Putting the Orchestra in its Place: Partnership, Community and the Dynamics of Collaboration at the Manchester Camerata's 'new home' in Gorton

This project seeks to examine the dynamics of collaboration in the community
work undertaken by the chamber orchestra Manchester Camerata, specifically as
it relates to the ways in which place and community mediate classical music,
memory and belonging. The project is timed to take advantage of, and research,
a new phase in the relationship between the Camerata and the community in
Gorton, as after seven years of collaboration it now has a permanent home there
at The Monastery. Building on the successful and longstanding partnership
between the Camerata and the University of Manchester, the project will draw on
the Camerata's expertise and past experience to ask the following overarching
question: what factors underpin the ways in which those who work for the
Camerata, with the Camerata and/or participate in its projects respond to the
Monastery and to Gorton as a place?
The project will engage with the growing body of scholarship that has investigated
classical-music organisations' approach to EDI initiatives, widening participation,
outreach, music community, urban regeneration, and music education, much of
which poses questions for the classical-music world that are, at best,
uncomfortable. By producing a critical study on the dynamics of collaboration that
is itself collaborative, the project is rooted in ethnomusicological methodologies,
both conceptually (in terms of a focus on community and place) and practically (in
terms of fieldwork methods).