Pitch is an abstraction: any given note doesn’t have a real-world referent. The existence of flutes that produce a family of fixed notes, however, suggests a developed tonal system of patterns and scales, a sense of right notes and wrong notes, a cultural and musical identity. This has evolutionary as well as cultural significance. - Literary Review
Is authenticity fading away as a personal ethic or is it something everyone wants to be? In fact, both are true – because the meaning of authenticity is changing. - Psyche
Venue operators are using their enforced downtime to scrub, buff and do major reconfigurations. In some cases, the work was commissioned and started before COVID-19. Toronto’s iconic Massey Hall, for example, closed in 2018 for a $135-million renovation that was scheduled to be completed as soon as this year, but now there’s not such a hurry. - The Globe...
Good old-fashioned letters, it turns out. Choreographer and educator Suchi Branfman has been running her Dancing Through Prison Walls project with inmates of the California Rehabilitation Center at Norco since 2016. She was not going to let the pandemic make her abandon her students, but they didn't have access to Zoom. So they started writing to each other. Garnet...
Ballet is often seen as the glorification of women -but, wherever it stands now, it condoned and encouraged the sexual trafficking of women for most of its history: a factor to which no history of ballet has given enough attention. - Alastair Macaulay
The standards for heating, ventilation and air conditioning at North American and European museums tend to be quite high: minimizing airborne dust and maintaining consistent air temperature, humidity, and circulation are crucial for keeping the items on display in good condition. So the upgrades necessary to keep airborne transmission of the novel coronavirus low have been relatively simple to...
The conclusion from these finds is that people in the African interior weren’t lagging behind coastal cultures at all. Some of the most important innovations in human prehistory happened in multiple areas of the continent at around the same time. - Ars Technica
She traveled to the Low Countries and Suriname on missions for King Charles II, and she took up writing to support herself because he never paid her. She went on to become one of Restoration London's most popular, and most controversial, playwrights and poets, using her work to argue against slavery and forced marriage and for women's right to...
"The decades-long interdependence of PBS decision-makers, philanthropists, and corporate funders with one white, male filmmaker highlights the racial and cultural inequities perpetuated by this system. The amount of broadcast hours, financial support (from viewers like who?), and marketing muscle devoted to one man’s lens on America has severed PBS from its very roots," said Grace Lee. - The Hill
"I should say that a raga is not a tune. It's not a note, not a scale, not a composition — although the raga is sung in the framework of a composition. But you can identify the raga from a particular arrangement of notes that have to do with the way they're ascending and descending; a particular pattern in...
The story of the concept of ‘meritocracy’ has been well rehearsed in recent times, largely because of the way in which inequality and precarity have exposed its weaknesses. But some are still surprised to learn that the idea was conceived in the spirit of social satire, not the spirit of idealism. - Sydney Review of Books
"It was supposed to be a murder mystery: two couples, four motives, one gun. What it became was a different kind of mystery entirely: a musical that got prominent pans, alienated much of its audience and lost most of its investment — yet survived. Not only is Follies, which opened on Broadway on April 4, 1971, still here 50...
"I can't pretend I'm 20. No one's going to believe it. But I can feel that I'm 20. … One advantage is, when I was starting out as a young actor, I often played old men. Well, I didn't know what it was like to be old, but being old, I do remember what it's like to be young."...
Eric Nuzum: "The average number of unduplicated shows aired over Saturdays and Sundays is 25. Do all those programs help build audience? Station listeners — including even core listeners who love your station and are its heaviest users — usually listen for a total of one or two hours every weekend. By scheduling so many programs, most stations are...
"New York City is heading into one of its most consequential elections in decades. … For the purposes of this inquiry, we asked eight leading Democratic candidates to spell out their specific proposals for arts and culture in New York City." - Artnet
