(Un)settling Institutional Hegemony: Challenges of Diversity Strategies in the “Western” Classical Music Sector

This chapter explores some of the challenges that diversity strategies in classical music institutions in the “West” can entail and hopes to offer constructive perspectives for those working toward equality and social justice in the cultural sector. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data gathered through a year-long qualitative study of a diversity project initiated at a German opera house, the author teases out the contingencies of diversity discourses as they become institutionalized in the cultural production process. The chapter documents that this ambivalent process can indeed offer a critical lens through which to address and challenge classical music’s white elitism, while it simultaneously also risks reproducing racialized and classed inequalities. To harness the disruptive qualities of diversity discourses in favor of actual institutional and social change, the author argues that it is pivotal to fundamentally rethink the standardized production logics that have been entrenched in the “Western” classical music sector.