“Why then, when we think of music, do we think of Chuck Berry’s Gibson 335, Mick Jagger’s lips, the cover of Revolver, Michael Jackson’s zombies, Blue Note’s stark photography, and Madonna’s breasts?” As one music historian points out, “It just didn’t occur to people that you could correspond the music to some kind of visual image. Someone had to think of that.” Scott Timberg looks at the history of what happened after someone did think of it.
Under-Appreciated “Mozart In The Jungle” Has Become Compelling
“As an exploration of an underrepresented subculture, cultural economic inequities, and the soul-strengthening properties of failure, “Mozart” has done right by its viewers all along. But this season’s emphasis on the need to fight the good fight no matter how futile it may seem is not only relevant but resonant.”
Here’s An Idea That Can Give Us Some Hope For The World: The Contact Hypothesis
“It’s the simple, inspiring idea that when members of different groups – even groups that historically dislike one another – interact in meaningful ways, trust and compassion bloom naturally as a result, and prejudice falls by the wayside.” Jesse Singal offers an explication and a history of the concept.
The Most Infamous Ticket-Scalper In History Is Now Fighting Against Scalping
Ken Lowson’s company, Wiseguy Tickets, used one of the first-ever bots to buy up and resell millions of tickets to shows and stadium concerts. “Seven years after his Los Angeles office was raided by shotgun-wielding FBI agents, Lowson [says] he’s switched teams. Now, he’s out to expose the secrets of the ticket industry in a bid to make sure tickets are sold directly to their fans.”
New York Times Reviews Eight Concerts In 90 Words Or Less Each
“Michael Hersch’s end stages, commissioned and given its New York premiere by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, was a little-relieved cry of anguish and anger in the face of terminal illness and death. But with a faint tolling of orchestral bells and whimpers in the violins at the end of the second movement, attitude gave way to what seemed a touching glimpse of the suffering soul itself.”
How To Get Through The Next Four Tumultuous Years On Social Media? Anne Midgette Says Opera Can Help
After all, there’s no better way to learn how to make your voice heard over a lot of noise without wearing yourself out.
America’s (And Maybe The World’s) Oldest Working Conductor
At 100, Ed Simons is still conducting the Rockland Symphony Orchestra, a group he founded 65 years ago in the northern suburbs of New York City.
New York City Ballet’s Sara Mearns Learns How To Play A Villainess
In The Sleeping Beauty, Mearns usually dances the Lilac Fairy, Princess Aurora’s protector – but she’s just performed Carabosse, the evil fairy, for the first time. Mearns talks to Gia Kourlas about how she approached the new role.
This Government Program To Help Arts Groups Increase Private Fundraising Actually Worked
“Arts Council England’s Catalyst funding programme has ‘paid dividends’ in contributing to ‘real change’ related to fundraising, the final report into the programme has concluded. The three-year, £70m scheme, which ended in 2015, helped arts organisations to increase their fundraising capacity through awards and match funding.”
It Turns Out Peter Pan’s Captain Hook Was An Afterthought
“When Jim Barrie took the original show to theatre he had to give stagehands more time to switch scenery. He created a scene that could be performed at the front of the stage. This scene featured a pirate ship and Captain Hook. The role soon expanded and the rest is history.”
Edmonton Theatre Cancels Production Of “Othello” After Outcry
“Listen, I love it when directors and actors make bold choices with Shakespeare, or play against him – and a lot of innovation begins in university or amateur theatres. But there’s a difference between subversive takes and regressive ones.”
What, Exactly, Defines A Movie As “Canadian”?
“The issue of what, exactly, makes a film or TV show genuinely Canadian is suddenly gripping the industry, after a series of government moves to shake up long-standing regulations. Creators are worried the moves, which would allow even more American talent into our movies and shows in the name of making the content more likely to sell internationally, will water down the distinct Canadian perspective just when it is finally starting to gain real traction around the world.”
Why Aphorisms Seem So Powerful To Us
“The voices of Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker and Benjamin Franklin still feel electrically alive to us because they managed to bake their personas into their brief observations. While proverbs and adages (cousins of the aphorism, to be sure) often lose their authorship and become orphaned—think about how many times someone has mentioned “an old Irish saying” without knowing anything about its actual provenance—aphorisms stay tethered to their creators, dragging their voices along through history.”
