“A new partnership will use $3 million in grant monies from the Mellon Foundation to help train eighth to 12th-grade students of diverse backgrounds who want to pursue music as a career,” writes Susan Elliott in Friday’s (1/24) Musical America (subscription required). “The idea behind the so-called Baltimore-Washington Musical Pathways (BWMP) program is to prepare under-served students in the Baltimore-Washington, DC, area for advanced college/conservatory study and, one day, to enter the professional work force. The partners in the venture—the Peabody In-stitute of the Johns Hopkins University, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO), the DC Youth Orchestra Program, and Levine Mu-sic—all have their own individual training programs for black and Latinx students. The idea is to bring them all under one beneficent umbrella…. In her comments, Mellon Foundation arts and cultural heritage program officer Susan Feder noted that BWMP, while similar to collaborative ventures in the cities of Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, BWMP would be the ‘first regional collaborative.’ ” Peabody Institute Dean Fred Bronstein said, “We want to make real change where it’s most needed—providing access and opportunity to a pool of diverse young musicians early on.”
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