Are Video Games The New Music Tastemaker? Where do kids get their music these days? Increasingly less from MTV. No, the new music guru is video games. "Recent surveys show that more than 40 per cent of game players have bought a CD from an artist featured in a game, 40 per cent have learned of a new band from a game, and 27 per cent have gone out and bought the CD." Australian IT 02/01/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 10:14 pm
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Chicago Museum Attendance Declines Fourth Straight Year "Attendance at Chicago’s top 10 museums fell for the fourth year in a row, although the pace of the declined slowed enough that museum officials expect a turnaround this year. In 2004, 7.48 million people visited at least one of the museums, down 1% from 7.57 million in 2003, according to a report released today from the Museums in the Park." Crain's Chicago Business 01/31/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 10:01 pm
A Hirst "Chapel" In Rome? American collector Carlo Bilotti is working on setting up a centre for contemporary art which will display works by Damien Hirst and other artists from his collection in a former chapel in Rome. "Mr Bilotti says he aims to create a “modern meditative environment” in the chapel which will be modelled on the Rothko chapel in Houston, Texas." The Art Newspaper 01/31/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 9:02 pm
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The Language Of Music (Forget The Mechanics) Today, however, the teaching of music—even at the great conservatories—is often a more mechanical affair. The problem, Bob Abramson says, lies in what these students have been taught about what matters musically—not experimentation, but repetition; not invention, but perfection. His students come to Juilliard knowing how to decode the symbols of music but not knowing how to infuse them with meaning. "We teach reading without literacy," he says. Slate 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 9:47 am
Classical Music - All Good Stories Have An Ending Is Western classical music coming to an end? Every good narrative must have an ending, and Richard Taruskin's new six-volume Oxford History of Western Music is an epic story. So "why is the sky falling, according to Taruskin, whose motives are no doubt higher than to simply lend his work cultural resonance? To him, it is an 'ashes to ashes' sort of scenario, one that he describes without passing judgment. Simply put, it is electronic music, which needs no scribblers but rather "ear players" to compose, coupled with the advent of the recent phenomenon of "sound artists" which signals that this tradition is not so much headed for a dustbin, but destined to shake off the shackles of notation, free at last to simply be music." NewMusicBox 02/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 6:33 am
Beware The Composer-Critic There is a long and noble tradition of great critics who have also been composers. But Josh Kosman writes that he still has an innate distrust of the composer-critic. "The artistic marketplace is an adversarial arena—or at least a competitive one, like any marketplace—and that makes it a setting in which it's important for the participants to be clear and consistent about their allegiances. A critic's exclusive allegiance, I am convinced, should be to his or her fellow audience members. A composer, by contrast, has other allegiances entirely—to his or her own creative imperatives, to the larger community of artists, even in some cases to posterity." NewMusicBox 02/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 6:26 am
Death Of The Pop Single "The single is now over. Not the pop song, of course, which blasts over everything from car ads to party political broadcasts, but the single record, which has now gone the way of the tape-to-tape. Just before Christmas, it was announced that more songs were downloaded from the internet than were bought as CDs or records in shops, and, this week, it emerged that sales of new songs were being outstripped by their sales as mobile phone ringtones. Downloading means no physical record, no sleeve, no artwork of any kind, just a piece of sound that will most often be deployed now by young people as a way of alerting them to another sound they like much more: the sound of each other talking. When the song becomes tired, consumers will simply press "delete". Given that pop music has always been the most nostalgic of art forms, the new disposability might sit oddly." The Telegraph (UK) 02/01/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 11:01 pm
Muti Still Miffed At Covent Garden Last year after 20 years trying to convince Riccardo Muti to conduct in its house, Covent Garden had to watch as the maestro walked out at the last minute. And Muti? He puts the blame squarely on the opera company: "I think that Covent Garden didn't behave properly. La Repubblica wrote a line that was wonderful. It said, 'In this story, for once, the English behaved like Italians, and the Italians behaved like the English.' That said everything." The Guardian (UK) 02/01/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 10:43 pm
Where Did Popular Classical Music Go? Where is the new classical music? Okay, there's lots of music being written out there. But "what is the most recently composed piece of classical music to have achieved a genuinely established place in the repertoire? I mean a piece that you can count on hearing in most major cities most years, and a performance of which is likely to bring in a large general audience. Shostakovich's first cello concerto, written in 1959, perhaps? Even that is stretching a point. A more truthful answer might be Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, composed 56 years ago in 1948." The Guardian (UK) 02/01/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 9:33 pm
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Sprucing Up London's "Intellectual Highway" Plans have been announced to spend £35 million to redo an urban corridor in London that is home to one of the biggest concentrations of cultural institutions in the world. "On and around the road are institutions including the V&A, Science and Natural History Museums, Imperial College, the Royal Colleges of Art and Music, the Goethe Institute and Institut Français, the English National Ballet, and the Royal Geographical Society." The street needs to be made more accessible, turning it into "the most significant intellectual highway in Britain". The Guardian (UK) 01/31/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 9:25 pm
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Celebrating Peter Brook "In a matter of weeks, on March 21 to be exact, Peter Brook turns 80. This is quite a milestone by any reckoning. One would be hard pushed to identify another living British director whose contribution to theatre has been so immense – and yet all the signs are that there'll be no great song and dance made when this anniversary comes round." The Telegraph (UK) 02/01/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 11:05 pm
