Show tunes can do just about anything, or so this Inaugural Night fundraiser seemed to say. “Though the name of the man being installed as the new president was never once mentioned, the subtext of the benefit seemed to be a refusal to succumb to any pessimism brought on by his election.
A First: Older Recordings Outsold New Releases In 2015
“Despite the massive success of Adele’s album 25, which sold a whopping 7.4 million copies in only six weeks, 2015 marked the first time in U.S. history that new releases were outsold by catalogue albums.”
The Invention Of Ambient Music
“In the sixties, pop music in West Germany was in a peculiar state. … But, as with the New German Cinema that emerged in that decade, new German sounds had begun to take shape. … The German press (and, for the most part, German audiences) ignored the ‘Krautrock’ bands entirely. But in advertisements and airports, on film soundtracks, and in concert halls, high and low, the music is still in the air, all around us.”
You Know A Lot Of Diane Warren Songs, Even If You’ve Never Heard Her Name Before
“If Warren’s career were one of her songs, she’d be in the bridge right now, the section that emphasizes the contrast between the verses and choruses, and which brings us back to the huge chorus at the end. ‘I’m so into the next,’ she said.”
New US Arts Education Law Suggests Hope
“While No Child Left Behind named the arts as a “core academic subject of learning,” gaps in access to arts learning persisted. In fact, despite the clear evidence of the value of learning in and through the arts, the U.S. Department of Education’s own research finds that the highest poverty schools in this country have the least access to arts education.”
A Neuroscientist Explains The Phrase ‘I Just Snapped’
“That neural circuitry is all subcortical; it’s not conscious. … The minute something is received as dangerous, or threatening, it invokes this defensive physical reaction. That’s the connection between snapping and threat detection, and that explains why we’re bewildered after we react in this way.”
How Art Star Mark Grotjahn Became Art Star Mark Grotjahn: By Repainting Signs For Local Mom-And-Pop Stores In L.A.
Jerry Saltz: “As a fan who’s never spoken to Grotjahn, I’ve often wondered where this Los Angeles-based artist’s work comes from, especially since he started making his abstract paintings when such paintings were entirely out of style.”
Two Of The Missing Hong Kong Booksellers Mysteriously Surface In China
“One man appeared on state-run Chinese TV saying he’d voluntarily returned to the mainland to face justice in a 2003 drunk-driving case. Meanwhile, the wife of another said she had received a handwritten letter, purportedly from her husband, reiterating that he too had returned to the mainland of his own volition to assist with ‘investigations.’ Both of the men hold European passports.”
Filmmaker Ettore Scola Dead At 84
“[He was] a painstaking and passionate chronicler of Italian society whose unforgettable masterpieces featured global stars like Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. … He leaves behind a wide-ranging oeuvre portraying the dark years of Italy under fascism and its identity crisis in the early half of the 21st century.”
Remembering The Great Hollywood Choreographer We’ve All Forgotten
But you remember his work if you’ve seen Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And Jack Cole’s dances “are often the most compelling reason to revisit movies like Down to Earth, On the Riviera and The I Don’t Care Girl. … It’s hard not to be drawn in – and sometimes taken aback – by the vitality and sexual exuberance of Cole’s dance numbers.”
Why Memoirs By Dying Authors Are Always So Popular (And Critic-Proof)
“These memoirs hold out the promise that you, too, will be able to cope once the eye of Sauron falls on you. Even if the tips are not practical in nature, often the mere lyricism people are able to bring to their tragic situations serves as its own kind of succor. When it comes your turn, you too may be able to make sense of it all by elegant resort to, say, the French existentialists.”
Research: Children Bond Through Music (And Avoid Those Who Don’t Know Their Music)
“Young children have a remarkably selective sensitivity to shared cultural knowledge. Children both prefer others who know songs they themselves know, and avoid others who know songs they do not know.”
Hollywood’s Turn Against Digital Effects
“We’ve reached a point where directors and audiences no longer derive authenticity from what looks ‘real’ but from what looked real in seventies, eighties, and nineties blockbusters. And real is an awfully flexible word. … It’s as if directors – especially the reboot generation – have finally become self-conscious about C.G.I.”
