“This article reports on the impact of music education for students in a secondary school in Victoria, Australia. Socially inclusive practices were a focus of the study as the school has a high percentage of young people with a refugee background. … Key findings from this case study research indicated that a music classroom which fostered socially inclusive practices resulted in a positive transcultural learning space. This research raises important questions about the critical role of music education and the arts in contemporary and culturally diverse school contexts.” – Research Studies in Music Education
Pianist Radu Lupu To Retire From Performing
“Lupu, now 73, has long frustrated his admirers: he last recorded in the mid-1990s, is absent from social media, and refuses to be interviewed. His health has been in decline; in the last two years he has cancelled appearances with increased frequency. In May, Arcady Volodos replaced him in Paris; earlier this month, Maria João Pires did the same in Berlin, coming out of her own retirement.” – WFMT (Chicago)
The Museumification Of Venice
Nearly 5 million tourists visited the city in 2017, compared with 2.7 million in 2002, according to data from the city’s hotels, which do not take into account the thousands of bookings with Airbnb Inc. and similar services. Meanwhile, the resident population has shrunk below 60,000. – Bloomberg
Familiar Argument: Why We Shouldn’t Feel Sorry For Paying Arts Graduates Less
Because the benefits of the jobs – it’s work that’s interesting, even fun… – are worth it? – The Telegraph (UK)
How A Caretaker With Little Training “Restored” (And Damaged) 200 Of Van Gogh’s Paintings
The 200 Van Gogh paintings which Jan Cornelis Traas restored for the family between 1926 and 1933 represent nearly a quarter of the artist’s works. It remains highly disturbing that a restorer with virtually no formal training and with little experience should have been given the task of restoring so many of Van Gogh’s paintings. – The Art Newspaper
Plan To Merge Florence’s Uffizi And Accademia Galleries
“The Italian culture minister, Alberto Bonisoli, is planning to merge the Gallerie degli Uffizi with the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence under a single administration” as part of a new set of reforms rolling back the previous government’s reforms of Italian museums. “The Accademia — best known as the home of Michelangelo’s David — will maintain curatorial independence, he added, through its own scientific committee.” – The Art Newspaper
This Is How A Language Dies
Today, only about 40 people speak the Tayap language, and Don Kulick predicts that the language will be “stone cold dead” in less than 50 years. How did that happen? Perhaps more importantly, what cultural and economic losses paved the way? The answer might lie in the backward way we’ve been framing language death. – The American Scholar
Female Video Game Designers Take On The Debate Over Abortion Rights
“As Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio work to reverse hard-won reproductive rights with ‘fetal heartbeat’ bills and potential 99-year sentences for performing abortions, game designers in the United States – and around the world – are creating interactive experiences that challenge the simplistic ways that many people think about abortion, and the blunt … laws that politicians have drafted around their constituents’ bodies.” – The Guardian
Next Head Of Paris Opera Will Be Canadian Opera Company’s Alexander Neef: Report
According to the French newspaper Le Figaro, Neef, who was director of casting at the Paris Opera before becoming General Director of COC in 2008, will succeed Stéphane Lissner as General Director in Paris in 2022. Neef’s contract in Toronto currently runs to 2026, and last fall he took on the job of artistic director of the summer-only Santa Fe Opera. – Ludwig van Toronto
The Irish Film Industry Has Grown Up. So What Does It Mean To Be An “Irish” Film?
“To resist globalisation, we need to insist on the importance of the local, whether that’s local food, local dialects, local industries. At its most successful, Irish cinema tells local stories that resonate as much abroad as they do at home.” – Irish Times
The Digital Age Has Been Unkind To Classical Music (It’s About The Meta-Data)
Browsing and accessing classical music online has been a chore. The data structures were set up for pop music, not classical. Finally, companies are working on some solutions. – The New York Times
Want To See A Model Of LACMA’s Redesign?
