The BBC is planning to “digitise and offer for download, for free, as much of its back catalogue of programmes that it can legally do, from the earliest radio reels to nature documentaries to educational programmes. Anyone will be allowed to re-use, re-edit and mix this material with their own, provided it’s for non-commercial use.” But why? Because it is in the public broadcaster’s interests…
Month: August 2003
Opera’s Essential 25 Recordings?
Tim Page ensures that his fall will start off with bags of vitriolic hate mail as he chooses 25 opera recordings meant to “give a novice listener an opportunity to explore the field.” “The selection process was not easy. Operaphiles are an opinionated lot, and I can already anticipate some of the mail, both curious and furious, that I’ll receive. A few sample heresies: Not one of the more than 60 operatic works by Gaetano Donizetti made the final cut. Virgil Thomson’s “The Mother of Us All” is here, but George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” an infinitely more popular American opera, is not. Where are the works of Benjamin Britten? And how can such composers as Mozart, Verdi and Wagner be limited to two operas apiece?”
BBC Takes On Chaucer For The 21st Century
“Traditionalists, gird your loins, for they have updated Geoffrey Chaucer. From a shortlist of 10 tales they have invited the cream of today’s television writers to create contemporary versions in their own voices but true to the spirit of Chaucer’s original. ‘Chaucer held up a mirror to the 14th century and we intend to do the same for the 21st, exploring themes such as the cult of celebrity, bigotry and the obsession with youth’.”
Names And Memorials
Names are a powerful memorial in our culture. Michael Kimmelman ponders the likelihood of some sort of list of names at the World Trade Center site as a memorial. “The competition guidelines for the memorial at ground zero require that the design ‘recognize each individual who was a victim’ on Sept. 11, 2001, and on Feb. 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was first attacked. It’s a safe bet that many of the 5,200 submissions interpret that as some kind of list of names. By aesthetic and social consensus, names are today a kind of reflexive memorial impulse, lists of names having come almost automatically to connote ‘memorial,’ just as minimalism has come to be the presumptive sculptural style for memorial design, the monumental blank slate onto which the names can be inscribed.”
Movies And The Musical Message
Movies use borrowed music to telegraph extra-musical ideas – most of them never intended by the original composers. Movies offer a peek “into the contemporary American unconscious, into the way mass culture understands, or misunderstands, high culture. The pop associations are an important part of the music’s meaning, even if the composer never intended his music to work this way.”
Politics Of Picking Memorials
With more than 5000 entries in the design competition for a World Trade Center memorial, how do jurors go about choosing? “In the first round, a jury typically tries to eliminate 75 percent to 80 percent of the entries. Richard Andrews, the director of the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, said that sophisticated juries could rule out some entries within 10 seconds. ‘But there will also be entries where three or four of the jurors say they didn’t see anything and one will say: `Look at it again. Here’s what I found.’ And it will be held over for a second round.’ That’s when jurors really start debating and discussing stylistic differences among submissions.”
Architect Behind The Buildings
Architect David Childs is having a major impact on the skyline of New York. “At Skidmore Owings & Merrill, you don’t know what my next building will look like. You know what a Richard Meier building will look like; there’s a style. I’m more like Eero Saarinen, whom I revere. His buildings all look different.” Buildings as “egoistic big statements,” as Mr. Childs put it, do not interest him. Making the fabric of the city is what excites him most: how streets thread their way through avenues and parks, how they open vistas to rivers or create a neighborhood.”
Minnesota – New Baton In Town
The Minnesota Orchestra is beginning life under new music director Osmo Vanska. “After seven years of flight and fancy under Eiji Oue and nine previous to him under the iron fist of Edo de Waart, the orchestra is banking on Vänskä as a happy balance — an elite, uncompromising musician of mild temperament, an A-list conductor for top orchestras in America and Europe, with expertise in a corner of Scandinavian repertoire the Minnesota Orchestra yearns to conquer. The stakes are high.”
Culture Lines At The WTC
A new palace of culture is to be built at the site of the World Trade Center. We don’t yet know which culture will be represented there, and jockeying for position is already intense. But “this much is certain: institutions that take the dare and locate themselves at that haunted, contested place will find that a lot more is asked of them than the usual dose of edification and diversion.”
Back To What Was?
The World Trade Center Restoration Movement is a group of people who want to retore the World Trade Center to pre-9/11. “In close solidarity with one another, and in opposition to the city’s political establishment, business leaders, academics and civic groups, and just about everyone else whose opinion matters, the W.T.C.R.M. demands that the World Trade Center towers be rebuilt. Not replaced by something new and supposedly better. Rebuilt, hewing as closely as possible to the design of the buildings that were lost on Sept. 11.”