Analysis: Fresno’s Keyboard Concerts is nationally acclaimed. So how did it get such a low Measure P score?

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Before going any further, let’s look at the big picture.

(Full disclosure: The Munro Review, which received $26,200 from Measure P in 2024 for projects that included continued expanded coverage of Measure P, applied in 2025 but was not awarded any funding.)

• Measure P money will soon go out to 134 organizations and projects that were awarded grants in 2025.

• Keyboard was one of 61 applicants, out of 195, that came up empty handed. In its grant category, Keyboard got the lowest score of 44 applicants.

• Many of the people involved in 2025’s controversies are looking ahead to 2026. Their pressing question: Will established, so-called legacy, organizations continue to get 80% of Measure P funds? Newer or “emerging” arts organizations plus individual artists will certainly keep demanding a change in that funding formula.

And Keyboard? It’s trying to come to terms with the big rejection of its application for $100,000 to pay pianists’ fees over two seasons (2025-26 and 2026-27). “It was made clear to us that an international caliber series such as Keyboard Concerts is not appreciated or wanted for Fresno,” Andreas Werz, president and artistic director of Keyboard, said. “Fresno just doesn’t want to appear on the musical cultural map of the world.”

Operating on a total budget of roughly $100,000 per year, Keyboard presents eight concerts a season. Reducing that number might be a consequence of not getting Measure P money, Werz said.

If classical piano music isn’t your interest, you might not appreciate what Keyboard brings to Fresno. I put myself in that category, at least I did until I attended the Oct. 24 performance of Hayato Sumino, a Japanese virtuoso, at Fresno State’s Concert Hall. It was my first Keyboard concert, but the series dates to 1972, when the late Philip Lorenz, a professor of piano at Fresno State, started the series.

Sumino is a rock star in the world of classical piano. He played at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2024 and has 1.3 million YouTube followers. An audience of 360 that varied in age, ethnicity and race packed Fresno State’s Concert Hall for Sumino’s performance. It looked to me like a cross section of Fresno’s population, and we were treated to a dynamic performance.

Coming off that experience, I found it hard to reconcile what panelists wrote about Keyboard in their individual evaluations of its application. The five panelists were William Freeney, Courtney Hill, Anthony Radford, Christina Soto and Mireles-Guerrero. Only Radford and Mireles-Guerrero responded when I reached out for comment.

Keyboard got a summary of the five panelists’ written comments from the Fresno Arts Council and then provided that summary, upon request, to The Munro Review. The summary does not identify which panelist wrote which comment.

Possible bias

Here are the comments that I believe suggest possible bias:

• With editorial comment, a panelist wrote: “If this concert has happened for the last 53 years (repeated ad nauseum) why does the Series need Fresno City taxpayer-funded grant money now?”

My analysis: The Covid 19 pandemic kneecapped many arts organizations, and they’re only beginning to reclaim lost audiences and regain financial stability. That’s a big reason that Keyboard – along with San Joaquin Valley Town Hall, Care Fresno, Dulce UpFront and many other established organizations – applied for project grants under Measure P. Town Hall, Care Fresno and Dulce all received grants.

As to the ad nauseum comment, Keyboard referenced “53 years” eight times in its application.

• Critically, a panelist wrote: “I find it disingenuous to say the project targets ‘the entire population of Fresno.’ There is not effort to help disadvantaged Fresno residents attend – only a blanket promise of free admission by prior arrangement for local students. There is not teaching of an art, only the opportunity to watch it performed and have a short dialogue afterward.”

My analysis: Teaching art is not a requirement of Measure P. I’d venture to say a majority of 2025 grant recipients – ranging from the Fresno Philharmonic Orchestra to The Smiley G. Stand-Up Evening of Comedy and Open Mic Show – do not teach art.

• A panelist wrote critically: Fresno residents won’t learn how to play a musical instrument from attending a Keyboard concert, “and watching world class musicians perform on a stage (or in an orchestra pit) does little to inspire the attendees to think, ‘I could do that.’ The concerts come; the concerts go. Nothing changes.”

My analysis: First, Keyboard doesn’t purport to teach anybody to play an instrument. Second, how can this panelist know that audience members are not inspired? I recalled two young people – a girl and a boy who appeared to be Hispanic tweens – who chose to sit in the front row at the Sumino concert. They seemed to listen intently during the performance. What were they thinking? Of course, I couldn’t know, but neither could the panelist who scoffed at the idea of someone finding inspiration at a performance.

• In a strongly worded comment, a panelist quoted Keyboard saying in its application that all arts organizations in Fresno face increased competition from other entertainment opportunities and “the dangerously strong draw of digital and electronic distraction.” The panelist wrote: “The elitist condescension in the dismissal of other modes of music or other art as ‘the dangerously strong draw of digital and electronic distraction’ is so egregious it drips off the page.”

My analysis: Using the loaded term “elitist condescension” sidesteps today’s reality: digital media does offer stiff competition to in-person forms of entertainment. One side note: Mireles-Guerrero – who did not make the “elitist” comment – said in her written comments that Keyboard did not explain how it would compete with or use Measure P money to overcome the distraction of video games and other electronic media.

After the five panelists completed their individual evaluations, including written comments, they met with staff of the Fresno Arts Council to discuss the applications. Only applicants could be spectators at the meetings, which were recorded by the Arts Council.

