“KUT in Austin, Texas Public Radio in San Antonio, KERA in Dallas and Houston Public Media have been in talks for about a year with conference calls on a near-weekly basis. … The journalism hubs are intended to increase regional coverage for both NPR and the stations participating in each collaboration.”
How Funders Distort Artistic Vision
“There’s a push from the politicians to constantly fund something new. And what we really need is sustainable, long-term development. That’s how you build inclusion – because people who are excluded need to understand how they can get involved. If you keep changing the rules it’s bloody difficult for the people who are on the inside, and it becomes impossible for anyone on the outside.”
The Viola’s Big Problem
The viola is an inherently quixotic instrument. Its construction is a compromise between an acoustic ideal and human limits: For its sound to bloom as effortlessly as that of a violin or cello, its neck would need to be impossibly long. For most of the instrument’s history, composers have conspired to keep it out of the limelight, assigning it a supporting role. And chamber music conventions dictate that on the rare occasion that a viola does get the melody, it’s facing the wrong way.
The Oh-So-Brief Glory Of The Tangent Piano
That’s brief in two senses: the instrument had a heyday of just a generation or so in the second half of the 18th century (only about 20 instruments survive), and the decay of the sound is quick enough that, as musical instrument historian Cleveland Johnson puts it, “on the tangent piano, one hears not only the beginning of every note, but the end. The instrument allows [its player] to play with this space between notes.” (includes sound clips)
Ellie Mannette, Who Perfected The Steel Drum As Instrument, Dead At 90
“As a child in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital, Mr. Mannette became fascinated with the bands he saw using trash cans and buckets as drums, hitting them in different ways to create different sounds. For the rest of his life, he sought to elevate and expand the craft of steel-pan music, and to share it with the world. He became a master tuner, builder and teacher.”
Choreographing To Get The Obsessions Out Of His Head: Reggie Wilson
“An idea hits me and I think, Oh, that’s cool. I usually don’t follow it when it first happens. And then it will recur and recur, over and over again. It gets to the point of obsession. Making a dance will help me process it, think about it on multiple levels … Then I have to ‘get rid of it,’ which means incorporating it into my everyday existence. Then it stops being disruptive.”
A Crowdsourced Virtual Museum Commemorates Houston’s 2017 Floods
“What is the Houston Flood Museum? First off, it’s somewhere that can be visited only online. It’s a website, which went live last week, whose creators envision a platform where people can pool their stories from [Hurricane] Harvey and, perhaps one day, future storms. From shared experiences, they hope, will come understanding. And healing.”
Is Programming Better When Artists Curate?
Performing arts institutions are recognizing they need vision to make it in an increasingly tough market. And artists have vision. But just going out and hiring artists is no replacement for the kind of institutional mission that makes vision work. And putting artists in these positions without thinking through their role in the larger organization risks undermining all their efforts and, in some cases, ghettoizing contemporary music still further as something that lies outside the organization’s main mission.
Arts Council England Reports Major Drop In London Arts Attendance
The figures include a dramatic decline of 17m (28%) in attendance and visits at London’s NPOs, which was marginally offset by modest increases in some other parts of the country.
Dance Is Thriving In The Catskills. But Is It Too Much?
The increase in activity is exciting, but as more and more dance residencies and presenters crop up, some of the people in charge have begun to express concerns about overcrowding even as they float dreams of synergy. Will the competition for financial support and audiences be zero sum? Or might the influx be beneficial to all, turning the region into a cultural destination, like the Berkshires?
Identity – What Is It, Really, And How Much Can We Truly Choose It For Ourselves?
Kwame Anthony Appiah: “Like all the words in our language, the identity labels we use are a common possession. Were everybody to follow Humpty Dumpty’s example [‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean’], we simply couldn’t understand one another. If Toni Morrison isn’t a black woman, the term isn’t doing any work. … ‘Lesbian’ isn’t much use if you’re looking for a partner on Bumble unless it signifies a woman who might be open to sex with another woman.”
A New Advancement In AI: It Remembers What It Has Learned
In short, the algorithm is able to note differences between what it encounters and what it has seen in the past. Like most people but unlike most other algorithms, the new system Higgins built for Google can understand that it hasn’t come across a brand new object just because it’s seeing something from a new angle.
Berlin Train Station Gives Up Plan To Use Atonal Music To Drive Away Undesirables
Last month, Germany’s national rail operator announced that it would start broadcasting atonal music from the speakers at Berlin’s Hermannstrasse station in order to repel drug dealers and homeless people who were congregating there. The city’s new-music community rose up in protest. Lisa Benjes of the Initiative Neue Musik writes about how she organized a concert of atonal music at the station that convinced the powers-that-be to abandon that plan.
In China, Some Sold-Out Hit Movies Are Really Seen By Very Few People
Many investors reportedly put money into films as a stock-market manipulation scheme, buying up blocks of unsold tickets and even entire screenings so that the perception of success will push up a company’s share price. Film production is also used as a way to evade capital-flight controls and transfer large sums of money out of the country.
Paul Taylor, R.I.P.
I wrote an appreciation of Paul Taylor for the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Paul Taylor, who died on Wednesday at the age of 88, was…
I Hate Burritos
So the headline isn’t mine, it came as a demand from my longtime eating partner Shelley, who heard me complain yet again about one of her beloveds — this particular paragon presenting as fat, limp,
Reading With Aimee Mann
LAST week I took a wild guess and approached singer/songwriter Aimee Mann for my musicians-on-writing column, All the Poets. As a longtime fan I had a vague sense that she was literary.
How The Online Global Gig Economy Threatens Us All
While freelance websites may have raised wages and broadened the number of potential employers for some people, they’ve forced every new worker who signs up into entering a global marketplace with endless competition, low wages, and little stability. Decades ago, the only companies that outsourced work overseas were multinational corporations with the resources to set up manufacturing shops elsewhere. Now, independent businesses and individuals are using the power of the internet to find the cheapest services in the world too, and it’s not just manufacturing workers who are seeing the downsides to globalization. All over the country, people like graphic designers and voice-over artists and writers and marketers have to keep lowering their rates to compete.
End Of An Era: The Village Voice Is No More
Three years after buying The Village Voice, and a year after the paper shut down its print edition, owner Peter Barbey told the remaining staff today that the publication will no longer be posting any new stories.
Can This Playwright Make Snooker Into Compelling Theatre?
The question seems even more unlikely when one finds out that the play in question is titled The Nap. But the playwright is Richard Bean, who gave us One Man, Two Guvnors. As he tells Roslyn Sulcas, “[Snooker] is sociologically quite interesting, because it’s a working-class game. You read the autobiographies of the top players, the tropes are exactly the same: alcohol, gambling, fast cars, women trouble, dystopian families. That’s your raw material really. At the same time it’s unbelievably difficult, and it’s like playing first violin in the Philharmonic.”