Today’s Stories
Bayreuth Festival 2020 Canceled Due To Coronavirus
This summer’s event would have included the premiere of a new Ring cycle staged by Valentin Schwarz with Pietari Inkinen conducting; that production will “probably” be postponed until 2022. Tickets for this year’s festival will be honored in 2021. – Opera News
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival Canceled For First Time Ever
In addition to calling off all events in the June 24-August 30 festival, Jacob’s Pillow administration is making staffing and salary cuts. However, said director Pamela Tatge, “[if] people are able to congregate again in August, we will make every effort to try to bring audiences together in keeping with the public safety guidelines in effect at that time.” – The Berkshire Eagle
Is COVID A Wakeup Call?
We do not yet know what effect the current pandemic will have on worldwide demographics. But it is actually slightly more likely to increase future populations than decrease them. If the actions of governments, or at least of most governments, make people feel more insecure, economically and socially, then younger people may in the near future have more children than they would have had; and the pandemic will, counterintuitively, very slightly increase the total future population. – The Guardian
Classical Music Activity Explodes Online As Shutdown Closes Stages
In-person performances have been replaced by a deluge of digital ones — live streams and recently unlocked archive recordings — that have made for a calendar hardly less busy than before concert halls closed. It’s enough to keep a critic happily overwhelmed, yet also wondering whether the industry is making a mistake by giving away so much for free. – The New York Times
What’s Missing While Looking At Art Online
It is increasingly common for people to buy art, like everything else, online. So online presence is obviously vital. Perhaps the Covid-19 emergency, while directing attention onto the virtual world, will also indicate its limitations. It has been argued by several commentators that, rather than bringing people together, digital technologies and social media contribute to the creation of a generation of disengaged narcissists under the spell of surveillance capitalism. Other people, places and things are reduced to the status of props in a theatre of selfhood. Yet it seems a little unlikely that the person who checks out galleries online fits that profile. – Irish Times
How Public Libraries Are Adapting To The Virus
When libraries closed their doors abruptly, they immediately opened their digital communications, collaborations, and creative activity to reach their public in ways as novel as the virus that forced them into it. You can be sure that this is just the beginning. Today libraries are already acting and improvising. Later, they’ll be figuring out what the experience means to their future operations and their role in American communities. – The Atlantic
Is Smell Our Most Powerful Sense?
Increasingly, loss of the sense of smell is being treated as a serious harm in clinical settings. Besides, the sense of smell is key to flavour perception. Indeed, most of what you perceive as the taste of food and drink is actually smell, being caused by volatile chemicals travelling from the cavity of your mouth through the open space of the pharynx up to your nasal epithelium. And there’s no way around it: the spice trade, with its growth following the Silk Road, has shaped the modern global socioeconomic landscape as much as – if not more than – philosophical discussion on reason and morality. – Aeon
The Role Of Homes In Shaping Writers
The description of a house can vividly reveal the experience of childhood or the story of a relationship: “How a house is lived in can tell you everything you need to know about people, whether it’s the choice of wallpaper, the mess in the kitchen, the silence or shouting over meals, doors left open or closed, a fire burning in the hearth”. – The Guardian
Edward Tarr, Master Of Trumpets New And Old And Of Their History, Dead At 83
“Mr. Tarr left his mark on every aspect of the trumpet world. As a player he set new standards of lyricism on an instrument long associated with military bravado. As a scholar he hunted for rarities in European archives and created performance editions of hundreds of newly discovered works.” He wrote the definitive history book on the instrument, and he led the revival of the 18th-century valveless trumpet played in period-instrument ensembles. – The New York Times
There’s An App For That: Be A Pop Star
Voisey allows users to choose from a library of beats from around the world, submitted to the Voisey website by producers, and sing their own lyrics and melodies over them. Their vocals are run through in-app vocal effects including auto-tune. The app is designed to make anyone sound like a star. – The Conversation
Dancer In The Dark: Did Intensive Study Of Butoh Drive A Young American Woman To Suicide?
