Yorùbá speech, that is. The West African language is tonal, using three different pitches, and dùndún drummers can adjust the tension on their drum heads to change pitch, stroke by stroke, to match Yorùbá syllables and words. - Smithsonian Magazine
"I hope that the theatre generally, will be open to the idea that when you limit yourself to doing only primarily white theatre for primarily white audiences, there is well over half the city you are excluding.” - American Theatre
The pipes and carillon bells of the instrument were discovered a century ago at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Scholar-performer David Catalunya says the pipes are near-perfectly intact and that, over the next five years, he'll make them playable again. - Aleteia
"Success isn’t how many awards you win, or how many five-star reviews you get. Success is built on how quickly you bounce back, how you take the lessons. Everything in between is just wounded ego.” - The Guardian
First, Stephen Sondheim couldn’t come up with songs because he didn't think James Lapine's script needed any. So began a cascade of calamities, right up to the Broadway opening, until the show shocked everyone involved by getting 10 Tony nominations and a Pulitzer Prize. - The New York Times
Mohammed Rezuwan is himself one of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya driven out of Myanmar by that country's military and mobs. He now travels around the refugee camps at Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, recording and translating his people's traditional stories. - PRX's The World
Following in the footsteps of the Uffizi in Florence, the St. Petersburg museum will auction off digital tokens of five works in its collection, one each by Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione, Monet, van Gogh, and Kandinsky. - Artnet
The 39-year-old's decision to end his 20-year career with the company next May comes three years after the scandal roiled City Ballet and two weeks after colleague Georgina Pazcoguin revealed in a book that he would regularly tweak her nipples as a greeting. - The New York Times
The much-praised new branch of the New York Public Library, across 5th Avenue from the famous flagship, wasn't supposed to happen. The NYPL board was bent on selling the branch property — until The Nation reported on the plan and advocates set furiously to work. - The Nation
Granted, the program was only just gearing up when the pandemic closed arts venues, but officials' hopes that 18-year-olds would use their few-strings-attached €300 to sample high culture are being punctured by reality. - The New York Times
Among the monuments added are Madrid's Paseo del Prado and Retiro Park, the old port of Guangzhou, Peru's ancient Chankillo observatory, Mexico's 16th-century Tlaxcala Cathedral, Ramappa Temple in south-central India, Sudanese-style mosques in the Ivory Coast, and the city of Nice. - The National (Abu Dhabi)
“Many of the first-choice people said, ‘Look I’m sorry, I’m not doing this any more. I have a family. I had to take another profession. Six months ago, I’d have welcomed it’,” he said. - The Guardian
‘Looted’ is a contested term: it covers a spectrum from out-and-out pillage to ostensibly legal transfers of title that may have occurred under coercion or under rigged laws. - Apollo
The public radio network’s operating revenue slid just two percent in 2020 to $270.1 million. And last year’s revenue was actually up seven percent from 2018 when NPR reported $251.3 million in operating revenue. - Inside Radio
From the early Middle Ages, various European languages adopted and adapted the Latin alphabet. So why did English end up with a far more inconsistent orthography than any other? - Aeon
