Yale School of Music Photo
Ellen Battell and Carl Stoeckel
The Financial Times’ Harry Eyers has lauded the Yale Summer School of Music-Norfolk Chamber Music Festival for its staying power. In an Aug. 17 column in which he reflected on “ways of making a cultural legacy last,” Eyers cited the festival and the BBC Proms as examples of doing just that.
Whereas “the BBC Proms … is one of the great survivors and adjusters … (having) changed patronage and building,” Eyers wrote, “the legacy of Ellen Battell Stoeckel, which sustains the Yale University summer music school and festival in Norfolk, Connecticut … is cultural patronage on the U.S. model, involving private philanthropy rather than public subsidy. But you could hardly say the Battell legacy was not public-spirited.”
“Battell’s masterstroke,” Eyers wrote, “was to leave a watertight will in which the family fortune was to be used for the running of a summer music school by Yale.”
While he acknowledged that “there is more than one successful way” to make “a cultural legacy last,” Eyers did suggest that “there is one way in which the Proms trump the Norfolk Festival, and that is in diversity of audience (Proms mixed, Norfolk mainly older and almost entirely white).”
Read Eyers Financial Times column here.