In addition to being an excellent player himself, Rex has devoted substantial time and resources to making St. Louis the destination for chess fans. He will be inducted into our state’s Sports Hall of Fame on January 29, 2012. Other inductees include former St. Louis Cardinal and eight-time Gold Glove winner Jim Edmonds, legendary Kansas City Chiefs cornerback Emmitt Thomas, and former NBA star and Mizzou guard Jon Sundvold.

Dr. Jeanne Sinquefield will also be honored at the ceremonies on January 29. She is receiving the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame Achievement Award for her instrumental role in the introduction of a Boy Scouts Merit Badge in Chess. Jeanne supports the teaching of chess in schools, where the sport contributes significantly to children’s math and critical thinking skills.

The team at Slay & Associates is proud to work with Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield and congratulates them on their Hall of Fame honors.

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Rex Sinquefield Inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame

Rex and Jeanne share the importance of tapping into undiscovered talents, finding and growing composition in Missouri, and the goals and success of the Missouri New Music Initiative.


A symposium of America’s leading arts donors

July 1, 2011

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know About Giving to the Arts

“Tapping Into Undiscovered Talents”

Just giving money to composers and music programs isn’t enough. The Missouri New Music

Initiative is designed to find composers, to assist them in the development of their skills by

arranging for them to work with musical groups, and to have their compositions performed by

encouraging orchestras and ensembles to perform newly commissioned pieces. In the last 6 years,

the Missouri New Music Initiative has resulted in more than 100 new pieces of music being written

by composers aged 7 to 82 and being performed by ensembles, symphonies, and other musical groups. Giving to the

arts is a great way to tap into undiscovered talents and interests. With some thought and planning, arts contributors

can inspire composers, musicians, and audiences to think in new ways, to see the world in a new light, and to appreciate

things that they never knew they liked or possibly did not know existed.

What is Your Favorite Hidden gem in Arts and Culture?

“Finding and Growing Composers in Missouri”

As the result of our dedication to finding and growing composers in Missouri, we are now finding

hidden gems of new music now are popping up in unexpected and wonderful places throughout

mid-Missouri and St. Louis. In the last five years, two mid-Missouri orchestras have performed a

total of 20 new compositions. Recently, a winning composition from the Creating Original Music

Program was played by an orchestra in Thailand and by the St. Louis Symphony’s Youth Orchestra.

A new project called the Sound of Art was inspired by collaborations with the Missouri Botanical Garden and the

Contemporary Art Museum of Missouri.

Tell Me about a Really Smart Grant to the Arts

“Missouri New Music Initiative”

There is music being composed in the minds of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Missourians—music that is never

performed and never heard. The Sinquefield Charitable Foundation established the Missouri New Music Initiative t

o find and grow composers throughout the state and turn Missouri into a mecca for the original composition of music.

It began with the Creating Original Music Program for Missouri’s K–12th graders, in affiliation with the University of

Missouri–Columbia. The program is a competition for original compositions, where the winners receive a cash prize

and their entries are performed at our annual music festival. That program has expanded to a high school summer

camp, undergraduate and graduate level programs, a distance learning program, the Missouri New Music Ensemble,

and a New Music Summer Festival that attracts composers from all over the world to Missouri for a week-long

program.

—Index fund pioneer Rex Sinquefield co-founded Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA). Jeanne Sinquefield oversaw trading at DFA and is a string bassist in three Missouri symphonies. They are co-founders of the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation.

Online at: http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/article.asp?article=1682&paper=0&cat=149
http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/article.asp?article=1683&paper=0&cat=149
http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/article.asp?article=1685&paper=0&cat=149

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Jeanne Sinquefield – “Music is the Joy of my life”

Mizzou New Music Summer Festival to include 10 world premieres

Experiences, musings spark creation of new music

Thursday, July 7, 2011 | 6:26 p.m. CDT; updated 8:24 a.m. CDT, Friday, July 8, 2011

BY WILL FLOYD

COLUMBIA — Every new piece of music has a story behind it, a bud of inspiration that will blossom into the vision of the artist.

For Steven Snowden, that story starts with a summer job working beside his father at a construction site. He is one of eight resident composers whose work will premiere next week at the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival.

