Classical Music Program Tackles the Diversity Issue
BOULOGNE-BILLANCOURT, France — On a recent afternoon, the French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky greeted the parents of children who had enrolled in a music academy he founded a few months earlier here outside Paris. For some, it was their first classical music concert.
One of the children was Amine Jerbi, the cheerful 7-year- old son of Tunisians. He tore around the room.
“If we manage to calm Amine down through music, it will be a huge victory,” Mr. Jaroussky said.
The new academy is rooted in the need for more diversity in classical music, he said. As the audience for classical music ages and fewer young people embrace it across Europe and the United States, the genre is facing a serious challenge to renew its devotees, let alone to fill its venues.
Mr. Jaroussky hopes to change that. His new institute, the Académie Musicale Philippe Jaroussky, provides free music lessons to 23 children from working- class or immigrant backgrounds.
Half of those who attend classical music concerts in France are executives or managers, and their average age is 54, according to a 2015 study.
“Whether in Hamburg, in New York or in Paris, I sing before the same kind of people,” Mr. Jaroussky said. “And as much as I love my audience, I’m worried that if we don’t bring more diversity onto the stage, we won’t get a younger and more diverse audience.”
The children in the academy, ages 7 to 12, were given the choice of learning the piano, violin or cello, and receive instruments to keep throughout the three-year program.
Yassine Souhir, a 7-year- old violin player whose favorite artists are Rihanna and the French rapper Maître Gims, said he enjoyed listening to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” on YouTube; Macéo Mennesson-Lorrente, also 7, said he was drawn to the cello because he could feel the vibrations of the instrument in his chest.
And Amine, who lives with a foster family, picked up the cello after he discovered 2Cellos, a pair of Croatian cellists who perform pop and rock.
Free instruments for immigrant children near Paris.
Mr. Jaroussky said his academy was inspired by the Demos project. Started in 2010 and coordinated by the Philharmonie de Paris, Demos now has 30 orchestras in France, each with more than 100 children from working- class backgrounds. Roughly 4,500 children have benefited from Demos’s free three-year program.
“When children get used to a cultural habit at a young age, they keep it,” said Gilles Delebarre, one of the founders.
Critics argue that while initiatives that reach a few thousand people yield positive results, more should be invested in music education in schools or public music academies.
Stéphane Dorin, a sociology professor at the University of Limoges in France, said that projects such as Jaroussky’s academy were too expensive to roll out more widely.
Such programs “won’t transform in depth the relationship that kids from working classes have with classical music,” Mr. Dorin said.
Three- quarters of the academy’s annual budget of € 500,000 comes from private institutions and donors.
On that day at the academy, the auditorium was filling up, and Mr. Jaroussky took his place in the front. Near him, Amine sat restlessly. But halfway through the concert, as a trio performed Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Trio Élégiaque No.1,” Amine calmed down.
“These sounds, they’re so beautiful,” he whispered. “Maybe I’ll try to play like them at home.”