to remove musicians from its payroll for having the wrong colour skin might just prove emblematic of the grand, desperate fudge we are in the midst of.

After I heard the story, I spent many an idle moment thinking about those freelance musicians – servants of the art, whose work in the pits of small theatres and the naves of cold churches throughout the land has put them at the coalface of the UK’s live music scene in every sense. They will have hauled themselves out of the financial and mental trauma of the pandemic only to find themselves out of a job for being born to the wrong parents.

What must that have felt like – really? I can hardly imagine. But those musicians may well have experienced, in that instant, some unwitting affinity with the collective struggle of those black and minority ethnic colleagues who have grafted for little reward in a white man’s world. Is this just retribution? Perhaps. But in no way is it right that freelance individuals have wound up paying the price for the sins and shortcomings of our industry – and society.

It’s worth considering what, precisely, motivated ETO’s decision. It surely wasn’t driven by racism. The more I think about it, the more I suspect it was driven by some sort of desperation – by the relentless pressure some classical music organisations are under right now, by the very real fear of being ‘outed’ as racist and the prospect of an all-but-inevitable social media pile-on to follow.

Ironically, ETO’s decision did prompt a backlash, just one in the very opposite direction. That backlash has itself dredged up plenty of unsavoury opinions that would deny we have a problem with diversity. We do.  

Did ETO and its director – who knows the value of a good controversy – see it coming? Was the gesture a knowing protest in the face of blunt bureaucracy and enforced box-ticking from the Arts Council?

If so, the intention can be understood even if the execution seems monumentally misjudged. I feel sure that some classical music organisations sense the awkwardness of their own lack of diversity right now. But we must acknowledge, in sympathy with them, that it’s easier for a gallery, a cinema or even a theatre to diversify quickly than it is for an opera company. We have the UK’s consistent undermining of music education to thank for that.

The more classical music becomes the sole domain of the privately educated, the more difficult it will be for opera companies to recruit staff and performers from truly diverse backgrounds. ETO is evidently in the happy position – for the new recruits, that is – of being able to hire sufficiently talented instrumentalists who are non-white. That’s one small morsel of positivity. In truth, the heaviest responsibility lies far further down the food chain. Opera companies have to recruit the most talented singers and players. If the most outstanding talent is insufficiently ethnically diverse, whose fault is that?

To some degree, it’s all our faults – accepted. But it’s also a fundamental that if insufficient numbers of BAME kids sing in choirs and play in orchestras in their early teens, problems will eventually be laid at the doors of our conservatories and universities and eventually our professional orchestras and opera companies. Almost overnight, the latter institutions have faced relentless pressure to reverse decades of underrepresentation stemming from educational discrimination. For many companies, doing so is in no sense artistically sensible and still less realistically possible. ETO’s bizarre policy proves it.

Some corners of society want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and care little for the artistic train-wreck that such action would leave behind. But we must admit that the word ‘woke’ enshrines a truth. As an industry, we have undeniably been ‘awoken’ from a naïve, unfair and unsustainable status quo. The only way we will truly and pervasively solve the problems we face is by focusing on youth and education. Otherwise they may never be solved.