BU Today feature: BU Global Music Festival Gets $15K Grant from National Endowment for the Arts
This article was originally published in BU Today on July 2, 2020. By Joel Brown.
A $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to the three-year-old BU Global Music Festival provides a welcome boost in what has been a tough year for arts organizations everywhere.
“We are truly grateful for this support, especially at the time when learning to listen to disparate peoples with different histories is all the more important,” says festival artistic director Marié Abe, a College of Fine Arts associate professor of music, musicology, and ethnomusicology.
The Art Works grant will be used to cover artist fees and production expenses for the fall 2021 festival, since this year’s event will be entirely online courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global arts organizations faced difficult challenges even before the coronavirus, because of increasing travel restrictions for international artists in the present political climate.
“The award provides a vote of confidence for our commitment to fostering compassionate and open ways for the public to listen to other groups of people within Boston University, Boston, the United States, and beyond, through vibrant musical cultures across the world,” Abe says.
“These awards demonstrate the resilience of the arts in America, showcasing not only the creativity of their arts projects, but also the organizations’ agility in the face of a national health crisis,” says Mary Anne Carter, NEA chair. “We celebrate organizations like the BU Arts Initiative for providing opportunities for learning and engagement through the arts in these times.”
The grant was even more of a vote of confidence because the application went in nearly a year ago, before last fall’s second BU Global Music Festival, says Ty Furman, managing director of the BU Arts Initiative, which produces the festival along with the CFA School of Music department of musicology and ethnomusicology, through the Karbank Fund for Global Music.