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How Music For Dance Is Different From Music For Music
“One of the most important skills for dance conductors is the ability to keep a steady tempo without becoming inexpressive or mechanical. They can’t rely on spontaneous rubatos or accelerations to create excitement or pathos. (It would throw off the dancers.)”
Newly-Released James Joyce Letter Reveals How Press Hounded Writer
The letter, which belongs to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, shows how reporters went to great lengths to discover details of the ceremony Joyce had tried to keep a secret. The author told his son that anyone who thinks he married as “a publicity stunt he must be a congenital imbecile”.
The New Fandom – It’s All About The Fans
“A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It’s all about them. They have mastered the ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Star Trek’ universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion. Anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies.”
Here’s The Real Mess In Higher Education
“Expensive gambles, unforeseen losses, and investments whose soundness has yet to be decided have raised the price of a college education so high that today on average it costs eleven times as much as it did in 1978. Underlying the anxiety about the worth of a college degree is a suspicion that old methods and the old knowledge will soon be eclipsed by technology.”
Louvre Predicts 30 Percent Increase In Attendance
“We have learned that the Louvre forecasts it will attract 12 million visitors a year by 2025, a 30% increase on the 9.3 million recorded for 2013, which made it the best attended art museum in The Art Newspaper’s annual attendance survey.”
So This Is PBS’s Idea Of Arts In America?
“Is PBS unaware that there’s more to art in America than Kristin Chenoweth, Melissa Etheridge and Michael Feinstein? Or does it simply not care? I hate to have to ask that question yet again, but not knowing the answer troubles me even more—and I suspect it’s also troubling at least some of the people who write the checks that keep PBS afloat. If it isn’t, it should.”
The Latest Classical-Pop Crossover Is The Worst Yet
It’s a “breathtakingly crass, spectacularly point-missing wave of pop-classical crossover. It makes one fantasise about re-education camps for the compulsory internment of whoever’s listening to this brazenly misguided bilge.”
Met Opera Debacle – It’s About Leadership
Peter Gelb is “right that opera in its current form is not sustainable — something of a given in a field that has literally no independent commercial viability, relies entirely on donations, can’t hope for significant European-style government funding in this country, and is paying hundreds of people very large salaries. The unions are also right that the problem is partly artistic.”
50,000+ Artists Apply for 89 Affordable Studios In Harlem
“Developers for the space, known as El Barrio’s Artspace PS 109 and located between Second and Third avenues, fielded 51,313 online applications via a city website by the July 14 deadline, officials said. That’s on top of more than 2,000 paper applications filed.”
Maria Abramovic Raised A Ton Of Money For Her New Project. So Why Is She Staffing With Unpaid Interns?
“Abramović raised over $660,000 for her institute on Kickstarter in June and recently “collaborated” with Adidas. Yet somehow she cannot afford to pay people to work for MAI.”
Why Does A Vancouver Theatre Critic Write Under A Pen Name? (And Other Arts Journalism Lapses)
“Since the practice of pen names fell out of favour in the mid-20th century, after newspapers began promoting themselves with their new brand of ethics, I wondered why any daily newspaper would go along with it?”
Met Opera Extends Contract Deadline At Last Minute
“The Metropolitan Opera postponed a threatened lockout late on Thursday night, saying that it had done so at the request of a federal mediator who was brought in at the 11th hour to try to salvage its contract negotiations with the unions representing its orchestra and chorus.”
How Sotheby’s And Christie’s Locate New People To Spend Massive Sums Of Money On Art
“If you’re even remotely curious about starting a blue-chip art collection, there’s a good chance the world’s biggest auction houses already know who you are, and exactly how much you might spend to own a masterpiece. … They’ve dispatched armies of experts to identify potential bigwigs, and satisfy their ever-expanding art whims.”
ABT’s Misty Copeland Is Now A Major Underwear Spokesmodel
“[Copeland] will become the new face of Under Armour’s ‘I Will What I Want’ campaign, which focuses on the apparel giant’s women’s business. To appreciate Under Armour’s out-of-the-box thinking in tapping a ballerina to front its national ads, one has to grasp the complexity of Copeland’s story.”
Dick Smith, Hollywood’s Master Of Makeup, Dead At 92
“As the grandmaster of special-effects makeup, Dick Smith broke ground in the movies in the early 1970s when he transformed Dustin Hoffman into a 120-year-old for Little Big Man and an adolescent Linda Blair into a diabolical demon [sic] in The Exorcist. When he received an Academy Award in 1985 for aging F. Murray Abraham into an elderly composer in the film Amadeus, many industry observers wondered: What took so long?”
Big Data Reveals How Cities Beckoned The Brainy For 2,000 Years
“How do you keep them down on the farm, once they’ve seen Paris? You don’t, suggests a study of 150,000 historical figures that shows cities have … acted as cultural magnets” for many centuries.
World’s Richest Man Calls For Three-Day Work Week – Could That Really Work?
