About Us
A home for all music lovers.
At Sinfonia Smith Square we are committed to creating an organisation that reflects our society. We hope to foster a welcoming environment for all, underpinned by a strong diversity and inclusion culture, allowing everyone to bring their whole selves to our venue and our performances, without fear.
Whether this is your first or one-hundredth visit, we welcome you to Sinfonia Smith Square.
Sinfonia Smith Square is a global orchestra made up of emerging talent from around the world.
Each year we welcome a new cohort of musicians to our orchestra, and each year we strive to reach as many musicians to apply as possible so that our orchestra is diverse and reflective of our global community.
Alongside partner organisations such as Black Lives in Music we have been making big strides in this area. We now hold an annual Demystifying the Audition Process online workshop to provide clarity around the application and audition process, which we hope will in turn encourage more people to apply. We are attending Freshers Fairs across the country each year to ensure students know about Sinfonia Smith Square as a potential route for them after their studies.
As part of our application process, our first round of shortlisting is carried out blind to remove opportunity for conscious or unconscious bias in the process. We are diversifying our excerpts list that musicians are asked to prepare, and reviewing this each year.
We are now working to offer more support for those not quite ready to be part of Sinfonia Smith Square, particularly for those who may have faced barriers to studying classical music. For 2024-25 we will be trailing a new Application Support Scheme open to musicians who were unsuccessful after our shortlisting application stage. This scheme will offer up to 5 musicians each year: paid-for music lessons with our alumni, coaching with our Artist Development Manager on CV writing & audition preparation, and sit-ins with our orchestra rehearsals, to support their development and equip them with enhanced skills so they can apply again for Sinfonia Smith Square the following year. We are also looking to trial a new annual scheme for Emerging Composers, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, to work with us for one season and have opportunities to write new music for our fellowship orchestra. In the coming years we aim to establish a new Pathways Scheme for musicians aged 16 or over who may be facing barriers to continued music education, working with them to help provide a route into classical music.
Sinfonia Smith Square has invited Black Lives in Music to collaborate with them to support EDI awareness amongst Fellowship musicians through thought provoking conversations and facilitated workshops. It’s been very heartening to see how the musicians have embraced this narrative and how it is becoming a welcomed and increasingly embedded part of the orchestra’s identity. Together with Sinfonia Smith Square we have worked together to help the musicians to see their place in the industry and their role & responsibility to advocate for equality in classical music.
Roger Wilson Director of Operations, Black Lives in Music
Smith Square Hall is a home for all music lovers.
We plan to work closely with organisations such as Attitude is Everything in the coming months, in order to improve the accessibility of our venue, and the language we use to describe it.
Our orchestra sits at the heart of everything we do. In addition to this, each season we are a venue for hundreds of professional and amateur orchestras and performers, who hire our space for their public concerts. As part of our commitment to support these groups and underpin all our venue programming with our DEI ethos, we hold an annual panel talk to share knowledge and inspire different approaches to programming and performance. Our recent panel talks have been on Diverse Programming (January 2023) and Inclusive Language and Marketing in Classical Music (January 2024).
Whilst our passion and our expertise lie in classical music, we are a home for all music lovers and try to programme a broad range of genres – from our monthly Jazz in the Crypt series to gigs for emerging musicians – so that there is something here for everyone.
We regularly have BSL interpreters for our family concerts, as well as regular relaxed performances that encourage a particularly informal environment for everyone to feel safe and welcome, including a chill-out space at the back of the hall and softer lighting during the performance.
As a cultural landmark in the heart of Westminster, we strive to be a beacon for the future of classical music and a place for our community to foster their love of music.
Through partnerships with local organisations such as the Tri-Borough Music Hub, the Abbey Centre, Pimlico Music Foundation, and local schools, we are forging strong local links with those around us. We want to involve our local community in our work, share ideas, and work together to inspire a love of music.
For anyone coming into our space alone or who might be nervous about attending a concert, some of our performances have Concert Chums: volunteers from the community who can be a friendly face to chat to during the interval, ask questions about what to expect from the concert, and enable you to feel safe and at home in a potentially unknown environment.
We are aware of the long-term plans of Sinfonia Smith Square around developing broader engagement and increasing support for young people and the local community, and we fully support this. Collaborative working is key to joining up communities. Together we can deliver this vision.
Stuart Whatmore Head, Tri-Borough Music Hub
We are aware of the huge milestones we must take to redress the lack of diversity that is still present within our organisation and our wider industry. We know that we have a long way to go, and we are committed to doing all we can to affect change and be truly representative of our community.
As an orchestra of emerging professionals at the start of their career, our musicians are perfectly situated to be both role models to the younger generation and advocates in the industry in which they are on the verge of forging their careers. We recognise this as both an opportunity and a responsibility, to ensure that our musicians reflect the society with which they so fully engage, and are equipped to challenge future inequalities they may come across in the music industry.
Contact us
Please do get in touch for more information about our work in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. If you're interested in partnering with us we'd love to hear from you!
Danielle Robson and Fiona Gibbs
DEI Leads
danielle@sinfoniasmithsquare.org.uk