Does your orchestra do any good?
mainA bunch of finance and legal guys in New York have put together an Adolf Busch Award, named after the anti-Nazi violinist and conductor, one of the first to leave Germany in 1933.
The award’s aim is to further Busch’s ideals by ‘promoting a more just and civil society through an annual award for individuals and organizations using music for social good.’
Do you do any of that?
There’s a $10,000 prize. Applications close on June 30.
Apply here.
a shoo-in for maestro eschenbach, surely?
‘Do you do any of that?’
I hope not. They should be spending all their time on music. Anything else should be left to social services.
What narrow horizons you espouse, to think that musicians can and should do nothing more than perform music!
If only Kurt Masur had heeded your advice in October 1989 in Leipzig…
I like the idea of rewarding good behavior.
I don’t like the idea of candidates applying for the reward.
They should form an advisory committee that nominates worthy candidates and chooses a recipient, much in the manner of Nobel or MacArthur awards.
It would be nice if a candidate could just do good things without making a big fuss, and then the advisory committee would somehow magically just … know about it. I see the application process as a way of letting the committee know what & who is out there doing good works. If they have to rely on their own resources to find out what’s going on in the world, then IMHO this runs the risk of becoming like the Birgit Nilsson Prize, which in theory is available to anyone, but in practice only ever goes to the super-famous.
Since this is a new prize, it will be interesting to see what level of visibility a person or organization needs to have before having a chance of winning, and what type of activities they are looking for.
I suppose the fairly small amount of the prize suggests they won’t have the resources to do much random investigating on their own, compared to the MacArthur Fellowships which are about $250,000 and manage to find some obscure recipients.
$10,000 is better than $0. May it go to deserving musicians.