Bring On The War The war in Iraq isn't even over yet, and already, the mass marketing juggernaut is gearing up to sell a sentimental version of it to a public that seems all too ready to embrace the pre-nostalgia. "Taking aim at the 18-to-34 set, publishers will soon roll out first-person tales from the front... Meanwhile, television, which couldn't locate a young audience for its Vietnam-era American Dreams, may end up with two series set in Iraq - a cable drama from Stephen Bochco and a network comedy from Golden Girls writer Mort Nathan." Why the rush? It's a new post-Vietnam generation, says the conventional marketing wisdom, and they're ready to get past old ideas about war as a national humiliation, even if their parents aren't. Philadelphia Inquirer 05/26/05
Posted: 05/26/2005 6:28 am
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Preserving What Legacy? Nicolai Ouroussoff is unimpressed by New York's preservation board decision to save two brownstones next to the Whitney Museum. "Essentially, for the sake of preserving a humdrum brownstone facade on Madison Avenue, the commission embraced a substitute design for the museum that transforms a generously proportioned public entrance into a more confining experience. The architect, Renzo Piano, drafted the alternative - which would save that brownstone, while demolishing another - when the museum realized that the addition was in danger of being voted down by the commission. Aside from weakening a promising design, the commission's stubbornness proves that it is unable to distinguish between preserving the city's architectural legacy and embalming it." The New York Times 05/26/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 11:20 pm
Fundraising For Joshua The Tate gets a £400,000 grant towards purchase of an important Joshua Reynolds painting. "It is the centrepiece of a forthcoming exhibition of his work at Tate Britain. The Tate has until July to raise the extra £3.2m needed to save the work from being sold, possibly abroad." BBC 05/25/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 10:23 pm
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Sandow: Orchestras Give Audiences Every Reason To Stay Away AJ blogger Greg Sandow wades into Drew McManus's Take A Friend To The Orchestra project, and isn't entirely sure why anyone should be so enthusiastic about the form. "There’s a dead zone between orchestras and their audience. The audience doesn’t know what’s going on. They don’t know what really happens at the concerts they hear—what chances are taken, what musical problems are solved, what anyone is trying to express. And of course any smart person who comes in from the outside can sense this. It’s engraved, somehow, on the whole orchestra experience: the blank rituals, the empty formality, the distant, scholarly program notes, all the rules about when to applaud, the very look of the people in the audience, who for the most part, and through no fault of their own, are only passively engaged. Who can blame anyone for staying away?" Adaptistration (AJ Blogs) 05/26/05
Posted: 05/26/2005 6:08 am
Scottish Opera Soldiers On, Into An Uncertain Future As Scottish Opera prepares to cease operations for a year as part of the government's plan to "save" it, the company is mounting a touring production of Verdi's Macbeth. But there may be no clearer indication of the fiscal and creative hole Scottish Opera faces than the cuts forced on this tour - only seven singers and a pianist are making the trip, and the entire chorus will be disbanded by summer's end. The Scotsman (UK) 05/26/05
Posted: 05/26/2005 5:31 am
The Conductors You've Never Heard Of There may not be a more thankless job in an American symphony orchestra than that of staff conductor. These baton twirlers enjoy none of the accolades accorded to music directors and guest conductors, get paid a fraction of what every other musician in the organization gets, and are expected to be fluent not only in all the standard repertoire, but also in Broadway showtunes and pops material. Most of the concerts they conduct will be before audiences of restless schoolchildren, and their names will almost never appear in a serious newspaper review. All that having been said, the job may be the best sink-or-swim training any musician can get, and many staff conductors have gone on to big things of their own. Baltimore Sun 05/26/05
Posted: 05/26/2005 5:22 am
Classical Music Finds Home On The Web "Classical music has become a booming sub-culture on the World Wide Web. In this decade alone, hundreds of classical sites have surfaced, like green shoots after a warm spring rain. Encyclopedic, all-you-want-to-know sites cater to beginners and music professionals. Internet radio sites range from South Africa to South Florida (like Miami's Beethoven.com). Sites offer everything from collections of viola jokes — the knock-knock jokes of the music world — to basic night-at-the-opera diary entries." Palm Beach Post 05/22/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 11:43 pm
Odd Choices For Cliburn Semifinals "The list of semifinalists in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, announced near midnight Tuesday at Fort Worth's Bass Performance Hall, had one jaw-dropper after another. What was the jury thinking?" Dallas Morning News 05/26/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 11:30 pm
Classical Brit Winners Katherine Jenkins wins Classical Brit album of the year. "Welsh performer Bryn Terfel won the prize for male artist of the year, while US conductor Marin Alsop won the female award. Belfast-born flautist Sir James Galway was given a prize for his outstanding contribution to music, 30 years after his solo career began." BBC 05/25/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 10:20 pm
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SPAC Has A Lot Of Healing To Do Upstate New York's embattled Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) has elected a whole new board, taken steps to become more responsive to community concerns, and done its best to respond to a scathing internal report that blasted its previous leadership and programming decisions. All that having been said, however, SPAC's finances have turned out to be in even worse shape than anyone had predicted, and one of the new board members speculated at this week's annual meeting that the organization would likely have been bankrupt within a year had changes not been made. The Saratogian (NY) 05/26/05
Posted: 05/26/2005 5:12 am
Answering To The Arts What good are the arts, asks a new book. The answer - "not much, it answers, if you want to argue rationally." The Telegraph (UK) 05/25/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 11:07 pm
Millennium Dome To Become Concert Facility London's Millennium Dome will reopen as a "first class" concert facility. "The £758m Dome was built as a Millennium project and opened in 2000. Intended as a symbol of the new, brighter Britain and funded by more than £600m of lottery money, the dome was mired in controversy from its inception." BBC 05/25/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 10:15 pm
