“With the recent boom in 99-cent-per-song downloading sites, music fans are cherry-picking their favorite tunes and ignoring full-length albums – much to the dismay of musicians who spend months crafting them. The album’s glory days could be history, with three-minute singles ruling the music world as they did in the 1950s. That shake-up would not only affect the record labels’ bottom line but might also transform the way pop music is created and heard.”
Month: December 2003
Botstein Hired To Revive Jerusalem Symphony
Early this year, the Jerusalem Symphony briefly stopped paying its musicians, even though they agreed to 20% salary cuts to try to save the orchestra. The orchestra was placed in receivership, its chairman resigned amid accusations of financial mismanagement and going-out-of-business signs went up on the concert hall.” Now American conductor Leon Botstein has been hired to revive the orchestra’s fortunes. “Botstein was hired, with the backing of the Jerusalem Symphony’s musicians and Israeli cultural officials, to try to rescue the forgotten stepchild of Israeli orchestras after it had been all but abandoned by its main backer, the Israel Broadcasting Authority.”
A NC Town And A Difficult Statue
The North Carolina town of Rocky Mount wanted to erect a statue to Martin Luther King as a tribute to the fact that Dr. King gave one of the first versions of his “I have a dream” speech. But the sculpture has been problematic – townspeople objected to the likeness of the statue, the sculptor has been protested, and…
A Big Job In Detroit
Whoever becomes the Detroit Symphony’s next executive director will have a lot of work to do. Not only is the orchestra searching for a new music director, “the DSO has run operating losses of about $3 million the last three years, including a $1.8-million shortfall in 2003, its largest deficit in more than a decade. A $1-million transfer from its endowment two years ago leaves the accumulated deficit at $2.2 million.”
Milan’s Missing Documents
An investigation of missing documents at Milan’s State Archive has proven startling results. “Thousands of pieces were found to have disappeared: parchments from the 11th century; papal bulls; official decrees bearing the signatures of Emperor Charles V, Empress Maria Theresa and Napoleon; autograph manuscripts by such Italian literary giants as Alessandro Manzoni and Gabriele D’Annunzio — a substantial slice of eight centuries of European history, as seen through documents from one of the continent’s wealthiest metropolitan centers from the Middle Ages onward. Some 3,000 items from the State Archives and smaller depositories have been recovered, while 1,000 more are still reported missing, probably smuggled into private collections in Italy or abroad.”
NEA Shakespeare Program Pacifies Critics
New Criterion editors have generally been against public funding of the arts in general and the NEA in particular. But “it is gratifying to report that the National Endowment for the Arts seems finally to have come around to our way of thinking on these issues. Under the leadership of the distinguished poet and critic Dana Gioia, the NEA has said farewell to the ephemeral and the meretricious. One evidence of the agency’s new commitment to quality is Shakespeare in American Communities.”
Is “Buffy” The Best Musical Of All-Time?
A TV poll to name the top 20 musicals of all time includes – an episode of the American TV show Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. “An all-singing episode of the cult teen sci-fi drama will battle it out with favourites such as Chicago, Cabaret and The Sound Of Music. Buffy is the only TV show to make the top 20 in Channel 4’s The 100 Greatest Musicals.”
The Art Of 7-11 (And Other Businesses)
At a time when some American cities are cutting back on public art, “Menlo Park (Cal.) now requires that public art adorn new commercial buildings and major remodeling. Early next year, Menlo Park residents will see the fruits of this new law when art is installed at the 7-Eleven, a cafe, and a Chevron gas station. To some, it’s a smart way to further beautify this bedroom community without using city money. To others, making business owners spend 1 percent of a project’s cost on art is an expensive annoyance.”
Should Barnes Temporarily “Sell” Some Art To Survive?
Is survival of the Barnes Collection depandant on moving to downtown Philadelphia? Another “solution” has been proposed by art dealer James Maroney. “The plan, which Maroney considers a form of legal “tenancy in common,” appears relatively simple: A selected number of Barnes’ paintings, not currently on display, would be sold to interested art collectors for the duration of the buyers’ lifetimes, but returned to the Barnes Foundation upon their deaths. Maroney said that the novel plan would raise money while imposing less “damage to Dr. Barnes’ vision than certain other proposals … .”
WTC – Are Architects The Only Ones Who Understand?
Why did we end up with such bad designs for the WTC memorial, wonders Jerry Saltz. “How could something so important and sensitive, something so in need of an inspired touch and more time, go so wrong, so quickly? To answer this we need to look back to a month after September 11, when the air was still acrid with the smell of the smoldering wreckage, and the managerial mindset that brought us to this point surfaced. At a packed assembly of architects in Cooper Union’s Great Hall, professionals from all over the globe met and listened to dozens of their own speak about the tragedy in ways I hadn’t heard before or, thankfully, since. I love contemporary architecture, but I was appalled by the breathtaking opinion, expressed by many in attendance, that architects were the only ones who understood the site ‘in the deepest sense’.”