The Southbank Centre, as part of their Africa Utopia Festival, will host the historic launch of the Chineke! Foundation with a performance by the Chineke! Orchestra, Europe’s first all- Black and Ethnic Minority (BME) orchestra this September.
‘The Chineke! Orchestra and Foundation is the brainchild of renowned British double bass player Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE, who co-founded the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment and serves as Professor of Double Bass Historical Studies at the Royal Academy of Music.
It was Nwanoku who chose the ensemble’s name (pronounced CHI-neh-keh), which comes from the Igbo people of south-eastern Nigeria. Meaning ‘spirit of creation’, the word is frequently used as an exclamation of good tidings among Igbo people (‘Chineke! Amazing!), hence the exclamation mark in the title.’
Nwanoku, the daughter of an Igbo father and an Irish mother, grew up in Kent in a town where hers was the only black family. ‘I’ve always felt as though I completely belong to the country and society in which I live,’ she says, ‘and I’ve never gone through my life feeling like I’m a token person of colour. I wasn’t brought up to be a statistic – I was brought up to be who I am, and being mixed race is not part of my agenda.
‘But it is clear to me that there are many reasons why people like me, people of colour, are not coming through, why they’re so very underrpresented in the arts in this country. And I know for a fact it’s not due to lack of talent.’
Chineke! is a conscious effort to redress the balance in classical music as far as race is concerned, both in the UK and across Europe. Nwanoku recruited the members of her new 60-piece ensemble (led by American violinist Tai Murray and conducted by black British conductor Wayne Marshall) by mining her impressive Rolodex of musician contacts for recommendations of professional musicians from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds.
Although players were not auditioned, the Chineke! board painstakingly researched the performance profiles and experience of each recommendation, trawling through hours of recordings and YouTube footage before inviting individuals to join the orchestra. Finding all the necessary players was tough, but not for lack of BME candidates: Nwanoku says that the standard was so high among the musicians she approached that many were already booked up for months in advance.
The Chineke! Foundation’s mandate extends to the recognition of the achievements of BME composers as well as perfomers, and every concert will feature at least one piece of music by a composer of relative ethnicity. The orchestra’s launch programme on 13 September, for example, will feature Elegy in memory of Stephen Lawrence by black British composer Philip Herbert, alongside works from the Western classical canon.
