In Sunday's Spotlight section, my column is about my recent trip to New York City to attend the National Endowment for the Arts classical music/opera institute. We covered lots of issues during the 10 days, and I wanted to at least touch on some of them in digest form. Some I'm sure I'll be pursuing for future stories, and others I just wanted to pass along.

Plus, I wasn't going to let you get away without me rhapsodizing about my list of all the Broadway shows I saw. More on that at the end of the post. First, about the music:

DIMINISHING SUPPORT?
Essentially, we're coming off an era in which there was unprecedented broad financial support for the arts from government and foundations. The Ford Foundation alone, with its historic gifts to orchestras in the 1960s, was almost singlehandedly responsible for creating a new "musician class" in which players in medium-sized cities were actually able to make decent livings. This was a major point emphasized by the institute's co-director, Joseph Horowitz, who wrote the book "Classical Music in America." (Some people say, in fact, that there are too many orchestras playing in venues that are too large -- creating an oversupply of product.) Now foundations like Ford are shifting priorities away from classical music. To survive in the future, orchestras will have to find more individuals to support them rather than institutions.