And what’s to blame? YouTube. Kids aren’t watching live music. Etc. (It’s true at least that very, very few music students are playing any of these instruments, the tuba included.)
Archives for July 2018
‘Brainy’ Books Are All The Rage In Nonfiction Suddenly, And Here’s Why
Basically, blame our ‘interesting’ times: “We’re living in a world that suddenly seems less certain than it did even two years ago, and the natural reaction is for people to try and find out as much about it as possible. … People have a hunger both for information and facts, and for nuanced exploration of issues, of a sort that books are in a prime position to provide.”
This Director Plans To Subvert Audience Expectations, Please A Repressive Government, And Bring Some Avant Garde Theatre To Beijing
That’s the goal in Chen Shi-Zheng’s adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao, anyway. “Despite the familiarity of this 13th-century play to spectators in Mr. Chen’s homeland, they might have trouble understanding all the lines. The principal actors Mr. Chen has cast for this staging in China are almost all Americans, and they will speak in English. In fact, very little about the production will signal the story’s Chinese origins.”
The Beauty Of Brancusi’s Work Leads To A Massive – Posthumous – Ascent In The Art World
“For years, Brancusi made hardly enough money to eat. In 1926, a version of one of his most extraordinary subjects, Bird in Space, was famously held up at the US border because customs officials didn’t think it was art.” In May of 2018, one of his sculptures sold for $71 million. What happened?
Without Using ‘Uncanny Valley’ Technology, Disney Plans To Feature Carrie Fisher In The Next Star Wars Film
What? The star died in 2016, but the studio says there’s enough leftover footage from the 2015 film The Force Awakens to include General Leia Organa in the next episode. “We were never going to recast, or use a CG character,” director J.J. Abrams said.
Accused Concertmaster Resigns From Professor Post At Cleveland Institute Of Music
William Preucil, who was suspended by the Cleveland Orchestra (where he was concertmaster) after an investigative story about sexual assault in the classical music world came out in the Washington Post, has resigned as Distinguished Professor of Violin at CIM. “In a letter to the school’s students, faculty, and trustees on Saturday, [CIM President Paul W.] Hogle announced that Preucil had tendered his resignation effective immediately.”
How Can Cities Make Scooters, Bikes, Segways And More Microtransit Devices Safe For Humans?
Design, of course. “Cities need to design for the modes they want people to use because they already lost the opportunity once, says McPherson. In the 1890s, American cities experienced a bicycle boom so pervasive it changed women’s fashion. Bikes were such a popular mode of urban transportation that cities scrambled to build cycling superhighways for them. Yet bikes lost that valuable urban real estate as sprawling cities prioritized cars.”
How To Make A Chamber Music Group Hip And Fun
In Cincinnati, the Chamber Orchestra director says, “Since we don’t have to sell 3,000 tickets, we can be more inventive, we can forge ahead, we can go to bars and do little shows there. … We can look to the next way of what to do with this medium, classical music. How do we stay relevant?”
Classical Music’s #MeToo Stories Are Just A First Step
Last week’s Washington Post stories about sexual harassment in the classical music world are an important first step. But where’s the institutional accountability?
Why Are Humans So Obsessed With Labyrinths?
Maybe because we think they’re like our brains or our pasts: “For Sigmund Freud, the unconscious resembled the dark corridors and hidden places of a labyrinth. Navigating the chaos of that maze – achieving mastery over it, mapping it, finding one’s way out of it – was the work of psychoanalysis, he told an interviewer in 1927.”
What’s This “Audience” Tag On ArtsJournal?
You’ve probably seen the “Audience” heading on the ArtsJournal website or the weekly “This Week In Audience” feature in our newsletters. Some readers have asked about it. One of the biggest shifts in our culture is the changes in audience behavior. So a couple of years ago we started tagging stories which speak to the changing relationships between artists and audiences. Last year we started doing a regular roundup of the most interesting of these and adding a little context to the issues. You can check out this week’s report, that includes stories about the ubiquity of screens and Orwell’s predictions about them, here.
The Perils Of Mainstream Stardom
There have been two recent documentaries about Whitney Houston’s life, and they “shed new light on many of the particulars of Houston’s life and death: her upbringing in the church, her turbulent marriage to Bobby Brown, her shortcomings as a parent. But at a moment when musicians, generally, have greater control than before over the production and distribution of their work, the films also consider the immense pressures Houston navigated in order to appeal to a white mainstream — pressures still faced today by black and queer artists seen as crossover pop acts.”
