BU Global Music Festival Receives National Endowment for the Arts Grant
Originally published on June 10, 2020 by BU Arts Initiative
BU Global Music Festival to Receive $15,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts
Boston University Arts Initiative announced that an Art Works award of $15,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts has been given to Boston University via the BU Arts Initiative for the BU Global Music Festival. Read more in the press release.
“We are truly grateful for this support,” says Marié Abe, Associate Professor of Music and BU Global Music Festival Artistic Director, “especially at the time when learning to listen to disparate peoples with different histories is all the more important than ever. The award provides a vote of confidence that is an affirmation of our commitment to providing an opportunity for the public to foster compassionate and open ways of listening to other groups of people, within Boston University, Boston, the US, and beyond, through vibrant musical cultures across the world.”
The BU Global Music Festival is an annual celebration of musical cultures around the world featuring high-caliber, international artists as well as vibrant local musical communities, bringing the wider musical world to the doorstep of thousands of students, adults, young people, and families throughout the Boston area. An expansion of the BU Global Music Concert Series, organized by the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, the BU Global Music Festival, presented in collaboration with the BU Arts Initiative, showcases musicians and performing artists steeped in folkloric, vernacular, popular, and traditional musics around the world, providing the BU community and the public access to diverse musical practices. Accompanied by workshops, panel discussions, lectures, and other educational offerings, this festival will offer the audience intellectual insights and hands-on experiences in selected performing arts from various parts of the globe.
Through exploration of diverse musical cultures, BU Global Music Festival offers a chance for the audience to experience and understand human sameness and differences across cultures, and aspires to develop interest, respect, and engagement with our neighbors, near and far, through musical performance and education. The 2019 BU Global Music Festival, which drew 1,000 people from BU, Boston and beyond, was also recently recognized by Transglobal World Music Chart Festival Awards as one of the top ten festivals in the world, and the only US-based festival to be recognized in that list.
“While the 2020 BU Global Music Festival has been postponed due to the pandemic,” notes Ty Furman, Managing Director of the BU Arts Initiative, “we are thrilled that the structure and timing of this award will provide support for the 2021 BU Global Music Festival.”
For more information on this National Endowment for the Arts grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.
The Boston University Arts Initiative in the Office of the Provost was created in the fall of 2012 with a mission to ensure that the arts are a vital component of the student experience at Boston University, and to build community awareness of and engagement in the arts at BU. Our programming reflects the interdisciplinary, global, and urban nature of Boston University and is primarily driven by faculty teaching and research interests.