MISSION & FOUNDATIONAL STATEMENTS

MISSION

Gateways Music Festival connects and supports professional classical musicians of African descent and enlightens and inspires communities through the power of performance.

VISION

Gateways Music Festival aims to be a multi-faceted resource primarily for classical musicians of African descent and a source of inspiration, enlightenment, and engagement for communities—especially communities underrepresented in classical music.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

We support and uplift each other, champion the music we love and demonstrate to the world that classical musicians of African descent do, indeed, exist.

We acknowledge that classical music belongs to all people, and that people of African descent have played an important role in classical music for centuries.

We seek to share our love of classical music with everyone, especially with people of African descent, many of whom are unaware of or have forgotten the African-American community’s rich classical music heritage and legacy.

We support efforts to increase the participation by people of African descent in classical music for the music’s ability to enrich the lives of individuals and communities and as an addition to our community’s already rich musical culture.

We support many of the classical music field’s efforts to be more inclusive, and specifically, to increase the participation of musicians of African descent, but affirm that we do not exist solely to provide a solution to a problem that we, as a community of musicians of African descent, did not create.