The Game To Expand Copyright "Copyright holders have been batting a thousand at the Supreme Court over the last decade. So why the complaints? The Property Rights Alliance and its allies know the real copyright debate isn't about whether intellectual property should be protected (virtually everyone agrees that it should) but over recent attempts to expand copyright far beyond its traditional boundaries. Those expansions are hard to defend, so copyright hawks are doing their best to change the subject." Reason 11/01/05
Posted: 11/02/2005 6:27 pm
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Christie's Has A Solid First Week, Breaks Toulouse-Lautrec Record "A painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec has been sold for $22.4m in New York, breaking the world sales record for the artist's work. His 1886 work La Blanchisseuse shows a female laundry worker gazing out of a window. It beat the 1997 record of $14.5m for one of his works. Christie's annual autumn art auction also sold Picasso's Sylvette on a Green Armchair for $8m. But Henri Matisse's Marguerites failed to reach its $10m asking price. A pair of Monet paintings also remained unsold, drawing no bids beyond $3.2m after pre-sale estimates of up to $6m. Christie's two-week Impressionist and modern art sale took a total of $160.9m in its first week." BBC 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 5:56 am
The Mozart Of Art Theft His name is, in fact, Mozart. "He is 82, lives in Linz and trades in stolen archaeological items from Italy. The carabinieri have found 3000 items to have passed through his hands and around 600 have already been returned to Italy." Agenzia Giornalistica Italia 11/02/05
Posted: 11/02/2005 7:19 pm
Homes Of The Henge Builders Unearthed For the first time, archaeologists have excavated homes of prehistoric Neolithic henge builders, in a set of dwellings, some older than Stonehenge, excavated from a Northumberland quarry. "The Neolithic Britons left some of the most spectacular prehistoric monuments in the world, but there have been only scraps of evidence showing where and how they lived. House sites are so rare that some archaeologists believe most people lived a semi-nomadic existence." The Guardian (UK) 11/03/05
Posted: 11/02/2005 7:04 pm
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Boston's 'CRB For Sale; Classical Programming Up In The Air The owners of Boston's commercial classical radio station, WCRB, are putting the station up for sale, but say they will require any buyer to maintain the station's classical format on at least a digital side-channel accessible to listeners with high-definition receivers. That isn't terribly reassuring to some listeners, since HD radios are almost entirely unknown in the U.S., and some in the industry question whether the format requirement actually carries any legal weight. Boston has two other stations that broadcast classical music, but WCRB is the only full-time classical station. Boston Globe 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 6:23 am
Yale Music School Scores $100 Mil, Eliminates Tuition The Yale University School of Music is poised to join Philadelphia's famed Curtis Institute in offering tuition-free enrollment to its students, following the announcement of new gifts to the school totalling $100 million. "Yale said it would also put the money toward increasing faculty, student and ensemble exchanges with foreign conservatories and toward Internet broadcasts of its events. The free tuition begins next school year and includes current students." The New York Times 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 6:15 am
Management Shuffle In NY, SF, and LA "Artistic administrator" is not exactly a glamorous title, but most major orchestras would have trouble functioning without one. So it was a notable event this week when three of the top US orchestras announced what amounted to an administrative carousel. "Chad Smith, the artistic administrator of the New York Philharmonic, will become vice president for artistic planning of the Los Angeles Philharmonic... Matías Tarnopolsky, currently senior director of artistic planning at the Chicago Symphony, will replace Smith in New York. Smith returns to the L.A. Philharmonic less than a year after he left the orchestra for New York." PlaybillArts (NY) 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 5:39 am
NJSO In The Black, But Questions Remain The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, which has been hit in recent years by deficits and a national scandal involving financier Herbert Axelrod's sale to the orchestra of a collection of valuable string instruments, has announced a surplus for the 2004-05 season, and increases in ticket revenue and donor giving. "But the orchestra is not clear of its primary threat: a debt load of about $19 million, composed of a $3.6 million line of credit it has not paid down in three years, and the balance owed on bonds and notes payable to creditors for the instruments. The orchestra restructured its debt to pay interest only for nine months last season, saving about $780,000 in cash... In all, the orchestra has made headway, but the financial report showed a seesaw of good and bad news." Newark Star-Ledger (NJ) 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 5:26 am
