In Tuesday’s (5/3) Los Angeles Times, Mike Boehm writes, “The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced $2 million in grants to Southern California arts and cultural institutions. Among other things, the money will enable USC librarians to bring 34,000 historic photos of 1920s and ’30s Los Angeles into public view via the Internet and help the Pacific Symphony press forward with its ‘Music Unwound’ series, a bid to enhance the concertgoing experience by adding visual projections and slices of acting to the proceedings. … The Pacific Symphony led a consortium of four orchestras in securing a $300,000 grant to augment performances with multimedia and informational elements, and to help use concerts as the basis for festivals involving museum exhibitions and instructional sequences at schools. … The grant supports two programs, ‘Dvorák and America’ and ‘Copland and Mexico,’ to be performed by the Pacific Symphony and its grant partners, the Buffalo Symphony, North Carolina Symphony and Louisville Orchestra. ‘Orchestras are moving to new concert formats,’ and this is a bid to help them incorporate new approaches into their regular subscription series instead of making them isolated attempts, said Joseph Horowitz, the New York City-based music scholar who serves as artistic advisor to the Pacific Symphony and is in charge of the grant. ‘We’re hoping to create templates that can be used by other orchestras as well.’ ”
Posted May 3, 2011
