Ideas Movies And The Musical Message Movies use borrowed music to telegraph extra-musical ideas - most of them never intended by the original composers. Movies offer a peek "into the contemporary American unconscious, into the way mass culture understands, or misunderstands, high culture. The pop associations are an important part of the music's meaning, even if the composer never intended his music to work this way." Philadelphia Inquirer (LAT) 08/31/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 10:46 am Visual Arts Names And Memorials Names are a powerful memorial in our culture. Michael Kimmelman ponders the likelihood of some sort of list of names at the World Trade Center site as a memorial. "The competition guidelines for the memorial at ground zero require that the design 'recognize each individual who was a victim' on Sept. 11, 2001, and on Feb. 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was first attacked. It's a safe bet that many of the 5,200 submissions interpret that as some kind of list of names. By aesthetic and social consensus, names are today a kind of reflexive memorial impulse, lists of names having come almost automatically to connote 'memorial,' just as minimalism has come to be the presumptive sculptural style for memorial design, the monumental blank slate onto which the names can be inscribed." The New York Times 08/31/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 10:51 am Politics Of Picking Memorials With more than 5000 entries in the design competition for a World Trade Center memorial, how do jurors go about choosing? "In the first round, a jury typically tries to eliminate 75 percent to 80 percent of the entries. Richard Andrews, the director of the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, said that sophisticated juries could rule out some entries within 10 seconds. 'But there will also be entries where three or four of the jurors say they didn't see anything and one will say: `Look at it again. Here's what I found.' And it will be held over for a second round.' That's when jurors really start debating and discussing stylistic differences among submissions." The New York Times 08/31/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 10:32 am Architect Behind The Buildings Architect David Childs is having a major impact on the skyline of New York. "At Skidmore Owings & Merrill, you don't know what my next building will look like. You know what a Richard Meier building will look like; there's a style. I'm more like Eero Saarinen, whom I revere. His buildings all look different." Buildings as "egoistic big statements," as Mr. Childs put it, do not interest him. Making the fabric of the city is what excites him most: how streets thread their way through avenues and parks, how they open vistas to rivers or create a neighborhood." The New York Times 08/31/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 10:19 am Back To What Was? The World Trade Center Restoration Movement is a group of people who want to retore the World Trade Center to pre-9/11. "In close solidarity with one another, and in opposition to the city's political establishment, business leaders, academics and civic groups, and just about everyone else whose opinion matters, the W.T.C.R.M. demands that the World Trade Center towers be rebuilt. Not replaced by something new and supposedly better. Rebuilt, hewing as closely as possible to the design of the buildings that were lost on Sept. 11." The New York Times 08/31/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 8:39 am Whose Freedom Gets The Museum? Should there be a "Museum of Freedom" built at the site of the World Trade Center? The idea has been proposed. But Herbert Muschamp writes that trying to wedge the idea of "freedom" into a building is highly problematic... The New York Times 08/31/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 8:39 am Music Opera's Essential 25 Recordings? Tim Page ensures that his fall will start off with bags of vitriolic hate mail as he chooses 25 opera recordings meant to "give a novice listener an opportunity to explore the field." "The selection process was not easy. Operaphiles are an opinionated lot, and I can already anticipate some of the mail, both curious and furious, that I'll receive. A few sample heresies: Not one of the more than 60 operatic works by Gaetano Donizetti made the final cut. Virgil Thomson's "The Mother of Us All" is here, but George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," an infinitely more popular American opera, is not. Where are the works of Benjamin Britten? And how can such composers as Mozart, Verdi and Wagner be limited to two operas apiece?" Washington Post 08/31/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 10:59 am Minnesota - New Baton In Town The Minnesota Orchestra is beginning life under new music director Osmo Vanska. "After seven years of flight and fancy under Eiji Oue and nine previous to him under the iron fist of Edo de Waart, the orchestra is banking on Vänskä as a happy balance — an elite, uncompromising musician of mild temperament, an A-list conductor for top orchestras in America and Europe, with expertise in a corner of Scandinavian repertoire the Minnesota Orchestra yearns to conquer. The stakes are high." St. Paul Pioneer-Press 08/31/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 10:15 am Songs Without Words "Most singing that we hear has words, and, although the singer may depart from those words for bar after bar of vocal gymnastics (as in a bel canto aria, for instance), we know that in the end we shall be returned to the text. It doesn't matter that the text may be more of a pretext for music than a real text conveying important