Gioia - The Businessman Poet Where did NEA chairman Dana Gioia get his education? Business school. "Gioia’s self-description has always been more voluminous than the Poet-Businessman shorthand. He is, he says, Latin (of Italian and Mexican lineage), Catholic, and a Californian with working-class roots. He came from East Los Angeles, born in 1950 to a taxi driver father and a telephone operator mother. His youth was spent crisscrossing Los Angeles, in search of new music, and art, and anything else that caught his imagination. He studied the piano, and Latin, and availed himself of the book and record collection left by an uncle killed in a plane crash." Stanford Business Magazine 01/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 9:45 pm
Bernstein Partner Wins Suit Against NYU Medical Center Mark Taylor, Leonard Bernstein's former partner, has won a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal from New York University Medical Center. "Taylor met Bernstein in 1989. When the composer fell ill it was Taylor who cared for him. Bernstein died in 1990. All the time Taylor remained closeted at work. But, in 1994 he was publicly outed as Bernstein's lover in a biography. The book also mentioned Farber, who was Bernstein's doctor. It circulated around the office, with references to Taylor highlighted." 365Gay.com 01/31/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 9:21 pm
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The Death Of Niche Theatre? Minneapolis-St. Paul's Outward Spiral Theater Company is Minnesota's "longest-lived theater company dedicated to telling the stories of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender America." But the company has suspended operations. What's led to the crisis? "The very idea of gay theater has become - if you'll pardon the expression - kind of a queer one", writes Dominic Papatola. Why? Because niche theatre like this has been absorbed into the mainstream. Perhaps there is no longer a place for theatre with an issue-based focus... Newsday 01/30/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 7:01 am
Scots National Theatre - Maybe (Just Maybe) It'll Turn Out Alright There's been no shortage of worry in Scotland about how the new National Theatre would take shape. Maybe that's because of the many years it took to get the idea off the ground. "But now that the National Theatre of Scotland is beginning to take shape, even the sharpest critics of the idea are being forced to concede that those fears may have been misplaced. For one thing, the organisation is being set up on an innovative commissioning model designed to ensure that the NTS works through Scotland’s existing companies, investing its budget in developing world-class new projects with them, and helping them to raise their game with every new production." The Scotsman 02/01/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 11:13 pm
Breaking Even - A Rarity Off-Broadway These Days "Burdened by ever-higher costs and increased competition from Broadway and beyond, the successful commercial Off Broadway play is a rarity these days, producers say. Long considered a cheaper, more viable alternative to the high costs of Broadway, the average Off Broadway production now regularly runs more than $500,000 to produce, with some costing nearly $1 million. Predictably, those higher costs have been passed on to the consumer; good seats for Off Broadway shows now commonly run more than $50, with some shows asking $65 or $75." The New York Times 02/01/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 11:11 pm
Aussie Theatre In Decline Theatre is on the decline in Australia - few audiences and fewer productions. "When they are young and starting out, writers hone their skills on the theatrical fringe. But these fringe companies are disappearing. The number of new works being staged around Australia dropped by more than a third in the past 20 years. More specifically, there has been "a jaw-dropping decrease" in theatrical activity in Melbourne in the decade to 2003 - down by 20 productions to 36." The Age (Melbourne) 02/01/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 9:37 pm
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LA Times Book Editor Leaving? "Could Steve Wasserman soon be leaving the L.A. Times? Buzz is getting louder that the head of the book review at the West Coast's biggest paper could be getting ready for a departure, with sources reporting that over the last few weeks he's had conversations with East Coast editors about other jobs." Publishers Weekly 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 10:07 am
Suit Happy - Publishing As Entertainment Who says publishing is a genteel business? Numerous lawsuits over publishing projects are currently before the courts. And some of them are pretty amusing... Rocky Mountain News 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 9:15 am
A Literary Prize Ready For The Spotlight? The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are - by some acounts - Britain's most prestigious literary awards. Its list of winners is long and impressive. "Yet outside the world of the highbrow literary cognoscenti, few have heard of the awards, despite the fact that they are the UK's oldest and, many would argue, most prestigious. Now one man armed with a grand vision and a plan to increase the prize money fivefold is aiming to take them out of the shadows." The Guardian (UK) 01/29/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 10:30 pm
Prize Mentality - What's It Doing To Our Books? "Britain has great fiction. A lot of it. But what is the prize system which now dominates the British literary world doing to that fiction? One winner means all the rest are losers. Many don't deserve that label. Fiction is, thanks to the Victor Ludorum ethos that now drives critical judgment, a gladiatorial combat. Is it a fair fight?" The Guardian (UK) 01/31/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 10:27 pm
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Time For Another Death-Of-Movies Theory? "The cinema, like the novel, is always dying. The movies were killed by sequels; they were killed by conglomerates; they were killed by special effects. “Heaven’s Gate” was the end; “Star Wars” was the end; “Jaws” did it. It was the ratings system, profit participation, television, the blacklist, the collapse of the studio system, the Production Code. The movies should never have gone to color; they should never have gone to sound. The movies have been declared dead so many times that it is almost surprising that they were born, and, as every history of the cinema makes a point of noting, the first announcement of their demise practically coincided with the announcement of their birth." The New Yorker 01/31/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 10:19 pm
Those Dangerous Hollywood Movies "Movies have long been a magnet for scrutiny, hysteria or moral panics, though obviously television now draws much of that dubious attention. Still, nothing can get commentators and even politicians going like a Hollywood movie. Consider Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, made mostly with Gibson's money but also with funds from investors, and released by a large theatrical distributor--thus, like many so-called "indies," a Hollywood movie in all but name. The Passion of the Christ represents a strange historical irony, because it was precisely the type of Catholic conservatism animating Gibson's controversial blockbuster that inspired Joseph McCarthy's tirades against Hollywood movies." The Nation 01/31/05
Posted: 01/31/2005 10:08 pm
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