New Exhibition: Arts Advocacy in Action

Arts Advocacy in Action: The Future of Music Coalition logo showing a hand grasping a musical note above the Washington D. C. skyline

Visit a new Library exhibition, Arts Advocacy in Action: The Future of Music Coalition, located in the Leon Robbin Gallery in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections. The exhibition highlights work by the Future of Music Coalition (FMC), which was co-founded in June 2000 by two Georgetown graduates, Michael Bracy (COL 90) and Jenny Toomey (COL 90). Toomey identified herself as a punk rocker, Bracy was working as a lobbyist. Joining them was a lawyer (Walter McDonough), a technology expert (Brian Zisk) an economist (Peter Dicola) and a public policy expert (Kristin Thompson). Concerned about the changes wrought by new entities such as Napster, this group designed their non-profit organization along the lines of a think-tank, dedicated to bringing together independent musicians and leading experts in technology, public policy, and intellectual property law.

The exhibition was curated by Professor Anna Harwell Celenza, the Thomas E. Caestecker Professor of Music at Georgetown University and the author of several scholarly books, including Jazz Italian Style: From Its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra(2017), Music as Cultural Mission: Explorations of Jesuit Practices in Italy and North America (2014) and Hans Christian Andersen and Music: The Nightingale Revealed (2005). Her work has also appeared in The Hopkins Review, Musical Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Music, Notes, The Cambridge Companion to Liszt (2005), and Franz Liszt and His World (2006) and The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington (2014) . In addition to her scholarly work, she has authored a series of award-winning children's books with Charlesbridge Publishing: The Farewell Symphony (2000), Pictures at an Exhibition (2003), The Heroic Symphony (2004), Bach's Goldberg Variations (2005), Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (2006), Duke Ellington's Nutcracker Suite (2011), Vivaldi's Four Seasons (2012), Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre (2013) and a 14-part syndicated series on Louis Armstrong for the NC Press Foundation. Her work has been featured on nationally syndicated radio and TV programs, including NPR's "Todd Mundt Show", BBC's "Music Matters" and "Proms Broadcasts", and C-Span's "Book-TV". Before coming to Georgetown she served as a writer and guest commentator for Michigan Public Radio and NPR's "Performance Today."