Visual Arts

Venice Has Sunk Two Feet... Venice has sunk 24 inches in 300 years, says a new study based on historic paintings. "The study, published in the latest issue of the journal Climatic Change, analyzed eight paintings by Giovanni Antonio Canal, nicknamed Canaletto, (1697-1768) and three by his lesser-known nephew Bernardo Bellotto (1720-1780). Both artists produced their paintings with the help of a portable camera obscura, a lens that projects images onto sketch pads. The trick, described by Leonardo da Vinci 250 years earlier, enabled them to reproduce accurate urban landscapes, complete with the lines of green scum formed by algae left on canal-side buildings by retreating high tides." Discovery 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 10:55 pm

The BBC's Architecture Problem The BBC is having difficulty choosing an architect and design for a new concert hall. "Faced with the embarrassing discovery that none of the five architects it had invited to design a showcase concert hall at White City came anywhere near meeting its budget, the BBC is having to learn quickly that an architectural competition is no guarantee of great architecture. On one level, the corporation has only itself to blame. The real problem with architectural competitions is not of the BBC's making. It, at least, is serious about building - but it has been swept along by the illusion that architectural competitions are a cultural duty - a myth perpetuated by self-important clients and socially dysfunctional architects." The Observer (UK) 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 10:07 pm

Where Art Is Hot "There is optimism and excitement in British art right now, despite its philosophical malaise. If a lot of the excitement is manufactured by editors, ad-men and PR personnel, it is also true that there is a hunger for art that amounts to something more than a trend. It's a hunger that persists, even as the taste for art as fashion continues to be so generously indulged. If it were somehow possible to reinvest the present with a sense of duration, a historical sweep and stretch, we might be able to enjoy the shallows less guiltily, and find ourselves more frequently lost in the depths." Prospect 07/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 9:36 pm

Music

Florida Philharmonic - Autopsy For The Future Can the bankrupt Florida Philharmonic be restarted? Perhaps - but a new model is needed. "Clearly what we did did not work. A different business model needs to be considered. Whatever is decided to be done, you've got to be put on good financial footing to begin with, with the money down before you build anything. That was never done with this orchestra."
The Sun-Sentinel (Florida) 08/25/03
Posted: 08/25/2003 8:32 am

• Florida Philharmonic - Anatomy Of A Dead Orchestra "It was never any secret the Philharmonic was staggering from one financial crisis to another, although most patrons and the public never realized how deep the problems ran. Since 1989, the Philharmonic burned through roughly $123 million, with yearly expenses soaring over $10 million, its financial records show. The orchestra's board and managers borrowed from its own foundation and endowment funds, which were supposed to guarantee its survival." The Sun-Sentinel (Florida) 08/24/03
  Posted: 08/25/2003 8:30 am

• Florida Phil Conductor Leaves Quietly Conductor James Judd left Florida last week without much of a sendoff from the orchestra he led for 16 years. "Recent circumstances make a festive send-off difficult. The Florida Philharmonic, which Judd helmed for 16 years and helped raise to its highest creative level, is in bankruptcy; with a reorganization effort floundering for lack of funds, the orchestra's demise appears all but certain. The conductor's abrupt resignation, following several dubious moves by an interim management team that left him out of the loop on key artistic decisions, widened the divide between himself and the organization into a gaping chasm. Still, it's an undeservedly quiet coda for the charismatic Englishman who built the Florida Philharmonic into a major regional arts institution and brought it international recognition." The Sun-Sentinel (Florida) 08/24/03
  Posted: 08/25/2003 8:27 am

Is It Live Or Is It... "Auto-Tuned"? "Pop stars and punk bands alike are piping their voices through the hardware, which corrects and improves their vocal pitch during concerts and on records. With musicians on the road touring for weeks on end, the autotuner has become a safety net that catches the occasional clinker on days when their voices may be off. (In a nutshell, the autotuner is told what key the vocal is in and analyzes the wave form in real time. If the singer is off-key, it will adjust the pitch to the closest note in that key.)" The Globe & Mail (Canada) 08/25/03
Posted: 08/25/2003 8:15 am

CD's Are Forever? HA! So you're transferring your music to recordable CD's so you'll have them forever? Better think again. A Dutch magazine tested CD's that had been recorded less than two years ago and discovered many of them no longer play. "It is presumed that CD-Rs are good for at least 10 years. Some manufacturers even claim that their CD-Rs will last up to a century. From our tests it's concluded however that there is a lot of junk on the market. We came across CD-Rs that should never have been released to the market. It's completely unacceptable that CD-Rs become unusable in less than two years." CDFreaks 08/24/03
Posted: 08/25/2003 7:28 am

