“The reality is that humans adapt. It’s the tools that become irrelevant. It’s the heart that makes the music. I think people will find a way to embrace it. It’s inevitable.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Why A Woman Will Play Othello In This New Production
“There have been no major productions with female Othellos in recent times, but they were not unknown in the 19th Century. At the Queen’s Theatre in London in 1833, a Mrs Selby “enacted the part of the valiant Moor to the satisfaction of a numerous audience”, according to the London Courier and Evening Gazette.”
Why It’s Difficult To Assess Elliott Carter’s Lasting Impact
“The case of Elliott Carter stands apart from the usual pattern of posthumous appraisals, not least because Carter lived to within a few weeks of his 104th birthday, and kept composing almost to the end. He may be the only composer in the history of Western music to have done so. Rather than leaving us just a handful of unusual works that slot neatly into the dotage thought inevitable before the Romantics or the transcendence Adorno heard in late Beethoven, Carter wrote dozens of pieces in a wide variety of genres. If Aaron Copland’s experience of composing (or rather not composing) in old age was like the turning off of a faucet, Elliott Carter’s was like whitewater rafting.”
How Should Hollywood Stop Abusers And The Culture Of Abuse?
Judd Apatow: “How are we going to decide who we shouldn’t work with? But in the most extreme cases, it seems pretty clear. We shouldn’t be making TV shows with Bill Cosby. We shouldn’t be putting on new shows with Bill O’Reilly. We shouldn’t be starring in movies produced by Harvey Weinstein. There are cases which are also complicated, and everybody has their own set of ethics about it, and those debates will continue. But there are very clear cases where people are getting hurt, and their lives are being ruined by people.”
Why Did Crime Decrease In America’s Cities? The Rise Of Nonprofits, Arts, Research…
“Nonprofits were more likely to form in the communities with the gravest problems. But they also sprang up for reasons that had little to do with local crime trends, such as an expansion in philanthropic funding. A spike in nonprofits addressing subjects like the arts and medical research occurred in this same era. Comparing the growth of other kinds of nonprofits, the researchers believe they were able to identify the causal effect of these community groups: Every 10 additional organizations in a city with 100,000 residents, they estimate, led to a 9 percent drop in the murder rate and a 6 percent drop in violent crime.”
Are We Supporting Awful People If We Watch Their Movies?
“Either everything’s dirty or everything’s clean. Caravaggio was a murderer but his paintings are sublime. David Bowie slept with underage girls. Ezra Pound and TS Eliot were both antisemites. Does admiring their poems make us condoners of hate-speech? Or do we cut this Gordian knot and view the work in isolation?”
Survey: Half Of Workers In Book Trades Report Being Sexually Harassed
“Many of those surveyed reported incidents where younger, more junior colleagues were harassed by men in more senior roles. Sixty-six percent of publicists, who often work closely with authors outside the office while on promotional tours, reported harassment, with 61% of booksellers reporting abusive behaviour from customers, colleagues or visiting authors.”
A Successful Amateur Theatre? It’s All About Motivating The Volunteers
“In a recent survey we carried out, 74% of people who said they were interested in volunteering would do it to have fun; 56% to spend time with like-minded people; 52% to give back to their community; and 48% to feel useful. Volunteers clearly want more out of their experience than just freebies. In fact, for an organisation like LTO, free tickets would probably lead to a financial crisis if we gave them away to all our volunteers.”
That Time John Philip Sousa Raged Against The Scourge Of Mechanical Music (Long Before Computers. Or Recordings)
His 1906 essay warns that mechanical music is “sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels” and was becoming a “substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul.” Sousa was referring in this essay to recorded music, but also to mechanical instruments that played themselves–such as the player piano.
Bringing The Audience Inside The Orchestra
Adding dozens of chairs, the orchestra lets ticket-holders sit among the musicians, following underneath Bernard’s baton instead of staring at his back. “There’s a lot of talk about how classical music is stuffy and there are a lot of rules. And that’s kind of a deterrent to enjoying classical music. The question is – how do you turn classical music performance into more of an experience?”