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I wanted to know what was said at the meeting where Keyboard was discussed, so I filed a Public Records Act request with the Fresno City Attorney’s Office and eventually received a copy of the recording. The recording was largely inaudible until it went through sound-enhancing software, and even then, not all comments were clear because of garbling and gaps in the recording.

From what I could make out, the panelists were more tempered in their public comments compared to what some of them wrote. Even so, panelist Radford – who told me he considers Keyboard an artistic “crown jewel” – was surprised at how quickly things went south for Keyboard. “We launched out of the gate in a negative way, and I didn’t really understand where this was coming from,” he wrote in an email.

Radford added: “The fact that Keyboard concerts bring in a level of art that is the best in the world didn’t sway [other panelists] to score the project very highly. But I learned that not everyone sees things the same way I do!” (Side note: Radford is a music professor at Fresno State, but, he said, he has nothing to do with Keyboard other than attending its concerts.)

I asked Radford and Mireles-Guerrero whether a person (like me) could read the written comments of the panelists and reasonably come to the conclusion that there was bias against Keyboard?

Radford responded: “Well, I’m not sure anyone can avoid bias. But my approach was to evaluate the application the best I could with what they presented.” (Radford put those words in bold.) In other words, he was stuck with what Keyboard wrote in its grant application

Mireles-Guerrero disagreed with the idea that Keyboard’s application suffered because of bias. “I think they applied assuming we would just know everything they were doing,” she said.

It’s clear that Keyboard didn’t help itself with its application. For example, it twice repeated the same vague statement about working to provide all elementary school students a chance to attend a concert for free without giving details to flesh out that effort. Logical questions went unanswered in the application. Has the outreach to students worked? How many students have come? How would students get to the concerts? (The transportation issue was a concern for panelists.)

Werz, Keyboard’s artistic director, offered no comment except to say: “I don’t see our application having been inadequate.”

Meanwhile, Mireles-Guerrero was pointed in her written comments about Keyboard saying it reaches out to students and music teachers. Keyboard ignores “the fact that most marginalized classrooms often see music and art funding cut first and may not have music teachers.” She said Keyboard’s responses on this issue were “lazy” and “blatantly disregard the inequities in access to the arts.”

On the question of how Keyboard addresses diversity – an issue all applicants were asked about – it seemed like Lilia Gonzáles Chávez, executive director of the Fresno Arts Council, tried to make up for what Keyboard didn’t say. According to the recording, she told panelists that Keyboard selects diverse performers but added that Keyboard “missed an opportunity” by not including the information in its grant application.

A side note: That kind of information prompted panelist Soto to tell me in September that Gonzáles Chávez showed bias in favor of Keyboard. Soto’s point: panelists were told to consider only what was in an application and Gonzáles Chávez sometimes went beyond that. Mireles-Guerrero agreed with Soto and told me: “It did seem like [Gonzáles Chávez] was trying to convince us to give [Keyboard] more slack when we were very specifically told not to do that for other applications.”

Was Gonzáles Chávez providing background information or was she trying to tip the scale towards Keyboard? I found it difficult to reach a conclusion from the problematic recording. But whatever perceived boosterism she might have displayed, it would seem to pale in comparison to the hostile comments from some panelists.

What happens now?

For Keyboard, there’s the question of whether it will apply for Measure P funding in 2026. “How many times do we want to get rejected?” Werz said. (In 2024, Keyboard applied for $25,000 in Measure funds, but it erred in not submitting all necessary documents and its application wasn’t considered.)

For the Measure P program, bias training could occur before the 2026 grants are awarded next year, according to Laura Ward, vice chair of the Fresno Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission, which awards the arts grants. Ward also serves as chair of the Commission’s Cultural Arts Subcommittee, which recommended the bias training.

There’s impressive precedent for such training. The California Arts Council incorporates implicit bias training in its grants program, and that education helps “bring awareness to the internal preferences, aversions, and predispositions which influence how things are valued and judged,” Ward said.

While not commenting on the scoring of Keyboard’s application, Ward acknowledged that bias was evident during this year’s Measure P deliberations.“Some of the public comments given at commission meetings demonstrated panelist bias, such as believing legacy organizations should only seek funding from other sources, and that they were not the intended recipients of these funds,” she said.
Ward added: “It is likely that beliefs like this led to some of the surprising grant scoring outcomes.” She concluded that Measure P “would benefit from a stronger panelist education program, before applications are reviewed and discussed.”

The Cultural Arts Subcommittee also has discussed ideas that would seem to enhance the cultural competence of scoring panelists. Those ideas include finding panelists – possibly from outside of Fresno – who have experience with arts and culture grants.

The need for greater cultural competence came to light this year during deliberations of the Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission. Elizabeth Laval, president of the Fresno City & County Historical Society, told the Commission in September about a glaring example.

She said a scoring panel penalized a museum for not proposing to hire artists even though that was never the museum’s intention, a fact that the panelists did not seem to understand. Laval said she was “appalled” at comments made by some of those panelists at a public meeting with the Fresno Arts Council staff. (The panelists in question were not the ones who scored Keyboard.) Laval’s solution: Find experts in arts and culture from outside the region to score applications.

I spoke to Laval this week and she told me the arts community had deep concerns this year about the way panelists were selected, trained and scored. “It goes way beyond one application,” she said. “The concerns were pervasive, and the Commission and the Fresno Arts Council heard the concerns.