She walks an interesting line between unconventionality and orthodoxy. Apart from Kaija Saariaho, whose music she played at her Kennedy Center recital in November, most of her favorite composers are white and male; she reacts vehemently to the idea of selecting a composer by any criteria other than her own visceral response (like, for instance, gender).
Author: Douglas McLennan
Saltz: Border Wall Prototypes Are Minimalist Art
Jerry Saltz: “As with much minimalism, these prototypes are hard-edged geometry and impervious materials brought into the American landscape of the West and arranged to impose order, inspire awe, and try to manage and align mystic political forces — and to make something that while instantly obsolete, like some useless Stalin Gulag project, meant to last forever. Trump has made something that evokes a real monument — one that may correctly be said to stand for everything he believes in. And I think mustn’t be forgotten.”
Prestigious Publisher Of Poetry Puts Poetry Publishing On “Hiatus”
“Poetry is changing, and the way people read is changing,” Alana Wilcox, editorial director of Coach House, told the Star. “We live in a Twitter world now — what does that mean for poetry?” Coach House still has six poetry titles planned for publication this year and another six for 2019.
Minnesota Orchestra To Be First Major American Orchestra To Go To South Africa
The orchestra will perform five concerts in the course of an 11-day tour (Aug. 8-19) with its music director, Osmo Vanksa, that also includes master classes and other community activities.
What If Diversity Doesn’t Make Us Better?
“There’s a growing body of evidence that even if diversity— the kind that results from immigration — once made America stronger, it may not be doing so anymore. Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist at Harvard, found that increased diversity corrodes civil society by eroding shared values, customs and institutions. People tend to “hunker down” and retreat from civil society, at least in the short and medium term.”
Claim: New UK Educational Policy Will Divide Society
At a time when creativity, teamwork, adaptability, critical thinking, communication and innovation have been recognised by educators, employers and government as fundamental building blocks for success in society and the workplace in the 21st century, England’s education policy is poised to permit only the brightest and wealthiest to access the creative subjects that will enable them to thrive in this brave new world.
Compulsory English Baccalaureate In UK Will Exclude 133,000 Students From The Arts
“The move towards a compulsory EBacc is likely to deepen the divide in the take-up of arts subjects between more affluent and higher achieving students and those facing more disadvantages. The Cambridge figures also reveal that drama, music, fine art and dance GCSEs are all taken up by fewer pupils from deprived areas and fewer lower attainers than others. Art and design is the only arts subject that bucks this trend.”
You’re A Writer? Really?
Writers are so often responding to questions that haven’t explicitly been asked, which perhaps is why our work is so difficult to measure and reward. The system in which we must live says to us, “What are you even for?”
If Criticism Is Just A Killjoy, Is It Worth Caring About?
“The delusion isn’t that criticism is important; it is important, the more so as discourse increasingly takes the form of people screaming at each other on the internet. The delusion is that critics can ever transcend the subjectivity that makes good criticism so interesting in the first place. And if a certain negativity, even a certain schadenfreude, attaches to that subjectivity, well, would you rather have a pretended objectivity that observes all the proprieties and never risks giving offense?”
Instagrammers Are Ruining The Experience Of Travel
Tourists have always taken photographs. Like graffiti, it’s a very human way of saying “I was here”. But in the pre-digital age, because of the expense of film as well as high shooting ratios, you were lucky if you ended up with one usable picture. Now “influencers” can take as many photographs as they need, photoshopping and filtering until they are able to post the perfect advertisement (for that indeed is what these images are). The centering of the self to such an extent is new too, and at the expense of knowledge, exploration and adventure.