In deference to St. Patrick’s Day, I’m reposting an entry from ten years ago. Titled “Yeats and the Economics of Creativity,” it originally ran on the Arts Endowment website on May 7, 2025. Last month, at the invitation of the U.S. Embassy in Dublin, I took part in a conference
When we talk about the arts and DIY, we commonly refer to craft activities or teaching oneself how to play a musical instrument. But what could be more DIY than free-form dancing? The adjective says it all. Free-form, freestyle, or free dance is a series of unstructured, personally directed movements
Call it entrumpy—a “gradual decline into disorder” (riffing on “entropy”), attributable to the unpredictability of our unprecedented President. Exploiting his “new” (more accurately: “renewed”) position on the White House bully-pulpit, Donald Trump has impelled U.S. museum heads to change their acronymic imperatives from DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) to DWI—Directing While
This is all I could get from the Getty’s press office when I asked at 2:50 p.m. ET about what I’d been reading elsewhere regarding the approaching fires: Getty is complying with the current evacuation order and is closed with only emergency staff on site. There is no damage to
At a memorial event in Jordan Hall in Boston on September 29, 2024, these were my remarks: This concert hall, this space, the vibrating air in here, the music that’s been heard, those sounds. The piano playing done on this stage… In 1907, Ferruccio Busoni played the piano right about
I was so pleased to get back to Call Time after some time off (for both work and pleasure) and to get to come back to it with the amazing Jack Viertel. As some of you might know, Jack was one of my original guests on Call Time when it
About a month ago, Michael Paulson wrote an article for The Times about an unexpected “bright spot” in the American theatre landscape. “Broadway is struggling through a postpandemic funk, squeezed between higher production costs and lower audience numbers just as a bevy of new shows set sail into those fierce headwinds,” Paulson
Katie uses her interview with Broadway dancer, Ixchel Cuellar (Mean Girls, Finding Neverland, Hamilton) to explore stage presence and the plethora of "dance shows" on Broadway today.
This beauty course is not aimed at putting beauty in service of business. My aim is the opposite. I want leaders to put business in service of beauty. Diane Ragsdale (2022) The world lost a brilliant mind and beautiful spirit with the passing of Diane Ragsdale last week. Elsewhere, in
Eno Piano is not just the title of an album. It represents an aspiration: the use of new technology and new techniques to make an instrument, a transformed piano, an “Eno-piano”!
In the world of music conservatories, in the classical music community, exceptional musical talent is usually considered to be the ability to quickly recognize pitches by ear, the possession of reliable musical memory, and the athleticism and dexterity to navigate complex patterns on an instrument. We have not considered imagination,
I've been reading and thinking a lot about human cognition – about how we make sense and take action. The useful answer describes a combo platter of species-wide sense-making systems and their unique manifestation in each of us…
