Apollo Chamber Players: when ‘diversity’ became dangerous

Discover more Featured Stories like this in The Strad Playing Hub 

’Due to changes with the Department of Education, our president and general counsel have become wary of your upcoming show, Diversity. General counsel is asking for information about the event to evaluate viability. Please provide to me ASAP so I can work to try to make sure we can still host the performance.’ 

My stomach lurched as I read the above email message, sent last month by the venue director at a notable local university. While not surprising given this country’s current Orwellian state of affairs, it remains a starkly censorious ‘request,’ with freedom of expression no longer a given in these Divided States of America. 

How is it that a word like ‘diversity’ has become a dirty one? 

The answer is complex, and when we envisioned our 17th season—We the People—early in 2024, we could not have predicted the extent to which this question would become so pointed, so politically loaded. We launched this season with the foundational pillars of democracy as our guiding themes: LIBERTY, OPPORTUNITY, DIVERSITY, and FREEDOM. These were never abstract ideas to us—they were creative mandates, civic commitments. But as the season unfolded, it became painfully clear that invoking these ideals was no longer safe in America. In fact, it had become an act of resistance.

Our season launched with LIBERTY, a programme timed one month before the 2024 presidential election. It featured actor and activist George Takei, whose story of Japanese-American internment during World War II and lifelong fight for civil rights cast a searing light on our nation’s democratic failures and fragile ideals. Bolstered by themes from Star Trek, Takei’s narration in The Book of Names, a new Apollo commission by Texas A&M University composer Marty Regan, wasn’t just historical reflection—it was a warning. A reminder that democracies can, and do, falter. That government-sanctioned racism, fueled by hysteria and failure of leadership, once tore families like his apart. 

Takei’s words brought history uncomfortably close. The commission quotes his 1981 testimony before Congress: 

’I have come to understand that as noble and as precious as our American ideals are, they can also be very fragile. Democracy can only be as good or as strong or as true as the people who make it so.’ 

This truth guided our next programme, OPPORTUNITY, which celebrated the voices of immigrant and international artists who have enriched America through their cultural resilience and creative innovation. Houston, a city forged by migration and entrepreneurial grit, served as the perfect stage for this dialogue between classical traditions and global influences. Turkish composer Erberk Eryılmaz, Hungarian-born master Miklós Rózsa, and Cuban-born dancers from Houston Ballet reminded us that artistic opportunity is not merely a benefit of democracy—it is one of its sustaining forces. 

Then came the DIVERSITY programme—and the email. Suddenly, a concert celebrating pluralism needed bureaucratic review. Suddenly, ’diversity’ was a red flag. 

We refused to back down. Our response was not to explain ourselves into neutrality but to believe boldly in the message: Diversity is not an enemy of democracy. It is democracy’s saviour and soul. Through music inspired by cultures from around the world and aligned with the renewing spirit of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, we offered a peaceful rebuke to the politics of fear. Houston’s unique role as a living example of what a multicultural, pluralistic city can look like was integral. 

Diversity is not an enemy of democracy. It is democracy’s saviour and soul

Our We the People season culminates with FREEDOM—a programme shaped in partnership with the inspired young minds of Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, a beacon of public arts education in Houston. Responding to the prompt ’What does democracy mean to you?,’ these students penned essays that became the heartbeat of a new commission for string quartet and choir, by Houston composer Marcus Maroney. Their words are not sentimental tributes, but urgent declarations from a generation inheriting a country—and world—in crisis. 

’Democracy is not a sprint; it is a marathon,’ writes 17-year-old Jordan Muscal. ’I hold the word democracy in my hands and watch it bend and break apart. In the mornings, I watch the sun rising. With it, I dare to hope for something better.’ 

Her voice, and those of her peers, ring with a fierce and unflinching clarity—hope lit not by naïveté, but by knowing what is at risk. These students remind us that authoritarianism rarely announces itself with a bang. It silences a concert here, bans a word or book there, and censors through fear, ignorance and nihilism. With this final concert, we confront that creeping erosion—and answer it with intergenerational voices that demand to be heard. 

If this season taught us anything, it’s that the work of defending democracy must be relentless. Democracy is not self-sustaining and our rights are not foregone conclusions. They must be fought for—not once every four years, but every single day, through art, through education, through compassion. 

We are not powerless. We are the people. Together, through the arts, we can help form a more perfect union.

The Apollo Chamber Players’ FREEDOM programme in its We the People series will take place on 10 and 18 May 2025. Find out more here.