information. Nor does it seem to matter very much to many people if the text that is being sung happens to be in a language they do not understand. A song that has no text at all takes us into a different world." The Guardian (UK) 08/30/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 7:41 am Arts Issues Culture Lines At The WTC A new palace of culture is to be built at the site of the World Trade Center. We don't yet know which culture will be represented there, and jockeying for position is already intense. But "this much is certain: institutions that take the dare and locate themselves at that haunted, contested place will find that a lot more is asked of them than the usual dose of edification and diversion." The New York Times 08/31/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 8:42 am People John Shearman, Art Historian, 72 John Shearman, an art historian and scholar who consulted with the Vatican on the restoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, has died at the age of 72. "Dr. Shearman probably achieved the most fame for his discovery that the vault of the Sistine Chapel was cracked along its length in 1504, four years before Michelangelo began work on it. Because the old decoration — incorporating stars and some geometrical shapes — was ruined, a new ceiling was needed." The New York Times 08/29/03 Posted: 08/29/2003 7:36 am Theatre Shakespeare's New Houses Shakespeare gets ever more popular. New theatres devoted to the Bard are being built in Europe. "In the past month an Italian version of London's Globe theatre has sprung up in the Villa Borghese park in the heart of Rome. In Poland, efforts are underway to reconstruct a Shakespearean theatre that thrived in the Baltic port city of Gdansk almost 400 years ago, but has since been replaced by a carpark." The Guardian (UK) 08/28/03 Posted: 08/28/2003 4:59 pm Plays - Just Slipping Away "Playwrights have shuttled between Hollywood and the theater for decades. But the commute is looking more attractive lately, with the poor economy affecting the arts, and mass media growing in influence. With the economy not exactly booming, now is not a great time (if there is one) to be trying to earn a living from the theater, note observers - making Hollywood look all the more appealing. In New York, for example, several theaters that focus on new works are doing fewer plays than they did 30 years ago, dropping from two dozen a year on average to six or eight today." Christian Science Monitor 08/29/03 Posted: 08/28/2003 3:34 pm Publishing BBC Takes On Chaucer For The 21st Century "Traditionalists, gird your loins, for they have updated Geoffrey Chaucer. From a shortlist of 10 tales they have invited the cream of today's television writers to create contemporary versions in their own voices but true to the spirit of Chaucer's original. 'Chaucer held up a mirror to the 14th century and we intend to do the same for the 21st, exploring themes such as the cult of celebrity, bigotry and the obsession with youth'." The Telegraph (UK) 08/30/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 10:54 am Slam-Dancing - Attacking Amis Tibor Fischer set off a literary storm earlier this month when he slammed Martin Amis' new book before it had even been published. "Fischer, whose fourth novel, Voyage To The End Of The Room, is published on the same day as Amis's Yellow Dog, is certainly shrewd enough to know that his column in the Telegraph earlier this month attacking Amis's novel with apparently unprovoked ferocity would get him talked about far more than any number of press releases for his own; he acknowledged as much in the piece: 'As a writer, I'm relieved that Amis has produced a novel unworthy of his talent. No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention'." The Observer (UK) 08/31/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 7:37 am Media Why The BBC Is Making It Free The BBC is planning to "digitise and offer for download, for free, as much of its back catalogue of programmes that it can legally do, from the earliest radio reels to nature documentaries to educational programmes. Anyone will be allowed to re-use, re-edit and mix this material with their own, provided it's for non-commercial use." But why? Because it is in the public broadcaster's interests... The Guardian (UK) 08/28/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 11:09 am Football Network Rescues Arts Channel A pay-TV service that has built its success on televising football and Hollywood movies, has bought a 50 percent stake in the UK Artsworld channel. Artsworld had been struggling financially for some time. "There is definitely room for growth. This deal will help us accelerate. We expect to go on to cable next year. We don't propose to change the mix and we won't dumb down. We retain editorial control, Rupert Murdoch won't be ringing up demanding this or that ballet. In fact, so far our principal effect has been to spur the BBC into reviving its arts coverage." The Guardian (UK) 08/30/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 7:31 am Anti-Infection Arts Funding The Toronto Film Festival is getting $400,000 from the Ontario government for "SARS relief." With SARS scaring away visitors to the province, the government set up a fund to help out. "Previously, the ministry announced it was providing the Shaw and Stratford festivals a total of $800,000 in marketing assistance to help them overcome the effects of the SARS outbreak. The TIFF money has been used for campaign aimed at potential attendees in U.S. border states and Canada as well as producers and buyers in the U.S. and overseas." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 08/30/03 Posted: 08/31/2003 7:23 am