A few days ago the "State" newspaper came out with an editorial against the Columbia City Council's decision to apply hospitality tax funding to costs for this year's Columbia Festival of the Arts, which starts two weeks from tomorrow. As you can read here, the paper's editorial board had strong concerns about the rather unorthodox mechanisms being employed to channel the funding to the Festival.

Today Mayor Bob Coble responds with an op-ed piece of his own, defending Council's contribution to the Festival. From an artist's standpoint, I think Columbia has a remarkably vibrant cultural life for a city its size in great part due to the support from its civic leadership. In the midst of all the talk in recent years about making USC a major research university and Columbia a magnet for high-tech industry, the mayor has consistently articulated the position that the arts are an absolutely essential component of an appealing, livable, and creative city. As Mayor Bob puts it, "it is critical to recognize the importance of arts and culture in attracting and keeping the businesses and individuals that will lead our economy in the decades to come."

That's not to say that concerns about the Festival are misplaced; I have a few of my own. I also like to see funds raised for the arts go more directly into the pockets of musicians, artists, and actors, rather than mostly to ad agencies, ad targets, web designers, and salaries for those running the festival. But, as I mentioned in the earlier post, Marvin Chernoff (the man responsible for the conception of this Festival) has, I believe, a logical idea. What would have been high-risk with dubious chances of success would have been to spend a ton of money on bringing in guest artists, to try to compete as a major arts festival on a near-Spoleto scale, with that 800-pound gorilla only 95 miles away and two weeks later than the Columbia event's close.

What I believe this Festival says is, "Here's eleven days in Columbia's cultural life, with not much added from any other similar-sized period of the year. We're going to focus on the events of this week-and-a-half, publicize them heavily and in a unified fashion across-the-board in terms of genre. We're going to promote them to those interested in dance, theatre, jazz, bluegrass, classical music, gospel, cinema, visual arts, opera...in a circle of cities within a 100-mile or so radius of Columbia, and to those in our Midlands area who may not have been fully aware of just how diverse and vibrant our cultural scene is here. Because if they like what they see and hear, well, they could pick just about any other fortnight here and find the same quality and diversity. And so, by this kind of global promotion, we hope that each and every arts enterprise in Columbia will attract some new audience members for the future and will each benefit in their own way."

So from this point forward, I personally will set aside some of my questions about how this or that could have been done differently, and affirm that if this "mission statement" above is what Mr. Chernoff intended as the Festival's goal, then I wish it every success. To learn more about the Festival, go the link at the top of the links list at the lower right of this page. In a few days, I'll do a post with my suggested itinerary for the Columbia Festival of the Arts, from April 26 all the way through the May 6 closing concert.

Gene Weingarten, who principally contributes humor pieces to the Washington Post, has written in today's Post Sunday Magazine what I consider the most important essay on culture that I've read in a very long time. The core of the piece concerns an experiment he somehow talked Joshua Bell into doing, to go down into the DC Metro subway system and play as a "busker," for whatever change people were willing to contribute. How did it go? Read the essay and find out.

Tomorrow night is the final concert of the season for the Southern Exposure New Music Series, still basking in the glow of its ASCAP/Chamber Music America award for programming, received earlier this year. And this one should be a doozy...the virtuosic and imaginative percussion quartet, So Percussion, returns to Columbia to perform Steve Reich's landmark 1971 work, "Drumming," alongside USC percussion students, who have been working this up beforehand with the guidance of their teacher, Scott Herring. The show is tomorrow (Thursday) night at 7:30 PM at the USC School of Music Recital Hall. As always, free admission but the usual advisory: get there EARLY if you want a seat. Reception afterwards at Wim Roefs' if ART gallery in the Vista.

Jeffrey Day's piece on the concert from "The State" can be found here. My preview article in the Free Times can be found here. [photo: So Percussion]

Last month, in posting about my appointment as Music Director of the Chamber Music Conference of the East in Vermont, I wrote of the significance of the amateur music community relative to the larger issues of the state of classical music in this country. Now this week, Blair Tindall (remember her?) has written an extensive profile for the Los Angeles Times on Don and Eve Cohen, two longtime stalwarts of the CMC, and the amateur chamber music scene in the LA area.