The five finalists were selected after a nationwide search for the UK’s most inspirational amateur orchestra.
Author: Douglas McLennan
UK Report: Number Of Children Participating In The Arts Falls
“Overall, 98% of five to 15-year-olds engaged with the arts in 2015/16, the report claims. However, numbers for specific genres including theatre, music and dance, have decreased.”
What Happens When We’ll Be Able To Edit Out Memories From Our Brains?
“Most of the time, we’re still better at subconsciously editing our own recollections than any new technology is. But with researchers working on techniques that can chisel, reconstruct and purge life’s memories, it becomes crucial to ask: do we need our real memories? What makes us believe that memory is so sacrosanct? And do memories really make us who we are?”
Have Recent Productions Of Mid-20th Century Theatre Classics Blurred History?
“A series of recent productions that came to New York with great acclaim have implicitly questioned whether we can still see these plays for what they are, or whether they need to be made new to avoid seeming stale. These productions took plays that are deeply rooted in a particular time and place—and that deal, urgently, with the issues of their day—and ripped them up forcefully to re-pot them in fresh soil.”
Jonathan Franzen On His Battle For Ideas
“I go to extraordinary lengths not to hear what people are saying about me. But that is itself a form of, well, it’s a form of self-protection because I know that all I have to do is hear one phrase—somebody will report to me all innocently, oh, somebody said such-and-such about me or about something I wrote, like I did this piece for the New Yorker a year-and-a-half ago where I made some, I thought, sensible points about the reality of climate change and the unavoidability of radical climate change, and people said, ‘Oh God, somebody called you a birdbrain’.”
Do The Arts Really Matter? (But Why?)
“Art opens us up to new ideas – so important always, but crucial now as the world seems to be losing its peripheral vision. We can all take refuge in our echo chambers, but the danger of cutting ourselves off from other ideas – or from ideas, period – is in vibrant display at the moment.”
David Brooks: How Artists Reframe The World
As usual, there were a ton of artists and musicians at the political conventions this year. And that raises some questions. How much should artists get involved in politics? How can artists best promote social change?
Is Everything Art? Is Everyone An Artist? Some Definitions Please…
“Yes there is music and yes there is painting, but is there such a thing as art? The arts? Do we need art to make sense as something other than a phantasm, or a useful fiction, to be able to advocate for it? Does that fabrication invalidate our efforts?”
Regional Theatre Pioneer Zelda Fichandler, 91
“Zelda Fichandler dedicated her early career to the establishment of America’s resident theater movement. When she co-founded Arena Stage, there were few non-commercial theaters in the United States and fewer theaters committed to providing a full range of world-class drama to its community with a resident company of professional actors.”
Massachusetts Legislature Reverses Governor’s 55 Percent Cut In Arts Budget
The fiscal year 2017 budget lawmakers sent to the governor’s desk in July included $14 million for arts, humanities and sciences programs through the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. But Baker vetoed $7.7 million, bringing the total figure down to $6.5 million, a 55 percent cut the agency called “devastating.”