Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård first appeared with the RSNO in November 2009 as a last-minute replacement for a sick conductor and went on to lead lauded performances of Shostakovich’s Symphony No11 in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He was appointed to the position of Principal Guest Conductor in 2011 and since then has appeared with the RSNO up to four times each season.”
How Consumer Culture Took Over Everything
Both “Less is more” and “More is more” are the catchphrases of a consumer society faced with unimagined plenty. Following World War II, “Less is more” suggested unease with mass abundance: restraint became an emblem of refinement. Two decades of uninterrupted prosperity later, “More is more” poked fun at its abstemious parent. It is also a fitting description of the way we live now.
Was “Cool” Ever Really Cool?
In its origin, cool was a creation of African-American jazz musicians to face the pressure of Jim Crow arrangements during a time when the United States was an unembarrassedly racialist white society. At various points in its history, cool was, in Dinerstein’s language, “the aestheticizing of detachment,” “an emotional mask, a strategy of masking emotion,” “a public mode of covert resistance,” “a walking indictment of society,” “relaxed intensity” played out through the jazz musician, who was “global culture’s first non-white rebel.”