By Alison Kim

On Feb. 3, Macalester received a $400,000 grant from the Minneapolis Foundation that will fund scholarships for music majors. Each year admissions office will work with the Music Department to designate four students as the recipients of the The Jane Burkleo Memorial Scholarship. “I just got a big box full of supplementary applications,” Music Department Chair Mark Mazullo said. “This is all need-based, so if we hear a student with a lot of talent, we are going to let admissions know they should give them that Burkleo.”

The scholarship is approximately $20,000 per recipient for four years.

Currently, 20 students are pursuing music majors and annual enrollments in music courses have averaged 352 students.

“It is important to let people know they can come prepared to major in music professionally,” Mazullo said. “It also allows us to give recognition to those musically talented students who are really attracted to the liberal arts.” The scholarship endowment awarded to Macalester College is the largest grant ever to be distributed from this fund.

The namesake, Jane Burkleo, had a life-long interest in music. In 1985 she established The Jane Burkleo Scholarship Fund of The Minneapolis Foundation for “the assistance of talented persons aged eighteen years and over in the active pursuit of education or training in music.” She died in 1986 at age 97.

Established in 1915, The Minneapolis Foundation is one of the nation’s oldest and largest community foundations that invests and distributes charitable funds created by members of the community.

“The Jane Burkleo Scholarship at Macalester offers an invaluable opportunity to students with exceptional musical talent,” Provost Kathleen Murray said. “It will help to insure that such students can develop their abilities to the fullest extent in the context of an academically rigorous liberal arts education.”

This is a propitious moment for the Fine Arts at Macalester, according to Murray. Plans to strengthen the music curriculum are already underway and the Step Forward Campaign has raised $5.5 million towards the renovation of the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center.