Composer/conductor/educator/horn player Gunther Schuller is turning 75 and writing a memoir of his life. But he’s only at his 19th year and already he’s written 250 pages. “I spent about four pages just describing what was available on the radio in the way of classical music. I am self-taught in everything except the French horn, and the radio is one of the ways how I learned so much music. I had to do some research because I had forgotten how much there really was, and I was flabbergasted; it helps explain things about me and others like me. There was no excuse for anybody’s being culturally illiterate, as most Americans are today.” – Boston Globe
Author: Douglas McLennan
JAMES LEVINE, OPERA CONDUCTOR
James Levine is in his 30th year at the Metropolitan Opera. “The man is simply wedded to the job. He even speaks the way he conducts, in long, flawlessly constructed paragraphs. He pays attention to verbal detail, too, rather as he might with some orchestral point in rehearsal, pausing to find just the right word or phrase to express what he wants to communicate. And then there is also, unmistakably, a certain personal reserve, a distancing that is sometimes a feature of his performances, a sense of his own importance that is conveyed by a reluctance to talk in depth about anything except conducting.” – The Guardian
THE VALUE OF ART
“The tragedy is that American culture is increasingly Postmodernist, whether we identify ourselves as pragmatists or as persons of faith, as defenders of tradition or as progressives. To ask about the practical value of the fine arts is to trivialize them as thoroughly as the rabid academic deconstructionists who argue that standards and canons are simply tools of oppression and that all art is ultimately political. Both sides seek to subsume art to base political purposes. The Right wants to use art to ‘remoralize’ the society, and the Left wants to use it for social therapy, to encourage ‘oppressed’ groups.” – American Outlook 11/00
DEBATING CENSORSHIP
It was a dull US presidential election. But the one issue that seemed to get people stirred up was a discussion of violence in the entertainment media. Not such an easy issue to get one’s arms around, though, writes Norman Lebrecht. “For half a century the very word ‘censorship’ was so closely associated with totalitarian regimes that it can no longer be uttered except in inverted commas.” – Culturekiosque 11/17/00
ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE
David Shiner, the star of the troubled musical “Seussical,” apparently can’t sing, dance or act. In trying to fix the show before it opens for real on Broadway November 30, the producers decide to replace him with Andrea Martin. But the show’s creative team fights the move. – New York Post
BURSTING THE DOTCOM BUBBLE
The struggling Chapters, Canada’s largest bookseller, announces it will lay off 18 percent of its online workforce and that it hopes to become profitable by Christmas of 2001. – National Post (Canada)
BOOK TURF WAR
Sales of books over the internet in Korea have taken off. But “threatened by the booming e-sales performance and its increased recognition as a reliable retail source, some of the largest book stores are accusing their new rivals of destroying the existing status quo built around the mandatory fixed retail price system. Late last month, the Association of Comprehensive Bookstores (ACB), an industry group of 11 largest bookstores in Seoul, announced that they will not carry books published by companies that also have deals with online book retailers.” – Korea Herald
IS PRINT REALLY DEAD?
Last week’s E-book publishing conference in New York had everyone pondering the future of printed books. “Microsoft’s vice president in charge of electronic books and ‘tablet’ computing devices, reiterated the company’s prediction that the last print edition of The New York Times would appear in 2018, and you could feel the thought-wave slither through the room like an eel. 2018? Hey, I was planning to be around in 2018 – and with some time to look at the paper finally, too.” – The Atlantic
BUSY LIFE
Composer/conductor/educator/horn player Gunther Schuller is turning 75 and writing a memoir of his life. But he’s only at his 19th year and already he’s written 250 pages. “I spent about four pages just describing what was available on the radio in the way of classical music. I am self-taught in everything except the French horn, and the radio is one of the ways how I learned so much music. I had to do some research because I had forgotten how much there really was, and I was flabbergasted; it helps explain things about me and others like me. There was no excuse for anybody’s being culturally illiterate, as most Americans are today.” – Boston Globe
JAMES LEVINE, OPERA CONDUCTOR
James Levine is in his 30th year at the Metropolitan Opera. “The man is simply wedded to the job. He even speaks the way he conducts, in long, flawlessly constructed paragraphs. He pays attention to verbal detail, too, rather as he might with some orchestral point in rehearsal, pausing to find just the right word or phrase to express what he wants to communicate. And then there is also, unmistakably, a certain personal reserve, a distancing that is sometimes a feature of his performances, a sense of his own importance that is conveyed by a reluctance to talk in depth about anything except conducting.” – The Guardian