‘We had to be that much more qualified to be treated as an equal’

Chi-chi Nwanoku founded the Chineke! Orchestra in 2015 with a very clear goal. It was “to provide outstanding career opportunities to established and up-and-coming black and ethnically diverse classical musicians in the UK and Europe”.

Nwanoku herself, born to a mother from Limerick and a father from a rural community in the south-east of Nigeria, has had a long and distinguished career as a double bassist. So I asked her first how she came to the double bass which, as the tallest instrument in the orchestra, might on the face of it seem an odd choice for someone who describes her height as “five foot nothing”.

“It came to me, actually,” she explains. “I’d always had a fascination with music. I was always surrounded by music at home. And then, I think when I was six, I had the opportunity to play . . . I was that child that was bouncing off all the walls. I’m the first of five, and I was the one that, if I was that six-year-old today, they’d be dishing out the ADHD tablets, probably, to me.”

She presents herself as an irrepressibly curious child. “I wanted to know about everything inside the classroom, outside the classroom. I was very active. And I was also top of the class in my school. I was just super-energetic. And my parents encouraged us to seize the world. I remember the day the teacher said, ‘Who wants to be in . . . ?’, and my hand was up before the sentence was finished. And the end of the sentence was ‘recorder ensemble’. I had no idea what a recorder was, but I just wanted to be in it.”

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She describes her first encounter with the instrument. “I turned up at the lunch break in this particular room at the school, and I was given this little wooden tube with holes in it,” she says. “That’s where it all started, I was fascinated by what this tube with holes did, and what it gave me when I did something to it.

“Right from the first moment, there was music on a music stand in front of us. We were given these very clear instructions that that black dot on that line there means that with your hands you’ve got to put three fingers there, your thumb there, you’ve got to breathe, you’ve got to play. All of those things were exploding off in the little brain of a six-year-old. All that information was exactly what I needed.”

I’d always had a fascination with music. I was always surrounded by music at home. And then, when I was six, I had the opportunity to play

She’s aware that not everyone takes the recorder seriously. “But I think it’s the most incredible starter instrument for anybody. You can stick it in your back pocket. Just the challenge! If you can be bothered, the challenge of trying to get this pure sound that the teacher made . . . that if you did this, this and this and it made a squawk, you knew that a bit of one of your fingers was not covering the hole completely. And if we did it right, we all made the same pitch.

“It was aural-visual. You had to process this information, because that black dot did not just refer to a note, it referred to a pitch and a sound and a volume and a length of time. So many things are packed into that one black dot. It made left hand do something, right hand do something. You had to breathe in, then you had to blow, then you had to listen and analyse what came out of the wooden tube. Honestly, I was captivated. It was the sort of thing that a kid that had too much energy . . . I don’t want to say too much, who’s the judge of how much is too much, but a kid who needed all of this stimulation to be satiated . . . it was absolutely up my street.”

The narrative, and everything that follows, tumbles out with an energy and enthusiasm that still seem unbounded. Nwanoku first moved on to the treble recorder. “The day I started on the treble recorder it was like playing a bass line to everyone else’s descant, and I discovered harmony. I was hooked. I knew that this subject, this music, had to be part of my life. Because then it started touching emotions, when harmonies change, things like that. That was it, me done.”

Next came the piano. That was followed by sprinting. “I was sprinting at national level. I had the fastest start in Great Britain over the 100 metres. I just didn’t quite qualify for Munich when I was 16. But I was preparing for Montreal. And in my final year in school, by then we’d moved to Berkshire and I was at Kendrick girls’ grammar school.

“In my last year at school I was doing A level music, still carrying on with recorder ensemble, my piano-playing was very good, sang in the school madrigal choir. That was it. I didn’t go to concerts or anything. I was sprinting at the weekends, competing. I took part in a women’s football match, a one-off game. I didn’t even know there was a women’s football team in Reading. I suffered the classic career-ending knee injuring, dislocation, somebody kicked me deliberately. It was devastating.”

To keep herself occupied, she turned to the piano, and entered the school music competition. “What a strange competition,” Nwanoku muses, “piano versus bassoon versus flute, all competing for one prize. I thought it was like the 100 metres against the pole vault!”

As a black child growing up in England, our parents made it very clear to us that if we were all going for a job and we were just the same level as all of the white counterparts, we would not get the job

She won first prize and the school’s head of music, John Dussek, suggested she could have a musical career with “a very unpopular musical instrument”. She pointed out the discrepancy of size when he brought her to a room with two double basses. “And then he said the right thing. ‘Chi-chi, when have you ever been put off by a challenge?’ He knew me very well! A week later I was having my first double bass lesson” – free tuition was part of the prize she had won – “and the rest, as they say, is history.”

In short, she took the competitive spirit of the world of sprinting to her career on the double bass. And she was also following the guidance she got from her parents. “One of the things as a black child growing up in England, our parents made it very clear to us that if we were all going for a job and we were just the same level as all of the white counterparts, if we were just the same qualified, we would not get the job. We had to be that much more qualified to be treated as an equal.

“Whenever I go to any rehearsal, to any project, this kind of training and perseverance has helped me in the industry. When I turn up to a rehearsal, I’m already concert-ready.”

This, Nwanoku explains, means that “I’m like a mirror for the conductor. They like that. I respond to what they’re trying to show us. Tempo, dynamics, expression, all of those things”. She won her first principal double bass position in a London orchestra, the London Mozart Players under Jane Glover, just three years after she completed her studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

The Chineke! Orchestra, she says, “came about because of a need. There was a void in our industry. In the classical music world we have a real problem with diversity. I’d been a principal double bass for 35 years, and I never saw anyone else of colour. I could count on one hand the people of colour I’ve ever worked with.” Three of them were singers, the other two viola players. “You can’t form an orchestra with two baritones, a soprano, two viola players and bass. That’s not gonna happen.”

She continues: “Then the penny dropped and a light-bulb moment happened and I knew what I needed to do. I called every establishment in the country, and said this is what I plan to do. Everyone agreed something needed to be done. They were just glad I was prepared to put my neck on the line to make it happen.”

Jude Kelly, then artistic director of the South Bank Centre, offered to put the new orchestra on at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, in a year’s time, and it happened “literally 364 days later”, recalls Nwanoku. “It was incredible. 62 of us walked on to the stage. And after that concert, she made us an associate orchestra of the South Bank Centre, at the same time as the National Youth Orchestra. And they’re about 60 years older than us.”

Commercial recordings and appearances at major international festivals – BBC Proms, Lucerne, Edinburgh – followed. The orchestra’s Dublin appearance is part of a European tour to Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The programme blends the familiar (Dvorak’s New World Symphony) and the unfamiliar (three works by black composers, Samuel-Coleridge Taylor’s Ballade in A minor, George Walker’s Lyric for Strings, and Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement).

The conductor is the Sri-Lankan German Leslie Suganandarajah, and the piano soloist is Jenebe Kanneh-Mason, a member of a spectacularly successful musical family from Nottingham. Her older sister Isata makes her Dublin debut at the National Concert Hall on Saturday, November 5th, and her cello-playing older brother Sheku became the first Black musician to win the BBC Young Musician competition in 2016.

The void that Nwanoku has lived through is certainly now beginning to be filled.

The Chineke! Orchestra performs at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on Sunday, November 13th. See nch.ie