Frankly, I’ve never understood why there has—until recently—been such a demarcation between genres in music. As far back as I can remember, I’ve been enormously responsive to music, independent of genre. I know I’m not alone in this, especially in today’s eclectic musical environment, but for many people, classical music’s vaunted tradition excluded an appreciation of popular or folkloric forms—and heaven forfend that any classical composer should write something as shallow as film music!
Author: Douglas McLennan
More Oregon Bach Festival Stumbles: Hires, Then Removes Another Conductor
The Oregon Bach Festival, which last year fired its artistic director amid accusations of racism and sex discrimination, has hired a conductor for this summer’s festival who was reportedly dismissed from a guest conducting job with the Oberlin Baroque Orchestra in 2015 after complaints he used racial slurs at a rehearsal. Just two days later, his name was removed from the festival’s website.
The Berkshire Museum Problem
Nina Simon: Why wouldn’t they make the rational choice to get as much money as possible for their sins? Because their choice has consequences beyond their own self-interest. It exposes the fragility of the rule of deaccessioning, the thin line between “treasured public asset” and “hard cold cash.” The rule is built on a sleight of hand, a conceit that says that museums won’t acknowledge the market value of objects — until they will. As cultural theorist Diane Ragsdale put it, “When communities become markets, citizens become consumers, and culture becomes an exploitable product.”
Playwright’s Estate Accuses “Shape Of Water” Studio Of Stealing
David Zindel, son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Paul Zindel, told the Guardian “he believes his father’s work Let Me Hear You Whisper, a play about a female janitor in a research laboratory who bonds with a captive dolphin and tries to rescue the creature, is a source of inspiration for The Shape of Water. Del Toro’s film was nominated on Tuesday for 13 Oscars, including best picture, best director and best original screenplay.”
Why Returning Indigenous Artifacts Is More Difficult Than An Agreement
“The University of Toronto embarked on a fourteen-year process of repatriating the bones of more than 1,700 individuals in its possession. But until recently, such agreements tended to be the exception, not the norm. In the meantime, the legal status of artifacts—which can serve as evidence in land claims negotiation—remains a long-standing sore point.”
America’s Decline Is Accelerating (Are People Noticing?)
American collapse is much more severe than we suppose it is. We are underestimating its magnitude, not overestimating it. American intellectuals, media, and thought doesn’t put any of its problems in global or historical perspective — but when they are seen that way, America’s problems are revealed to be not just the everyday nuisances of a declining nation, but something more like a body suddenly attacked by unimagined diseases.
Why Language Struggles To Express Science
“In the twentieth century, some physicists, notably Robert Oppenheimer, worried that physics had reached a point of extreme alienation from popular language, and even from the language of other scientific disciplines. Intelligibility to non-physicists was becoming increasingly difficult, in some cases even impossible. Many physicists and science writers today seem more optimistic. While recognizing the distance between physics and ordinary language, they tend to believe that our language can be transformed to make the truths of physics available to a wide public audience.”
The Israel Philharmonic’s Biggest Change In Decades
“Founded by Hitler refugees in the 1930s and patronised by the café-dwellers of Tel Aviv, the orchestra has seen its audience grow old and its output stagnate. An influx of Russian musicians and concertgoers in the 1990s gave a brief blip of renewal but the IPO was set on a road to irrelevance. Young Israelis go to clubs, not concerts. Part of the problem has been the IPO’s resistance to change.”
Margaret Atwood On Why It Was A Bad Time For Ursula Le Guin To Leave
As an anarchist, she would have wanted a self-governing society, with gender and racial equality. She would have wanted respect for life-forms other than human. She would have wanted a child-friendly society, as opposed to one that imposes childbirth but does not care about the mothers or the actual children. Or so I surmise from her writing. But now Ursula K. Le Guin has died.
The Antidote To Fake News Is…?
We should be clear that when we lament the ‘fake news’ take over we are talking about media illiteracy, not actual fake news. Fake news was originally reported in our current public discourse to describe actual false information knowingly posted by bloggers in Macedonia who were gaming the system to get more clicks to make money from ads on their websites, as reported by Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander in Buzzfeed. Facts may be framed within a news story in interpretations that are biased. Fake news has come to be used to dismiss news that has a bias with which we disagree thanks to Trump’s co-opting of the term.