“I could hear bits and pieces of classic rock songs between drills and other random power tools, and I would often get very short fragments of these songs stuck in my head with no memory of their context,” said Snowden, who grew up in Branson. “These bits and pieces would eventually evolve into something that hardly resembled the original, similar to the process of saying a word over and over until it no longer makes any sense.”

Those memories prompted Snowden to compose “For So Long It’s Not True,” which is based on seconds and half-seconds of “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin.

“I never listened to classical music when I was younger — I use blues and pop music (for inspiration) because it is where I came from,” Snowden said.

Another resident composer, Patrick David Clark of St. Louis, said he got the idea of his new work, “Ptolemy’s Carousel,” from the mathematical equations Ptolemy created so that it appeared the Earth was the center of the solar system, a belief widely accepted at the time.

These calculations reminded Clark of the calculations a composer must make to get what is wanted from the music.

“’Ptolemy’s Carousel’ is a continuous rotation of harmony, fairly pure harmony and complementary harmony, with its eight chords orbiting like the planets around the sun,” Clark said. “I would describe it as a sub-dream and mystical environment of sound.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds, whose “SEASONS: Cycle 2″ will be performed on Thursday evening, uses seasons as his muse for his composition that will be performed at the festival.

In a written description of the piece, Reynolds said he drew not only on the earthly seasons of the year — fall, winter, spring and summer — but their relationship to the seasons of life — infancy, youth, maturity and age.

“Reading through a range of poets … I searched for pertinent passages, absorbing the characteristics they associated with each of my seasons,” Reynolds wrote. “Every movement in the two Cycles refers both to a season of life, and to a season of the year. There are ‘consonant’ pairs such as infancy/spring, and more ‘dissonant’ ones including winter/youth.”

“SEASONS: Cycle 2″ is electroacoustic, a term applied to a range of music exploring and incorporating natural and electronically generated sound. The piece is part of a multi-part project he is working on with the nationally known new-music ensemble, Alarm Will Sound.

Composers are really starting to understand and develop electroacoustic music, said Stefan Freund, co-artistic director of the festival, composer and founding member of Alarm Will Sound. “I know people will take his (Reynolds’) ideas into the future.

Freund, along with the festival’s other artistic director, W. Thomas McKenney, were charged with selecting the eight resident composers from more than 100 applicants from around the world.

The six-day Mizzou New Music Summer Festival will include lectures and workshops by the resident composers, MU faculty composers Freund and McKenney, guest composers Reynolds and Anna Clyne and guest artists Susan Naruckiand Jaime Oliver.

All presentations, as well as rehearsals, are free and open to the public.

The main focus of the festival will be four concerts, which will feature 10 world premieres, all performed by Alarm Will Sound.

Snowden said it’s an amazing opportunity. “A lot of young composers dream of working with Alarm Will Sound,” he said.

Members of the ensemble arrived this week and have been rehearsing at the Sinquefield Reserve south of Jefferson City, a home of festival patrons Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield. On Wednesday, the elegantly simple architecture of the reserve’s lake house and the lush, rolling grounds around it seemed an equal match for the music being performed inside.

At first, watching the musicians get ready for rehearsal was like watching a group of high school friends tuning guitars and tapping drums in their parents’ garage. Random notes — a bowed chord, fingers dancing on a keyboard — punctuated their talking and soft laughter.

But once the rehearsal started, it was as if a switch had been thrown. The atmosphere became one of focus and cohesion; and the music, at this point “Ptolemy’s Carousel,” was soothing and flowing, one note gently running into the next.

This is the second public Mizzou New Music Summer Festival (a scaled-down trial run was held in 2009 at the Sinquefield Reserve). It is being sponsored in part by theMissouri Arts Council, the City of Columbia Office of Cultural Affairs, and theSinquefield Charitable Foundation.

The festival is part of the Mizzou New Music Initiative for the creation and performance of new music.

“Jeanne Sinquefield’s dream is to establish Missouri as a center for new music,” Freund said.

Online at: http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2011/07/07/mizzou-new-music-summer-festival-continues-make-columbia-center-new-music-composition/

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Mizzou New Music Summer Festival announces selection of eight resident composers for 2011

Branson grad composing musical career

Posted: Tuesday, June 21, 2011

By Tyler Francke |

Steven Snowden, far right, leads a coaching session with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble in San Francisco, Calif., as they prepare a piece written by Snowden for a West Coast tour.

