Lara Downes: “Two weeks of dates cancelled, and then before we knew it, two months. Every single concert, opera, festival, club date–our calendars were wiped clean. When it happened, some of us were out on the road, and we made our way home in confusion and panic. Some of us were getting ready to head out on tour, and we cancelled flights, unpacked suitcases. We were all stunned. It was surreal and impossible.” – I Care if you Listen
Rehearsals Move Online – To Practice And For Community
“Physical distancing is the antithesis of what a community chorus is all about. We rehearse for four months before our performances twice a year. The community we form as we breathe, learn the music, and sing together is a vital component of who we are. Who are we in times of physical isolation?” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Do Musicians Need A Federal Works Progress Program To Survive?
Musicians have lost the battle to monetize recordings. With the internet awash in cheap streaming and free videos, our income now comes from live performance alone. Even if livestreams end up being only a short stopgap, offering them up for free on a large scale sets a dangerous precedent. Forced to be pioneers in this nuanced, digital field, we need to set the standard now—past performance footage is different than creating totally new content, for example. How do we assign value in an array of contexts? – Middle Class Artist
Online Music Streaming Is Up 32 Percent
The two leading platforms are Spotify with 35 percent and Apple Music, with 19 percent. Amazon Music is third with 15 percent of market share. Paid subscriptions represented 80 percent of total revenue, with advertising and brand partnerships rounding out the remaining 20 percent. – Ludwig Van
Violinist Commissions Composers For Online Fragments
Jennifer Koh got to work on Alone Together, an online performance series for which she hyper-compressed her usual process of discovering composers by asking 21 of them with some level of financial security (be it from salary or grants) to donate a new work between 30 seconds and one minute long, as well as to nominate 21 freelance composers for new commissions funded by Arco. – Washington Post
Judge Throws Out Musicians’ Lawsuit Over 2008 Fire That Destroyed Master Recordings
Representatives of those artists or their estates sued Universal in June, arguing that the company had been negligent in protecting their tapes and that the company had a duty to share with artists any income it received from an insurance settlement over the fire. – The New York Times
The Greatest Scam In Canadian Art History
“[It’s] the greatest art scam in Canadian history,” says art dealer Don Robinson, who suffered a stroke because of the stress he endured in his campaign against a market awash with forgeries. “The more you dive into a pool of garbage, the more you get to know the garbage within it,” says Ritchie Sinclair, Norval Morrisseau’s former assistant and another key figure in exposing the scandal. – The Art Newspaper
NY Museums, Collectors Worry About Art Security
Know What Else Coronavirus Has Infected? Our Everyday Language
Karen Russell: “Today, we are witnessing the shotgun weddings of words into some strange unions, neologisms sped into existence by this virus (‘quarantunes,’ ‘quarantini’), epidemiological vocabulary hitched together by Twitter hashtags. It seems like there is a parallel language contagion occurring. ‘Self-isolation,’ ‘social distancing,’ ‘abundance of caution’ — pairs of words I’d never seen together in a sentence back in January have become ubiquitous.” – The New Yorker
Ben Brantley And Jesse Green Size Up The Off-Broadway Season (Since It’s Now Over)
Ben : “In many of these productions, time seemed to be torn off its hinges, and the solid floor of what we think of as ‘normal life’ to have cracked open. Who knew how apt a preface such works would provide for the rudderless world we now inhabit?”
Jesse: “‘Rudderless’ is exactly how a lot of these terrific plays (and a handful of musicals) wanted us to feel politically, existentially and even spiritually — I mean with actual ghosts.” – The New York Times
Why The Hollywood Reporter’s Editorial Director Abruptly Walked Out
“Matthew Belloni resigned as editorial director of The Hollywood Reporter due to intense conflicts with Modi Wiczyk and Asif Satchu, the co-CEOs of the trade’s owners, Valence Media, over their attempts to meddle with the publication’s editorial independence” — in particular, pressure to generate positive coverage and avoid negative coverage of people and projects in which Valence is involved. – Variety
James Drury, Star Of Long-Running TV Series ‘The Virginian’, Dead At 85
“He played the laconic rancher with no name on the revolutionary NBC series. Among Westerns, only Gunsmoke and Bonanza lasted longer.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Karina Canellakis Named London Philharmonic’s Principal Guest Conductor
Before embarking on a conducting career in 2013, the 38-year-old American performed as a violinist in solo and chamber works as well as in the Berlin Philharmonic’s Academy Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony. “I had always loved it and was fascinated by scores,” she said about conducting. “It never occurred to me that this was not something for a girl to do.” – The Guardian
Another Salzburg Festival Canceled (But Not The Main One, Yet)
Just short of a month after the Salzburg Easter Festival was called off because of the pandemic, the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, directed by mezzo Cecilia Bartoli and scheduled for May 20-June 1, was canceled. The announcement came shortly after Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz banned all public events in the country through the end of June. – Opera News
Is Spatial Awareness Our Superpower?
In the age of GPS, we tend to take our navigation and spatial abilities for granted, until they – or the technology – let us down. It is easy to forget that they have sustained us for tens of thousands of years. Over the course of our evolution, Homo sapiens developed an appetite for exploration and a wayfinding spirit that set us apart from previous human species. It had a huge effect on our future. One of the most intriguing recent ideas in anthropology is that our ability to navigate was essential to our success as a species, because it allowed us to cultivate extensive social networks. – Aeon
A letter to unknown friends
A few days after my beloved Hilary received her double-lung transplant, I published an open letter in The Wall Street Journal addressed to the family of the anonymous organ donor whose lungs she used to breathe during the last month of her life. – Terry Teachout
As Schools Move Online, Less Than Half Of Their Students Log In
The absence rate appears particularly high in schools with many low-income students, whose access to home computers and internet connections can be spotty. Some teachers report that less than half their students are regularly participating. – The New York Times
Tips From Met Opera Performers For Surviving The Shutdown Of Everything
One Met Opera dancer said that his counterparts in other cities should “get to know your rights under the newly passed Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (known as the CARES Act).” – Los Angeles Times
Dancer In The Dark: Did Intensive Study Of Butoh Drive A Young American Woman To Suicide?
Sharon Stern was a vivacious, popular, hard-working actor when she enrolled in the MFA program at America’s first Buddhist university. There she met Butoh master Katsura Kan and became his ferociously devoted disciple. That ferocity of devotion — to her teacher, to the art form and the idea of loss of self behind it — concerned her parents, her friends, and ultimately Kan himself. When Stern killed herself, her parents blamed Kan and sued him for wrongful death. – The New Yorker