EMPANELED

posted by James Reel

    Yesterday I went to Phoenix to serve on an Arizona Commission on the Arts panel evaluating grant applications from music organizations. The commission staff seemed pleased with how well we panelists worked together; most of us had done our homework, and we made our way through the 40 applications thoroughly but efficiently, dispatching them in about three and a half hours, not counting the lunch break.
    We were warned not to “rewrite” the grant applications, judging the organizations by what we thought they should be proposing rather than what they actually requested funding for. Not every panelist complied. One among us frequently suggested that the organization’s educational component should be more extensive, even if the funding request had nothing to do with educational programs. Education is a wonderful thing, but really, that’s not the core mission of many arts producers or presenters, and funding for a group’s main programming shouldn’t hinge on such extras. Fortunately, the panelist merely presented those pro-education comments as gentle encouragement, and didn’t penalize anyone for perceived lapses.
    In the beginning, I was concerned that another panelist’s praise for one applicant’s “audience diversity” signaled that a lack of diversity would count against other groups. Welcoming a broad spectrum of people into the arts is what most of us hope to do, but we can’t impose “diversity” on groups serving homogenous communities. So a music presenter in Sun City is patronized almost exclusively by elderly white people, and elderly white people constitute its board of directors; well, that’s who lives in Sun City. Before the group’s audience and board can be diversified, we’ll need somehow to move younger and browner people into Sun City, and it’s not up to an arts presenter to re-engineer community demographics.
    Again, that turned out not to be the idée fixe I’d feared. All in all, we were pretty kindly disposed to most of the applicants. That wasn’t true of panels judging certain other categories; one person told me that her panel had given very low marks to fully one-third of its applicants.

ECLAIR SUR L'AU-DELA

posted by James Reel

    From a review in the local morning daily of a concert at the deaf-and-blind school in which Dmitri Kabalevsky’s The Comedians was accompanied by computer-generated abstract images:

    Russian composer Dmitry Kabalevsky would likely have chuckled at the sight Sunday afternoon. …
    Yes, Kabalevsky would have delighted in seeing the dynamic epilogue of his suite transcribed into a pulsing octagon shape that fused into a series of lines and swirls as the music grew more frenetic.
    The composer also would have been pleased to hear how fine the orchestra performed the work …
    Kabalevsky would have been pleased that his music touched so many people who likely did not hear a note of it.

    I am so jealous. Never in my career as a music critic have I ever been able to ask a dead composer his opinion of a performance. Clairvoyance is a skill seldom mastered by professional critics, who waste too much time studying music rather than extra-sensory perception.
    As edifying as it is to be informed of Kabalevsky’s posthumous opinions, I wonder what the critic thought of the performance?