Musicians Strike Radio City "Musicians for the Radio City Music Hall's famous Christmas Spectacular went on strike Wednesday and announced they had the support of other unions at the landmark [New York] theater." With the annual show scheduled to open tonight, the strike was timed to cause maximum disruption. Nonetheless, the success of the strike may hinge on whether the show's other unionized workers - the stagehands and the famous dancers known as The Rockettes - honor the picket line. Radio City is planning to go ahead with a prerecorded soundtrack, and the stagehands have yet to commit to a sympathy strike. The Rockettes announced that they would not cross the picket line, but Radio City says they have a no-strike clause in their contract, and are expected to perform. Newsday (NY) 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 5:01 am
At Least Someone Will Get To Play It A rare violin once owned by 19th-century virtuoso and composer Nicolo Paganini was bought at auction Tuesday by the Moscow-based Violin Art Foundation, which plans to loan it out to the winner of its prestigious annual competition. The Foundation paid just over $1 million for the instrument, which was made in 1720 by the Italian master Carlo Bergonzi. The sale price was a record for a Bergonzi violin. BBC 11/02/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 5:00 am
- Previously: Paganini's Violin To Hit The Block An 18th century Cremonese violin once owned by Nicolo Paganini will go on sale at Sotheby's next week with an asking price of £500,000 ($894,600). "Not only is it the first time one of Paganini‘s cherished instruments has come up for auction, it is one of only 50 surviving violins by master craftsman Carlo Bergonzi of Cremona." ABC News (Reuters) 10/26/05
Today's 10-Year-Old Music Fan: Denied Access As a child Rupert Christiansen spent countless hours in the music collections of public libraries, exploring and listening. "Could a 10-year-old budding maestro - or opera critic - enjoy the same adventure today? Only if he or she was the winner in a postcode lottery. Decent public music collections have become increasingly hard to find in a library structure which has replaced its old mission of humanising and educating in favour of providing value-free dissemination of information. I see the logic in this, but feel impelled to defend my own culture's corner." The Telegraph (UK) 11/02/05
Posted: 11/02/2005 6:11 pm
Esa-Pekka Salonen On Conducting: "You know, in some ways conducting is counter-intuitive. It's like winter driving in Finland - if you skid, the natural reaction is to fight with the wheel and jam on the brakes, which is the quickest way to get killed. What you have to do is let go, and the car will right itself. It's the same when an orchestra loses its ensemble. You have to resist the temptation to semaphore, and let the orchestra find its own way back to the pulse." The Telegraph (UK) 11/02/05
Posted: 11/02/2005 6:06 pm
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France Steps Up To Help New Orleans Culture "Benefit concerts to help jazz musicians in New Orleans hit by Hurricane Katrina are to take place in France. Local musicians will also be sponsored to play club dates in Paris. An exhibition of loaned French works at the New Orleans Museum of Art is among the other cultural initiatives being lined up by officials to help the city." BBC 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 5:54 am
Arts Funding? Sorry, We've Got A City To Run. The two candidates in Detroit's mayoral race freely admit that they don't know a think about the city's arts scene, and both are hesitant to commit to any arts funding in the future. The sitting mayor killed off the Department of Culture, Arts, and Tourism last year as part of a plan to battle a massive budget deficit, and Detroit has plenty of civic problems that take priority over the arts. "Those in the arts and cultural communities, who are facing funding woes such as a $1.5-million cut to the Detroit Historical Museums and a $5-million cut to the Detroit Zoo, appreciated the candidates' attention but remain skeptical." Detroit Free Press 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 5:11 am
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Ollie The Bear Oliver Knussen has come a long way since bursting onto the scene as a composing and conducting prodigy at age 14. "Bearded, toweringly tall and nearly as large around, Knussen, 53, lumbers into a room like a slightly disoriented bear. He looks as if he'd just as soon as be eating honey from a crockery jar as writing one of his fastidious musical miniatures." He has also developed something of a reputation for missing compositional deadlines. However, despite the complexity of some of his work, he has become one of the UK's most well-known composers, and he is an increasingly welcome guest on the podium of various major orchestras, probably for the quiet passion he brings to the work. San Francisco Chronicle 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 4:56 am
The Mysteries Of Mike Leigh Mike Leigh has such appeal that even his untitled projects have fans lining up to buy tickets. "No one questions any more that Leigh is a 'real' writer, as they sometimes used to when they discovered how fully his actors participated in the creative process. He thinks the confusion was his fault - until 1987, his credit was always 'devised and directed by'. Then he switched it to 'written and directed by'. 'It should always have been that. Nothing you can do about it now'."
