1. Roundtable 1

This chapter looks at approaches to urgent issues around equality, inclusion and diversity within classical music today through the lens of volume’s main theme: the future. The discussion covers three arenas in which efforts to increase representation in terms of gender, race and – to a lesser extent – class are well underway, though still with significant steps still to take for parity to be achieved. These are: music higher education, community projects undertaken by orchestras, and festivals of new music. Each author provides a snapshot of the issues at stake in these different areas of classical music practice, showing distinct challenges but also important areas of overlap. There is common ground in the attempt to broaden the profile of the students, participants and practitioners active in their various spheres and, in so doing, there is an implicit challenge to one or other of the tenets of classical music culture described above. The discussion originally took place as part of the Maastricht Centre for the Innovation of Classical Music’s 2021 symposium that considered ‘the Future’. The panel consisted of Maria Hansen, chief executive of ELIA, a Higher Education network; Kirsteen Davidson Kelly, formerly creative learning director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, now chief executive of the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland; and composer, improviser and scholar, George E. Lewis, who is the Edwin H. Case professor of American music at Columbia University.