I am from a musical household - both my parents are professional violinists and played in the symphony when I was growing up, and my father ran - and still runs - a very successful violin studio in Canada. I had the privilege of growing up in an artistic household and witnessing both the joys and complexities of what it is to be an artist in today’s increasingly complex world. The issue of arts funding was therefore, and still is, a significant topic that has run through the course of my entire life.
Having started very young, playing violin at age 2 and piano by age 5, my life has inevitably unfolded alongside my relationship to music. I went to an arts high school in the United States at 14, and started to develop an awareness of the global nature of the arts and the international community it both engaged and enabled. Through the course of my studies, I developed a keen interest in economics and international affairs and the ways that the arts are deeply and inevitably connected to the politics, social dynamics, and economics of place.
Having lived, studied, and performed across many geographies has enabled me to develop a rich sense of how different communities and cultures navigate the issues of economics and the arts in myriad and differing ways. I have in some sense ‘collected’ experiences which have developed in me both a resilience and a curiosity. Resilience because the arts are, in many contexts, valued deeply and supported meaningfully in accordance with those values. Curiosity because in many ways we still have a long way to go to arrive at a place in which we recognise, nurture, and robustly develop the full capacity of the arts.
No matter the context or the treatment, my perspectives as shared in the recent Future of Business podcast episode emerge from a life spent wrestling with the questions any artist wrestles with: how will I continue to fund this, and what are the fundamental reasons it should be realised, developed, and further supported?
Featured image: National Knigge Piano Competition, Vancouver, Canada
