on 4/17/03 11:46 PM, Herb Levy at herb@eskimo.com wrote:
Uh, before you get a wild hair up your butt on this, Skip, has Marshall Allen actually applied for grants that he hasn't received, and if he has, are his applications any good?
Actually, from what I've been told, his applications are well-rendered. However, espec in Philly, where he's applied for stuff like the PEW fellowship, there are already certain artists that have the accreditation of the people who whoose the people -- Bobby Zankel, Tyrone Brown etc -- largely because their grant proposals are written by the "right" people. No offense to those people, but doesn't the Sun Ra Arkestra -- both in achievement and operating expenses -- deserve at least as much? The grants trusts in PA generally and Philly specifically (the state and city where the Arkestra is most readily qualified) are extremely insulated.
I remember when as a jazz artist either your status had to be intense (Sonny Rollins) or your purpose extremely unique (Carla Bley) to get a Guggenheim. But Patricia Barber? This is angering to me.
Before you accuse me of sour grapes, I have never applied for a grant and could not see myself applying for one (I don't believe in it for myself), so it ain't that.
Meanwhile, because mercer Ellington couldn't find a suitable grant in the USA, the Duke Ellington archive is in Copenhagen.
Now that you put it in this context, I can think of a couple of issues that could be problems. All in all, it's really no different than anything else in music, art or whatever. Each of us can think of great musicians who end up not getting great gigs, not getting great recording deals. It has to do with a lot more than simply aesthetic quality, but who knows how to play what game when. And that's not going to change any time soon. All private foundations or public funding agencies have priorities and guidelines for what they fund. Sometimes these come from the original source of the funds (an individual may decide to set up a foundation to do something very specific) or the staff may see a need that they want to address that the original source may not have foreseen (there are old foundations that now spend a lot of their resources on AIDS research or intermedia art or other things that the original donor could not have foreseen 25, 50, or a hundred years ago). But, it's very rare that a funding organization will go outside their guidelines to support a specific project, without developing a competitive program with an application procedure, etc. Grant programs for individual artists usually work quite differently than grant programs for organizations. Why Patricia Barber got a Guggenheim is very different from why the Arkestra doesn't get support. Why Marshall Allen doesn't get grants MAY be related to the distinction between how funders deal with individuals and organizations. Guggenheim Fellowships are support to do a specific project in your field. Artists receive them to make new works, physical and social scientists get them to do research. Getting pissed off about Barber getting support really isn't worth the trouble. I have no idea what Barber's project was (though I guess it'd be listed in the press release at the Guggenheim site, but I don't really care enough to take the time to check), what the pool of other applications was like or what the panel dynamic was, but all of those things go into who gets funded. Panels look at hundreds of applications in a field and decide who has proposed a project that looks like it will further their current work AND that looks like the applicant can reasonably do the project for the budget they propose in the time they have planned for it. (The panel dynamic is probably the most important and most mysterious aspect of the process. Group decisions are NOT science. It's like deciding where to go to eat with a group of friends. If three people like Asian food better than Mexican and one person like burgers better than Thai food, the consensus may be to go to a rib joint because that's how the discussion unfolded.) The Pew Fellowships is a program that supports individual creative artists working in a variety of media and genres from music to poetry to painting etc. with grants of $25,000/year for two years. The idea is that this money gives generative artists time to create new works in their field. Regardless of the merits of supporting the continuation of the Arkestra, this is NOT a program that's going to rank that kind of activity very highly. Maintaining a repertory ensemble isn't even on the radar for them. I could imagine Allen maybe getting support for creating music from this program, but applying to the Pew Fellowships program to support his work as leader of the Arkestra is probably a waste of time. Without knowing much about the Philadelphia scene, or the guidelines for local funding, or how the Arkestra is organized (how their board of directors and staff operate, what their financial planning is like, etc.), I can only conjecture about why the Arkestra may not be supported by public grants in the area. I can tell you that funders, both public and private, are increasingly looking for organizational stability (no one's giving a lot of money to organizations that look shaky right now, unless there's a VERY strong and believable commitment to making changes in the organizational structure) and high levels of service to the community (programs for education, outreach, etc.) in addition to artistic quality. Artistic quality alone is not enough for funder from institutional donors, for that you've got to find rich fans who don't care about the business end of things (& there are fewer and fewer individual donors like that). If the Arkestra's only seeking, say, money to keep the band going between gigs, without having a financial and management structure together, without a long-range business plan, without a competitive outreach & education program, they're not going to get a lot of funding from public or private institutional funders. I'm obviously assuming that the Arkestra doesn't have this kind of organizational structure in place. If they do, then we can start looking for conspiracies against creative music. If they don't, they're just not going to be competitive. That may be cold, but it's the way things work. And like I wrote above, that's not going to change any time soon. -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb@eskimo.com