At 78 minutes, Cowboy Carter is nearly as long as composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s epic Seventh Symphony (1941) and has structural similarities to symphonic music too. There are clear “movements” within the work in which certain lyrical and musical ideas are grouped together. - The Conversation
At a time when orchestras are eager to connect with a broader swath of their communities, Alsop’s struggle to score a position at the very top of the field attests to the persistent lack of both Americans and women on the country’s most prestigious podiums. - The New York Times
"Music on its own does not stand for anything except itself. The greatness of music, and the Ninth Symphony, lies in the richness of its contrasts. Music never just laughs or cries; it always laughs and cries at the same time. Creating unity out of contradictions — that is Beethoven for me." - The New York Times
What is most striking is the symbolic incorporation of the statue into the wider messaging of the protest... The students have dressed up Washington like the school mascot, adding new political symbols to existing ones. - Washington Post
“It’s just not hitting like it used to.” I still find some joy on the app. The delight is just less abundant than it was. Something has changed on TikTok. It’s become less serendipitous than before, though I don’t know when. - The Guardian
The reason conductors have changed is that the musicians they lead have changed. And the reason the musicians they lead have changed is that the societies those musicians inhabit have changed. That doesn’t necessarily render the music-making we experience any less intense or meaningful. - Gramophone
Oh, no, there’s no butting out on Nextdoor, only butting in. Somebody posted the other day about the “slow moving vehicle following the school bus every morning.” Alarming! Turned out it was the newspaper delivery guy. - Washington Post
"The Bauhaus, in its American imagining, became a place of heroism, even martyrdom. Nazism was, by definition, something done to the school, not by it.” The reality is, depressingly, quite different. - The Guardian (UK)
"Matthew Muckey, associate principal trumpet, and Liang Wang, principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic, have filed federal lawsuits against both the orchestra and the musicians’ union Local 802.” Their first appeals worked in 2020, which made the New York Magazine story all the more difficult to read. - Broadway World
That’s “the Order of the Third Bird—supposedly a secret international fellowship, going back centuries, of artists, authors, booksellers, professors, and avant-gardists. Participants in the Order would converge, flash-mob style, at museums, stare intensely at a work of art for half an hour, and vanish.” - The New Yorker
The Revival returns "with the opening of a new theater in the South Loop. And The Home Comedy Theater, conceived by a collective of iO and Second City veterans, is building out a space in Lake View as an artistic residence for displaced long-form improvisers." - Chicago Sun-Times
Those dismissing the protests as incoherent "should stand back and consider the iconography. … The students may be making inconvenient or even irrational requests of the institution and the country at large, but they are framing those demands as part of a continuum of American values." - Washington Post
Interviews show that “dogged by debt, over-optimistic financial forecasting, leadership turnover and overreliance on a small group of funders, the museum patched holes by creating new ones.” And, among small nonprofit museums, it’s far from alone. - Seattle Times
OK, blame screens a little, but also the loss of peer hangout time during the pandemic; the right-wing campaign against school libraries and librarians - and the un-delightful experience of being a kid, just trying to read, and having to take quizzes all of the time about "excerpts." - Slate
