to the Rockefeller Foundation with a background as a musician and critic.  He was born in 1931 in Teaneck, NJ, received a B.S. and M.S. in music at the Juilliard School as a scholarship student, and worked as a music teacher and pianist for dancer Jose (!) Limon.  From 1962 to 1967, Klein was a music reporter and critic for the New York Times.  He came to the foundation in 1967 as assistant director under Norman Lloyd and became the director of arts in 1973 when Lloyd left.
To understand the way in which Klein perceived his role as a funder and specifically as one of the primary and initial funders of art and artists' television, it is necessary to understand how he saw his program and role within the larger foundation itself.  He drew his models for approaching a new, unestablished field, the wide open territory of a new art form with no history or funders, from the overall history and philosophy of the Rockefeller Foundation.

After the founding of Rockefeller Institute, the foundation began to examine medical education, and the Flexner Report, which came out of that, changed forever the way medicine was taught in this country.  The Rockefeller Foundation has always stood for the green revolution.  We talk about life sciences now, but that was an experimental term in the 1930s; Warren Weaver thought h would be very important for scientists from different disciplines to work together, so he offered grants for, say, a biologist to work with a mathematician, and the DNA molecule was discovered because of Warren Weaver's grant program.  You come and you work at a place like this, and you think, "Oh God, how am I going to measure up to those people?" Now that all has to do with changing perceptions and attitudes.  You don't need a private foundation to support the status quo.  It has money that should be used to take risks.  If the foundation challenges itself at all to be pertinent, it has to think this way.  What I did was come to the organization, got the feeling of it, the spirit and history, and say, "Okey, how do you think that way in the arts?" 5

Klein saw his role as a funder within the fledgling field of media as one of both influence and response, and his role was in fact much more than simply that of a foundation officer.  He was directly involved in the establishment of a number of influential media arts organizations and programs, and he worked closely advising many organizations.  He is often described as an ideal funder by the fortunate who received funding from him and who formed, in many ways, a kind of club.  "Howard was a wonderful sort of guiding influence," says David Loxton, former director of the Television Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen,

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