From 2010 until its sudden termination by DOGE last April, I directed Music Unwound, an NEH-funded national consortium of orchestras and universities. A letter from Michael McDonald, the acting NEH chairman, informed me that the demise of Music Unwound represented “an urgent priority for the administration.” It was ended “to safeguard
I was at a seminar yesterday given by Professor Philip Hackney of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, given (via web) at the Marxe School at Baruch College, on “Tax Policy Toward Arts Nonprofits: Democracy or Plutocracy?” It’s a good question! I won’t try to summarize what Professor Hackney
In my past life I spent some time in university administration, and one of my jobs at this public university was to take proposals for new degree programs that the university had approved of to the state board of higher education, for their necessary approval. In those proposals we had to include
The Boston Symphony's board didn't fire Andris Nelsons as its music director. Not exactly. They declined to renew his contract because he and the BSO weren't "aligned on future vision" — the board's own words, offered without apology. Not artistic differences. Not budget. Not performance. Future vision. That phrase is
This recent book is open access, here. And my full review in the International Review of Public Policy is also open access, here. My review begins: There is an old joke: An American tourist is visiting Oxford for the first time, and on his first morning signs up for a guided walking tour. The
Having written a book – The Propaganda of Freedom – exploring the relationship between JFK and the arts, and having finished in manuscript a subsequent study of Leonard Bernstein and cultural leadership, I find myself responding to the Trump-Kennedy Center and kindred developments by looking backward at what might have
Authorship used to be a status granted by an act of creation. Now it will be a status you will have to defend through paperwork. We have moved from the era of the romantic "lone genius" to the era of the administrative author who will need to "prove" the machine
An early review of my forthcoming novel “The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale from the Gilded Age,” by Hans Rudolf Vaget, appears in the current issue of “Wagner Notes” — the journal of the Wagner Society of New York (pp. 11-12). The book is already available for purchase (with a discount)
Evidence abounds this week that the battles for culture are intensifying. Taken together, these tests of authority over cultural institutions are probes of where the line is, of how much self-censorship the cultural sector will perform without being explicitly required to.
I wasn’t initially planning to write anything about Wednesday night’s Carnegie Hall concert by the Chicago Symphony under Klaus Makela, their 30-year-old impending music director. I’ve written about Makela quite enough. I have no doubt that he is immensely gifted. I have seen him ignite an orchestra with a rare
The question isn't whether AI will change our definition of creative excellence. The question is how we will engage with that change: with curiously and critical insight, with our existing values intact but our existing definitions loosely held? Or defending the current map as if it were the entire territory.
Brink Lindsey takes his title from one of my favourite essays, John Maynard Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (which I wrote about here). Keynes, in 1930, wondered what lives might be like in our present. There are three big predictions in the essay, interrelated, of which I would say he got two right, which
“As the repertoire ages, as the world changes, we will have ever fewer Fischers and Honecks, and ever more Dueñasas, Lims, and Chos. The outcome seems to me unpredictable. It could be a refreshment and it could be a dilution.“ A dozen years ago, Ivan Fischer came to Carnegie Hall
