I know the conductor Thomas Fortner, now based in Berlin, from his years as assistant conductor of the remarkable South Dakota Symphony. Thomas recently posted a 70-minute podcast posing earnest questions about the state of classical music. Excerpts follow. JH (1:55): People are not attentive to the arts. People don’t
I read a story yesterday about the attempts to make a local arts tax in Portland, Oregon slightly less bad, and since I used to teach about this sort of thing I thought it might be worth giving my personal quick-and-dirty checklist on local earmarked taxes for the arts. Here are
Most arts policy debates happen at one scale. Most cultural activity happens at another. It turns out the gap between those two scales — between the world that the arts, funding fights, and nonprofit board meetings live in, and the world where most people actually encounter culture — is so
My review of “Defending Music: Michael Steinberg at the ‘Boston Globe’ — 1964-1976” (Oxford University Press) is today published online by “The American Scholar.” The kicker, at the end, reads: “Michael Steinberg was never intended to make a career writing concert reviews. He was ever courageously drawn to what would
We collected 118 stories on ArtsJournal this week. Here’s what I learned. The detail that stuck out in the Metropolitan Opera’s announcement last fall that it had made a $200 million deal with the Saudi government to take the company to perform in the Kingdom for three weeks every winter
Jeremy Rothman, Chief Artistic Officer of The Philadelphia Orchestra and Ensemble Arts, shares their 125-year history championing composers beyond the standard canon.
LACMA proposes a new model for museums. For a long time now, context has been an essential deliverable when you go to a museum. It’s how meaning gets constructed. Just what was so remarkable about the way Constable painted light, and how did it have an effect on the painters
Yes, Minister ran on BBC television in the early 1980s, the early Thatcher years (I’ll come back to the importance of this). I enjoyed it at the time (I was pretty young), and recalled it when I went to work in government myself in the 1990s. Canada has a UK-style Westminster
My play The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York was just premiered (as a work-in-progress) at the University of Michigan/Ann Arbor. It’s my good fortune to be working with a terrific actress and director: Esther van Zyl and Jack Tamburri. We next produce the play (this time with lighting design)
Colin Asher, author of the critically acclaimed biography of Nelson Algren "Never a Lovely So Real," now focuses on five emblematic figures — Huddle Ledbetter, Elmo Hope, Johnny Cash, Ike White, and Tupac Shakur — as he explores the influence of incarceration on blues artists, jazz musicians, country singers, rock'n'rollers,
I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that simply engaging with a lot of narrative fiction will make people more ethical, or more generally empathetic (which is not the same thing), or will increase the depth of their political understanding. There isn’t any evidence for it, and too many counter-examples
The threat isn't that AI replaces artists. It's subtler and more coercive: that an algorithmically saturated environment erodes the capacity for the kind of thinking that we like to think art requires. Tolerance for ambiguity. Patience with difficulty. The willingness to be bored before a breakthrough.
Anna Weber, General Manager for Artistic and Operations at Carnegie Hall, shares the depth of their festival programming and focus on collaborative partnerships.
Boston’s “Arts Fuse” today carries my thoughts on “Furtwängler in Wartime” occasioned by Ian Buruma’s new book “Stay Alive.” Excerpts follow. You can read the whole thing here. One learns from Ian Buruma’s Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-45 – an absorbing study of what it was like to live in the German
