R. I. P. : The National Endowment for the Humanities (1965-2025)

Since 2010 I have administered Music Unwound, a national consortium of orchestras and educational institutions funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I assume that Music Unwound no longer exists – nor does more than $150,000 in Congressionally approved MU funding as yet unspent. To my knowledge, there has been no formal notification. The forces in play are arbitrary and anonymous. It feels different than being cancelled by an adversary with a face. It feels more ominous.

Music Unwound created cross-disciplinary festivals, linked to high schools, colleges, and universities, in ten states in every part of the US. The recipients ranged in size from the New Hampshire Music Festival to Indiana University/Bloomington. The topics were themes and events in American history. We aspired to explore an expanded mission for American orchestras, and also fresh ways of presenting music in performance. 

Though I cannot pretend that every MU festival was a complete success (we were attempting something untested), it was not unusual to hear audience members (the NEH required post-concert conversations) testify: “That was the most memorable concert I have ever attended.”

I would say the most sustained, most striking successes were in El Paso, Texas, and in the state of South Dakota. In El Paso I was privileged to work with a visionary educator: Lorenzo (“Frank”) Candelaria, at that time Associate Provost of the University of Texas/El Paso (UTEP) and also a proactive member of the El Paso Symphony board. Thousands of UTEP students attended El Paso Symphony concerts (with their parents and siblings) for the first time. Practically all were Mexican-American. Most were the first in their families to attend college. They were the hungriest, least entitled students I have ever encountered. The topics in play included the cultural efflorescence galvanized by the Mexican Revolution – and Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were new names to most. Another MU festival dealt with Kurt Weill as an exemplary American immigrant. I have many times, in this space, recounted the personal impact of these events on UTEP students. (I append some evidence below.)

In South Dakota, where the impact of Music Unwound is ongoing and ever expanding, I was again fortunate to encounter a visionary cultural leader onsite: Delta David Gier, the Music Director of the South Dakota Symphony. His concerts were already humanities-infused. The MU alliance took that a step further, and also linked SDSO subscription concerts to Sioux Falls high schools, and to universities across the state (which bus students to SDSO concerts up to an hour away).

I have documented the South Dakota impact in a couple of NPR “More than Music” radio documentaries (ALSO funded by Music Unwound): “Shostakovich in South Dakota” and “What’s an Orchestra For?” You can hear the testimony for yourself (or read excerpts below). 

And you can sample a typical South Dakota Music Unwound concert, “Copland and Mexico,” here. The remarkdable visual track is by my longtime colleague Peter Bogdanoff, the host is South Dakota Symphony conductor Delta David Gier, the actor is Frank Candelaria. (The same program, introducing the master Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, was presented by the El Paso Symphony, the Austin Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Las Vegas Philharmonic, the Louisville Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, and the Brevard Music Festival [most recently lead partner in the MU consortium].)

South Dakota is a red state. Its former governor is now Secretary of Homeland Security. Its Senator John Thune is the Senate Majority Leader. An extensive profile of Senator Thune in the current New Yorker reminds me of South Dakotans I know: courteous, quietly aspirant. I read that he prefers to work behind the scenes. 

I fervently hope he is doing so.

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I append below some excerpts from previous blogs — here and here — describing humanities-infused festivals in South Dakota and El Paso:

For Mark Bertrand, the pastor of Sioux Falls’ Grace Presbyterian Church, the [contextualized] South Dakota Symphony performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony [bearing witness to the Nazi siege of Leningrad] evoked the resilience of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invading army in 2023. Absorbing the inspirational impact of the symphony on the beleaguered city, Bertrand also found himself thinking about the role of culture in a nation’s life. “We don’t value things the way they did. It really gets you thinking about how different their values must have been.”. . .  As Shostakovich’s symphony began its slow, inexorable ascent toward a final climax, Bertrand found himself remembering a German soldier whose words were quoted earlier in the evening. The Russians not only broadcast the Leningrad Symphony throughout the Soviet Union. They managed to broadcast it via loudspeakers to the Nazi troops blockading Leningrad. After the war, a German soldier testified: “It had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realization began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad. We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and weather – the will to remain human.” 

The South Dakota Symphony’s performance of the Leningrad Symphony was elaborately partnered by South Dakota State University. Reflecting on dropping enrollments in the Humanities, David Reynolds, director SDSU’s the School of Performing Arts, says: “I realize that in some high school curricula today the story of World War II may be only a week. I think that finding a way to use the performing arts to bring this kind of story to life is a wonderful opportunity to touch students who are growing up with social media and other non-traditional resources. Students in our Music Appreciation classes – those are the folks that one of these days will be bank presidents, school board presidents, and will decide the role of the arts in public and private schools. It’s very important for them to have experiences just like this one – Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad. To get them thinking that life would be incomplete without the arts being a part of it.”             