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Ismail Merchant, 68 Ismail Merchant, half the creative team of Merchant Ivory, has died at the age of 68. "Along with his creative partner James Ivory, he made such acclaimed period films such as Howards End, A Room With A View and Remains of the Day. Merchant Ivory won six Oscars since the pair's famous partnership began in 1961 with German-born screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala." BBC 05/25/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 10:12 pm
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The New School Starts A New Drama School The New School's 11-year association with the Actors Studio comes to an end as the school announces it is starting a new graduatee drama school. The decision to break with the Actors Studio is "a simple move toward more oversight and control over the program's curriculum and staffing. The new acting program will be headed by Robert LuPone, who was nominated for a Tony Award as an actor in "A Chorus Line" on Broadway and was a producer of last year's Tony-nominated play "Frozen." He'll be joined by Arthur Penn, the director of the original 1959 Broadway production of "The Miracle Worker" and of the 1962 film version, who will act as the school's artistic adviser. The New York Times 05/26/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 11:12 pm
Broadway Tours Have A Good Year "Broadway touring shows sod 12.4 million tickets during the 2003-04 season and earned over $700 million in revenue. Nearly 200 theatres nationwide housed the Broadway tours for engagements usually ranging from a few days to a few weeks. The 12.4 million tickets matches the number sold during the previous season and ranks as the highest total since the 1998-99 season." Backstage 05/25/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 10:32 pm
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Digital Anxiety - Publishers Worry About Google Project Publishers are uneasy over Google's plan to digitize books. In a May 20 letter, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) blasts Google's so-called Print for Libraries program for posing a risk of "systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale." BusinessWeek 05/23/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 11:48 pm
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Is Nielsen Undercounting Minority Viewers? The Nielsen ratings company wants to roll out its new automated "people meters" in the Washington, D.C. market as soon as possible, replacing the decidedly outmoded info-gathering method of having select viewers keep a written diary of their viewing habits. But five of D.C.'s major TV stations have filed objections to the switch, saying that the meters undercount minority viewers and young viewers. Washington Post 05/26/05
Posted: 05/26/2005 6:56 am
New York Acting To Lure Hollywood Back To Town New York City has apparently had enough of losing film productions to Toronto, and has begun offering a generous package of incentives to filmmakers. "Producers are offered a 15 per cent tax credit for productions that shoot at least 75 per cent of their project in New York's five boroughs. To sweeten the deal, the city is offering free advertising for the films on city-owned billboards and bus shelters." But you won't hear Toronto complaining - "a bold increase in Ontario's tax credits for the industry, which offer both Canadian and foreign productions a tax break for shooting here, has helped reinvigorate the city's flagging industry." Toronto Star 05/26/05
Posted: 05/26/2005 6:45 am
Are Voice Actors Becoming Obsolete? The latest trend in animated films has been to cast well-known actors in the lead roles, and market (at least in part) on that star power. But to the little-known pros who have spent a lifetime perfecting their skills as voice actors, this is a revolting predicament, and many worry that their considerable talents will soon become expendable, as Hollywood insists on bigger and bigger names to headline animated flicks. New York Daily News 05/26/05
Posted: 05/26/2005 6:20 am
Don't Write Radio's Obit Just Yet With the rise of satellite radio, portable MP3 players, and podcasting, many cultural observers have already declared traditional radio to be dead, or at least on its way towards becoming the type of broadcast wasteland that the AM band became following the rise of FM in the 1970s (but before AM's resurgence in the 1990s on the back of sports and talk formats.) But the facts simply don't back up such a simplistic view of the coexistence of old and new media: the latest market study of those stuffy old radio stations shows plenty of profit yet to be had. And as long as there is profit potential, there is simply no chance of radio giving up the ghost. Boston Globe 05/26/05
Posted: 05/26/2005 6:00 am
TV's Closest Season This season was the closest ratings race ever for American TV networks. "For the first time in its two-decade history, Fox, once the upstart outsider, will win the network competition in the category of viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, which every network but CBS defines as the yardstick of prime-time supremacy, because so many advertisers pay a premium to reach that group." The New York Times 05/26/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 11:25 pm
US Shuts Movie Downloading Site US federal agents shut down a Web site that they said allowed people to download the new Stars War movie even before it was shown in theaters. "The Elite Torrents site was engaging in high-tech piracy by letting people download copies of movies and other copyright material for free, authorities said." Yahoo! (AP) 05/25/05
Posted: 05/25/2005 10:51 pm
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PBT Exodus Continues "Two key staff members left the struggling Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre this week, further fueling concerns about the company's viability as its leaders try to eliminate a $1 million debt and attract new audiences. The departing veterans include Mary Ellen Miller, who has led fund raising at PBT since 1992, and Molly Mercurio, public relations director. Ballet school director Roberto Munoz has announced that he will leave at the end of the summer, as will Gail Murphy, director of marketing. PBT, which lost its managing director a year ago this month when Steven Libman resigned, is being run by Robert Petrilli, interim managing director, and Terrence Orr, artistic director. Earlier this year, the company suspended its search for a permanent managing director." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 05/26/05
Posted: 05/26/2005 6:35 am
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