Growing up in Hollister, and later near Walnut Shade, young Steven Snowden had no college aspirations and expected he would find his career in construction, like his father and many other men in his family had before him.

Then, his sophomore year, he joined the Branson High School Concert Band, where he started learning the French horn.

“I was really terrible,” Snowden said with a laugh. “But I kept practicing, and I got better and better.”

He said his improvement was due in no small part to the dedication of then-band director Eric Matzat and choir director Bob Abbott, who recently retired.

“They were very supportive, encouraging and also very good at what they do,” Snowden said. “It proves how influential your teachers can be. I became so excited about music that I wanted to do something with it.”

What he did was enroll in Missouri State University in the Music Department, graduating in 2005 with a Bachelor of Music in composition. He said he began his education in performance, but changed his mind when he tried writing music for the first time.

“When I started composing, it was like a light bulb for me,” he said. “It was really exciting. I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

Snowden continued his education, earning his Master’s in composition at the University of Colorado and beginning the Doctor of Musical Arts program at the University of Texas at Austin, which he hopes to complete in three more semesters.

At the same time, however, Snowden also embarked on his career in musical composition. He said he is a bit of a late bloomer in a field where many composers begin at the age of 7 or 8, which has been both a difficulty and a blessing.

“Because I got started kind of late, every time I write music, it’s really different,” he said. “I feel like I’m reinventing the wheel to a certain extent.”

But he’s also found that he  likes “being all over the place.”

“Music can express such a wide variety of things, and I want to explore a lot of those,” Snowden said. “I like writing all different kinds of music for different ensembles.”

While Snowden has received awards and fellowships from across the country, one of the most prestigious honors will be at the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, which is being held in Columbia, just a few hours north of the town his family still calls home.

Snowden is one of eight composers selected in a nationwide search to produce a new work that will be played by Alarm Will Sound, a highly acclaimed music ensemble.

“It’s a pretty amazing opportunity. They’re one of the best-known concert music groups out there,” Snowden said. “They’re all top-of-the-line musicians.”

Snowden’s composition for the festival will be as unique as his background is in the composing world. His inspiration for the piece is the 1969 Led Zeppelin hit, “Dazed and Confused.”

“I didn’t grow up listening to classical music,” Snowden said. “I grew up listening to classic rock when I was helping my dad out at construction sites.”

Wherever Snowden’s career takes him, he said he will bring the Ozarks with him.

“When I started composing, I realized more and more that where I come from is a major part of the music I write,” he said. “There is a rich musical heritage in the Ozarks that I’m really trying to embrace. And being from that area is something I’m really proud of.”

Online at: http://bransontrilakesnews.com/entertainment/article_a0cc25a2-9c4c-11e0-a8b0-001cc4c002e0.html

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Young Area Composer Liza White Chosen for Mizzou New Music Summer Festival Gets National Media Coverage

Around the Columns
Conducting and composing

For Patrick Clark, winning the 2011 Sinquefield Composition Prize led to two big boosts for his musical career: the chance to compose an original score for the University Philharmonic and to conduct the orchestral performance.

Since 2006, the Sinquefield Composition Prize has selected an MU student to write a piece that is performed at the annual Chancellor’s Concert. Typically, the winner, who receives a scholarship and cash prize, works with the ensemble’s conductor. But because Clark, BM ’91, is a graduate student in orchestral conducting, he was asked to lead the ensemble’s performance. The dual roles led to unique experiences and challenges for Clark.

“I found out it might be easier to conduct someone else’s piece rather than your own,” Clark says. “During rehearsal, I was much less likely to address the orchestra if they needed to play with more accuracy. Instead, I went home and looked at the score to make sure I had written it correctly.”

Clark began writing the piece in late October 2010, when he learned that he had won the competition. He spent winter break composing from morning to night — though he says he didn’t mind.

“As long as I could make sure my electricity bill is paid, all I’d do is write music,” he says. “I’ve written one other full orchestra piece, but it always feels like the first time. Everything you think you know seems to go away in a cloud.”

In late January 2011, Clark finished his nine-minute piece, which was inspired by Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. He picked out themes from the late Russian composer’s work and interpreted them using his own contemporary American style. Clark’s piece debuted at the Chancellor’s Concert in March 2011 and a professional recording was made in April 2011.