In another “Music Unwound” program, I quote Dakota State University student Nora Zoller, responding to an SDSO festival that brought former US Ambassador John Beyrle to Madison, South Dakota (population 5,000). She was able to chat with him over dinner on campus. She told me she was profoundly inspired by his optimism about “how to handle uncertainty and what it means to be OK in the face of adversity.”

On the same NEH-funded NPR program, David Earnest, a political scientist at South Dakota State University, pondered the receptivity of SDSU students to SDSO festivals. A relative newcomer to South Dakota, he cited a culture of courtesy, a “frontier mentality” of helping one another, and a humility about the wide world. “I think those attributes really commend our students to opening up to new opportunities and ideas.” 

In El Paso, one of our MU festivals, “Kurt Weill and America,” included five concerts, three master classes, seven classroom presentations, and a visit to a semi-rural high school. The first undergraduate UTEP class I visited was Selfa Chew’s “Afro-Mexican History.” She is herself Mexican/Chinese/Japanese, an authority on the fate of Japanese Mexicans during World War II. I told Weill’s story: a Jewish cantor’s son, born in 1900, he was the foremost German operatic composer of his generation. He fled Hitler and wound up in New York, where he re-invented himself as a leading Broadway composer before dying young in 1950. Weill considered himself an American from day one. He did not wish to consort with other German immigrants. He told Time Magazine: “Americans seem to be ashamed to appreciate things here. I’m not.”

The immediacy with which Professor Chew’s students engaged with this story was electrifying. One student asked with a trembling voice: how was Weill able to do it? She missed Mexico. . . .  On Friday afternoon a UTEP Music “convocation” featured the El Paso Symphony’s exceptional guest soloists – William Sharp and Lisa Vroman – singing Weill. Bill sang “The Dirge for Two Veterans,” a patriotic setting of Walt Whitman in response to Pearl Harbor. I introduced this performance by screening FDR’s “day of infamy” speech, declaring war on Japan. Brian Yothers, from UTEP’s English faculty, gave a 10-minute talk on Whitman and why Weill would have found this iconic American a kindred spirit. Two UTEP vocalists sang “How Can You Tell an American?,” composed by Weill three years into his American period. The students keenly appreciated the song’s answer: you can’t tell Americans what to do. When our 80 minutes expired, no one got up to leave. 

The festival’s central event was an El Paso Symphony subscription concert, given twice. The first half explored Weill in Europe; the main work was the Weill/Brecht Seven Deadly Sins (1933). Part two was Weill in America: the four Walt Whitman songs; a Broadway medley to close. This was music as sanguine as Weill/Brecht is cheeky. What was Weill about? We posed the question with a scripted exegesis and a continuous visual track by Peter Bogdanoff.

After that came “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” – a joint presentation of UTEP’s Opera and Theatre programs. Cherry Duke, director of Opera UTEP, wrote in a program note: “With the prevalence of division, xenophobia and fear in today’s news, I was struck by similar themes in many of Weill’s works. He seems to ask the question: Who exactly is the stranger, the outsider, the exile?” Weill’s songs, and a chunk of his 1946 Broadway opera Street Scene, were interspersed with excerpts from Brecht’s Mother Courage, and from the 1929 Elmer Rice play upon which Street Scene the opera was based. These juxtapositions registered powerfully. Even more powerful was a recitation of a 1935 poem by Langston Hughes, who collaborated with Weill on Street Scene. It began: “Let America be America again./Let it be the dream it used to be.”

The quarterback for the El Paso Weill festival was Frank Candelaria, who as Associate Provost at UTEP has the vision and persistence to make big things happen. Frank is an El Paso native, the first member of his family to obtain what is called “higher education” — Oberlin and Yale. He left a tenured position at UT/Austin to return to El Paso five years ago. He expected the Weill festival to catch fire in El Paso, but the intimacy with which it penetrated personal lives took him by surprise. On the final day he said to me: “I learned a lot about my own city and how strongly people identify as Americans.”

Which brings me to a final vignette. Once again a visit to Eastlake High School proved a humbling experience. It serves a semi-rural “colonia.” Of the school’s 2,200 predominantly Hispanic students, 69 per cent are “economically disadvantaged.” Frank and I visited Eastlake last year for “Copland and Mexico.” Again some 300 students were taken out of their classes for an hour-long assembly. When I entered the auditorium I was applauded – I was remembered. I spoke about Kurt Weill and immigration, I shared my clip of FDR declaring war, I played a recording of “Dirge for Two Veterans.” A girl raised her hand to tell us that she had wept twice during the song – the parts where Whitman and Weill describe moonlight overlooking the twin graves of the two Civil War soldiers, a father and son. Then I played a Frank Sinatra recording of “September Song,” after which the students requested another one. So I played Sinatra singing “Speak Low.”

Afterward, the East Lake Chorus asked to sing for me. They chose the “Star-Spangled Banner.”