The Densest Music Ever?
“Black MIDI,” a subculture of electronic music remixing that mutated into existence in Japan five years ago, is an aesthetic snapshot of the early 21st century if there ever was one. It’s digital, viral, and truly “multimedia”–because it’s music, data visualization, and software demonstration at once.
Arundhati Roy: Activist Fiction
“I got into trouble in the past for my nonfiction, and I swore, ‘I’m never going to write anything with a footnote again.’ “
Rising New York Rents Pushing Artists Out Of The City
Being studioless, some have put their art careers aside. Others have begun to ask: If they can’t afford gritty, unglamorous Industry City, then where?
“Inherent Dullness”: A Young Man Goes To An Orchestra Concert
“I had trouble enjoying myself. My brother did too. This by no means is to suggest that the orchestra itself was poor. Perhaps me and my bro are just uncultured, southern swine. More likely it was just not for us (and by extension a lot of people in my age range). I enjoy symphony music. I have a playlist of classical music on my Spotify. But I thought sitting and watching the orchestra play has an inherent dullness.”
Why Ravel Was An (Almost) Great Composer
“Everything in Ravel’s music is held at a distance, as it was in his life. Just think what iron discipline and self-denial it must have taken, to keep the messy intimacies of life at bay. There’s a similar denial in the music. You always know where the music’s heading; there’s no sense of discovery or risk.”
Oh… So You Thought You Were Supposed To Read Those Books On Your Shelf
“A survey has found that half of an average home’s 138 books go unread. I’m surprised it is as low as a half. Books aren’t meant to be read.”
How Science Is Trying To Look Inside Your Soul
If you think of your self as an essence—something you’d describe with adjectives like “unified,” “continuous,” and “unchanging”—well, science has some bad news for you.
The New World Trade Center – A Panoramic View From The Top Of The World
“No doubt the new building’s official dedication will open the way to a necessary debate over its merits as architecture and urbanism, its turbulent design history and the compromises made over the long years it took to get the thing built. But in one important respect, One World Trade Center has already succeeded. It has reclaimed the sky. And this is the view from there.”
The Art World’s Most Narcissistic Exercise Is About To Commence (Can’t Wait)
“The Biennial is the most purely narcissistic of all New York art world events, an orgy of navel-gazing that can leave a bad feeling—a sense of unease, if not disgust.”
Japan’s “Beethoven” Apologizes
“Ditching his trademark long hair and sunglasses, a clean-cut Mamoru Samuragochi repeatedly bowed in shame before a packed press conference in a Tokyo hotel, where some dubious reporters dragged along hearing-impairment experts to assess the mock maestro.”
Loss, Betrayal, and Inaccuracy: A Translator’s Handbook
“If this much loss comes with the translation of a single word, it’s hard to imagine the worlds that are lost with the rendering of an entire novel. But the crucial thing to remember – I often tell myself – is that it doesn’t matter. Loss is invisible; it is what makes it through the net that matters.”
Why Do We Find Some Languages More Beautiful Than Others?
Bernd Brunner (aggrieved): “People often describe German, my native language, as hard and aggressive. They relish criticizing its guttural sounds, long compound words, and the sentence structure … According to popular accounts, it was five hundred years ago when the apparently polyglot Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, declared ‘I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.’”
When James Met Jean-Jacques: How Rousseau Cured Boswell of Calvinism
“Boswell had been raised in the dour Church of Scotland, where the worst of Scottish weather and Scottish Calvinism met to form a perfect storm of fear and trembling.” And so, while on the Grand Tour, the young man turned to the author of Emile and The Social Contract, who had “succeeded in the redoubtable task of uniting, if only on the subject of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Catholics and Protestants, monarchic France and republican Geneva.”
Why Robert Ashley Was a Great Opera Composer (And Why So Few Americans Knew of Him)
For a start, it’s because his approach to writing opera was, as he wrote, “Put aside intelligibility, put aside urgency of plot. Put in embellishment. Put in Maria Callas and Patsy Cline and Billie Holiday.” Mark Swed explains.
Reports of Kiri Te Kanawa’s Retirement Are Greatly Exaggerated
While she did just make her last opera appearance, she says, “One door closes and another door opens but as to retiring, I’ve never ever had that word in my vocabulary. Only thing is that other people have got it in their vocabulary because they can’t think of anything else to say.”
Whatever Happened To Qatar’s Once-Budding Film Industry?
“In Doha, there was once a buzzing festival and schemes to nurture local talent, but now much of the the money in the Qatari film business goes to projects elsewhere.”
‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Coming to Broadway For Sixth Time
Bartlett Sher will direct the musical’s latest incarnation in the fall of 2015. No casting has been announced, though the director has reportedly talked informally with Broadway stalwart Danny Burstein about playing Tevye.
Ex-Orchestra CEO in Silicon Valley Indicted for Embezzlement
“Stephen Jay Carlton, the former executive director of the Los Altos-based Peninsula Symphony, is facing felony charges for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the nonprofit organization, prosecutors said Wednesday.”