This summer, Clark will continue honing his dual skill set as a resident composer for the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, July 11–16. Visit newmusicsummerfestival.missouri.edu for a schedule of events.

Online at: http://mizzoumag.missouri.edu/2011-Summer/columns/sinquefield/index.php

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Columbia Civic Orchestra to Premier a Work Commissioned by Orchestra and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation

Published: Tuesday, June 21, 2011, 8:00 AM

By Kathryn Roy

2002 Longmeadow High School graduate Liza White has been selected as one of eight resident composers for the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival.

A 2002 Longmeadow High School graduate is making a name for herself in the music world.

Liza White, who plans to complete her doctorate studies in music composition at Northwestern University in the fall, has been selected as one of eight resident composers for the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, put on by the University of Missouri School of Music and the Mizzou New Music Initiative, in July.

White, along with the other resident composers, will travel to Columbia for the festival, which runs July 11 through July 16. There, she’ll take part in a series of public concerts featuring her own music being performed, as well as music from other contemporary creators.

She will also have the opportunity to participate in workshops, master classes and other events.

Resident composers will be able to work with guest composers Roger Reynolds, winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for music composition, and Anna Clyne, who serves as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
White’s music will be performed by the music group, Alarm Will Sound.

White said she is thrilled she was selected for the festival. “It’s a really fantastic group, and I’m excited to get to work with them,” she said. “It’s what young composers do to try to get out there and get their work performed,” she said of applying for such opportunities.

Under the application guidelines, White wrote a musical piece involving all of the 16 members of the ensemble.

The piece had to be less than eight minutes long.

White said she was also given information about where percussion instruments would be placed on the stage, so that one musician wasn’t expected to be running from one side of the stage to the other.

“I definitely took into account what I know about them (Alarm Will Sound),” she said. “I listened to their past performances and watched videos on YouTube. They’re really good about putting on a good show.” White said the ensemble also does some choreography in their performances, so she wrote some into her piece.

Alarm Will Sound plays arrangements of popular music, which is something White enjoys writing. “My music is very much influenced by pop music, and this piece is no exception,” she said.

A former trombonist who dabbles in voice and guitar, White focuses on composing these days, and hopes to eventually land a professorship in music composition.

“For me, the main reason to do things like this is to meet musicians and to work with people on a really personal level,” she said.

Jeanne Sinquefield of the Sinquefield Foundation, which funds the Mizzou New Music Initiative, said the festival attracted 120 applicants from around the globe.

She said the musicians in Alarm Will Sound are extremely talented, and it’s a wonderful opportunity for up and coming young composers to work with them. “

They have played together for so long that they’re able to play very complex new music,” Sinquefield said. “

What we offer (the resident composers) is to come for a week and actually work with the group, work with other composers and master composers and you get a recording. It’s a lot of fun.”

Sinquefield said the Initiative is one way to bring about new music, while many people are convinced that older pieces are the only thing worth listening to.

“Since our program started, there have been 100 pieces written for our program,” she said.

White said she is indebted to the music department at Longmeadow High School for giving her her start. “I was very lucky to have that,” she said.

“While I was a good student, it was music that kept me wanting to go to school. I hope they can keep the program as excellent as it’s been.”

For more information on White, visit www.lizawhitemusic.com.

A related link you can also visit is The Republican’s 2011 Talented Teens’ blog http://blog.masslive.com/talentedteens

In print and online at: http://www.masslive.com/living/index.ssf/2011/06/area_composer_chosen_for_festival.html

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Mizzou New Music Summer Festival announces selection of eight resident composers for 2011

They are:
* Kari Besharse, Champaign IL
* David Biedenbender, Ann Arbor MI
* Patrick David Clark, Columbia MO
* Michael-Thomas Foumai, Honolulu, HI
* Yotam Haber, New York, NY
* Clint Needham, Columbus OH
* Steven Snowden, Austin TX
* Liza White, Berkeley CA

The 2011 Mizzou New Music Summer Festival will include a series of public concerts featuring music from these eight resident composers and other contemporary creators, as well as workshops, master classes and other events.

