Music

"Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear

In the past year, the phrase "net neutrality" has become much more frequent in conversation and in the news. What does it mean and should arts grantmakers be concerned? To help answer the question, short excerpts from several sources are presented below. In addition a session will be presented at GIA's 2006 conference, "Keeping the Internet Open," organized by David Haas (chair, Grantmakers for Film and Electronic Media In the past year, the phrase "net neutrality" has become much more frequent in conversation and in the news. What does it mean and should arts grantmakers be concerned?

Imagine throwing an arts event and the entire community shows up. This is oftentimes what takes place in the towns delightfully portrayed in Bright Stars, a publication from the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In Neal Cuthbert's foreword to this award-winning piece, it is underscored that rural communities in Minnesota are suffering in several ways due to listless econo-mies and dramatically shifting demographics.

Background
The cultural sector does not exist in a vacuum. It is being challenged by major demographic, economic, technological, and social factors outside its immediate control. While the commercial arts and individual artists are also struggling to adapt to these changes, for a variety of reasons the nonprofit arts sector has been particularly slow to respond effectively.

This article is dedicated by the author to the memory of Mois Cruz Sánchez. Moisés, like Filemon, was a native of San Juan Mixtepec in La Mixteca in Oaxaca. He was a migrant farmworker. His dream was that Mixteco citizens in his village elect one of their own to the village governing body, independent of the local caciques [political bosses]. He fulfilled that dream and was elected mayor of his village four years ago. He also worked for the transnational organizing of the Mixteco people and founded an organization for that work.

"I believe that if we can keep our values close, our imaginations open, and our stories fierce, we can and will win." - Thenmozhi Soundararajan

Introduction

A growing number of scholars and writers have been tracing the multiple connections between the arts and economic vitality during the past decade. A recent book by anthropologist Maribel Alvarez, There's Nothing Informal about It: Participatory Arts within the Cultural Ecology of Silicon Valley (2005) has drawn a new set of connections for me and raised the possibility that informal, or participatory, cultural practices may have greater meaning in an economic context than I previously recognized.

America is on the threshold of a significant transformation in cultural life. There have been many cultural shifts in recorded history: Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and the rise of the reading public; the growth of a mercantile class and the birth of private art markets independent of the church and the king; the invention of gas streetlights and the beginning of urban nighttime entertainment. The most recent cultural transformation, still with us today, was set in motion on the threshold of the twentieth century.

For classical music lovers in East Texas and Western Louisiana, KTPB-FM has been the only source of classical music programming for the past fifteen years. From its first broadcasts, KTPB has offered the live presentations of the Metropolitan Opera alongside concerts of the Longview Symphony and the East Texas Symphony Orchestra.

2005, 158 pages. Arts Education Partnership , One Massachusetts Avenue, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20001-1431, 202-336-7016, aep@ccsso.org

The Arts Education Partnership's new book, Third Space: when learning matters, should be required reading for anyone involved in what promises to be a lively and contentious debate around the 2007 reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.