This isn’t just a problem in composition – but, as other arts start to figure out how to support primary caregivers and their creativity, new music can get it together too.
Archives for April 2017
Top AJBlogs From The Weekend Of 04.30.17
Black Eye Porn
“Normally The Guardian publishes all of Rowson’s cartoons, but I don’t think this one. He mailed it to Heathcote who forwarded it to me. Heathcote wrote the lines when I asked him.” — Gerard … read more
AJBlog: Straight|UpPublished 2017-04-28
On charging admission at the Met
The New York Times reported that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is looking at options to make its “suggested” entry fee into something a little stronger than a hint, at least for people who live … read more
AJBlog: For What it’s WorthPublished 2017-04-28
Nora and the mansplainer
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway premiere of A Doll’s House, Part 2. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Hugh Kenner defined conceptual art as that which, once described, need not be … read more
AJBlog: About Last NightPublished 2017-04-28
The ‘Garden Bridge’ Is Dead, And Those Who Proposed It (Should) Owe The British Public Millions Of Pounds
How did it get so far in the first place? “Varnished with a Kevlar coating of celebrity sparkle, Bullingdon Club backing and architectural fairy dust, the garden bridge has always seemed capable of surviving every missile of common sense thrown at it. For three years it has been fiercely opposed by supporters of gardens and bridges alike, of which this vanity project was clearly never either.”
The Next Hot Thing In Opera?
Why don’t we know more about Giacomo Meyerbeer? “Few things could be further from the same old arias than Meyerbeer (1791-1864). Hardly a corner of the repertory has grown mustier, a puzzling development given the composer’s prominence during his lifetime. In his heyday, Meyerbeer was a uniquely powerful hitmaker, as well as an innovator who brought opera to new levels of orchestral color, dramatic scale, choral mass, historical richness and theatrical dazzle.”
Canadian Theatre Needs To Go Way Beyond A Hashtag
The deal: “I want a contemporary colour palette. I want the people of the world that I see around me to be telling those stories. That homogenous world that I see onstage [traditionally]? It’s just not my world. I don’t recognize that.”
Vito Acconci, Architect And Performance Artist, Has Died At 77
His move from performance artist (his most famous piece, “Seedbed,” included him lying beneath a false floor in a gallery, masturbating and speaking to gallery visitors over a hidden mic) to architect “confused his peers and caused his profile in the art world to recede, to the point where many younger artists who were indirectly influenced by his work had little idea who had created it. In his later years, Mr. Acconci sometimes agonized over this situation, but he said he had no choice but to follow his interests where they took him.”
How Would A Writers’ Strike Affect TV Shows?
Late-night would suffer first, and badly. SNL? Good luck. Daytime soaps? Probably kill them all, likely forever. The Walking Dead? Well … maybe the strike won’t last that long.
The Tate Asked Office Workers To Pitch In To Buy A Sailboat For Departing Director Nicholas Serota
That went over really well among the staff. “The timing was awkward. The call for contributions came as the Tate group, which operates four museums and art galleries across the country, was in pay negotiations with staff.”
The Ukrainian Dancer Who Has Become An Actor And A Star On (Of Course) ‘The Americans’
Irina Dvorovenko plays a Russian woman who finds herself depressed and lonely in the U.S. It’s a big difference from being a principal for American Ballet Theatre, but not so different from her youth: “Ms. Dvorovenko, born in 1973, grew up in Ukraine with dancer parents and studied gymnastics before entering ballet school at 10. For her, the show’s time period has brought back a flood of memories. Many have to do with hunting for food. (In the transcript of our interview, that word comes up 21 times.)”
Suddenly, Composers Are Taking Over The Pop Music (Festival) World
The revenge of the school orchestra? No, seriously: “You can now scarcely move at big music events without bumping into a 30-piece woodwind section. If DJs are the new rock stars it’s looking suspiciously like composers might be outflanking them all.”
When A Larger Power (Read, Russia) Has Erased Your Country’s Cooking Heritage, What Do You Do?
Turn to a 19th-century cookbook by a princess, of course: Princess Barbare Jorjadze’s book, Georgian Cuisine and Tried Housekeeping Notes, “has long been a prized household possession. … Georgian chefs now increasingly consult Jorjadze’s book for forgotten flavors, many of them obliterated by the Soviet Union’s homogenizing influence.”
The French Capital Of Lacemaking Has Become The French Capital Of Far-Right Politics, But How?
Of course, Calais only became a lacemaking capital after some British skulduggery: “Lace-making began to flourish here in the early 19th century, after three British weavers smuggled giant looms, called Leavers machines, across the English Channel to evade English restrictions on selling lace to the French. They set up in the textile-making town of Calais. The new industry blossomed, and the metallic click of the Leavers looms vibrated in Calais’s narrow streets day and night.” (Narrator voice: This prosperity was not to last.)
Pittsburgh Symphony’s Runout Performances At Scottish Rite Cathedral Are Ending After This Season
The orchestra said there were two reasons, but they both sound like an absence of dollar bills rubbing together.
Why Are Contemporary Families In Novels So Often Confined To One Or Two Children?
