Month: August 2003

Songs Without Words

“Most singing that we hear has words, and, although the singer may depart from those words for bar after bar of vocal gymnastics (as in a bel canto aria, for instance), we know that in the end we shall be returned to the text. It doesn’t matter that the text may be more of a pretext for music than a real text conveying important information. Nor does it seem to matter very much to many people if the text that is being sung happens to be in a language they do not understand. A song that has no text at all takes us into a different world.”

Slam-Dancing – Attacking Amis

Tibor Fischer set off a literary storm earlier this month when he slammed Martin Amis’ new book before it had even been published. “Fischer, whose fourth novel, Voyage To The End Of The Room, is published on the same day as Amis’s Yellow Dog, is certainly shrewd enough to know that his column in the Telegraph earlier this month attacking Amis’s novel with apparently unprovoked ferocity would get him talked about far more than any number of press releases for his own; he acknowledged as much in the piece: ‘As a writer, I’m relieved that Amis has produced a novel unworthy of his talent. No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention’.”

Football Network Rescues Arts Channel

A pay-TV service that has built its success on televising football and Hollywood movies, has bought a 50 percent stake in the UK Artsworld channel. Artsworld had been struggling financially for some time. “There is definitely room for growth. This deal will help us accelerate. We expect to go on to cable next year. We don’t propose to change the mix and we won’t dumb down. We retain editorial control, Rupert Murdoch won’t be ringing up demanding this or that ballet. In fact, so far our principal effect has been to spur the BBC into reviving its arts coverage.”

Anti-Infection Arts Funding

The Toronto Film Festival is getting $400,000 from the Ontario government for “SARS relief.” With SARS scaring away visitors to the province, the government set up a fund to help out. “Previously, the ministry announced it was providing the Shaw and Stratford festivals a total of $800,000 in marketing assistance to help them overcome the effects of the SARS outbreak. The TIFF money has been used for campaign aimed at potential attendees in U.S. border states and Canada as well as producers and buyers in the U.S. and overseas.”

Trying To Save Munch

The Oslo city council has approved $6.6. million to preserve the works of Edvard Munch. “Very few of Munch’s paintings are in top condition. Most of them are now peeling so much that we have no chance of doing our job with so few staff. The classic Skrik was painted on cardboard and is so even more vulnerable to damage. Munch never applied any protective layering to his paintings. He wanted to keep the matt finish, so he never varnished his paintings.”

The Multi-Purpose Public Space

What’s needed for the World Trade Center space, argues Justin Davidson, is something that can serve many functions. A new exhibition gives “a sense of how many simultaneous functions a public space can serve. Italian urbanists long ago understood the beauty of an open square – or ellipse, lopsided trapezoid, or whatever shape streets and houses would permit – on which civic, religious and commercial institutions front and which different generations adapt to their own purposes. These are hybrid areas, where the sacred rubs up against the profane.”

John Shearman, Art Historian, 72

John Shearman, an art historian and scholar who consulted with the Vatican on the restoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, has died at the age of 72. “Dr. Shearman probably achieved the most fame for his discovery that the vault of the Sistine Chapel was cracked along its length in 1504, four years before Michelangelo began work on it. Because the old decoration — incorporating stars and some geometrical shapes — was ruined, a new ceiling was needed.”

Music’s Hot New Thing

“In the generations of German composers younger than Wolfgang Rihm, Matthias Pintscher is the one with the most impressive track record. He is still in his early 30s, yet has been attracting international attention for a decade. He conducted his first stage work, a ballet called Gesprungene Glocken, at the Berlin Staatsoper at the age of 23, and his first opera, Thomas Chatterton, which was based on the life and mysterious death of the 18th-century English poet, was premiered in Dresden in 1998. Another opera has been commissioned for the Salzburg festival, provisionally titled Heliogabal, though at present that project seems to be on hold, while a third, L’Espace Dernier, will be premiered at the Opéra Bastille in Paris in February.”

CBC Archives – Ready For Online?

Now that the BBC is planning to make its archives available online for free, will the CBC do the same? “The CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, already has a section on its Web site that contains clips from historically significant radio and television broadcasts. The CBC Archive, active for more than a year, contains clips as varied as speeches from Prairie populist Tommy Douglas and Justin Trudeau’s eulogy at this father’s funeral.” But everything online? Not yet