"Parsons faced a financially embattled DSO when she took the reins in 2004, followed by grueling labor strife several years later. She ultimately helped guide the organization to fiscal stability, along with global acclaim for a series of pioneering digital initiatives. Parsons also oversaw the appointment of two music directors, Leonard Slatkin in 2007 and Jader Bignamini in 2020."...
"Last week, City Manager Marcus Jones recommended that the city take over arts funding from the Arts & Science Council, which has managed the funding process for decades. Jones's plan would see the arts and cultural groups receive $12 million per year from the public and private sectors — a 50% hike from a proposal the council has been...
It alleges Google "punishes" publishers in its rankings if they don't sell enough advertising space in its marketplace. Google called the claims "meritless". Associated Newspapers' concerns stem from its assessment that its coverage of the Royal Family in 2021 has been downplayed in search results. - BBC
What most comes across is the protean creativity of the period, the globe-spanning connections that promoted it, and Menand’s mastery of large slices of it. “People cared. Ideas mattered,” Louis Menand writes. “People believed in liberty, and thought it really meant something.” It would be silly to say that people no longer care about such things, but perhaps they...
On your path to becoming an intellectual in Silicon Valley, understanding these two lessons—the Peter Principles, we’ll call them, since that adds nothing to the conversation but sounds sophisticated—will be key to your success. First, the point of your interventions in the public sphere is not to “win” any “argument,” nor to attract new adherents or convince neutrals of...
Musicians addressing the environment head-on only represents one side of the music industry’s engagement with the climate crisis. The way we listen to music impacts the environment. Streaming music uses a significant amount of energy, even though the technology seems to make sound feel immaterial. Kyle Devine is author of Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, which traces “the...
The stress and cost of work visa requirements, new taxes, and prohibitively high touring costs have upended the careers of scores of British musicians, to the extent that many are considering moving to Europe. “There will be a new hub of freelancers in an EU country instead.” - Bloomberg
That’s a notable uptick from the streamer’s 2020 spend of $11.8 billion, as the pandemic prompted production delays across the industry, and a 2019 content spend of $13.9 billion. - Variety
For 45 years, the light sculptor has been designing and building a complex inside Roden Crater, a volcanic cinder cone about 50 miles northeast of Flagstaff. In his 70s (he turns 78 this year), he had begun to think there was no hope of living to complete his ambitious plans. Then $10 million in seed money arrived from (of...
That view is to see the rise of Substack and podcasting and Bandcamp for musicians who want to escape the tyranny of the record labels and streaming platforms—supported and enabled by other services like Stripe and Patreon and Kickstarter—as a kind of Distributism for artists and knowledge workers. - Hedgehog Review
Says Ken-Matt Martin, who was named artistic director last month after having been Robert Falls's number-two at the Goodman, "If I figured out how to get Black people to come to a theater in Des Moines," — he founded the Pyramid Theatre Company, which present the work of Black artists in Iowa's capital — "I can probably figure out...
As the risks reduce and the research possibilities open up, then it is easy to imagine how we could slip, unnoticing, from thinking the recording of neurons in a healthy human brain is unimaginable to thinking it is something that needs doing to further our understanding of ourselves. Sooner than we thought, we will face a deep ethical challenge,...
Thomas Larson, former music critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican (1980-82), now a staff writer at the San Diego Reader: "Figuring out that the thing words do for music is not a musical problem. It's an aesthetic one, which adds more ambiguity, not less. Good ears and smart criticism trail the music like a bloodhound, howling out the...
"How do you support artist relief, raise money, how do you help people still feel like they haven’t disappeared? It has been a huge effort. When I posited the idea of how best to create continuity with what we have in a rapid economic decline, , “Why don’t we just stop because everything stopped?” No, we have a moral...
"A career in ballet lasts only as long as a dancer's body does. If they're lucky, dancers can perform into their 30s — or in rare cases, into their 40s. When every season counts, taking time off to get pregnant, give birth, and recover is daunting. … they were already losing valuable career time to COVID-19. Why not...