How To Fix The Oscars’ Diversity Problem
It’s no secret that the Academy is not diverse. A 2014 study found that its membership was 94 percent white, 76 percent male, and an average of 63 years old—so the most prestigious awards are governed by the tastes of very old white men. The Academy not only needs to diversify its leadership, but should also institute a cut-off age of 65 for members whose tastes no longer reflect the current zeitgeist.
George Weidenfeld, Dean Of British Publishers, Dead At 96
After fleeing to the UK from Vienna in 1938, “he founded his publishing house with Nigel Nicolson in 1949 … He published big-name authors from Charles de Gaulle to Pope John Paul II and Henry Kissinger … In 1959, Weidenfeld & Nicolson risked obscenity laws to publish Lolita.”
ISIS Has Razed The Oldest Christian Monastery In Iraq
“Located just four miles south of Mosul,” Dair Mar Elia (St. Elijah’s Monastery) “was built in the 6th century by Assyrian Catholic monks … [Satellite] imagery analyst Stephen Wood described the stone walls as ‘literally pulverized … into this field of gray-white dust.'”
Lorin Maazel’s Castleton Festival Called Off For 2016
The summer event, “which conductor Lorin Maazel founded on his private estate in Virginia in 2009 and nurtured until his death in 2014, … [will] take a year-long hiatus. … ‘I have no finances anymore,’ said Dietlinde Maazel, the actress and widow of the conductor, who took over the festival after her husband’s death.”
What Makes One Thing A Language And Another A Dialect?
A language is indeed a dialect with an army and a navy; or, more to the point, a language is a dialect that got put up in the shop window. Yes, people can sit down in a room and decide upon a standardized version of a dialect so that large numbers of people can communicate with maximal efficiency—no more clau, clav, and ciav. But standardization doesn’t make something “better.”
What Fairy Tales Tell Us About Our History
“Folktales are often disregarded as lesser forms of literature, but they’re valuable sources of information on cultural history. Despite being fictitious, they work as simulations of reality.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.20.16
Playing For The Screens – Is Our Obsession With Video Changing The Live Arts Experience?
One weekend last November, the biggest box-office at movie theatres throughout the UK wasn’t for the latest Hollywood blockbuster (the latest Hunger Games movie opened that Friday). It was for a live broadcast of Kenneth Branagh’s production of The Winter’s Tale which was streamed live to 520 theatres in the UK … read more
AJBlog: Diacritical Published 2016-01-20
Repeating some lessons
As we head into 2016, we — meaning we in classical music — have to focus more than ever on the future. We have to! Because here are some truths, truths that can’t be said strongly enough. … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-01-20
How Cage Makes Us Philosophize
One name that musicians may run across often in the literature on John Cage and not recognize is Richard Fleming. He’s a philosophy professor at Bucknell University, a friend of mine for twenty-five years, and … read more
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2016-01-20
For Fun: Shorty Rogers
When the music labeled West Coast Jazz was still in its heyday, before rock achieved more or less total dominance in popular music, Shorty Rogers maintained his popularity. One of his most successful pieces was … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-01-20
slow it down
The sixth movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie presents an interesting lesson in melody, harmony and scoring, if we can step beyond the usual comments on birdsong, modes of limited transposition and the Ondes Martenot … read more
AJBlog: Infinite Curves Published 2016-01-20
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Size Matters (In Orchestras, At Least)
“Chamber orchestras too often cede the limelight to their larger cousins. Composers today tend to want to go large, ruling out smaller groups like ours approaching their work. That’s a critical mistake, not only in terms of possibilities of performance but also in the development of the composer.”
Couplets Off The Cuff: Meet The Improvised Shakespeare Company
“What distinguishes [its] intricate, erudite brand of improvisation is not that every show is new (which it is), but how the plots, themes and language are deeply rooted in a specific aesthetic. It makes the shows meatier than most improvisation, if less wildly unpredictable.”
Ai Weiwei Does Department Store Windows
“This is better than MoMA,” said Ai about the Bon Marché Rive Gauche in Paris, site of his latest installation. He found “that working in a department store had been liberating. It allowed him to go beyond the white cube of most galleries and use the atrium and window displays in an interesting way, he said, and he liked that passers-by could see his work.”