In a widely cited paper from 2007, on a number of common measures of innovation and wealth creation, cities deliver benefits that exceed what we would expect by a simple scaling up of the numbers of people involved, and at lower cost in terms of the infrastructure required. - Aeon
Morlot, born in Lyon in 1974, will replace Kazushi Ono. The contract with the OBC is for four years, with a minimum of eleven weeks of work with the orchestra each season, of which eight would be for seasonal concerts, two for recordings and one for festivals. - Ara Balears
Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the 1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and ambition to which all this gave rise. Yet, in the past decade, exhilaration has been replaced by suffocation. - Washington Post
Many musicians have watched, cringing, as the term “gig economy” has become a defining term of the national economic Zeitgeist. Not just because the word “gig” is our word—it originated with jazz musicians in the 1910s—but because, in a larger sense, we are the original gig workers. - Brooklyn Rail
John Mortensen has made a thorough study of how music students in Baroque-era Naples were taught to improvise harmony and counterpoint, then a basic skill. And he's seeing interest from present-day students who don't want to play the same hundred pieces everyone else does. - Early Music America
"I was looking forward to talking to students at the Cambridge Union this Friday, but I hear that someone there has been blacklisted for doing an impersonation of Hitler I regret that I did the same on a Monty Python show, so I am blacklisting myself before someone else does." - The Telegraph (UK)
In fact, there have been composers in China writing for European instruments for over a century. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, though, the country has produced several generations of accomplished composers — and developed an audience eager to hear new scores. - Prospect
The latest plot twist has foreshadowed a potentially unhappy ending. Like the rest of Portland’s urban core — and like downtowns across the United States —Powell’s is contending with staggering uncertainty. - The New York Times
"The construction industry is responsible for nearly 40 percent of global carbon emissions, and it must be part of the solution, says museum president and executive director Aileen Fuchs, … (who believes) the museum is the perfect space for hashing out solutions." - MSN (The Washington Post)
"We have new brain-based evidence that autobiographically salient music -; that is, music that holds special meaning for a person, like the song they danced to at their wedding -; stimulates neural connectivity in ways that help maintain higher levels of functioning." - News Medical
The Illinois legislature approved the rule this summer — almost entirely along party lines. Republicans seem to assume out-of-hand that the class will be anti-conservative; supporters say there's no political agenda other than "giving students tools to develop their own BS detectors." - Axios
Theater salaries, even for full-time jobs, are so low so often that the weekly nationwide theater newsletter Nothing for the Group recently debuted a section called That’s Not a Living Wage. - San Francisco Chronicle
When a co-founder of the Pillars Fund advocacy organization discussed this issue within the industry, he heard repeatedly that decision-makers didn't know where to find Muslim actors, writers and directors to hire. So the group created the Pillars Muslim Artist Database. - The New York Times
First Folio Theatre, a small Equity company in the Chicago suburbs, will close when David Rice retires in 2024. He and his wife founded First Folio in 1996; they had other sources of income, and the theatre can't afford to properly pay a successor. - MSN (Chicago Tribune)
Los Angeles magician Krystyn Lambert and puppeteer Pam Severn have launched a new variety show called "No Man's Land" featuring circus artists, jugglers, ventriloquists, comics, and, of course, prestidigitators — the goal being "normalize female-dominated shows." - MSN (Los Angeles Times)
