Josh Niland tells the story of curator Henry Geldzahler and the 1971 deaccessioning of Max Beckmann’s Self-Portrait with Cigarette.
Chatting With Brian Eno About Ambient Music
“The path of least resistance for anyone with a lot of sound-making tools is to keep making more sounds. The path of discipline is to say: Let’s see how few we can get away with.”
A Brief History Of Yorick’s Skull
“No other piece of stage business has burned itself so deeply into the collective consciousness. All the greats have been there, from Richard Burbage to Thomas Betterton, Sarah Bernhardt to Laurence Olivier. Even Bart Simpson has got in on the act. Given all this, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that, for Hamlet‘s earliest audiences, seeing real human remains on stage would have been a shock.”
New Music Is Booming In L.A. – And There’s One Problem With That
More groups and composers are competing for donors. Jim Farber looks at how some organizations, large and small, and handling the challenge.
The 19th-Century Chinese Script Only Women Could Write
In one rural county in Hunan province, women developed a phonetic writing system called nüshu, in which they wrote poems, letters, and even autobiographies. Lauren Young gives a brief history of nüshu and its rediscovery in the 1980s – and she debunks a couple myths about it.
How ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic Outlasted Almost Every Star He Parodied
Some of it is that – to the surprise of many – he’s extremely quiet and focused in the studio. Some of it is that he’s extremely resourceful in trying to get singers to give permission for his parodies. And some of it is that he’s extremely nice: “I don’t want to be embroiled in any nastiness. … I take pains not to burn bridges.”
Tracy Letts Furiously Wrote A Play In The Wake Of The Election (And Steppenwolf Is Bringing It To Broadway)
Steppenwolf artistic director Anna D. Shapiro: “The state of the world was really crushing me, and then Tracy got the script into my mailbox. I called him and said that we are lucky you write plays for us.” (And you know that a play by the writer of Killer Joe and August: Osage County is going to be furious.)
Johannesburg Art Gallery, Africa’s Largest, Forced To Close Due To Leaky Roof
The roof has leaked since 1989, but heavy rains last month did so much damage that the museum – whose collection includes works by Picasso, Monet, and Rodin – has been forced to close for several months. And, as Lynsey Chutel reports, that’s by no means JAG’s only problem.
Street Theatre In Beirut: Palestinian Refugees Act For Syrian Refugees (And Lebanese City Folks)
Milia Ayache writes about adapting, staging and performing Derek Walcott and Biljana Srbljanović in Arabic with her Masrah Ensemble.
It’s Time For The Internet To Become A Public Utility
“As it stands, there is not only no incentive for the cable companies to not only expand far beyond the metropolitan areas where there are residences — it doesn’t make fiscal sense to go much further, which is why 43 percent of rural California residents have no broadband access — but there’s no real incentive for them to even innovate their products to provide better service for their existing customers. They’re getting their $50–80 a month for their substandard service anyway, as the only other choice is cutting the cord entirely.”
Music Is One Of The Last Places Where Mentorship Is Sorely Needed, And Sometimes Sorely Lacking
A conductor who had Michael Tilson Thomas as a mentor for years says, “If I don’t mentor folks and get involved with them, then who’s going to care for the next generation? In my mind, a mentor is someone who can actually serve as a role model for what a great person or a great musician might be, and that’s where you’re going to get folks hopefully emulating and striving to do that kind of work. … Those are the kinds of musicians you want around.”
Soon Machines Will Be Able To Tell When Something Goes Wrong Just By Listening
“We’re developing an expert mechanic’s brain that identifies exactly what is happening to a machine by the way that it sounds,” says Amnon Shenfeld, founder and CEO of 3DSignals, a startup based in Kfar Saba, Israel, that is using machine learning to train computers to listen to machinery and diagnose problems at facilities like hydroelectric plants and steel mills.
Stuart McLean, 68, Storyteller and Host Of “Vinyl Cafe”
“When we’d go on vacation, he couldn’t stop interviewing people, even if he didn’t have his tape recorder. And people would tell him the damnest things. They would confess their inner secrets to him.”