See the Dance Films From the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle
“Thanks to a collaboration between Gaumont Pathé archives, La Cinémathèque Française, and sound-recording expert Henri Chamoux, 34 of the original films [shown at the Exposition's newfangled Phono-Cinéma] have been beautifully restored.” (includes clips)
A Century of Dance in America, On Walls in Washington
Alastair Macaulay visits the “exuberantly diverse” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, “Dancing the Dream”, which features everyone from Vernon and Irene Castle to Rudolf Nureyev to Shirley Maclaine to Isadora Duncan to Mark Morris to Twyla Tharp to John Travolta to Gypsy Rose Lee.
Wilmington, NC to Get Its First Opera Company
“Opera Wilmington is now formally incorporated and is applying for federal non-profit status … Plans now call for the company to mount a production of Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow, in English, July 25-27 … with a cast of student and local singers.”
An African-American ‘Annie’ (Why Didn’t Anyone Think of This Before?)
Columbia Pictures is producing the remake for release this coming holiday season, with stars Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild) and Jamie Foxx. (includes trailer)
Today’s Universities Are Broken. So How Do We Fix Them?
“It’s clear that universities will have to figure out the balance between commercial relevance and basic research, as well as how to prove their value beyond being vehicles for delivering content. But lost in the shuffle of commentary here is something arguably more important than and yet containing all of these factors: culture.”
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Executive Director, Western Folklife Center
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Detroit Symphony EarShot New Music Readings & Workshops
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Master of Arts in Arts Administration – Goucher College
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Broadway Joke: Adele Dazeem Now Substituting For Idina Menzel
“In a social media joke circulating on Twitter, a fake playbill notice for the Broadway musical “If/Then” states that its star, Idina Menzel, will be replaced by her alter-ego, Adele Dazeem.”
Venezuela’s Artists Increasingly Speaking Out Against Government
“From pop culture to high culture, Venezuela’s conflict is leading actors, artists, athletes and fashion designers to voice their support for the antigovernment protesters, with a minority backing President Nicolás Maduro.”
The Power Of Music: For Good AND For Bad
Music is power. In his 2010 book on noise and silence, George Prochnik asked a series of provocative questions that began with this one: “Is it really true that all our reactions to sound are dictated by simple equations: loud, low sounds equal something powerful, so be scared or be prepared to mate; soft, little sounds equals something small, so be calm, be prepared to mate, or both?”
How Our “What Is Art?” Debate Got Going In The Wrong Direction
“To a large extent, the art world today represents the institutionalization of Duchamp’s early-twentieth-century pranks. The great irony is that Duchamp intended not to extend the boundaries of art but to short-circuit the entire project of aesthetic delectation.”
11th Century Indian Sculpture In Toledo Museum May Have Been Stolen
“The Toledo Museum of Art said it saw no signs of trouble when it bought the small bronze statue of a Hindu deity in 2006 from a New York dealer now charged in India. The statue resembles an idol now listed as stolen in India.”
Russian Court Reduces Sentence Of Man Convicted In Bolshoi Acid Attack
“Pavel Dmitrichenko, a Bolshoi soloist, was convicted in December of organizing the attack and sentenced to six years in prison. The Moscow City Court on Thursday reduced his sentence by six months to 5½ years.”
Big Concerns About The Scale Of Massive Picasso Restorations In Paris
“What comes as a truly horrible surprise is that all of Picasso’s 5,000 works have been “cleaned, restored and reframed” for the opening. It beggars belief that some urgent “conservation” necessity should have struck all of these modern works at the same time.”
Stunning Move: Getty Images Makes 35 Million Images Free On The Web
“Getty’s not doing this out of the good of its heart. It recognizes that images on the Internet are treated as de facto public domain by many people on social networks, blogs, and the scummier parts of the content web. It knows it’s highly unlikely to ever get significant money out of any of those people.”
Canadian Theatres Have Their Own Pipelines (Or Do They?)
“Has the theatre pipeline that supplies Canada’s regionals really sprung a leak? One piece of good news is that, this season, for the first time in recent memory, the most-seen new play in the country hasn’t been a recent Broadway or West End hit, but one born in Toronto.”
Denver’s New Cultural Plan: Lots More Art In The City
“The plan calls for more art in just about every venue within city reach, from its buildings and theaters to its parks and even the streets themselves. In addition, it lays the groundwork for more funding of art projects, as well as incentives for planners and developers who make art a priority.”
This Year’s PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize Finalists
This year’s judges were Madison Smartt Bell, Manuel Muñoz and Achy Obejas. They considered more than 400 titles published by American authors in 2013.
The People Who Bought Charles Ives’ House (And What They’re Doing To It)
“They have not just [hired] renovation architects, they’ve got restoration architects – historical, sensitive architectural work going on, so things are improved without changing.”