Carlos Slim: “People are going to have to work for more years, until they are 70 or 75, and just work three days a week – perhaps 11 hours a day.” Other business icons, among them Google co-founder Larry Page, think similarly. Is this a practical idea? Possibly …
Robert Drew, 90, Pioneer Of Cinéma Vérité
“[He] altered both journalism and filmmaking when he helped develop the hand-held camera and a synchronized sound recorder and put the new equipment to use making documentaries in the put-the-audience-in-the-room style.”
When The Fourth Wall Is The Naked City: Tales Of Outdoor Theater In New York
“Alfresco settings have their advantages – the fireflies, the moon, the breeze – and their complications, too: the bicyclists, the boomboxes, the gaze of raccoons that live just below the Delacorte’s stage and often scamper on. The Times asked performers, producers and directors to talk about the perils and pleasures of acting under the sky.”
Actually, Some Material Goods CAN Make You Happy
“It’s been the refrain of behavioral economists … for years: Spend your money on experiences, not things. A vacation or a meal with friends will enrich your life; new shoes will quickly lose their charm. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story, argue psychologists Darwin A. Guevarra and Ryan T. Howell in a new paper … Not all goods, they say, should be lumped together.”
Research Archive Meets Warehouse Meets Database Meets Flea Market: Behold The Accumulibrary
“Unlike modern libraries, the Accumulibrary doesn’t segment or segregate media types. It fails to differentiate documents from things, books from periodicals from pamphlets, devices from objects, the new from the used from the old, the rare from the common. The sole laws that it holds sacred are the law of number and the law of stuff.”
Look What They’ve Done To St. Ignatius Loyola: They’ve Made Him Twee
“A Catholic publishing house” – Loyola Press, naturally – “is encouraging the people of the Internet to ‘find your inner Iggy’ and explore Ignatius’s vision of spirituality. In doing so, it appears that they have created the first-ever twee saint.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.31.14
How Has Opera Changed?
AJBlog: OperaSleuth | Published 2014-07-31
The Peter Gelb furor (3)
AJBlog: Sandow | Published 2014-07-31
Stanford: The New Art Place To Be
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-08-01Chicago Symphony Exec Named New Director Of San Diego Symphony
“Martha Gilmer’s role has been large. In addition to working with the music directors, their ideas and complex personalities and overseeing all programming, she worked with and enlisted guest conductors and guest artists and created new ongoing programs to move the organization into the 21st century.”
Indie Movie Makes More In Video-On-Demand Than In Theatres. Is This A More Viable Path?
“The movie, directed by Bong Joon-ho, made $3.8 million in its first two weeks of VOD release, compared with $3.9 million from five weeks in theaters.”
Newport Jazz At 60 – Grandad To The Modern Festival
“For the past 60 years, no institution has done more to help establish jazz as a legitimate art form than Newport and the notion of the jazz festival that Mr. Wein created. Where jazz once rubbed shoulders with pop stars like Frank Sinatra, it now competes for government and corporate funding with opera and chamber music.”
UK Teenager Quits School After His Drawing Goes Viral Online
“I reckon I wasted two years sat at school doing nothing. I didn’t expect this to happen a month ago. I feel honoured people appreciate my work and that I can hopefully make a living off it.”
Israeli Show Canceled In Edinburgh After Protests
“The hip-hop opera is presented by a company that receives money from the Israeli government which campaigners said made it legitimate to boycott, particularly due to the current situation in Gaza.”
Will Creating An “Arts District” Make A City More Dynamic?
“Dallas is trying to create more “vibrancy” downtown; trying to attract more people and keep them there for longer. One way it is doing that is through its arts district, a truly phenomenal collection of cultural institutions housed in equally impressive buildings, which is just now completing the commercial infrastructure it believes will activate the streetscape both day and night.”
Protests Over Light Installation In Toronto
The public art project, known as Nyctophilia, or love of the night, is set to be officially unveiled Wednesday night. In June, when the poles went up at the corner of Weston Rd. and Dennis Ave., it sparked a flurry of negative comments to the Star and other media outlets.
Why The Vienna Philharmonic Sounds Different From Other Orchestras
“The “Vienna sound” has been the subject of reams of music criticism, academic research, acoustical experiments and more than a little debate. Not everyone agrees on precisely what it is — it is sometimes described as plush, warm and rich or sumptuous — but many listeners say that they know it when they hear it.”
Amazon: Hachette Dispute Is About Lower Prices And More Money To Authors
“Books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more,” Amazon said in the statement, which was posted on the forum for its Kindle ebook reader. “If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.”
International Study: Culture Is Big Travel Appeal For Young People
“Of the 15 countries with the largest economies in the world, the participants – plus 1,000 additional young people surveyed from the UK – said that France was the most attractive place as a source of arts and culture, followed by Italy, the US and then the UK.”
“Save The Corcoran” Court Hearing Has An Uninhibited Star Witness
Philanthropist Wayne Reynolds, who was first wooed for the Corcoran’s board chairmanship and then rejected, “led a packed courtroom Wednesday on a rollicking and highly critical narrative account of his interactions with gallery leadership, at one point likening the Corcoran’s executive suite to ‘a goat rodeo,’ and asserting that he could do better, if given a chance.”