Emma Donoghue says, “My publishers initially choked when I offered them a novel about eight children, with four parents. One editor suggested I trim this down to a ‘big family of five kids.’ But by my standards (having grown up in an Irish Catholic clan in the 1970s), five was a puny total. Also, I needed the kids to outnumber the parents, to create enough pleasurable havoc. So we compromised: I culled the kids to seven.”
What Happened At This Promised Music Festival Turned Lord Of The Flies On A Remote Island In The Bahamas?
A promised selfie paradise turned pretty grim (generating an immeasurable amount of schadenfreude on Twitter and Instagram): “When guests arrived on the island of Great Exuma for the inaugural weekend, they found something closer to ‘Survivor’: grounds that were woefully lacking in the promised amenities, replaced instead by dirt fields, soggy tents and folding chairs.”
Hacker Holds Netflix Up For Ransom With Leaked Episodes Of ‘Orange Is The New Black’
Whoops, and OITNB isn’t alone (nor is Netflix). “Rumors of a massive leak of Hollywood films and TV episodes have been circulating online for months, fed by purported screenshots of the footage and a copy of a proposed deal to delete the stolen material in return for tens of thousands of dollars in electronic currency.”
Time Out New York ‘Restructures,’ AKA Ends, The Job Of Its Longtime Theatre Critic
David Cote: “Nobody seems able to answer the question of how you can make theatre criticism more appealing, more clickworthy. One answer is to be a goddamn flamethrower every week, be a bomb thrower, to write scorched-earth reviews. Just be completely hedonistic and ego-driven in your criticism, become a master stylist, and treat everything in front of you onstage as fodder for your most delicious and vicious language. That’s one road. And people may enjoy your writing. The thing that’s sacrificed is any sense of a larger responsibility, and any aesthetic consistency.”
What’s It Like To Play Call Of Duty As A Muslim?
It’s … weird. “Does this game want us to consider ourselves, the soldiers, as conquerors? Or sufferers? And what of the casualties? There are minimal depictions of civilians getting killed (except a notable sequence involving a bombing raid from afar), so the game left me with the feeling that I was a hero for having killed all those brown men. I, after all, endured.”
Philadelphia Orchestra’s Mongolia Tour Is – Well, Not Cancelled, Exactly … (Yet)
The country has been undergoing a financial crisis for most of the past year and had to get a $5.5 billion IMF bailout in February. So the Mongolian government can no longer afford its portion of the expense of a visit by the full Philadelphia Orchestra (which would have been the first U.S. orchestra ever to perform there). A reduced contingent of musicians might travel to Mongolia, though even that isn’t certain. David Patrick Stearns has details.
If The BBC Is So Great, Should It Get Public Subsidy?
If something is the best in the world, it ought not to depend on government subsidy or favourable regulation or legislation that discriminates against competitors. It ought to be able to stand on its own two feet, as Google has had to do since it was a start-up in September 1998 and as all surviving US media businesses have over the decades. But in the 21st century, just as in the mid-20th, the BBC seems not to understand the meaning of market forces.
Why Hollywood Writers Are Striking In The Era Of Peak TV
“What we’re fighting for is for studios and networks not to be able to hold writers for six straight months [between seasons without pay]. You’re just in career limbo. The companies are making more money than ever before, and it just feels like the writers who are creating all this content are becoming less and less valuable.”
The Time I Designed A Building And IM Pei Decided To Visit
The madness began after I received a phone call from my brother, Christien, who worked for a luxury travel agency. “Great news,” he said. “I may have a client for the villa for New Year’s week. How’s the project coming?” My heart sank. More than two years in, and we were nearly out of money. We really could have benefited from a holiday rental. But there was no way we could be ready in time, I told him. “But it’s apparently a famous person,” my brother added. “Some architect,” he told me. “His name is I. M. Pei. Ever heard of him?” My brother was not a student of architecture, so the significance of this was lost on him.
Unsettling: An E-Book That Forces You To Edit It To Read It
One hundred separate versions have been published online by Editions at Play, a digital publisher that specialises in “books that cannot be printed”. You can read any of the 100 editions for free – but if you’re lucky enough to own one, prepare yourself for some creative destruction: each version can only be passed on to a new owner after it has been modified. Owners must add one word and remove two from each of the story’s 21 pages and are stopped from moving forward through the book until they’ve made the required interventions.
Online Dating Sites Report That What You Read (Or Whether You Read) Makes A Difference In Dating Success
According to eHarmony, women who listed The Hunger Games among their favourite books saw the biggest boost to their popularity, while men who read Richard Branson’s business books were approached most often. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was a hit for both genders. But crucially, reading anything is a winning move; men who list reading on their dating profiles receive 19% more messages, and women 3% more.
Opera’s Diversity Problem Is A Vocal Problem
“These days, the opera field itself is effectively sabotaging the argument that voice type comes first. Opera is increasingly trying to present itself as just another form of drama, a musical equivalent of spoken theater or film, with its cinematic broadcasts and emphasis on younger, more attractive performers. That argument is problematic: Opera isn’t, in fact, equivalent to a TV show and doesn’t hold up well in the comparison; its strengths lie elsewhere. But if you’re going to make that argument…”