Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

The Kansas City Sheet Music Collection contains over 660 titles published from 1874 to 1966. The most significant Kansas City publisher of sheet music was J.W. Jenkins' Sons Music Company, which published from the 1880s to the 1940s. Jenkins' Sons published on a national level and is perhaps best known as the publisher of Euday L. Bowman's "Twelfth Street Rag." The collection includes several notable compositions, one of which is Scott Joplin's "Original Rags," (shown right) published by the Carl Hoffman Music Company in 1899.

The collection includes several compositions that celebrate Kansas City itself. Of particular historical relevance are pieces about the Kansas City A's baseball team, Fairyland Park, the Plaza lights, Electric Park, and the city in general, such as "Kansas City Blues," "Kansas City High School Cadet March," "Kansas City My Home Town," "Kansas City Pep," and "Kansas City's Triumphal March." The collection also includes works by important local composers such as Charles L. Johnson and Lucien Denni, who formed their own publishing companies in order to publish sheet music.

Some of the more unusual publishing companies from the Kansas City area represented in the collection include the Kansas City Talking Machine Company and the Jones Dry Goods Store, the latter publishing music during the first decade of the 1900s. Publications by the Woodland Music Company represent the most recent works in the collection, containing the collegiate sports compositions of Milo Finley and items by Martha Fay.

The Senate Appropriations Committee just closed out the line item for the Cultural Partners' budgets appropriating $4.5 million additional for the Missouri Cultural Trust Fund for FY2008!! This is in addition to the core of $3.3 million, bringing the amount to a total of $7.8 million, the largest amount appropriated in the history of the Cultural Trust!

An additional $750,000 for each of the Cultural Partners was also approved - Missouri Humanities Council, Public Broadcasting, Missouri Library Networking Fund and Historical Preservation!! We will not have to go to conference to work out any differences on any of these budgets.

It is time to say THANK YOU! Please take a moment this week to contact the members of the Senate Appropriations Committee to express your appreciation. In addition, please send thank you notes and place calls to your Senator and Represenative thanking them for their support of the arts this session and explaining what the additional funding will mean to your arts organizations and community.

Contact information for your elected officials can be found by following the links below:

Missouri House of Representatives

Missouri Senate

Missouri legislators can also be reached in Jefferson City by contacting the Capitol switchboard at (573) 751- 2000.

Many thanks for all of your advocacy efforts this session and for all you do to promote the arts in Missouri!

Missouri Citizens for the Arts

He emerged from the Metro at the L'Enfant Plaza station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you?

The thing is Joshua Bell is a great violinist but he doesn’t know how to busk. There are violinists who are not even close to being as good as he is (such as Jim Grasec or Lorenzo LaRock), yet they get crowds to stop and listen to them. It’s because when you play on the street you can’t approach it as if you are playing on a stage. Busking is an art form of its own.

With just under six weeks until the end of session, both the Senate and the House have been working vigorously to approve legislation and negotiate compromises on some of the more controversial issues.

ARTS APPROPRIATION
After meeting for hours throughout the week, the Senate Appropriations Committee finished the first round of mark-up on all budget bills (HB 1 to HB 13) yesterday evening.

The Senate Appropriations Committee left all the Cultural Partners' budgets open for further debate last Wednesday, April 4, 2007. Leaving the line items open means they can come back and cut money out of the program later if they wish. If they cut the arts and the amount differs from the House budget, we will have to go to conference to work out the differences.

When session resumes on Tuesday, April 10, 2007, the committee will begin analyzing and discussing open items to determine which portions will need to be sent to conference for further debate.

For more information on the Senate Appropriations Committee, please visit:
http://www.senate.mo.gov/07info/comm/aprp.htm

SENATE
The foremost accomplishment this week was the perfection of MO HealthNet, SCS/SB 577, the Medicaid reform legislation sponsored by Senator Charlie Shields. The program is the proposed solution to replace the current Medicaid program, which sunsets in 2008. The hours of debate resulted in nineteen amendments, which included:

Adding other mental health providers (licensed under chapter 337, RSMo) in addition to psychiatrists and psychologists to the groups eligible for MO HealthNet payments.
Requiring that the Department of Social Services engage in a public process for the design, development, and implementation of MO HealthNet and that the process include input from consumers, health advocates, disability advocates and other key stakeholders parties.
Inserting section 208.659, which revises the eligibility requirements for the uninsured women’s health program to include women who are at least 18 years old and with a net family income of, at, or below 185 percent of the federal poverty level.
Attaching Representative Schaaf’s Medicaid fraud bill, HB 353, which was approved by the House earlier in the session.
Requiring hospice care to be covered under MO HealthNet.

The bill is expected to receive final approval from the Senate early next week.

HOUSE
The House endured a long, but productive week as they approved over thirty bills and debated several more. The legislation they looked at varied from licensing to transportation to immigration. Among the bills that were approved was HB 579, sponsored by Majority Leader Representative Tom Dempsey. The bill allows for the deployment of health care professionals licensed, registered, or certified in Missouri or any other state in an emergency and grants them immunity from civil damages. The bill achieved unanimous approval in the House with a vote of 159-0.

Other bills taken up by the House include:

HCS/HB 914, sponsored by Representative Jay Wasson, which contains multiple provisions relating to licensing and regulations. The bill was perfected on Tuesday and is on the House Calendar to be third read.
HCS/HB 182, sponsored by Representative Mark Bruns, which establishes the Outside the Hospital Do-Not-Resuscitate Act to permit the execution of do-not-resuscitate orders for use by emergency medical providers for patients receiving treatment outside a hospital. The bill was third read and passed by a vote of 158. It was first read in the Senate on Thursday.
HJR 19, sponsored by Representative Carl Bearden, which proposes a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a citizen's First Amendment right to pray on public property and reaffirming a citizen's right to choose any or no religion. The bill was perfected on Thursday and is on the House Calendar to be third read.
HCS/HB 497, sponsored by Representative David Sater, which establishes guidelines for the licensure and supervision of physician assistants. The bill was third read and passed by a vote of 149-8.

UPCOMING LEGISLATIVE DATES

Easter Break will be Monday, April 9. Session for both chambers will resume at 12:00 on Tuesday, April 10.
The last day to report House consent bills from a Senate committee is Thursday, April 12.
Appropriations bills must be Truly Agreed and Third Passed by Friday, May 11.

Holland's review, found on Monday's front page of The New York Times' "The Arts" section, said, "I can't think of a conductor who brings more interesting music on his visits to New York City than David Robertson."

Robertson, who according to Holland "found ways to keep our minds from wandering," employed a collection of clocks in introducing British composer George Benjamin's "Sudden Time." Holland wrote that the inventive use of ticking clocks "changed the way people thought about time and to a degree the way music thought about itself."