Voices are being heard, of course. Songwriters would be hard-pressed to resist the actions and rhetoric of the Trump presidency. But what rabble is being roused? Are the modern protest singers preaching to choirs? A nation is divided, and many of the protest songs are not of the unifying “this land is your land” kind.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Increasingly, Creative People Are Turning To Analog Over Digital
“The virtues of digital turn out to be the vices as well. Having all the music on earth at your instant disposal turns out to be almost the same as having none; Spotify’s playlists show people picking the same tunes over and over. Digital life’s too self-absorbed—either we evolve quickly away from the social primates we have always been or else we will quietly suffer from the solipsism inherent in staring at ourselves reflected in a screen. It’s too jumpy; concentration, from which all that is worthwhile emerges, is the great loss.”
Some Lessons We Learned Bringing New Work To Small Theatres
Small venues are often encouraged to ‘buddy up’ with larger venues to develop their skills, expertise and knowledge. This can lead to an erosion of confidence, implying that small venues are somehow inferior and need help or advice. Small venues operate differently from larger ones, in that they manage their resources extremely well and develop a close understanding of and relationships with their audiences in ways that larger-scale organisations sometimes find difficult to achieve.
For First Time In A Decade, UK Museum Attendance Falls
“The 2.8% decline is almost all attributable to a fall in visitors from overseas, despite an increase in tourists visiting the UK. Overseas visitors now account for 47% of all visitors to the sponsored museums, while a like-for-like comparison shows they accounted for 49% the previous year. Visits by people from the UK continue to show marginal growth, roughly mirroring population trends.”
What It’s Like To Join The Chicago Symphony
Nathan Cole: As I put in my first set of numbers, my stand partner made a sound, a kind of groan cut short. I looked over, the point of my pencil still on the page. “Did you want my markings on the bottom instead?” “We don’t mark fingerings here,” he said.” “Here, you mean at this spot?” “I mean in this orchestra.” His face softened, and he added, “Sorry, you’re probably used to seeing them, right?” I was indeed used to seeing fingerings as a matter of course. My mind was fairly blown. “How do you play all this music then?” My stand partner paused, as if he’d never considered the question before. “Practice?” he suggested. When you ask, be ready for the answer.
Kill The National Endowment For The Arts? Here’s What That Would Mean
“What would the elimination of the NEA mean for the arts in the US? In terms of actual direct support, very little. Many foundations, other funding bodies, and individuals dole out more for the arts each year than the arts endowment: for example, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs 2016 budget was $165 million, with additional funds dedicated for capital projects; philanthropist David Geffen’s $100 million gift to New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2016 outstripped the NEA’s direct granting budget that year. But the NEA has impact far exceeding its direct grants.”
The Pompidou At 40: Here’s The Impact It’s Had
Rem Koolhaus: “The Centre Pompidou was maybe the last moment that a museum competition won with that degree of abstraction, radicality and that degree of newness. It was more a hypothesis than a project and I think museum competitions since then have moved as far as possible away from that. The very model of a museum that the Pompidou offered has been avoided as much as possible by subsequent museum competitions, juries, clients and realisations.”
The Great American Play? And The Audience Survey Says…
“The experiment brings to mind Komar and Melamid’s “Most Wanted” project in the 1990s, in which that Russian duo created paintings based on polls of what people from various countries like to see in art. Here, the cast, with help from the musician Liljie, go through vignettes that illustrate some of the survey’s results.”
How Do We Make Jazz More Viable? Harvard Business School Takes Up The Case
“The dilemma here is how do you get young people at any age to start being interested in jazz? There is some research that says that people imprint on music in their romantic years, the time that they’re dating. That would be high school through college, more or less. Jazz is losing generations of young people because they’re not exposed to it during that time. Jazz is no longer the music of rebellion, hip hop is. This is not something that’s easily solved.”
The Corporatization And Consolidation Of New York’s Music Scene
“But in the increasingly consolidated concert business, the reality is that corporate dollars are taking over, even in the clubs that for decades seemed to embody rock music’s anti-establishment ethos.”