A Box Office Worker Becomes A Last-Minute West End Star
Jennifer Caldwell, who was working in the box office in London’s Arts Theatre, got the call to fill in when the understudy was already filling in someone else’s role: “One of the producers saw me on the box office and said ‘I’ve had an idea’ about getting me to fill in. I said maybe, so he said ‘what if we cut parts of the show – can you do a reduced version of the track?’ and I said why not! We rehearsed from 3.30pm until 5pm and were on stage at 7pm.”
What A Beast
The Captain is the best movie in years. Fight me.
Happy Hours Aren’t Always Happy
Two dancers create a performance that’s also theatrical, that’s also improvised, that’s also a comedy, and that’s also something different every time.
What To Do To Improve The Complex, Smart Los Angeles Show ‘Vida’
What’s good, Vida? “The show has provided plenty to talk about. There is lots of conflict and (impressive) sex. Plus, it is set in Boyle Heights, the historic Eastside neighborhood that has been the site of highly visible clashes over gentrification. But more significant, Vida is the ultimate Los Angeles show — one in which Hollywood sheds its misperceptions about Los Angeles (that we’re all bikini blondes and palm trees) in favor of portraying a more textured view of the city — in this case, a view that is resolutely Latina.”
Ann Cefola: Free Ferry & The Getz-Gilberto Connection
There’s a cool connection between some jazz liner notes to a recent book of poetry.
The Head Of The Royal Academy Will Step Down After Eleven Blockbuster Years
Sir Charles Saumarez Smith “will leave at the end of the year and said he was departing at a time of ‘obvious strength and success.’ Just over a million people visited the gallery in 2017, and a £56m redevelopment of the site was unveiled earlier this year.” And then there are the blockbuster David Hockney and Anish Kapoor shows – triumphs for the RA.
The Secrets Of Hollywood – At Least Gay And Bisexual Hollywood – Get Revealed In A New Movie
True: “Though Hollywood is now seen (sometimes unfavorably) as a liberal bastion, it wasn’t always that way. For lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, life in Hollywood up until the early 1990s — and perhaps, in some ways, still today — was a game of smoke and mirrors, hiding parts of themselves in public for fear of losing their jobs, being harassed by the police or worse.” That’s why Scotty Bowers pimped for the queer men and women of Hollywood for years.
An Artist, With The Help Of Many Others Across The DMZ, Unites The Koreas By Hand
Kyungah Ham found a North Korean propaganda leaflet – something she hadn’t seen for decades – in 2008, and that changed her art, and her life. “For a decade, Ms. Ham has been producing designs on her computer that are printed and smuggled into North Korea through intermediaries based in Russia or China. Then a group of anonymous artisans, whom she has never met or spoken to, are paid to convert them into embroideries, using exquisitely fine stitching. With bribes and subterfuge, the works are smuggled back out. Ultimately, they are shown and sold at galleries and exhibitions.”
Artists Deal With The Tide Of Gentrification In Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo
The area is changing rapidly: “The promise of more light rail and Little Tokyo’s proximity to popular destinations like the Arts District are also increasing construction of market-rate housing that has led to the evictions of long-time residents, including Japanese American artists with ties to the Little Tokyo community.”
Late Last Week, MoviePass Had To Get An Emergency Loan To Survive
How long can the subscription-based service last? It might not be too long. “Any of the app’s 3 million users that attempted to see a movie on Thursday were greeted instead by an error message claiming that their reservations could not be processed.”
Why Do Adults Reread Our Childhood Classics – And What Do We Learn About Ourselves When We Do?
It’s familiarity, true: “There is an allure to the repetition of rereading, submitting to the rhythms of a narrative, place, and characters you know well, and the familiar emotions they evoke. Rereading also has a different pace. I tear through a book on the first read, to find out what happens next, but rereading feels mellower and more leisurely, even while relearning the parts I’ve forgotten.” But then, there’s the discovery of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia – basically, there’s the risk of understanding the suck fairy.
A Broadway Show Actor Commits Suicide Six Days After A Brutal Meeting With The Director, And The Cast Is Reeling
“However complex the causes of Mr. Loeffelholz’s death may be, widespread discussion of his final rehearsal has brought new attention to the way theatrical creative teams wield power in an era of increasing concern about how managers treat subordinates in the workplace.” In other words, there’s a lot – a lot – of bullying on Broadway.
How Opera Became A Tool For Empowering Young People In South Africa’s Townships [PODCAST]
The founder of Umculo, an organization that uses musical theatre and opera to get both young people and adults interested in the power of the music for social change, was inspired by El Sistema in Venezuela.