This Week: Systematically learning to love classical music… Where people going into the subway just to see the art… The down sides of TV binge-watching… I fought the ticket boys and the bots totally won… A budding romance between classical music and movies.
- Conquering Everest – How I Learned To Love Classical Music: When you don’t know anything about an art form, it’s daunting to approach it. Shayne Carter decided to approach classical music systematically and learned to love it. “The tower of music loomed forebodingly before me. I began with baby steps, playing piano records in the background as I went about the day, letting the tunes seep in by osmosis, not getting too close in case I scared myself off. Over the next few weeks the slow-drip method started to take and the music began to fall into place. Melodies untangled. Their logic unfurled. Basically, I listened, and listened again, until the music made sense.”
- The Coolest New Public Art In New York? The Subway: New York’s much-delayed Second Avenue subway finally opened a few weeks ago. It features art by prominent artists about prominent New Yorkers. The portraits have become so popular, they’ve become a destination on their own. We can think of public art as decoration, but sometimes it’s so good it helps define the experience of being in the space.
- Binge-Watching TV Is Changing How We Watch: But there are some downsides. “Binge TV is entering a new phase in which the makers of your shows, in particular at places like Netflix and Amazon, are betting that the satisfaction of gorging on eight to 10 episodes, batch-released, will be enough to glue you to your phone, laptop or, if you’re feeling fancy, your actual television. The joy is in the completion. Neither attention to quality nor narrative structure matter, necessarily. They drop it. You stream it.”
- Theatre Against The Ticket Bots: The London producers of “Hamilton” labored mightily to try to thwart ticket bots when they tried to buy up all the available ticket inventory for the popular show. And a tech truism reasserted itself: you can’t beat technology. The producers went to a lot of trouble to institute a paperless system that would keep tickets off the price-gouging resale market. That worked for (literally) less than two hours.
- Movies And Classical Music – It Works!: Many orchestras have started providing live accompaniments to movies. And getting an audience. “The allure of this programming from an orchestra’s perspective is easy to see. In their never-ending quest to bring in new audiences — particularly patrons for whom the standard classical repertoire is less familiar terrain than it was to their parents and grandparents — the San Francisco Symphony and similar organizations have found a product that exerts a different sort of allure from that of a Brahms or Mahler symphony.” And indie movie theatres have reinvented their programming and are finding success. ”Frankly, it’s a bit surprising, but here’s the deal: “From themed weddings to live-streamed operas and interactive movie nights, indie theatres are reinventing themselves as the new entertainment hubs on the high street – eating into the market share of the multiplex giants and in-home rivals such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.”
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