“For me it is a real problem when we don’t reflect the society we live in. It’s not good for books, or culture, or commercially. We are going to become irrelevant. We know we have a real issue, and we have been slow. We have to address it.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Has El Sistema’s Flagship Orchestra Stumbled?
“The decision to turn the Simón Bolívar orchestra pro, in a sense, may have been a miscalculation. For one thing, it raises expectations of excellence. When it was a student ensemble, it was easy to simply root for these inspired young musicians. But the music-making during these three recent programs, though exciting, was uneven, certainly not at the level the orchestra’s current status would call for.”
Broadway Producer Chosen To Direct Kennedy Center’s Theatre Program
Finn, 46, who will report to Robert van Leer, the center’s senior vice president for artistic planning, said in an interview that part of what made the job so attractive was the commitments Rutter and van Leer made to commissioning more theater pieces and in the center producing more original projects.
How Computers Are Learning How To Listen and Write Music
“In July, a team of scientists from Queen Mary University of London reported they had trained a neural network to determine musical genres with 75% accuracy by feeding it with 6,600 songs in three genres: ballad, dance, and hip-hop. Then they tore apart the layers of the computer’s neural network in order to see what the network learned at each layer when the scientists exposed it to songs from Bach and Eminem.”
Lyric Analysis: Country Music Is Getting More Sexist
Researchers found that songs from the first half of this decade were “more likely to refer to a woman’s appearance, to women in tight or revealing clothing, to women as objects, and to women via slang than songs in one or both prior decades.”
An Italian Opera House That’s Thriving (So What’s The Secret?)
“The fact that the Teatro Regio is thriving raises the question: if it can reverse its fortunes despite its somewhat lesser status, what’s to stop other Italian opera houses from doing the same? If nothing else, their name power would attract plenty of sponsors.”
Researchers Discover That Music And Dance Change Our Brains In Markedly Different Ways
“The pathways that were most affected were bundles of fibers that link the sensory and motor regions of the brain and the fibers of the corpus callosum that run between the hemispheres. In the dancers, these sets of connections were broader (more diffuse); in musicians, these same connections were stronger, but less diffuse, and showed more coherent fiber bundles.”
Sotheby’s Says Old Master It Sold Five Years Ago For $10 Million Was A Fake
“Sotheby’s earlier this year became aware of a possible authenticity issue with a 17th century Dutch painting attributed to Frans Hals and informed the purchaser, the auction house said in a statement Thursday. It then hired an outside firm to conduct a technical and forensic analysis of the work, which was peer reviewed. Those efforts showed the painting couldn’t have been created in that period because modern materials were used.”
Scottish Survey: All Time High In Engagement With Culture
Overall, the report says 95 percent consume culture. “The figures cover both attendance at cultural events, the most popular of which is watching a film in the cinema, and cultural participation, the most popular of which is reading for pleasure. When trips to the cinema are excluded, the proportion of the population who attended a cultural event in 2015 stands at 75%. This figure has risen from 70% in 2012. When reading for pleasure is excluded, 52% participated in a cultural activity in 2015, up from 48% in 2012.”
What The Goodman Theatre Is Finding Out With Its Audience Engagement Experiments
Engagement isn’t just a simple matter of making more information available. It’s a mindset. “What if a person pays $50 for a show they end up hating? Or what if a person is organizing a night out with friends, or a date, or a family gathering—and everyone has a poor experience? Our goal is to show them that a new play is exciting because it’s untested, not in spite of its lack of production history. Who wouldn’t want to be part of something new? Letting the audience learn more about process allows them to share in our excitement.”