To readers who may look on any case for significant public funding of the arts in the U.S.A of 2021 as so hopeless as to be hardly worth raising, or who simply oppose it as not the American way, I would ask: “All right. Then what?” Our strangely designed but borderline-workable vehicle of tax-incentivized private giving plus major foundation support plus hearty governmental slaps on the back while tossing little change-purses of coin is running on the rims. No matter what tinkering we do, it will continue to wheeze so long as it’s not expansive boom-time in America, which it hasn’t been for a good long while now, and looks not to be for a long while ahead. Even then, it will have tough going unless the populist, anti-governmental mindset that prevails in such a large portion of our electorate is somehow re-tuned. Of course, I belong to a High Arts constituency, and harbor hierarchical assumptions about the distribution of funds for the arts, which in the view of many makes me a statue waiting to be toppled, whereas in my own reality I am an alms-begging wretch on a windy corner. Some words of autobiography may help to explain my perspective, and the path to my proposal.

In 1968, I took a position as associate of the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music. I had already joined the board of an organization called Affiliate Artists, and so had a borderline relationship with the world of arts development. But the MBR Fund job entailed much more direct participation in a field where my experience had been of the struggling-young-artist and journalistic critic varieties. The foundation had been established to aid young musicians in the early stages of their careers (Martha Baird, a concert pianist in her youth, had strong sympathies for their problems), and soon extended its reach to the support of organizations that employed such artists. Thus, it had both an individual grant program, for which it ran live auditions on a roughly monthly schedule, and an organizational grant program, which involved an application process and on-site evaluations. I was busy in both, primarily with opera companies and singers, but sometimes with chamber music groups and instrumentalists, contemporary music projects and composers, and a modest musicology program. Our staff was small; everyone did everything in some proportion.

Affiliate Artists was a service organization that matched up young performers with presenting institutions—most often, but not exclusively, colleges and universities. The matchup was non-residential; that is, the performers committed a chunk of time each year (six weeks, if memory serves) to the presenting institution in exchange for a year-round stipend, but the rest of the time were free to pursue their careers, underpinned by the stipend. The institution, meanwhile, was free to make whatever use of the artist seemed productive to it during the committed weeks—community outreach, workshops, recitals, classroom demonstrations, etc. This struck me as a win-win situation, and indeed the organization sustained its program for a number of years. I remained on the board until reaching the mandatory three-term, nine-year limit. I later joined the board of the National Opera Institute, founded in 1970 by the legendary Broadway producer Roger L. Stevens (also a founding officer of the Kennedy Center and the NEA), and served there for four years, until the Institute began gravitating toward the support of musicals and other non-operatic lifeforms. And following my departure from the MBR Fund in 1973, I worked on a free-lance basis for several years for the firm that the NEA had contracted for field evaluations and reports on organizations (in my case, opera companies) applying for grants. This came to an end in 1980—not coincidentally, with the advent of the Reagan administration.