Doing Well, Then Doing Good.

BY THE TIME you read this, yet another independent bookstore in my neighborhood will have closed, the victim, say its owners, of online competition and escalating rents--equal, here in Silicon Valley, to Manhattan rates for commercial real estate. A piano store has also gone out of business, as has a music store that displayed, well, scores of scores in its window.

The bookstore is to be replaced by a chain store that sells everything for walkers. In other words, stuff you may have never known you needled in order to put one foot in front of the other, like walking shoes whose tongues are cushioned with fine yak hair, or socks knitted from hummingbird feathers, or pert little walking caps specially imported from Liechtenstein, or genuine parchment-printed walking maps of the neighborhood, where a pretty two-bedroom house selling for, no fooling, a million dollars is then torn down to build a bigger, not as pretty house in a community that, despite its vaunted desirability, daily grows more homogenized, more vapid, more, shall we say, artless.

It's depressing, given the region's wealth, and not just in dot-coms and other high-tech enterprises. This community's riches can also be measured in the many cultures of the people who have come here to work in high technology, and--at least until they can no longer find affordable housing--raise their families. This county, Santa Clara, is the most ethnically diverse in America, I learned at the Arts Build Community conference, presented annually by the Community Foundation Silicon Valley, which promotes philanthropy by individuals and corporations. Of the foundation's four focus areas, the hardest sell is the arts. The highest level of giver interest is in education, said spokeswoman Michelle McGurk. "That makes it challenging for groups like the ballet," she said, understatement discernible in her voice.

Conference participants learned how to write better grant applications; I learned how many devoted artists and heroic community activists have carved out a place for their passion. There are ballet troupes, opera companies, theater groups, a Peace Chorale, a haiku poetry group and a Mexican folk troupe, Los Lupenos, that's been going on for twenty years and is currently working with Carlos Orta of the Jose Limon company on a modern piece. One American Indian group is working with commuter train representatives to find alternatives to spraying the railroad's right-of-way with weedkiller, which destroys the grasses they still use to weave their baskets.

So how do we stack these arts groups, these baskets, against the million-dollar teardowns and the decimation of shops and venues for the arts and literature? How do we raise consciousness and encourage giving to the arts? How are the culture and the multi-culture going to hold up?

There are a few encouraging signs--and sounds. The sweetest is from Resonate, a Silicon Valley software maker that has done well and is now doing good. At its initial public offering, or IPO, last August, Resonate took $1.1 million in directed shares of its stock and launched the Resonate Foundation. The very first grant from that foundation, $30,000, went to Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley to help its dancers, precipitously relocated from Cleveland (where they were part of the Cleveland San Jose Ballet), with deposits on their apartments and half the first month's rent.

"It was brought to our attention: Here's an organization that urgently needs help," said Ken Schroeder, Resonate's president and CEO. He noted wryly, "Dance companies are one of the worst investments you can make. They need scenery, they need costumes, they need supplies for an entire season." But it didn't stop his foundation from stepping up.

"We're not typical," said Schroeder. "But it's been an observation on our part that the arts in general are not getting what we would expect, given the notion of wealth in the Valley." He laughingly deflected questions about his age. But if he were the typical IPO-cyberkid-in-a-Boxster, he'd likely be less arts-aware, and the dancers of San Jose might be living at the Y.

Schroeder is 52 and in his youth was basted in the arts. He went to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and studied violin in Juilliard's pre-college division. He'd always been interested, he said, in music as well as science, but at Juilliard, "I ran into Pinchas Zuckerman and found out that he was a genius and I was not." No problem, he said. "I enjoy engineering as much as the arts. When I went to CCNY for my engineering degree, I drove cabs, arranged music and played in string quartets."

Since joining Resonate in 1998, Schroeder, who went to dance as well as classical music events in New York, has hit a lot of opera in San Francisco but has had time for little else, "other than naming our conference rooms after major composers." He finds many alliances between technology and music. "There are pattern-matching issues that music and technology follow," he said. And he mentioned studies that suggested a correlation between exposing pregnant women to music and their children being born with higher IQs. "It's great to expose children to the arts to help them develop," Schroeder said, adding that when more of that happens, "I think you'll find a lot more charity and philanthropy directed toward the arts."

When Fortune magazine named Resonate one of its hot new companies for the year 2000, Schroeder and the company's founder were pictured in tails and a Deadhead outfit, respectively. Their Web site, www.resonate.com, is decked out with French horns. The name of the company, said Schroeder, "is a double entendre. `Resonate' means the harmony created by different elements working together. We act as a conductor for Internet services, making them work in harmony, like an orchestra." Or maybe like a ballet company whose dancers have been welcomed into a new home.