What We Know About How People Use Music In Their Daily Lives
“I think one of the most interesting things is the number of people who really don’t have music playing in their homes. It’s quite striking across the nine countries we surveyed. Something as simple as entertaining friends and family: 84% of people in Sweden, 83% of people in the U.K., 79% of people in the U.S. don’t play music when they have friends over.”
Is Science Moral?
“To label science as moral or immoral completely misses the point. Science is amoral. Science is a collection of facts about the natural world painstakingly carved out by a community of scientists who engage in detailed quantitative research and data analysis. This is true even for computer simulations of detonation shock fronts of explosive devices, for example, and even of engineers and technicians putting bombs together in an assembly line.”
Irwin Stambler, 92, Author Of ‘The Encyclopedia Of Pop, Rock And Soul’
He was trained as, believe it or not, an aeronautical engineer, and he wrote books on aviation and space exploration as well as biographies of musicians. But he’s remembered for his encyclopedias on rock/pop/soul, musical theater and the “American songbook,” country-and-western, and (with his son) folk and blues – the first comprehensive scholarly reference books these genres had.
Data: The Oscars Avoid Old(er) People
USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism just released a study that found that “only two main characters over 60 appeared in the 25 films nominated for Oscars over the past three years. And things are even grimmer if you’re not Michael Keaton, as he played them both.”
Why Thornton Wilder’s ‘The Skin Of Our Teeth’ Is Suddenly Relevant Again
Seems like we hadn’t seen much of Wilder’s second-most famous play in recent years; Wilder himself once wrote that “it mostly comes alive under conditions of crisis.” Laura Collins-Hughes talks to three prominent directors – Carey Perloff, Bartlett Sher, and Arin Arbus – and playwright Paula Vogel about both the script’s problems and why this might be a good time to produce it again.
The Original Svengali Was A Conductor, And Other Goodies From The Novel That Gave Us The Word
That novel was Trilby (you may recognize that name as well), which was written as a serial for Harper’s Monthly by George du Maurier (Daphne’s grandfather) in 1894. The title character was a tone-deaf working-class girl whom the conductor-pianist Svengali hypnotized and turned into a world-famous opera singer. As Emma Garman recounts, both of those characters got as far beyond their creator as the monster did with Victor Frankenstein.
The Pioneering Minimalist Composer We’ve Forgotten About
“The canon of musical minimalism tends to be set in stone, carved like Mount Rushmore: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young. It’s solid, immovable, but the lineup has long lacked for figures who are under-acknowledged or under-appreciated – most notably Tony Conrad.” Jennifer Lucy Allan fills us in.
How The Martha Graham Dance Company Revives A Work She Created Decades Before The Current Dancers Were Born
Marina Harss talks with company artistic director Janet Eilber and rehearsal director Denise Vale about recreating the stark 1931 piece Primitive Mysteries – and with PeiJu Chien-Pott, who’s dancing Graham’s own role and says it’s the hardest one she’s ever done.
‘White Guy For Rent’ – Playing Random Foreigners To Help Chinese Developers Sell Condos
During the big real estate bubble a few years ago that led to China’s now-notorious “ghost cities,” expats like David Borenstein found work as what Chinese called a “laowai-for-rent” – appearing at real estate sales events pretending to be a foreign businessman or musician or athlete in order to make the development look international and important. Borenstein tells Linda Poon what it was like.
Did ‘Goodnight Moon’ Have A Sequel? Yes, Sort Of
In 1950, Margaret Wise Brown wrote, and put away, two fragments that Sarah Lyall describes as “part variation on, part expansion of” her 1944 children’s book , which later became a worldwide bestseller. Lyall tells how those two fragments were found and combined by an editor and will be published this year.
Google Has Created A Bot To Play Duets With You
“Google’s latest artificial intelligence experiment is a music-playing piano bot that digests whatever keyboard melodies you give it and tries to respond in kind.” But does it succeed in responding in kind? Nick Statt tries it out. (includes video)
Anish Kapoor To Put A Deep Black Whirlpool In Brooklyn Bridge Park
New York City’s Public Art Fund in New York will install Kapoor’s Descension – a funnel of black-colored water that spirals down into the ground – in Brooklyn Bridge Park this summer. (How many think-pieces do you suppose we’ll get comparing it to the 9/11 Memorial?)