All the fears and complaints that Hollywood actors and writers have are a reality for musicians and songwriters, too. Yet the rockers, pop singers and hip-hop artists are not on strike to protest their paltry royalties or AI inroads. One big reason? They’re not unionized. - Los Angeles Times
Ironically, the education of more and more people in the United States has led to an expansion of potential audiences for quality, and progressive, history. It has also generated a series of unresolved questions about overt and implicit politics, style, and the identity of the historian as a writer and a public person. - Boston Review
The Dresden prosecutor’s office announced on July 21 that the two activists, Jakob Beyer and Maike Grunst, would be fined €1,500 ($1,600) each for the act. - Artnet
Yasmeen Lari, who's spent nearly two decades creating and promoting architecture for the poor using inexpensive traditional materials and techniques, has designed improved, flood-resistant huts made of mud, rice husks, lime, and bamboo for thousands of villagers. Each costs less than $90. - The Guardian
New music for old instruments is, of course, nothing new. Nor is the engagement by composers with varying degrees of historically informed performance. But in scouring the internet, there appear to be new directions revealing unknown aspects of old instruments. - Early Music America
"Democracy, it's been said, isn't easy. Neither is examining its terrible fragility through the form of a deeply fun, fairly avant-garde song-and-dance show. … Does real democracy stand a chance, if old-school authoritarianism has a good beat and you can dance to it?" - Variety
With each musician guaranteed $200 for an hour-long set, “we’ve presented about 400 concerts featuring 500 musicians, reaching about 18,000 listeners." - San Francisco Classical Voice
"Barbie combines the rules of the movie musical ... with the investments of a Beckett or a Ionesco play. … (It's) a highly symbolic exercise where theoretical entities get to speak for themselves, and where real people get to tell anthropomorphized theoretical entities what effects they have on the human experience." - Literary Hub
Like Kleiber, Klaus Tennstedt and Leonard Bernstein seemed to harness everything they knew in the heat of the moment. But Kleiber also had structural rigour and brisk tempos that gave his performances an infectious buoyancy. - Gramophone
"(She) was a percussive, samba-driven improviser, an interpreter as worldly-wise as Edith Piaf and a consummate nightclub artist. With a thick, husky voice seasoned by cigarette smoke and late hours, Andrade sang torridly of love; she could also swing as hard as any American jazz singer." - NPR
"Calder Gardens, the long-awaited showcase for the art of native son Alexander Calder, is finally moving toward reality. The new museum will be located on Center City's Benjamin Franklin Parkway, between 21st and 22nd Streets across from the Barnes Foundation and near several major cultural institutions." - MSN (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
"The New York Times … has signed a deal with the public media organization PRX to repurpose (The Ezra Klein Show) into a weekly one-hour radio show. … Klein joined The New York Times two years ago and launched the podcast in January 2021." - Inside Radio
"A group of booksellers, publishers and authors filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to stop a new law in Texas that would require stores to rate books based on sexual content, arguing the measure would violate their First Amendment rights and be all but impossible to implement." - The New York Times
"Celia Fushille … is stepping down next year at the conclusion of the company's 30th season to hand her job to nationally acclaimed choreographer Amy Seiwert. … The news comes more than three months after Smuin Ballet hired Seiwert, a former company member and choreographer-in-residence, as associate artistic director." - San Francisco Chronicle
