What’s new, though, is not the level of output. It’s the commitment to Irish talent. As INO’s artistic director Fergus Sheil explained, the company “wants to give pride of place to Irish singers and celebrate their work at home in Ireland the way it is celebrated in leading opera houses around the world. We want to bring our creative talent to venues large and small, to communities around the country, and create thrilling experiences that will attract new audiences to our uniquely multi-faceted artform.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Study: Hormones Influence The Kind Of Music We Like
“A first-of-its-kind study from Japan reports men with higher testosterone levels are less likely to enjoy sophisticated music, such as classical, jazz, and avant-garde. Its findings raise the intriguing possibility that musical taste may be significantly influenced by our hormones.”
Coming To Terms With Degas
A century after his death, we are just about coming to terms with Degas’s achievement, with his position as the modern artist. His work was entirely about contemporary life – even more so than Manet’s. In his entire career he only ever showed one painting with a historical or biblical theme, the early Scene of War in the Middle Ages. Edmond de Goncourt recognised in 1874 that ‘among all the artists I have met so far, he is the one who has best been able, in representing modern life, to catch the spirit of that life.’
You’re In The Theatre? Put Down The Damn Social Media!
“It’s hard to control a cough or a cranky kid’s wails. Tough to tame the artistic ambitions of bats or squirrels. And sometimes, I guess the rain gods want in on the festivities too. But most philosophers and legal scholars would agree that even the most strung-out phone addicts possess free will. Force majeure has nothing to do with Facebook.”
The Interviewer’s Trick: How Terry Gross Gets People To Open Up
What I’m really trying to do is find the person’s comfort zone. Some people are great on craft — the process of writing, the process of making the film. Some people are great on anecdote. Some people are great on biography, their personal story. So I’ll just keep looking for that spot.
What The “All The Money In The World” Salary Gap Says About Changes In Hollywood
“It’s easy to criticize Hollywood’s current moment of reckoning for coming off as superficial. You can wear black to a couple award ceremonies and say the right lines in interviews, but does it really mean you’re working to effect systemic change behind the scenes? The All the Money in the World situation served as a reminder of how, for actors, preserving their public image is often more important than the money they stand to make.”
Virtual Reality Comes To Art (But Who Owns – Controls – What?)
Legal questions about ownership of virtual public spaces were thrown into sharp relief in October when Snapchat partnered with Koons to allow users to project his balloon sculptures in specific sites around the world using augmented reality (AR). In protest against an “augmented reality corporate invasion”, the artist Sebastian Errazuriz “graffiti-bombed” one of the works and placed it in the same geotagged location in Central Park as the Snapchat version.
Music Isn’t Just A Thing We Process With Our Brains
“When I’m pinned to the back of my seat by the mind-warping rhythms of a drummer, or the harmonic ingenuity of an improvising guitarist, I often have the feeling that my body ‘gets’ things in a way my brain can’t. I find myself physically responding to nuances in the musical texture that have been and gone before I have time to formulate thoughts about them. I can speculate to some extent about what I’ve heard after the fact – that snare hit was perhaps a shade early; that cadence resolved just a fraction too late – but in the moment, I can’t quite articulate what it is that I’m reacting to. My grasp on what I’m hearing doesn’t seem cognitive. It seems visceral.”
“Punk” Was Counterculture. It Contained Seeds Of Its Own Distruction
Since punk began as a rebellion against boredom, the dead space of commercial music production and the empty hedonism born of the hippie era’s “great sexual revolution”, it was only a matter of time until it, too, would become corrupted. A yearning for its own prelapsarian state was built into punk’s ethos.
A Golden Age For Free Speech? Yes, But Wow…
“In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech. And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by alt-right trolls or a swarm of Russian bots? Was it maybe even generated with the help of artificial intelligence? (Yes, there are systems that can create increasingly convincing fake videos.)”