The best of what the university has to offer lies less in its specific power to advance knowledge or solve problems in any of its many fields than in its more general, more crucial ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.” We have turned inward exactly when we needed to turn outward. – The Baffler
How The Baltimore Symphony Got Into Dire Straits
The Baltimore Sun obtained financial documents showing the orchestra’s fiscal health is in calamitous condition. Even factoring in additional state funding, the orchestra is projected to barely make payroll in July and August, according to cash forecasts for a 52-week season. The orchestra would likely end its fiscal year with an approximately $1.5 million deficit. – Baltimore Sun
The Monastery Where Spanish Was Born
According to García Turza, if the Suso monks were the first to record the sounds of the Ibero-Romance language on the page, they are also responsible for the creation of the Spanish alphabet. – BBC
Robert Therrien, Whimsical Sculptor, Dead At 71
“[He] was best known for his oversized sculptures of chairs and tables that he produced at larger-than-life, room-filling scale. In doing so, everyday pieces of furniture seem unreal, and viewers become like children, crawling beneath kitchen tables. They have become staples at museums across the world.” – ARTnews
Colossal Art: Stockhausen’s Astonishing Masterpiece
Alex Ross: “Aus licht” turned out to be the kind of inexplicable marvel that one waits half a lifetime to see. It induced shivers not just in its awesome moments—trumpeters intoning a chorale from balconies; brass players engaging in military-style skirmishes in the aisles; angel voices singing an extraterrestrial liturgy—but also in its unexpectedly intimate passages, its glimpses of the composer’s shattered childhood. “Aus licht” was one of the great theatrical events of the new century.” The New Yorker
When Zeffirelli Went Wrong At The Opera
He was all about the lavish set. At their best, his productions induced gasps. But ultimately, these stagings were not just singer- and conductor-proof. They were drama-proof, almost like a parody of opera. – The New York Times
The Eka Trio: ‘O’
The young Scandinavians of the Eka Trio combine the relaxed sensuosity of trends in Nordic music with their underlying commitment to the adventurousness that goes to the heart of jazz. – Doug Ramsey
Renee Fleming’s Theatre Breakout
The past two years have been busy in the theatre, with non-operatic roles, some time in Carousel, and currently in The Light in the Piazza. – The Guardian
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Goes To Broadway To See “What The Constitution Means To Me”
Ginsburg got a standing ovation when her famous line about women on the Supreme Court was said by a cast member: “When will there be enough women on the court? My answer is, when there are nine.” – CNN
What Goes On Backstage At The World’s Oldest Theatre Collective
“Theatre collective” may seem a surprising way to describe the Comédie-Française (est. 1680), but it’s accurate: the company is owned and controlled by its actors and other members. Reporter Laura Cappelle pays a visit to see how it all works. – The Guardian
Charles Reich, Author Of ‘The Greening Of America’, Dead At 91
“Reich was a popular Yale University professor whose students included both Bill and Hillary Clinton and a respected legal scholar when a 39,000-word excerpt from The Greening of America ran in The New Yorker in September 1970, generating a massive volume of letters. The book was published a few weeks later and sold more than 2 million copies, making Reich a middle-aged hero for a rebellious generation despite scorn from both conservatives and liberals.” – AP
An Oral History Of ‘Oh! Calcutta!, Which Premiered 50 Years Ago
“An erotic revue conceived by the English theater critic Kenneth Tynan, Oh! Calcutta! took it all off at the Eden Theater, a former pornographic cinema that had been renovated by the show’s producer. … [Tynan] solicit[ed] anyone and everyone to submit a titillating sketch. Nothing ‘about art or redeeming literary merit,’ he advised. A lot of the luminaries (Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Edna O’Brien) dropped out or were dropped, but the final, all-male lineup included Sam Shepard, Jules Feiffer and John Lennon.” – The New York Times
Warner Is Paying Nearly Half A Billion Dollars To Keep J.J. Abrams
“Following a months-long courting process that included multiple suitors, WarnerMedia is in final negotiations for a new partnership with [Abrams’s company,] Bad Robot, sources say. … Abrams, who is currently editing Star Wars: Episode IX for Disney, was among the top producers in Warners’ TV fold at a time when brand-name showrunners are in increasingly high demand.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Why Sotheby’s Was Bought
The purchase, by Mr. Drahi’s BidFair USA, returns the only publicly traded major auction house to private ownership after 31 years on the New York Stock Exchange. – The New York Times
Art Requires Empathy. Machines Don’t Have It. So Can They Make Art We Will Relate To?
“We are able to empathise with nonhuman characters or intelligent machines in human-made fiction because they have been conceived by other human beings from the only subjective perspective accessible to us: ‘What would it be like for a human to behave as x?’ In order to understand machinic art as such – and assuming that we stand a chance of even recognising it in the first place – we would need a way to conceive a first-person experience of what it is like to be that machine. That is something we cannot do even for beings that are much closer to us.” – Aeon
The story of Mrs. T and me — in a hundred words
Inspired by a series that The New York Times describes as “Modern Love in miniature, featuring reader-submitted stories of no more than 100 words,” I thought I’d try to sum up the wildly improbable but nonetheless true story of our courtship and marriage in one hundred carefully chosen words. – Terry Teachout