Orchestra Musicians In Danger Of Hearing Loss Orchestra musicians are said to be at risk of hearing damage. "The legal limit of sound exposure is 90 decibels in the UK but the sound of a symphony orchestra playing a big classical piece at treble forte has been measured at 98dB. Orchestras are now preparing for an EU directive which will reduce the maximum sound level to 85dB, a drop of 20%. A report from the Association of British Orchestras showed that as well as deafness, players could suffer from damaged frequency discrimination, tinnitus or diplacusis (in which the pitch of a single tone is heard as two different pitches by the two ears)." The Guardian (UK) 08/23/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 10:02 pm

Building A Better Jazz Festival As Chicago looks to building a better jazz festival, it could do worse than look to Montreal for a blueprint. "Twenty-four years ago, a small group of intrepid Canadian jazz promoters took a chance on staging a weekend-long mini-fest, hoping that a few listeners might show up. Approximately 12,000 did, and today the Montreal International Jazz Festival has grown into the largest, most intelligently programmed jazz soiree in the world. Its $12.7 million (U.S.) budget and 500-concert lineup easily outpace any American counterpart." Chicago Tribune 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 5:25 pm

Endangered Species - Dallas Classical Music Radio Times are bad at Dallas-Fort Worth's only classical music station. "Ratings have dropped to the point where WRR is no longer among Dallas-Fort Worth's top 20 stations. 'We've hit a wall in the last 18 months'." Dallas Morning News 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 5:17 pm

• What's Wrong At Dallas' WRR "Much as local listeners may grouse, some of the problems are built into WRR's commercial format, which has to make room for the advertisements that pay the bills. Similar artistic concerns can be raised with classical-music stations in plenty of other markets. From coast to coast, classical broadcasting just isn't what it was 30 years ago, in what now looks like a golden age. Classical radio has been hit by the double whammy of a general economic slowdown and a major rewrite of the laws governing the U.S. radio industry." Dallas Morning News 08/24/03
  Posted: 08/24/2003 5:15 pm

Music - Best Of Times, Worst Of Times "For the past few years, the music industry has been awash in gloom and doom. The grim chorus is now as familiar to the public as any top 40 hit: Piracy has gutted profits, CD sales are going steadily south for the first time since the format was introduced in the 1980s, corporate conglomeration has stultified any art in the business of recording and concerts. All of that is true, and in private even the titans of the business express fears that probably echo the anxious mutterings of railroad barons in the days when Model T's began rolling down the line. But here is the funny thing lost in the histrionics: Today may be the very best time to be a music fan, especially one looking for a connection to a favorite artist or guidance and access to the exotic or rare." Fort Worth Star-Telegram (LATimes) 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 5:14 pm

How To Grow Opera Addicts In Canada there are several self-taught opera gurus who specialize in igniting a passion for the grand art in their audiences. "What these men have in common, besides an encyclopedic knowledge of opera, is a seemingly insatiable urge to communicate their passion to others. They all talk as persuasively as the proverbial refrigerator salesman in the High Arctic. It hardly seems necessary, since there appears to be no shortage of applicants for their courses and guided tours." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 08/23/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 1:05 pm

Arts Issues

Euro-Meltdown At Euro Disney "Europe's 'cultural Chernobyl', as one French critic called Disneyland Paris, is in meltdown again. Falling attendance, overspending on a new movie-themed park and those cursed terrorists are to blame. This month, it announced it would have trouble repaying its banks and the doomsayers are predicting bankruptcy." The Telegraph (UK) 08/25/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 10:40 pm

People

Elliott Carter - On Top At 94 "Though considered in certain circles to be America's greatest living composer, he is, in others, demonized for alienating audiences with music that's so dense, so packed with information in so little time, that it's like street noise. Anyone listening to Carter expecting typical classical symmetry and tunefulness is primed for disappointment. If heard in the anything-can-happen spirit of progressive jazz, Carter's hairpin turns and animated chatter among instruments are anything but mysterious. He tests listeners at the beginning of his pieces, often with a jarring chord that all but says, 'If you can handle this, the rest is easy'." Philadelphia Inquirer 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 10:09 am

