“[Ann Hobson] Pilot played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for four decades before retiring from the orchestra in 2009. She is one of four African-American musicians who broke the color barrier with symphonies in the 1960s.” – The Albany (Ga.) Herald
Baltimore Museum Of Art Remaking American Art History
“The Baltimore Museum of Art doesn’t wish to renovate American art history by placing more black artists in leading roles. The BMA wants to take a wrecking ball to American art history, rebuilding it from the ground up with black artists serving as load-bearing walls.” – Forbes
Charming: When 12-Year-Old Timmy Page Was A Movie-Maker (Back In The 60s)
Like a pint-sized Cecil B. DeMille, we see Page in his family’s suburban Connecticut neighborhood as he wrangles his actors, gauges camera angles and shouts, “Action!” In cut-away interviews, the young Page expounds on French new wave directors and silent film stars with the intellect of the Pulitzer-Prize winning critic he’d become. – Los Angeles Times
Paul Taylor Company After Paul Taylor
Paul “liked watching the dancer figure it out. He liked giving you a challenge or an obstacle or a directive and then sitting back and seeing what you would do with it. He was also famous for giving you two notes that contradicted each other. Like “I want you to crawl slower but get off faster.” For him, there was something in the spirit of the try, the spirit of the effort. I intend on keeping that.” – The New York Times
Scientists Figure Out Direct Brain-To-Brain Communication
In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains. Electrical activity from the brains of a pair of human subjects was transmitted to the brain of a third individual in the form of magnetic signals, which conveyed an instruction to perform a task in a particular manner. – Scientific American
How Matthew Lopez Transposed The Edwardians Of ‘Howards End’ Into The Gay New Yorkers Of ‘The Inheritance’ (A Crib Sheet)
“‘I consider this the ultimate in fan-fiction, basically,’ [says] Lopez, … [who] wanted to know, ‘How faithful can you be to the novel while simultaneously blowing it up?’ For those who know Howards End well and need an intro to the gay New York of The Inheritance (or vice versa), the playwright walks a few key lines of comparison between the two.” – New York Magazine
They’ve Discovered Another Problem At The Rothko Chapel, So Its Reopening Will Be Delayed
“When construction crews dismantled the chapel’s acoustical ceiling tiles this summer to prepare the building for a new skylight, they found the concrete support walls were built without steel reinforcement.” That was permissible back in 1970, when the chapel was built, but it won’t do in today’s Houston, a city ever more vulnerable to ever more powerful hurricanes. Steel rebar reinforcements are being added to all the walls. – Houston Chronicle
Did They Just Discover A Portrait Of Machiavelli Painted By Leonardo Da Vinci?
“An unsigned painting of an unidentified bald man with a beard has aroused excitement among historians and art buffs after lying largely unnoticed in the collection of a historic chateau in central France for decades.” That chateau belonged to the renowned diplomat Talleyrand, and a document signed by his chamberlain is what set off all the fuss. – Yahoo! (AFP)
This Minneapolis Playwright Has Won $400,000 In Literary Prizes This Year
“I always imagined I would be a playwright at night and a CPA or something in the day,” Lauren Yee said. “I’m pretty organized and disciplined. There are times when I’m thinking about a project and I put the pieces together like a producer.” Now, she gets to be a full-time playwright. – Star-Tribune (Mpls)
That Terrible Last Season Of Game Of Thrones? Turns Out Creators Really Didn’t Know They Were Doing
” They apparently kept being surprised at their experience, and not just through its now-infamous, unseen pilot, which the duo has long admitted was a complete disaster. It just seems like even as the show evolved into the success it became, the duo—who scripted the vast majority of the series, taking on even more work when the show began outpacing the source material from George R.R. Martin—were still, apparently, largely unsure about anything they were doing.” – Gizmodo
Beloved NY Broadway Show Revival Series Gets A New Curator
Lear deBessonet is best known as the founder of Public Works, a much-lauded program of the Public Theater that once a year stages a new musical adaptation of a classic story, which is performed by a handful of Equity actors and more than 100 amateur performers drawn from across the five boroughs of New York. The program has proved influential, spurring similar ventures in multiple cities across the United States and in England. – The New York Times
John Killacky – Artist-Turned-Legislator Changes His View On Arts Advocacy
“Since being elected to the Vermont House of Representatives last fall, my perspective has dramatically changed as to how best advocate for the arts and, in fact, how siloed arts organizations and their funders are. My legislative work focuses on economic development, tourism, heath, education, affordable housing, environment, and agriculture, as well as vulnerable populations: veterans, prisoners, the homeless, those suffering from substance use disorders, and survivors of physical and sexual abuse. Art is barely present in these conversations, but is so needed.” – Americans for the Arts Blog
Berkeley Symphony’s New Conductor On His Transformative Career Encounter With Marin Alsop
Joseph Young: “I went up to her and said ‘I really want to go to grad school for conducting’ and she said ‘why don’t you come study with me.’ That moment changed my life. Before that I had no examples. I had no mentor. All I knew was that I wanted to conduct orchestras. In that moment I had all of that. Someone from whom I learned there is a transcendental power in what we do in music, which I began to appreciate. Someone who showed me, by example, to be a leader not only of an orchestra, but of a community, as when I was with her in Baltimore.” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Chou Wen-Chung, ‘Godfather Of Chinese Contemporary Music’, Dead At 96
“[He] left a relatively small body of compositions, but his fastidious and elegant works are filled with emotional eddies. He wrote mostly for Western instruments, but made them bend single notes to accommodate the microtonal flexibility of Chinese music.” In addition, as a professor at Columbia University, he trained an entire group of now-prominent Chinese composers, among them Tan Dun, Zhou Long, Chen Yi, and Bright Sheng. – The New York Times
Getty Museum Safe From Fire, But Will Stay Closed Through Friday
The Getty is still safe and secure, representatives said. But the fire, which has burned more than 650 acres and prompted mass evacuations, was only 15% contained Tuesday afternoon, and the National Weather Service said winds topping 80 mph could sweep over the region through Thursday evening. – Los Angeles Times
Is This Comedy Quiz Show Responsible For Boris Johnson Becoming Prime Minister?
