Stories

The Composer-Conductor Who Pioneered European Opera In Japan

Manfred Gurlitt was reluctant to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power, but he ultimately had to flee and ended up in Tokyo. By 1941 he was music director of the Tokyo Philharmonic; a decade later, he had founded his own opera company and taught most of Japan’s opera singers. - Bachtrack

The New School Makes Some Painful Cuts

The New School will employ 65 fewer full-time faculty members in the fall than it did last year, Kessler said. Based on the most recent federal data, that reduction would amount to roughly 36 percent of its 2024 full-time faculty work force. - Chronicle of Higher Education

Radio Station Says New Data Center Has Forced It Off The Air

“Rainey Broadcasting has told the FCC that development surrounding a massive data center and semiconductor manufacturing project forced gospel WFQY Jackson, MS (970 AM) from its longtime location. Yet ... a rival broadcaster (is) arguing the Commission should determine whether the station had already been silent before the site was lost.” - Inside Radio

Getting Students Inside Dance

“That’s the entire mission of the school Not ‘You come to us’ but ‘We bring dance to you.’ And we want people in the room who can say, ‘I was just like you and now I’m out in the world dancing.’” - The New York Times

Will The Smithsonian’s Smallest Museum Survive?

Anacostia, since renamed the Anacostia Community Museum, was the first federally funded museum focused on Black history, as well as the first federally funded community museum; it is still the only Smithsonian to archive and document daily life in the nation’s capital. - The Atlantic

A Story Of Gay Life In Early America

The two women lived openly as a same-sex couple from 1807 to 1851 in Weybridge, VT, where they ran a successful tailoring business. Despite some local misgivings, they were largely accepted. Neighborhood children apprenticed with them, and Sylvia served as a deacon in the local Congregational Church. - ArtsFuse

Here’s What Trump’s Washington Arch Would Look Like

Much of the public debate around the arch has centered on how it would affect other nearby memorials, particularly the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. - Washington Post

A New Wave Of Women’s Ragebait Lit

"These books may have inspired more than their share of hot takes ... but the conversations around them allow us to question where we are and what our feminist ideals have become … (now that) so many of the problems that felt like they were somehow close to being solved … have become drastically worse." - Harper’s Bazaar

Ben Folds: The National Symphony Is In Peril

The NSO doesn’t even know if it has a home, given the previously announced two-year closure of the Kennedy Center. This is a very bad sign. Further, the tools for survival are entangled in the Kennedy Center’s legal and financial troubles. - Variety

Trump Administration’s Plans To Cancel Student Loans For Almost All College Arts Programs

Yale University’s master’s programs in visual arts and music would fail. Harvard University’s master’s degree in museum studies would fail. The Juilliard School’s undergraduate and graduate programs in music would fail. - The New York Times

Crystal Bridges Completes Major Expansion

This component of a long-running plan for the site adds two galleries and 114,00 square feet (10,590 square metres) of space for a recent major gift and the subsequent reinterpretation of its collection. The museum's footprint has expanded by half since its opening in 2011. - Dezeen

Second-Generation Cambodian-American, Trained Only In U.S., Becomes Skilled Teacher Of Khmer Classical Dance

Peter Veth has never studied in Cambodia — only in his hometown of Lowell, Mass., a center of the diaspora. But from sixth grade on he took classes with visiting Cambodian masters and at Lowell’s Angkor Dance Troupe, where he now teaches the art form to younger dancers. - Dance Teacher

London’s Royal Opera House Is Embracing AI. Some Musicians Aren’t Happy

"We started programming SHIFT because there is a bit of a crisis in the performing arts with regards to machine learning. There's absolute panic. And in fact last year, when we announced it, some leading people in the arts were describing AI as evil and as the devil." - The Independent

Report: Australian Arts Participation At Highest Level Ever

More Australians are attending live arts events and festivals, with 2025 the highest level of attendance recorded. While some art forms have seen shifts back towards more frequent pre-COVID-19 attendance patterns, others have not fully recovered. - Creative Australia

Carl Schachter, Influential Music Theorist, 93

His groundbreaking work as a music theorist primarily advanced Schenkerian theory by integrating rhythmic, metric, and harmonic dimensions into linear voice-leading analysis, while emphasizing how these elements interact to form structural coherence in tonal music. - The Violin Channel

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