11/05/2025
So evil
A Letter from Artistic Director Matthew Robertson regarding the termination of our 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Grant:
"Last night, immediately following our first D.C. area performance of The New American Songbook, the National Endowment for the Arts sent The Thirteen a notice of termination of their 2025 grant in support of our Vocal Fellows Program. Now in its fourth year, our Vocal Fellows Program of 2025 is a career training program for early career singers who come from demographic groups that are underrepresented in our field. Our fourth class of fellows is with us now, performing in our program titled The New American Songbook. To be clear: The NEA grant for this program - the third we have proudly received - was awarded under the prior federal administration, in November 2024, and paid to us in April 2025. We are hopeful that the administration will not attempt to claw back any funding following their notice of termination. But in any event, none of our artists’ compensation is at risk; The Thirteen will fulfill our responsibilities to them regardless of federal action.
The NEA’s terminating letter reads, in part: "The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President. Funding is being allocated in a new direction in furtherance of the Administration’s agenda." Reading this statement, I admit to anger. The New American Songbook - a musical program that we had, minutes before receiving this email, finished performing - opens with In the Beginning, a seminal work by composer and first generation American Aaron Copland who is most closely associated with the “American Sound,” and includes works by women, composers of color, and works that bring attention to societal issues that are acknowledged by people of good faith across the political spectrum. Our Vocal Fellows Program seeks to extend a welcome and opportunity for early career singers who have, for far too long, not been explicitly welcomed in our art form. It is hard for me to think of many programs that “reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity” more than these two programs.
We are a professional choir and orchestra, and we warmly welcome everyone - whether Democrat, Republican, or neither - as audience members or artists. We do not - nor are we qualified to - prescribe policy solutions. Yet we share the same charge as artists from all ages: to be in dialogue with the times in which we are living and to humanize the stories we tell.
At our core, as artists, we are all storytellers. As storytellers we work to spark empathy and understanding in our audiences and among our colleagues. In the final calculation, all art that is not in service of the state - whether George Handel or George Orwell, Igor Stravinsky or Jonathan Swift - is subversive in that it seeks to build empathy, belonging, and broad community. This is our artistic heritage.
Those values of empathy, inclusion, and community are lodestars for us. And so, as should surprise nobody who knows us: We will welcome our fifth class of Vocal Fellows next year and we’re going to continue to tell the stories we feel charged to tell.
Tonight and tomorrow, I will do something I have done nearly 225 times: take the stage to make music with the artists of The Thirteen for you, our audience. Thank you for being part of this community."
Matthew Robertson