Sharon Stern was a vivacious, popular, hard-working actor when she enrolled in the MFA program at America’s first Buddhist university. There she met Butoh master Katsura Kan and became his ferociously devoted disciple. That ferocity of devotion — to her teacher, to the art form and the idea of loss of self behind it — concerned her parents, her friends, and ultimately Kan himself. When Stern killed herself, her parents blamed Kan and sued him for wrongful death. – The New Yorker
Critical Thinking About Indigenous Art
So far, the best Indigenous-authored texts about Indigenous art are not reviews but catalogue and academic-essays, which are critical in that they explicate the context, intent and meanings of Indigenous artworks, but do not offer evaluations. They do not ask, for instance, if one work is better than other work, nor why considering a work as art is a more productive approach than considering it as a work of culture, an elaborate utility, or a trade good. – Momus
How One Off-Broadway Company Is Able To Close For Three Months But Still Pay Everyone
“Ars Nova did not seek an article about the course it has chosen. On the contrary, [its directors] worried that discussing it publicly could look like they were shaming colleagues amid an industry-rattling pandemic.” That Ars Nova can pay everyone it had engaged for its canceled shows “has nothing to do with an angel donor — there isn’t one, [the managing director] said — but rather serendipity.” – The New York Times
How Charity Fraud Led To Harvey Weinstein’s Downfall
Although Tom Ajamie’s amfAR investigation never received the same level of attention as Weinstein’s sexual predation, it remains the key event that led to his downfall. After all, it was during the eight-month inquiry, which Ajamie’s firm did pro bono, that he learned of Weinstein’s open secret. – The Hollywood Reporter
‘We Are All Edward Hopper Paintings Now’
Jonathan Jones: “If [the widely-shared tweet is true], a crisis of loneliness is impending that may be one of the most fraught social consequences of COVID-19. The loss of direct human contact we’re agreeing to may be catastrophic. This, at least, is what Hopper shows us.” – The Guardian
Premium Classifieds
Master of Arts in Arts Administration – Goucher College
Designed for the working professional, the M.A. in Arts Administration from Goucher College allows you to live and work wherever you are while you learn from national arts leaders. Master of … [Read More...]
No, We Are Not All Edward Hopper Paintings Now
Alex Greenberger: “[There’s] a difference between Hopper’s forlorn subjects and so many of us right now. They choose to live in modernity and find themselves alienated because of it. We choose to simply try to stay alive in the world today and a pandemic that has so far killed more than 36,000 worldwide is keeping us captive.” – ARTnews
Arts Council England Acts Quickly On Funding, But The Price Will Come Later
ACE was faced with an impossible choice. Unlike the German government, which has announced a €50 billion package of support for artists and the cultural sector, recognising that it is characterised by a high proportion of self-employed people whose livelihoods have disappeared overnight, the UK government has been slow even to recognise the problems faced by the self-employed in any sector, let alone the arts. – The Stage
Michael Sorkin, Who Fought For Social Justice Concerns In Architecture, Dead Of Coronavirus At 71
“A fiery champion of social justice and sustainability in architecture and urban planning, [he] emerged as one of his profession’s most incisive public intellectuals over a multifaceted career as a critic, author, teacher and designer.” – The Washington Post
Public Service Or Piracy? Authors Battle Internet Archive Over ‘National Emergency Library’
With libraries and bookstores closed across the U.S., and with teachers searching for materials to use for remote teaching, the Internet Archive decided to lift all restrictions on access to the 1.4 million books — many still under copyright — that it has digitized. Teachers and academics are very pleased; authors and publishers, on the other hand, call the move a “copyright grab” that robs them of royalties and breaks the law. – The New York Times
China Orders Reopened Cinemas To Close Again
“Hours after municipal authorities in Shanghai gave more than 200 cinemas the greenlight to re-open Saturday, national-level Chinese authorities on Friday ordered all theaters throughout the country shut again …, without saying exactly why or when they might hope to re-open.” (The general presumption is that the government fears another coronavirus outbreak.) – Variety
Center Theatre Group In L.A. Furloughs Half Its Workers And Suspends All Shows
The city’s largest theatre nonprofit, which operates the Mark Taper Forum, Ahmanson Theatre, and Kirk Douglas Theatre, will maintain health insurance for its workers but send half of them home until at least August 9; the rest will face pay cuts. – Los Angeles Times
Judy Drucker, For Decades South Florida’s Leading Classical Music Impresario, Dead At 91
She brought to Miami (and, later, Fort Lauderdale) such artists as Vladimir Horowitz, Mstislav Rostropovich, Itzhak Perlman, Luciano Pavarotti, Marilyn Horne, Beverly Sills, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Kiri Te Kanawa, and almost every major symphony orchestra in the U.S. and Europe. (Not to mention dance companies like ABT and Alvin Ailey.) And, for her, they kept coming back. – South Florida Classical Review
Met Museum Will Provide Another Month’s Pay To Laid-Off Staff
With its building closed indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic, the museum’s administration let go most of its employees with a promise to pay them only through April 4; that promise has now been extended to May 4. – The New York Times
Aldeburgh Festival Is Called Off For First Time In Its History
“The Aldeburgh Festival is the latest cultural casualty of the coronavirus pandemic. The classical music event founded in 1948 by Benjamin Britten will not go ahead, it has been announced.” – The Guardian
How A Magazine Of Debate Influenced Our Culture
For many who wrote for the magazine, attended its monthly discussion lunches or simply subscribed, involvement with Encounter was to take sides in an historic struggle in which the Anglo-American relationship was deemed crucial (which is certainly how Lasky saw things). It was this sense of engagement, reflected in the magazine’s title, that gave its pages their distinctive character. – The Critic