LACMA has dedicated a space to the exhibition of the new plan with a 15-foot model built in Zumthor’s studio. The site model is a single slab of molded cement, reproducing several blocks of the Miracle Mile with abstracted precision to focus attention on an all-white volumetric model of the LACMA addition. – Archinect
San Francisco’s School Board Is Spending $600,000 To Destroy A Mural
Bari Weiss: “The notion of erasing art has an American pedigree. The [immigrant New Deal-era artist] Victor Arnautoff was intimately familiar with it, having been interrogated in 1956 by the House Un-American Activities Committee for drawing a caricature of Vice President Richard Nixon. But I suspect he would have been surprised to learn that more than 60 years later, progressives in charge of educating San Francisco’s children are merrily following this un-American playbook.” – The New York Times
In The New ‘To Kill A Mockingbird,’ Aaron Sorkin And Broadway Utterly Fail Scout
Yikes: “How does a white man from New York City tell a Southern Gothic about a young girl growing up in the Depression Era South, a story inspired by the female author’s lived experience? For Sorkin, it’s easy—you just silence her voice.” – LitHub
Why Do So Many Ignore The Suffering In The Poems Of Mary Oliver And Elizabeth Bishop?
Maybe because it’s easier on certain types of reviewers and critics to ignore clear evidence of suffering and pain? “Oliver and Bishop share a clear appetite for animal flail and gore and death. But many readers don’t seem to make very much of this. Critics praise the work, but tend to smile gently, indulgently, upon Bishop’s rhymes, her received forms and elegant impersonality, Oliver’s ‘old-fashioned’ subjects.” – LitHub
When You Want To Feel Inspired By Language, What Should You Read?
Language can be curved, bent, cajoled, broken, reconstituted, made to fit a creators passion. When that’s what you want to read, here are some ideas to put up higher on the TBR pile. – The Rumpus
How Is It That Musicals Both Ultra-Gay And Not Gay At All?
Musicals can help young men, especially (but not only!), come out, and lord knows they’re often campy enough … but where are the happy gay musicals? Other than Bill Rauch’s happy and gay Oklahoma! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018, really, where exactly are they? – The Stage (UK)
The Author Who Just Won The Dylan Thomas Prize On Code-Switching And Superpowers In London
Guy Gunaratne, whose novel is written in ”a pungent first-person patois,” explains that of course he speaks differently to an interviewer. “publishing is pretty middle class and I’ve had to accommodate. In London, you learn to code-switch quite well and I’ve always thought of that as a superpower in a way. You’re able to express yourself with different vocabulary in different situations, not through any pretence but because the way you express yourself matters, and your social condition is inherited through your inheritance of dialect.” – The Guardian (UK)
Isabelle Sarli, Whose Films Challenged Censors And Created A Sensation In Argentina And The World, Has Died At 89
“Sarli became an instant sex symbol in her feature film debut, in El Trueno Entre las Hojas (Thunder Among the Leaves) in 1958, when she became the first woman to appear fully nude in a mainstream Argentine movie” – and during Argentina’s military dictatorship, her movies were censored, one not being shown until the return of democracy. – The New York Times
Women Are Still Working On Changing The Discussion Around The Female Body In Art
Artist Donna Huanca uses semi-nudes to claim space in what she says is still a very male space. “I’m trying to distort the male gaze, to have it be so powerful that it reflects back in a different way.” – Los Angeles Times
Is Morality Hard-Wired Into Mammalian Brains?
Maybe morality started with food. Really. – The New York Times
Guggenheim Workers Vote To Unionize
The vote, in which 57 voted to join the union and 20 against, will see more than 90 arts handlers and facilities staff join the same union that represents roughly the same folks at MoMA PS1. – Hyperallergic
The New York Times Is Pretty Sure You Like To Read Memoirs
The story is about 50 memoirs from the last 50 years, but The New York Times has also ranked them. Want to know what number one is? (You know BuzzFeed would make this a quiz, asking how many you’ve read, but now you can do that on your own.) – The New York Times
Writers Guild Fights Back With Cease And Desist Letter To Agencies
The writers/agents fight hit a new level of ugly in the last week of June. “After being slapped this week with lawsuits from two of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies, the Writers Guild of America fired back on Friday, sending a cease and desist letter in which the guild accuses agencies of engaging in anti-competitive behavior.” – Los Angeles Times
This Library Is Bound For Freedom
Well, of course it’s free – it’s a library! – but more than that, “The Free Black Women’s Library, a mobile pop-up library and community for black women, is creating spaces [across Los Angeles]. A movement that was first sparked in New York, the library hopes to cultivate an appreciation for black female writers but also a safe space for communities of color.” – Los Angeles Times