Leslie Sprout, a candidate for the Ph.D. in the History and Literature program in the Department of Music, is writing a dissertation entitled New Music and State Support for the Arts in France, 1938- 1945. Having researched the French government’s innovative decision to fund contemporary music in 1938, and having followed that program through to the immediate post-war period, Sprout is particularly interested in the dissertation in the continuities between past and present concerns in French musical life and in the broad aesthetic and political implications of state support for the arts in contemporary society.