Chineke! Orchestra artistic director and double bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku addresses the audience during Chineke’s concert at Boston’s Jordan Hall on March 22, 2023. Photo by Robert Torres/Celebrity Series of Boston.
“After more than three decades in the classical music industry, British double bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku began grappling with the question that had troubled her for years: Why was she consistently the only Black musician onstage?,” reports Afolake Oyinloye in Friday’s (3/24) AfricaNews. “In 2015 Nwanoku took a leading role in creating a more diverse future for classical music, which, from musicians to conductors to repertoire, traditionally skews heavily white. She founded Chineke!, Europe’s first majority Black and ethnically diverse professional orchestra, which this week played at … the New York Philharmonic’s David Geffen Hall in Manhattan’s Lincoln Center. The performance was part of their long-awaited North American debut tour … which included stops in New York, Ottawa, Toronto, Boston, Worcester and Ann Arbor…. The London-headquartered Chineke! echoes similar efforts in the United States, including the Detroit-based Sphinx organization that promotes representation of Black and Latino artists in classical music…. The League of American Orchestras … found in a 2014 study on diversity that just 1.4 percent of orchestra musicians were Black—and there’s little reason to believe much has changed…. Nwanoku believes that especially for young people, seeing more diverse faces onstage is ‘an immediate door-opener.’ ”
