Music

If you want encouragement about the future of music, spend some time around youth orchestras. I had a wonderful experience in Great Falls, Montana. For two one-week residencies every year, the extraordinarily generous violinist Midori immerses herself in a small community (for which she dramatically reduces her fee, by the way), performing on its orchestra's subscription concert, and working with that orchestra's affiliated youth orchestra. She also visits schools and coaches chamber music, spending so much time with so many young musicians that one feels there must be two of her.

In June 2007, the Broward Cultural Division and the local arts incubator, ArtServe, Inc., implemented the first "The Artist as an Entrepreneur Institute" (AEI) in South Florida. Presented on four consecutive Saturdays, the AEI offered eighteen classes during three full-day sessions and an extra half-day Business Plan Clinic on the final Saturday.

Arts and education grantmakers at an historic gathering in Santa Fe in October of 2007 agreed on the need to forge a new vision for public education in the United States and to collectively explore how the arts can help shape and realize that vision.

Convened by Grantmakers in the Arts and Grantmakers for Education, more than 100 foundation representatives met formally for the first time under the aegis of their two affinity organizations to debate and discuss the role of the arts in education.

Crossing Borders and Boundaries was the theme of the GFE Conference in 2007, and shortly after the GFE and GIA conferences and the Arts and Education Weekend, I left for a trip to Asia including visits to Thailand, Cambodia, and Hong Kong. The GFE conference underscored the fact that one of the most important skills needed now is to be globally literate, which is pretty much being neglected in schools at the moment.

According to some, "the word twain has its origin in the Old English twegen, meaning two. The phrase never the twain shall meet was used by Rudyard Kipling, in his Barrack-room ballads, 1892: 'Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.'" Kipling uses a colonial lens to bemoan the lack of commonality and accord between the British and the indigenous East Indian. Until my recent trip to New Mexico I often felt that same lack of accord between arts funders and education funders.

There are few moments in life when you get to experience a series of "firsts." That thought occurred to me in the Albuquerque airport as a first-time visitor to New Mexico, as well as a first-time attendee to both the GFE and GIA conferences.

2007, 113 pages. Leveraging Investments in Creativity, 450 West 37th St., Suite 502, NY, NY 10018, (646) 731-3275, www.lincnet.net

Accountability vs. Trust

2007, 57 pages. The Boston Foundation, 75 Arlington St., Boston, MA, 02116, (617) 338-1700, www.tbf.org
PDF online: www.bostonindicators.org