Met Opera Proposes Federal Mediator For Last-Minute Labor Talks
“With time running out before a lockout of its workers threatened for later this week, the Metropolitan Opera proposed on Wednesday that federal mediators be brought in at the 11th hour to facilitate negotiations with several of the company’s unions. But it was unclear if the unions would agree to a mediator, or if there was enough time left to forge a deal.” (includes video)
Orlando Ballet “Needs To Take A Deep Breath,” Says New Boss
“‘We all need to take a deep breath,’ says Jim Mitchell, the ballet’s fourth executive director in three years. During that time, the leadership was in flux and the organization was left homeless after a mold infestation shut down its headquarters in the former Orlando Utilities Commission building.”
Tracey Emin’s Bed Will Spend Ten Years At The Tate
“Tracey Emin’s controversial artwork My Bed is to return to the Tate after selling for £2.2m earlier this month. Count Christian Duerckheim, the piece’s new owner, has agreed to loan the work ‘for a period of at least 10 years’, said Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota.”
Is Your Name Your Destiny?
“Names work hard: They can affect who gets into elite schools, what jobs we apply for, and who gets hired. Our names can even influence what cities we live in, who we befriend, and what products we buy since, we’re attracted to things and places that share similarities to our names.”
James Wolcott, Frank Bidart, David Rabe Win PEN Literary Awards
“The poet Frank Bidart, the critic James Wolcott and the playwright David Rabe are among the winners of the 2014 PEN Literary Awards, announced today by the PEN/American Center.”
Downtown L.A.’s Arts District Is Pricing Out The Artists (It’s An Old Story)
“In the 1970s, the streets east of Little Tokyo and west of the L.A. River made up a dingy district of hollowed-out warehouses that landlords rented to artists who needed a lot of space for little money. … [Now, a] new coffee shop moves in every month or so, and it’s hard to walk two minutes in any direction in the 52-block neighborhood without finding a blue-and-white filming notice.”
Hollywood And Kodak Unite To Save Motion Picture Film
“Faced with the possible extinction of the material that made Hollywood famous, a coalition of studios is close to a deal to keep Eastman Kodak Co. in the business of producing movie film. The negotiations … [should] result in an arrangement where studios promise to buy a set quantity of film for the next several years, even though most movies and television shows these days are shot on digital video.”
Rome’s Opera House Avoids Liquidation (For Now) With Labor Deal
“A tentative agreement has been reached between management and unions representing the staff of Rome’s Opera House, following recent strikes over the theatre’s restructuring and salvage plan. The threat of liquidation which had been hanging over the Opera House has been averted, pending an upcoming referendum by unions on the terms of the restructuring programme.”
Cincinnati Art Museum Names New Director
“Cameron Kitchin, director of Memphis’ Brooks Museum of Art, has been named the new director of the Cincinnati Art Museum after a nearly seven-month search.”
Can This Program Hook A New Generation Of Young Dance Addicts?
An experimental program at Manhattan’s New Victory Theater has been presenting to youngsters – for free – three weeks of wide-ranging modern dance programming, with the companies doing the same material they perform for adult audiences. The dancers seem to love it even more than the kids do.
100 Years Of World War I Movies (And How They Changed)
David Mermelstein surveys the ways in which The War to End All Wars has been portrayed on screen, and how each era’s preoccupations affected the stories those films told.
This Is The Guy To Bring To A Bloody Knife Fight (If You’re Putting It Onstage)
“Death is easy, but for a good eye-gouge, Broadway directors call Rick Sordelet. … A top purveyor of staged mayhem, Mr. Sordelet has created fistfights, sword duels, stabbings and gunplay for some 60 Broadway productions – as well as Hollywood films, the Metropolitan Opera, the 1995 Super Bowl halftime show, and Ben Hur Live.”
Poetry? There’s An App For That – Five Of Them, In Fact
The Times‘s app critic (yes, it has one) looks at an encyclopedic offering from the Poetry Foundation for discovering new poems; a Shakespeare app that includes all the sonnets and plays; two packages, for writing haiku and for longer verse; and an app devoted entirely to Eliot’s The Waste Land. (includes video)
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.30.14
The Peter Gelb furor (2)
AJBlog: Sandow | Published 2014-07-30
Community Engagement ≠ Charity
AJBlog: Engaging Matters | Published 2014-07-30
“An Arts District without artists?”
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-07-30
Cincinnati Hires A Director, As Another Curator Departs
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-07-31
Dead parrot ballet
AJBlog: Performance Monkey | Published 2014-07-30London Theatre By The Numbers – This is A Booming Industry
“In 2012/13 more than 22 million people went to a London theatre performance and £618.5m was taken at the box office. London cinema admissions totalled 43 million, meaning the average ticket price would need to be more than £14.40 – which it is not – for cinema to have a bigger box office figure than theatre.”
The Met Opera: Caught Between Competing Realities
“Whether our current opera house model will survive will depend, I believe, on how successfully opera houses attract new artists to create work that speaks as eloquently to the traditions as to present-day audiences.” It’s an open question, however, whether the Met can do so. It certainly cannot while the stage door is padlocked.”