The Festival’s guest composers for 2011 will be Roger Reynolds, winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for composition and professor at the University of California at San Diego, and Anna Clyne, a native of London who currently serves as the Mead Composer-in- Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The acclaimed new music group Alarm Will Sound, conducted by artistic director Alan Pierson, once again will serve as resident ensemble, as they did for the inaugural Festival in 2010, and the Grammy award-winning soprano Susan Narucki will perform with them as a guest artist.

The eight resident composers were selected through a portfolio application process to create a new work for Alarm Will Sound. During the festival, they will receive composition lessons from Reynolds and Clyne; take part in rehearsals with Alarm Will Sound; give presentations on their music; and receive a premiere performance and professional live recording of their work.

The resident composers also will have the opportunity to return to Missouri for a residency at the Sinquefield Reserve (http://www.sinquefieldreserve.com/) sometime during the following academic year.

“Last year a participant described composing for Alarm will Sound as being like driving a Ferrari,” said Jeanne Sinquefield of the Sinquefield Foundation. “It will be fun to see what this year’s composers can do with their ‘car’.”

The Mizzou New Music Summer Festival is part of the Mizzou New Music Initiative, a diverse array of programs at the University of Missouri’s School of Music co-directed by Dr. Stefan Freund and Dr. W. Thomas McKenney.

Intended to position the school as a leading center for music composition and new music, the Initiative is a direct result of a $1 million donation by the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation led by Dr. Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield. Their vision is to create an incubator for the composition and performance of new music, and to showcase Missouri as a center for the music of tomorrow.

The City of Columbia Office of Cultural Affairs and the Missouri Arts Council also have provided financial assistance for the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival.

For more information:

Mizzou New Music Summer Festival: http://newmusicsummerfestival.missouri.edu/

Sinquefield Charitable Foundation http://www.sinquefieldcharitablefoundation.com/.

Kari Besharse: http://karibesharse.net/

David Biedenbender: http://www.davidbiedenbender.com/

Michael-Thomas Foumai: http://www.michaelfoumai.com/

Yotam Haber: http://www.yotamhaber.com/

Clint Needham: http://www.clintneedham.com/

Steven Snowden: http://www.stevensnowden.com/

Liza White: http://www.lizawhitemusic.com/

Roger Reynolds & Anna Clyne: http://newmusicsummerfestival.missouri.edu/composers.html

Alarm Will Sound: http://newmusicsummerfestival.missouri.edu/AWS.html

Susan Narucki: http://www.susannarucki.net/

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Eight of the Best New American Composers Selected for Inaugural Mizzou New Music Summer Festival July 12-18

Music is Central

“Music is such a central part of everyone’s life,” Jeanne said. “Radio, CDs, what about the music in Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Schindler’s List? We know so much music and we don’t even know we know it. And there’s so much new music. So you say to yourself, well, how do we get new music? I was in Vienna doing a series of concerts last year, and think about it Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, come from all over Europe. But Vienna attracted the best composers,” Jeanne enthused. So, she explained, they created a culture for musicians, for composers, for these types of geniuses. “These people were in that particular place in that particular time and people put money up to have orchestras hire composers,” she explained. As a result, these composers’ work was encouraged.

Bringing the Composers of Today Together

“So I started thinking,” Jeanne began, a clear purpose forming in her voice, “Well, maybe you could do it here in America, if it happened in a specific place. You’ve got that great writing place in Iowa, that best opera place in Santa Fe in the summer.” And Jeanne realized what she was going to do, what she could do. “I knew we could do that here in Missouri,” she said. When Jeanne’s vision first began to take shape, it materialized as a statewide competition for young composers in K-12. And not only was the program well-received, the contenders were modern-day Mozarts and Bachs in their youth. “We gave cash prizes to students and to their music programs. The first year we were blown away. One, where do these kids come from? They just crawled out of the ground,” Jeanne laughed. “They were so talented! We did it the next year, and by that time we decided the kids were out there, but there was no place for them to go to get better, so we decided to add a high school summer camp.”

Jeanne’s dream of fostering young composers in Missouri developed further in the third year of the program. “We had this documentary done called ‘Genius Among Us.’ My son’s a movie producer and they were on strike, so he got a bunch of guys to come out and feature the children in our program. It was one of those random good luck strikes, and they won a couple of film awards.” But it was what Jeanne heard the students say in the film that impacted her the most. “What was interesting was that every young composer is all the same. They all say, ‘I hear it in my head.’” Jeanne says she remembers thinking: “You know what, when I get up in the morning, I don’t hear [music] in my head. And,” she said, “that’s what seems to differentiate these composers, these kids. They have this ability to hear new music in their heads.”