The Guardian (UK) 11/03/05
Posted: 11/02/2005 7:12 pm
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August Wilson On Writing A Play "Once you get the first scene done (or it might be the fourth scene in the play), then you can sort of begin to see other possibilities. Just like working in collages, you shift it around and organize it: This doesn't go here; that speech doesn't really belong to that person, it belongs to this person. So, very much like Romare Bearden, you move your stuff around on the pages until you have a composition that satisfies you, that expresses the idea of something and then—bingo—you have a play." American Theatre 11/05
Posted: 11/02/2005 7:35 pm
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Simon & Schuster Ed-in-Chief Quits "Michael V. Korda will step down at the end of the year as editor in chief of Simon & Schuster's trade books imprint, a post he has held since 1968, the company said yesterday. He will remain as editor in chief emeritus, editing the books of about a half dozen writers, including David McCullough, Larry McMurtry and Mary Higgins Clark." The move appears to be entirely voluntary on Mr. Korda's part. The New York Times 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 6:14 am
China's New Literary Star Stays In The Shadows China's most successful novel in years, which is shortly to be published in the U.S., is called Wolf Totem, and serves as a surprisingly sharp allegorical critique of Chinese culture even as it celebrates aspects of the country's long and colorful past. But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the novel is that its author has chosen to remain entirely anonymous, even in the wake of the book's stunning success, and that he has, up to this point, succeeded. The New York Times 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 6:10 am
Bookseller Of Kabul Goes On The Run Shah Mohammad Rais, better known as the "Bookseller of Kabul", says he fears blood vengeance after Åsne Seierstad's bestselling book about him has been translated in an Afghan language. Aftenposten 11/02/05
Posted: 11/02/2005 7:58 pm
Just When You Were Afraid There Weren't Enough Novels In The World... Yup, it's National Novel Writing Month. "Now in its seventh year, this global write-fest was the brainchild of Chris Baty, a Californian freelance writer, and has grown from 21 participants in 1999 to over 42,000 last year, all trying to meet the 50,000-word finish line by midnight on the last day of the month and make it onto the NaNoWriMo roll of honour. This year, an estimated 60,000 speedwriters are taking part and there are local chapters scattered across the UK, from Brighton to Birmingham." The Guardian (UK) 11/01/05
Posted: 11/02/2005 7:17 pm
S&S Editor Korda Retiring After 47 years at Simon & Shuster, star editor Michael Korda is retiring. "The 72-year-old industry veteran, who was born in England and remains one of the most well known and well-respected editors in New York, will leave his top post at the end of the year and take on the role of editor in chief emeritus." PublishersWeekly 11/02/05
Posted: 11/02/2005 6:02 pm
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Prairie Home To Hit The Road? Garrison Keillor's wildly popular radio variety show, A Prairie Home Companion, is leaving its longtime home at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota at the end of December, and details are extremely sketchy about where the show will find a home, and whether the host wants a home base at all. "PHC is negotiating to broadcast several shows from... the University of Minnesota and from the State and Orpheum theaters in downtown Minneapolis, as well as several locations around the region... The departure of St. Paul's biggest star also puts a damper on the city's drive to bring in more entertainment." Minneapolis Star Tribune 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 6:30 am
Stone Making 9/11 Pic Controversial filmmaker Oliver Stone has begun work on a major film focusing on the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York. But contrary to his reputation, Stone appears to be going out of his way to insure that the final product doesn't strike anyone who lived through the tragedy as insensitive or sensationalist... Boston Globe 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 6:21 am
File Trading Goes Legit "The old-school peer-to-peer network iMesh has left the murky world of illegal file swapping behind with the launch of a new service that enables users to share up to 2 million tracks from the four major record labels. The New York-based company is charging its 5 million users an a la carte fee of 99 cents to purchase a track, or $6.95 per month to gain unlimited access to the catalog... The company has built Microsoft Digital Rights Management technology into its software, allowing users to see a complete list of tracks available on the Gnutella network. However, they can only download tracks that they are willing to pay for, or that are not copyright protected." Wired 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 6:05 am
UNESCO Culture Pact Worries American Filmmakers "Late last month, members of the UNESCO voted 148 to 2 for an accord that supporters claim will protect local cultures from globalization. The debate was cast as a battle between global conformity and cultural diversity, with delegates from several smaller countries saying they were afraid of being swallowed up by American culture. But the United States and Hollywood's major movie studios said they see the UNESCO accord as little more than trade protectionism and worry foreign countries will use it as a way to impose quotas or raise other barriers on the importation of American movies, television programs and music." Backstage (Reuters) 11/02/05
Posted: 11/02/2005 4:37 pm
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