“An institution in Britain, Have I Got News For You began airing in 1990 and runs on Friday nights on the BBC’s main channel, averaging 4 million viewers. … Political guests are subject to continual mockery, especially if they have a scandalous past or their policies appear muddled. But for those willing to be laughed at, and to laugh at themselves, the show has become a way to endear themselves to the public in a country where self-deprecation is an art form.” And Boris Johnson’s appearances on the show are seen as “pop culture classics.” – The New York Times
13-Year, $90M Legal Battle Over Art And Cardboard Is Now Over
“The case was brought by the paintings’ owners, Stanley and Gail Hollander, in 2007. They sought more than $90m in damages in connection with a claim for alleged loss in value on the [Martin Kippenberger triptych] Copa III, Copa IV and Copa IX (1986) after damage caused by a handling hiccup. After a three-week trial by jury and millions spent in legal fees, Gail Hollander (Stanley died in 2016) received just $19,500, their claim undone by a curious restoration of the paintings’ frames.” – The Art Newspaper
Desert X Was A Promising Idea, But It Has Compromised Itself By Working With/In Saudi Arabia
In Saudi Arabia apostasy is punishable by death. Unless artists are willing to make their host’s state control of expression an explicit subject of their work, those who participate cannot escape compromise from the polluted context.” – Los Angeles Times
800 Musicians Say They’ll Boycott Amazon Festival Over Company’s Work For ICE
The letter — organized by a group of artists and activists including Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis, Downtown Boys’ Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, Evan Greer, Adult Mom, @k8_or_die, Carmen Perry, and Jes Skolnik, according to Rolling Stone — comes in response to the announcement of Intersect, Amazon’s first music festival, which will be held in Las Vegas from December 6-7. The company is promoting the festival as an event “where music, technology, and art converge.” – Hyperallergic
Max Exodus Of Leadership Of Vancouver’s Arts Organizations
It’s an impressive roll call (and all women): Executive director of the Vancouver International Film Festival, Jacqueline Dupuis. Ballet BC artistic director Emily Molnar. Vancouver’s Chutzpah! Festival artistic managing director Mary-Louise Albert. Kathleen Bartels executive director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Kelly Tweeddale, executive director of the Vancouver Symphony. And Kim Gaynor, general director of Vancouver Opera. – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
Surprise: Vancouver Opera General Director Steps Down Over Disagreement On Company’s Direction
Kim Gaynor joined the opera three years ago, and was given the challenge of moving the company from a traditional season (or “stagione”) model to a festival with a number of events during a concentrated period in the spring – a decision that had been made by the board and her predecessor, James Wright, ahead of his retirement. The move had been made in response to financial and organizational challenges. – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
The Bumper Sticker Is Wrong – Mistakes Do Define Us
General infallibility is a tempting proposition. Treating an individual’s attitudes and preferences as givens – as matters beyond debate or criticism – might seem to promote human dignity by forcing us to treat all views as equally worthy of respect. But such an outlook is likely, if anything, to have the opposite effect. This is because taking seriously a person’s capacity to make mistakes is critical to taking seriously their capacity for rationality. Only by recognising that people are capable of error can we properly value anyone’s goals or engage in rational debate. – Aeon
Harry Vetro’s New CD
The young Canadian drummer Harry Vetro has followed his debut album as a leader, Northern Ranger, with a shorter CD of four tracks. The new album has a similar title, Eastern Stranger, but perhaps that won’t create confusion among Vetro devotees. – Doug Ramsey
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (11)
It wasn’t until I sat down with this album from my father’s collection that I started to grasp that its star was far more than just a charming but old-fashioned minstrel-show entertainer with a wall-to-wall smile. And I had no idea in 1969 that I was destined to spend much of my middle age thinking and writing about him. – Terry Teachout
Seattle Area Libraries Boycott MacMillan E-Books Over New Policy
In response to a new policy on e-book purchases imposed by Macmillan Publishers and effective Nov. 1, King County Library System will be boycotting the publisher’s upcoming e-books, declining to purchase any new Macmillan books in that format. Seattle Public Library will not be boycotting, but warns readers that they may notice long delays in obtaining new Macmillan e-books. – Seattle Times