Taking It To The Next Level

Jeanne noted after all she had accomplished in the competition and the summer program, she still thought there could be more done, more created, to foster an environment to grow young composers. “We said we have a high school camp, why not add a college camp? Except when we sent out apps, it didn’t occur to us to put age or education limits on the thing. We got eight winners out of 120 applicants. These were world class composers and ensembles and the people who got accepted are the best younger composers. They are all in their 30s, all coming for a camp to have their music performed. It’s really, really hard to get their music performed. Hiring an orchestra is expensive.”

Jeanne remembers her excitement over a future concert with these eight composers. A concert, the inaugural Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, will be held Monday, July 12 through Sunday, July 18 in Columbia, Mo. According to the Press Releases: “The week-long series of events will include four public concerts, culminating in the world premieres of new works written by eight international composers and performed by the acclaimed new music ensemble. Alarm Will Sound at 2 p.m., Sunday, July 18 in the newly renovated Missouri Theatre Center for the Arts, 203 S. Ninth St. in downtown Columbia.”

“What kind of music will they come up with?” Jeanne asked excitedly. “This concert is going to be unbelievable. I think we will have more talent in a single place. And this is a concert performed in Missouri! We have this prize at the university, a big tuition thing, and if you win this scholarship, you also get to write an original piece that will be performed by an orchestra we would partner with. Then things kept going further and the University students were coming and saying: what about us? So I worked with different orchestras – Columbia Civic and others, encouraging them to hire composers, to invite these kids to write original pieces.”

Jeanne might be satisfied knowing her dream has resulted in eight full undergraduate rides for composers. She might be enthused about the coming compositions of the young musicians and composers she is fostering. But really, in her mind, this is just the beginning.

Support for the Composers

Jeanne discussed the opportunities for the composers in her programs. “We have our own ensemble, online or distance learning. There is an on-call composer, and he’ll help.” Jeanne’s program continues to grow, and as the students network with each other and find commonality with other young composers, the vision comes more clearly into focus. With her co-collaborators, she discovers new and interesting ways to tie the arts to music. In an annual contemporary art competition, students will write a piece of music to go along with a piece of art. “I don’t even know how I’d start about picking the music,” she smiled.

Seeing Your Dreams Through

How has Jeanne accomplished what she has for young composers nationwide? “It’s not that you just do something, you’ve really got to want to do it,” she stressed. “I figure if my grandpa can do some of the things he did, no one should use the excuses, ‘well I can’t do that because I didn’t go to the right school,’ ‘I didn’t come from a wealthy background.’ You decide you can or can’t. If you want to be an expert on something, read 100 books. I didn’t major in music, I’m not a composer. But, you can do a lot of things if you’re willing to. People can say what they want about my goal to make Mizzou a Mecca for composers, but I have eight of the best young composers there this summer. The reason our students are getting better is that they now have a bunch of friends like themselves; no one had ever met another composer. But we are developing such great musicians and composers. But we have to grow the kids up and have a place they can have their music performed. We must encourage symphonies to commission new pieces. We have to grow the audience, grow the students. Make it available.”

Jeanne’s passion is tangible. She affirmed anyone can advance causes they care about. For her, it’s been passion, drive, lots of networking and, as she put it, “sweat equity.” “People think it’s about money. Yeah, you need money to do things but you can get a lot done by some money and a lot of sweat equity. You’d be surprised what you can get done just by working on it. You see people all over the country doing amazing things, but it’s all sweat equity.”

“If I can encourage composers . . . well, that’s just what we’re really trying to do, get these areas of interest, of passion, supported.” And, she explained, “These kids are geniuses. Why wouldn’t you want to encourage a genius?”

(Springfield, Missouri)

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KTRS

Philanthropist and string base player Jeanne Sinquefield discusses her dream of making Missouri a mecca for new music composition during the 6:00 p.m. Shaw Spotlight on Saint Louis Radio Station KTRS.  The Sinquefield Charitable Foundation-sponsored Mizzzou New Music Initiative offers young composers countless opportunities.

Click Here to listen.

Excursions for the ears and heart

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