MUSIC : Elitist Art World Hostile to Minorities, Professor Says : Audiences won’t expand until non-whites feel more welcome, expert at UC Irvine says.

Cultural diversity is the new buzzword among arts administrators seeking to bolster dwindling audiences. But how knowledgeable or effective are their efforts to reach out into new communities?

Not very, says Robert Garfias, a UC Irvine professor of anthropology and one of 26 members of the National Council on the Arts who advise the National Endowment for the Arts on grant recipients and policy.

“Suddenly everybody is talking about cultural diversity and wanting to maximize audiences, but they don’t have a clue how to do it,” Garfias said in a recent phone interview.

“For example, some of the opera companies in some of the major cities--who shall remain nameless--decided to reach the large Hispanic audience living right in their area. Of course, they can’t think of any Spanish opera, so they say, ‘Let’s do some Zarzuelas,” Spanish musical comedies.

“What’s wrong with that? It’s like teaching English sea chanteys to people in the South. It sends the wrong message.”

Garfias will try to send the right message in a free lecture Thursday in Spanish titled, “La Tradicion Sinfonica en el Ambiente Latino-Americano” (The Symphonic Tradition in the Latin-American Community). The 6 p.m. lecture at the City Hall Annex in Santa Ana is co-sponsored by Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a service organization to the Latino community, and the Orange County Philharmonic Society.

“I’m trying to reach a group of people who ordinarily don’t ever attend the symphony, more than likely haven’t had any opportunity to do so in the past, and probably had little interest,” he said. “They have had contact with the art world under conditions probably hostile to them. The white Establishment is pretty hostile.

“It’s the environment that makes you feel that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t belong there. You have to know what you’re doing to be a part of it. It’s very deep. That, in essence, is the core of the problem.”

Garfias describes the attitude as “traditional snobbism . . . (tied into) elitism.”

“I think the elitism may be gone now, but it’s so inherent and so deeply embedded and has been for such a long time, it’s very difficult (for organizations) to know how to reach out,” he said. “People don’t understand the depth of this hostility. They send out an invitation to a concert. Most of the people who receive it don’t understand it means them. They’re so used to being kicked in the teeth . . . it seldom seems like a genuine invitation. More than that, if it is understood, if the invitation is genuine, it doesn’t mean anything.”

Some organizations, according to Garfias, try to solve the problem by reaching out to minority children, in hopes that they will bring in their parents.

“It’s not going to work that way,” he said. “That is a very big step for the parents to make into what is viewed by them as hostile territory. Not intellectually, but as a deep feeling that they don’t belong there. They’ve been made to feel that way in every contact they have had.”

Some cynics, however, believe that any such outreach efforts are mere window dressing to satisfy requirements set by state and national governments for funding. But not Garfias.

“I work very closely with the California Arts Council as well as the National Endowment,” he said. “Nothing would lead me to believe that it’s window dressing. There is a sincere desire to reach out. . . .

“A lot of it is quite frankly self-interest--enlightened self-interest,” he added. “Audiences have to be expanded if the major arts organizations will survive. The old elite groups that support the arts are becoming a smaller part of the population as the population changes.”

But to expand the audiences, Garfias does not advocate abandoning or altering the Western tradition.

“It is universal. It is our art music. . . . This is our culture now. The European art tradition is our common arts heritage, what we accept in being part of this culture. Of course, I don’t think we should give up our (own) culture, not at all. We are also more than one thing, we are hyphenated-Americans. I am happy being more than one thing.

“It would be a shame to change that,” he said. “It would be better to diversify the audience and get those people interested in Beethoven, Mozart and grand opera. There is no reason there can’t be a diversity of people culturally and ethnically in the audience, and preserve the elite tradition in that way.”

The European art tradition, he said, “is the most intellectually challenging part of our tradition. What is intellectually elite should not be based on racism or economics, but on exposure. It may be perfectly possible that not everybody would be interested in it, but a proportionate number would be if the doors were open to them. Latinos have the sense that the doors have been closed to them for a long, long time. That’s what we’re trying to turn around.”

Garfias doesn’t expect an overnight turnaround, however. “People are looking for a solution right now,” he said. “I’m talking about maybe the next generation, if we don’t lose them. . . .

“I’m not so optimistic that to do (a few outreach activities) a few times will change the complexion of the audiences in the Orange County Performing Arts Center. If you walk in there, the audience is almost entirely white. There are very few blacks, very few Asians, almost no Latinos. You just can’t run that organization that way in that part of the county, which is so ethnically diverse. There’s something wrong with that.

“A lot has to happen before there is a smooth transition. But I feel encouraged because a dialogue has been opened. Everybody is talking about how to address this issue. It’s sobering how much we have to do before we can accomplish it. But at least there is a dialogue now.”

Robert Garfias will give a free lecture in Spanish entitled “La Tradicion Sinfonica en el Ambiente Latino-Americano” at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Santa Ana City Hall Annex, Santa Ana Boulevard and Ross Street. Seating is limited. Information: (714) 541-0250.