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Entry: The Death of Music by the Spirit of Government Subsidies Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_death_of_music_from_the_spirit_of_government_subsidies#15310 Post contents: Thomas Jefferson, in arguing for the virginia Statute of Religious Liberty, made the point that subsidy of the Anglican clergy by the state had made them more attentive to their emoluments than to their duties. Anyone familiar with 18th-c. Anglicanism knows this is all too true. Subsidy of the arts by government has had an analogous result. When a museum or a symphony orchestra is dependent on grants from government, or (what is almost the same thing) from tax-exempt foundations, it need not pay much attention to its duties to the admission-paying public. My late father attended the University of Minnesota in the years before World War II. While there he had a job as an usher at concerts of what was then called the Minneapolis Symphony, which then perfomed at Northrup Auditorium on the university campus. I think he did it mostly because it was a cheap way to get to hear the orchestra! The Minneapolis Symphony at the time had an eminent conductor in Dimitri Mitroupoulos, and recording contracts with Columbia. It was at its artistic peak - and it was entirely privately funded at the time. Dad died nine years ago, and I recall him observing more than once that the decline of what is now called the Minnesota Orchestra from its pre-war pinnacle was the inevitable consequence of its increased reliance on grants and subsidies. To Dr. Cathey's point above, I concur that monarchs (and of course the church) were great patrons of the arts and of music throughout most of the era that gave us our 'classical' repertoire. However there is a great difference between a patron like Haydn's Prince Esterhazy, or the great Roman cardinals who so encouraged the development of the oratorio in the days of Stradella and Alessandro Scarlatti, and an "arts board" that recommends government grants today. The former were aristocrats, connoisseurs of highly developed tastes, who could afford any luxury and often did. The latter, I suspect, are often people whose tastes enter less into their decisions than do political factors. There is an old joke that a giraffe is a horse designed by committee. The way government subsidy now works, we are getting art and music to the design of committees. Sent at: 2008 07 24