Author: Douglas McLennan

John Luther Adams – Composer Of Places

“What sets Mr. Adams’s seething, shimmering, preternaturally patient sound forces apart is their absence of a definable human anchor. The pieces that make up the “Become” trilogy are neither stories about nature nor pictures of it. Rather, as Mr. Adams writes in an essay accompanying the excellent recordings, ‘this is music that aspires to the condition of place’.” – The New York Times

Broadway’s Spiderman Disaster, Ten Years Later

“You had Spider-Man dangling seven feet above the first two rows. It was the worst possible position because no one could reach him. One of the crew members fetched a stick to prod him with, but that didn’t help. It was like a live Spider-Man piñata. But we knew by the end of the night, well, that’s the worst it’s ever going to be. We’ll keep improving it and improving it, and it’s going to be duck soup by the time we open in January.” – BBC

Big Art Telling Big Stories

“The resurgence over the past two decades of artists working in the grand manner suggests that the energies inherent to this style didn’t disappear but were merely redirected: into cinema like that of Cecil B. DeMille; into cycles of narrative painting such as the African American history paintings of Jacob Lawrence; and even into political spectacle, lingering on in the rallies of President Trump. And now they are coalescing again into a coherent artistic form, with multiple offshoots and variations, including the works of Titus Kaphar and Kehinde Wiley.” – Washington Post

A Better Way To Give Concerts?

Stephen Hough: “One issue I wrote about that seems to have struck a chord with readers was the idea of removing the interval and having shorter concerts, lasting around 60-80 minutes, perhaps at different starting times, and even repeating them on the same night. Since the pandemic struck this shrunken format has quickly become the norm, a neat solution to comply with new health and safety requirements … and I’ve loved it.” – The Guardian

Why We Need To Rethink The Idea Of Public Statues

Ideas about statues change as society changes. As this happens, different groups contest the meanings behind the sculptures, leading to disagreement about whether they should be kept or taken down. But while ideologies can change, causing this iconoclash, communities retain their collective memories about something, whether they are good or bad. – The Conversation

What Will The Biden Administration’s Arts Policy Look Like?

“The big idea was to create a White House office on arts, culture and the creative industries,” says Megan Beyer, the co-chair of the campaign’s Arts Policy Committee and a former executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities under Obama. She compares this to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which was established by Congress in 1976 with a broad mandate to advise the president on domestic and international policy that could be applied across federal agencies. – The Art Newspaper