Lawrence Summers - Reinventing Harvard? As president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers has a radical agenda - transforming the very nature of the way one of the world's great universities does business. "Even if Summers were a guileful and calculating figure with a hidden agenda of drastic change, he would have a tough row to hoe. But he's not: he's a blunt and overbearing figure with an overt agenda of drastic change. It should come as no surprise that Larry Summers is not quite as popular a figure as his gracious predecessor was." New York Times Magazine 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 7:46 am

Theatre

Direct This! "Willful directors can either enliven or distort. Enliven, if they accept the gulf between a playwright's time and immediate intentions on the one hand and the sensibilities of today on the other, and set up a critical dialogue between past and present, text and audience. Distort, if they just lay a simple-minded, ideologically monolithic interpretation on a multi-faceted play. The temptation to distort is particularly powerful in a climate that discourages the new, like commercially cautious Broadway or the West End today." The New York Times 08/24/03
Posted: 08/25/2003 7:17 am

• Direct Line - Now That Would Be A Revolution Michael Feingold writes that it's time for the role of director to be redefined. "I'm afraid it's time for the theater to get rid of directing. Now don't panic. I said directing, not directors. I'm talking about a specific kind of directing, fairly common these days, that functions only as an interference to the work being performed. It's become a fashion in Europe, and in certain academic circles, where various theoretical excuses have been made up for it. And, as lovers of great theater music know to their dismay, it's widely prevalent in opera—so much so that directors coming onstage for their curtain call at premieres are shocked when they don't get booed." Village Voice 07/30/03
  Posted: 08/25/2003 7:06 am

• The Cult Of Directing "That directing has, for a time, replaced writing or acting as the primary force in theater is only an understandable phase in stage history. Soon it will undoubtedly have run its course. While the phase lasts, we can relish its virtues and groan over its defects. But that the director should replace the performance as the object of interest is a physical impossibility, since that would make the whole occasion lose its point." Village Voice 08/06/03
  Posted: 08/25/2003 7:02 am

Feeding On The Fringe New York's Fringe Festival has become a theatre-feeder. "When the fringe began in 1996, it was a countercultural event. Now, it's a risk-free development workshop for theater producers, not to mention development types in film and television. And in turn, a lot of shows have hired publicists to exploit their properties and build attention. 'There's a total new focus on exploring the fringe. It's all about buzz - which shows are going to rise above the crowd.' The New York press has a lot to do with that. And since the Fringe Festival operates during the dull, dog days of August (arts-wise), there are plenty of editorial holes to fill." Chicago Tribune 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 12:28 pm

Publishing

Leonardo Online For the first time, readers around the world can explore Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and drawings, including plans for a town he designed but which was never built. "The new 3D Turning the Pages website version is unique in enabling readers to unscramble Leonardo's text. Not only was his language medieval Italian; his handwriting ran from right to left, since this came easiest to him as a lefthander. The software, developed by library staff, allows viewers to reverse the script and read a translation of the text. Clive Izard, project manager, said the technology would allow a full translation to be added." The Guardian (UK) 08/23/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 9:59 pm

Wild About Harry - American Book Sales Soar "Even more than anticipated, the June release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix gave business at the nation's largest book chains a much needed jump start, revving up quarterly sales and igniting optimism that the momentum will carry over into the rest of the year." Publishers Weekly 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 5:43 pm

Media

All Things BBC Free For Download The BBC plans to make all of its radio and TV library available free for downloading over the internet. "The BBC probably has the best television library in the world. Up until now this huge resource has remained locked up, inaccessible to the public because there hasn't been an effective mechanism for distribution. But the digital revolution and broadband are changing all that." BBC 08/24/03
Posted: 08/25/2003 7:25 am

Dance

Dancing On Schubert A collaboration by choreographer Trisha Brown and baritone Simon Keenleyside reinterprets Schubert's classic "Die Winterriese" song cycle. "The real revelation of the Winterreise experiment is the effect it has on Schubert's music, which is flung into unusual and arresting contexts. Brown had feared that it might enrage musicologists: 'I worried that it might be irreverent to Schubert. In the rehearsal room, when we first made it, I said to the dancers that I'm thinking of Simon, who is going to lie down now. He's delusional and dreaming and you put your knees up and your hands up and catch him to stop him from falling off. On one level, it couldn't be simpler. But on another level it's so totally absurd and surreal and radical. In fact, the new setting, and the vocal effect it creates, paradoxically manages to serve the score in a way that a conventional performance never could." The Guardian (UK) 08/23/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 10:34 pm