CommonWealth Beacon
Politics, ideas, and civic life in Massachusetts 
Republish
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You are free to republish the text of this article both online and in print. We ask that you follow some simple guidelines:
- You must use the HTML code provided below.
- You must republish the whole story, credit us appropriately, and, if you’re republishing CommonWealth Beacon stories online, include a link to our original publication page.
- You can’t sell the work separately or grant downstream publication rights to other republishers.
- Please note that images are not included in this blanket license as in most cases we are not the copyright owner.
Our full Republishing Policy can be found here.
by CommonWealth Beacon staff, CommonWealth Beacon
December 15, 2025
Sign up for The Saturday Send, CommonWealth Beacon’s weekly newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on essential Massachusetts news.
THE HOLIDAYS MEAN more people than usual may find Tchaikovsky’s music waltzing through their heads on sugar plum feet, but classical music does not have a reputation as the most accessible or diverse art form. And a decades-old Boston area program aimed at expanding who hears and plays classical musical found that very mission put it and other arts programs on the chopping block for federal grants.
Project STEP, which gives students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds classic string training, lost $55,000 pledged from the National Endowment for the Arts, and programs across the state aimed at expanding access to the arts saw similar cuts.
In March, it was estimated that around 150 programs are losing more than $5 million in grants, according to the Boston Globe. The rationale offered in letters was that the funding would be redirected to “projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.”
Élider DiPaula, a Brazilian-born composer and new executive director of Project STEP, took the helm six months after the NEA cuts were announced. He came to Boston from Chicago, where he founded and led Project 88 Music Academy — a Chicago area organization aimed at “revitalizing classical music” through building up new generations of artists and diversifying audiences.
“We want to normalize people feeling comfortable with who they are, to act how they are, and to produce the art that they want,” DiPaula told CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jennifer Smith on The Codcast. “Of course there are constraints, and I think politics is to help establish some of those constraints. But when the policies are solely to suppress a group — to quiet a few communities — that becomes a bad type of political move, and we don’t partake in that type of agenda. We want to expand. We don’t want to oppress.”
Project STEP was founded in the 1980s by a former member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which was struggling to find musicians from underrepresented groups to audition for open spots. A significant problem, he and others realized, was the pipeline itself.
“We as a society, as a group, as a nation, do not support a foundational step in in the development of a child,” DiPaula said. “We do have the demand,” he said of aspiring young string musicians. “We don’t have the skillset built on par with what is expected of them.”
Project STEP’s core program is available for students from underrepresented or marginalized backgrounds in 1st through 12th grades and involves intensive string instruments training through private lessons, orchestra rehearsals, and public performances. And the price tag for running the program is steep — a 12-year music education through Project STEP costs about $140,000 roughly for each student, according to the 2025-2028 strategic plan. The annual $350 fee, which may be mostly covered by financial aid, covers about 5 percent of the actual direct instruction costs.
NEA funding is not a main pillar of the program, but losing grants they have relied on for at least 25 years “creates a strain” that then needs to be offset by individual supporters, DiPaula said. People are aware of the issue now, he said, and are trying to offset the loss, but that can be difficult to sustain.
“I think the administration knew that could be the case,” he said of the surge in community support, “but they also understand that it’s not sustainable in the long run. And they hope that the longer they hold this funding from organizations that we are going to exhaust our donors, exhaust our supporters. And they hope that we are going to collapse in that way.”
Other programs have reeled and scrambled to fill the gaps though emergency fundraisers.
For DiPaula, the political backlash cycles against certain types of arts is becoming “predictable” — not easy but possible to weather. Doing so requires getting support from the same communities they’ve worked to build and expand.
“We see that same type of problem recurring, and with time and experience, we’ve learned how to manage this,” DiPaula said. “And I think one thing they’re not accounting for, when they make those plans to attack us, is that we are resilient.”
On the episode, DiPaula discusses the loss of grant funding (7:00), what it means to have equity in mind in the classical music world (16:00), and the politics of art (25:00).
Submit a Tip
