Back in October 2011, the National Institute for Responsible Philanthropy found that 55 percent of foundation money goes to the top two percent of organizations by budget size.

To some degree, this makes sense, as large arts institutions have the staff time to spend on writing grant proposals, and smaller organizations may not require the same amount of cash to achieve more focused missions. But in the same study, the National Institute for Responsible Philanthropy also revealed that only 10 percent of arts funding supports underserved communities, and concluded that in the arts, as the report’s author Holly Sidford put it, “philanthropy is using its tax-exempt status primarily to benefit wealthier, more privileged institutions and populations.”

Here’s a link to the full report.

These findings underscore Matthew Yglesias’s point about class and tax-exempt giving, and shows just how small the worlds of arts managers like Thomas P. Campbell really are.

Matthew Yglesias weighed in last week on tax-exempt giving to nonprofit organizations:

…it’d really be worth scaling this all back a great deal. A rich guy giving a gift to an elite university that mostly serves the educational needs of rich kids is not particularly worthy of a tax subsidy. That’s doubly true when we all know that the “gift” is in some respects a bribe to boost the admissions prospects of his own family members. We don’t have a shortage of political advocacy in the United States. God is not going to become angry at us and punish us if our churches become less splendid. Due to the progressive rate structure of the income tax, these tax deductions are very much a way of increasing the social and political clout of the rich and don’t seem to inspire a ton of charity in the sense of helping poor people.

In addition to tolerating a tax code that exempts from taxation multi-million dollar gifts that uphold an elite status quo, we live in a world where the NFL–whose franchises bring in hundreds of millions in revenue each season–is considered a nonprofit. Maybe its time we tighten things up.

Last week, Tom Jacobs of the Pacific Standard reported on a recent paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing that examined what compels people to buy tickets to an orchestra concert. Jacobs felt that Wagner Kamatura and Carl Schimmel’s research–“Mahler meets Moneyball“–upset assumptions about new music by showing that “less-popular works written before 1900 have a stronger negative impact on occupancy than less-popular works from after the turn of the 20th century.”

There were plenty of other things that, according to Kamatura and Schimmel, actively enticed concertgoers (a big-name star like Josh Bell and familiar works by Beethoven and Mozart) so saying that contemporary music doesn’t drive people away as much as second-tier Romanticism is hardly an endorsement, and certainly not a revolutionary upending of conventional wisdom.

So many people in concert-music circles want to convince themselves that it’s only weak-kneed artistic directors who are keeping new music from a willing-and-ready-audience. As a result, they’ll overemphasize the importance of points made by researches like Kamatura and Schimmel to keep their own hopes and prejudices alive.

The truth is, programming unfamiliar music is hard. There’s a lot of inertia to overcome and there isn’t much of an audience out there screaming for new stuff. I think it’s essential to the art form, and essential to keeping adventurous listeners engaged, to push musical boundaries but we can’t kid ourselves: it will rarely be a short-term, single-ticket moneymaker.

Magic Hat and Kentucky beer company West Sixth are currently embroiled in a trademark-infringement fight that has become a very public battle. West Sixth is the underdog here, but it’s doing itself no favors with its sarcastic, overblown, immature attacks on social media. Here’s an example from a recent post on Facebook, where the company addresses Magic Hat directly:

We saw that you finally decided to hire a PR person to reply to our petition from yesterday. I suppose after more than 10,000 people signed it, you couldn’t ignore it any more. 

Since you decided to publish our letters (which I hope everyone takes the time to read, they’re hilarious), we also want to make sure everyone can see the full text of the bogus lawsuit. As you can see there are some crazy claims in it, and some that even look like it might have been copied and pasted from other lawsuits – what’s that craziness about us moving into South Carolina?

There are probably a lot of people who will support West Sixth no matter how it acts, but there are many who will be turned off by its antics–particularly when they see that Magic Hat really has a case here:

The best thing West Sixth can do is keep as quiet and polite as possible, and use this publicity as a chance to focus on its product instead of its logo (it really is a bad logo; West Sixth: take this opportunity to change it).

Here’s how Zachary Woolfe explains the significance of Yuja Wang’s short, tight dresses:

… the tiny dresses and spiky heels draw your focus to how petite Ms. Wang is, how stark the contrast between her body and the forcefulness she achieves at her instrument. That contrast creates drama. It turns a recital into a performance.

I appreciate that Woolfe doesn’t revert to gape mouthed aawking, but doesn’t ignore the issue either. His is as good an interpretation of how Wang’s dress affects a listener as any I’ve seen. (Another worthy read on how critics address the dress is here, by Anne Midgette.) That said, there still is something lascivious about the whole affair, particularly after reading the “so short, so tight” comments made by other middle-age male critics.

Onto another issue: someone needs to get Woolfe to lay off the purple prose. Check this out, from the same review:

The liquidity of her phrasing in the second movement of Scriabin’s Sonata No. 2 eerily evoked the sound of woodwinds. In that composer’s Sonata No. 6 she juxtaposed colors granitic and gauzy to eerily brilliant effect before closing the written program with a rabid rendition of the one-piano version of “La Valse,” accentuating the sickliness of Ravel’s distorted waltzes.

Holy cow!

If someone told you to pick a song as a lullaby for your baby, would you pick this?

Well, one of the parents in a Beth Israel Medical Center study on how music effects premature newborns did. And with was no doubt a great deal of imagination, the participating musicians converted it into a much softer, more palatable song lullaby.

The results of the study, which involved 272 children over two weeks, point to subtle but real developmental benefits for premature newborns.

But it’s important to remember that this wasn’t about how music benefited the babies, but how one form of music–the lullaby–helped. As pointed out by the Average White Band example, the researchers went to great pains to take suggested songs from parents and convert them into “lilting waltzes” accompanied by gato drum pulses and the whooshing sounds of an “ocean disc.”

When it came to making musical choices, the researchers made a priori, culturally grounded assumptions about what would be beneficial. I wonder what effects some peppier tunes might have had?

On the Raffetto Herman company blog, David Herman compares good marketing with good jazz:

In jazz music, the use of improviastion means each performance is different, often affected by the audience listening. A good marketing strategy needs to do the same. By using different themes and avenues, a company can reach a broader customer base with the ability to shift its campaign based on response.

As important to jazz as improvisation is preparation: great jazz musicians spend years practicing scales and arpeggios, memorizing changes to hundreds of standards, and imitating the styles other great musicians, all so that, when the time comes for them to be in the spotlight, they’ll deliver their own satisfying, spontaneous, enjoyable performance.

Likewise, a good marketing strategy is still only as good as the planning that goes into it. That gives you the tools you need to respond to any situation–or in the jazz parlance that Herman uses, to improvise on any theme–and win over a customer.

Last weekend, students at the Parsons School of Design unveiled the alternative orchestral attire they’ve been working on since the start of the school year as part of a project funded by Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony.

Judging by the photos, most of the designs were surprisingly traditional: most of them maintained the black-on-black color scheme for women, and the men are still in tuxes, still looking like waiters. Some students showed an interest in electronic technology, such as motion sensors in clothes to trigger projections, but that doesn’t really do much to change how the musicians look on stage.

In addition to an article on WQXR’s website, you can read about it on Classicalite.com.