The band directors at Spring Lake, outside of St. Paul, Minnesota, have pledged to include at least one piece by a female composer and one by a composer of color in each concert, for each of the school’s bands. “We made a commitment this year to only buy music from composers of color,” says Brian Lukkasson, one of the directors. He says it’s been hard, but not because those composers aren’t writing for band. They are.
Author: Douglas McLennan
How The Oscars’ Best Picture Voting Is Biased Towards Rewarding Movies Like “La La Land”
“When the Academy expanded the best picture category to more than five nominees for the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010, it also made a fascinating tweak to how the votes are counted. It used to be a first-past-the-post system, where all you needed was more votes than everyone else to win. This meant that movies used to be able to win without majority appeal, as all you needed to do was persuade a dedicated minority to pick your movie. But now, instead of picking their choice for best picture, voters rank them. Then they’re counted with instant runoff voting,1 and the impact this has is it’ll award films with broad majority appeal over ones that have strong plurality appeal.”
The Mall Of America Is Looking For A Writer-In-Residence
Following in the footsteps of unlikely writer-in-residence stunts at places like the Ace Hotel, London’s Heathrow Airport, and aboard Amtrak, the Mall of America will give one writer the chance to spend a short residency “deeply immersed in the Mall atmosphere while writing on-the-fly impressions in their own words” in celebration of the mall’s 25th birthday this year.
What The California Symphony Has Discovered About Attracting Millennials
“What the California Symphony discovered, in short, was that “almost every single piece of negative feedback was about something other than the performance.” Another important discovery was that it’s single-ticket buyers, not veteran subscribers, who are most likely to use the orchestra’s website.”
Turns Out Andy Warhol’s Death Wasn’t So Simple
“For at least a month before his death, Warhol had been ill, but had done his best to keep up his usual exhausting pace. His terror of hospitals had prevented him from getting any serious treatment. Even once Warhol had finally ended up in the office of Bjorn Thorbjarnarson, a leading surgeon — he was known for treating the Shah of Iran — Warhol had begged for some kind of stay-at-home treatment. “I will make you a rich man if you don’t operate on me,” the artist had said, Dr. Thorbjarnarson recalled during my visit to his New Jersey home in 2014. (He is now 95 and lives in Florida.)”
Conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, 93
Skrowaczewski suffered a stroke in November and again in February. A memorial service will be held March 28 at Orchestra Hall. “It is hard to express all that Maestro Skrowaczewski has meant to the Minnesota Orchestra,” the orchestra said in a statement Tuesday afternoon. “In total, his partnership with the Minnesota Orchestra spanned 56 years, and we are deeply grateful for more than a half-century of music-making with him.”
As Machines Learn To Think, Humans Will Be Redundant
“Dataism is a new ethical system that says, yes, humans were special and important because up until now they were the most sophisticated data processing system in the universe, but this is no longer the case. The tipping point is when you have an external algorithm that understands you—your feelings, emotions, choices, desires—better than you understand them yourself. That’s the point when there is the switch from amplifying humans to making them redundant.”
Study: We More Readily Believe Things Getting Worse Than Things Getting Better
“People are quicker to diagnose change for the worse than change for the better. We established this basic effect across many methods, measures, and contexts … People demand less evidence to diagnose lasting decline than lasting improvement.”
How They Made That Freeway Dance Scene In La La Land
Susan Stamberg: “The scene was filmed with 30 professional dancers and more than 100 extras on a 104-degree day. They first rehearsed in a parking lot, and later the actual freeway at 3:00 o’clock in the morning. On paper, Moore and director Damien Chazelle mapped out where the cameras would go. That morphed into 3D on a model ramp with toy cars. Then it was show time, which meant shutting down the freeway ramp for two days of shooting. All in all, it took 47 takes — for a three-minute and 48-second dance number that occurs entirely before the movie title looms up on screen.”
Where’s Hillary? On Broadway, Of Course…
“Mrs. Clinton has been attending Broadway shows for years, often when she has had a personal connection to an artist, a producer, or to a show’s subject matter.”