Turns Out Einstein Was Right About Just How Spooky The Universe Is
Is quantum entanglement real, or is Einstein’s skepticism about quantum physics justified? Turns out that Einstein may be right. “The universe might be like a restaurant with 10 menu items, Friedman said. ‘You think you can order any of the 10, but then they tell you, ‘We’re out of chicken,’ and it turns out only five of the things are really on the menu. You still have the freedom to choose from the remaining five, but you were overcounting your degrees of freedom.'”
How Merce Cunningham Created A New Way Of Thinking About Movement
Cunningham, with John Cage, changed everything: “The dance marked a crucial turning point for both Cunningham and Cage, as it pivoted around the notion that time, rather than melody or narrative, should constitute the underlying relationship between dance and music. … Cunningham and Cage were free to create independently of one another, with their shared aesthetic only fully revealed in the performance itself.”
Nicolai Gedda, Swedish Singer Who Rose From Poverty To Become A Star Opera Tenor, Has Died At 91
Gedda’s career lasted well into his 70s, much longer than is usual for classical singers. “Over a quarter-century, he sang 367 performances with the Metropolitan Opera, from his debut in the title role of Gounod’s ‘Faust’ in 1957 to his final performance, as Alfredo in Verdi’s ‘La Traviata,’ in 1983.”
The Anti-Jock Who’s A Principal Dancer At City Ballet
Anthony Huxley is “a dancer of superlative refinement with the air of a silent-movie star, caught somehow between the world of the speaking and the world of dreams. In ballet, where dancers fight to show their best angle, Mr. Huxley is prized for his line and poetic sensibility.”
The Importance – And Necessity – Of Islamic Philosophers
Sure, many of them are religious – but so are the medieval Christian ‘philosophers’ we study, including Thomas Aquinas. They believed in the Quran, but also “engaged in detailed disputes over such central philosophical issues as free will, atomism and the sources of moral responsibility, and debated such technicalities as the inherence of properties in substances, or the status of non-existing objects.”
Buchi Emecheta, Nigerian Writer Whose Books Revealed The Lives Of Women Like Her, Has Died At 72
Emecheta always knew what she wanted to do: “One day she was beaten in front of her class when she announced that she wanted to be a writer. It was a cherished dream, born when she visited the family’s ancestral village, Ibuza, and listened to a blind aunt telling stories about their people, the Ibo.”
The Surprise – And Challenge – Of Suddenly Being Asked To Conduct The New York Phil
When conductor Semyon Bychkov fell ill halfway through an afternoon rehearsal, assistant conductor Joshua Gersen stepped in – and then got to lead the orchestra at that night’s performance as well, “leading impassioned and incisive accounts of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem ‘Francesca da Rimini,’ a piece he had never conducted, and the intense ‘Pathétique’ Symphony, a work he had previously led only in part.”
An Opening Artists’ Salvo Against Anything That Divides The U.S. And Mexico
Michael Govan of LACMA, about the Pacific Standard Time art festival opening in the fall, known as PST LA/LA (one of the LAs is for Latin America): “We have so much to do to make everyone understand how connected our cultures are — how connected we are. … There is no us and them. There is just us and us.”
If Big Names Skip Them, Are The Grammys Irrelevant?
As Drake, Kanye West, Justin Bieber and Frank Ocean sit them out, “this year’s Grammys promise to draw out only more skepticism of the long-standing ceremony.” Maybe the awards have aged themselves out.
Last Year’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Gives Us A Reading List
Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won for “The Sympathizer,” says that “Sometimes people have said that I give voice to the voiceless Vietnamese. If you know anything about Vietnamese people, you know they are not voiceless. They are quite loud, whether it is in Vietnamese or English. Here is a reading list of some of the most important writing by Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans, just to prove that we have not been voiceless. Most of the time we are just not heard.”
Two More Dancers Leave Pennsylvania Ballet
Hired to run the ballet school after the previous staff member quit over the firings of a huge number of dancers, a married couple quits. “The couple, graduates of Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet Academy, had danced in Russia and the United States before opening a dance school, the Academy of International Ballet, in Media. Their son, Aleksey Babayev, is a Pennsylvania Ballet corps de ballet dancer.”
Just How Far Will British Actors At The BAFTAs Go About Trump?
The show is edited for length and then broadcast “two hours after the ceremony takes place – but the programme-makers [will] do their best to reflect the essence of any speeches made. ‘This is not a political event,’ the spokesperson said. ‘Actors and actresses have a right to air their views. It’s our duty to reflect their views.'”