MA 30 Profiles in Courage: Susan Feder By Joshua Simka December 2, 2014
Since her arrival at the Foundation, Feder’s recommendations—based on her extensive research, long experience in the field, and sound judgment—have yielded almost $300 million in grant money. Among projects to have taken shape on her watch are a $490,000 grant to support the development and production of new American operas at Fort Worth Opera, $1.73 million for the establishment of a composer-in-residence program at Opera Philadelphia, and $1.75 million to Opera America to promote the creation and production of new American operas. Among the largest grants were $5 million each in December of 2007 to support opera and music-theater programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (including a 2012 production of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach) and to support an endowment for new commissions and collaborations at Lincoln Center (Toshio Hosokawa’s Matsukaze in 2013 and John Adams’s oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary in 2012–13). Though it is the trustees of the Foundation who have the final say in grants awarded, the creativity and scope of the projects emanate from within her jurisdiction. Feder, who graduated from Princeton University and completed her graduate studies in music at the University of California, Berkeley, has written extensively on music. The onetime editorial coordinator of The New Grove Dictionary of American Music and program editor for the San Francisco Symphony, she serves as vice president of the Amphion Foundation, which backs American composers, and is on the boards of the Kurt Weill Foundation and Charles Ives Society. She is the dedicatee of John Corigliano’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Symphony No. 2, Augusta Read Thomas’s Helios Choros, and Joan Tower’s Dumbarton Oaks Quintet. Copyright © 2025, Musical America |