“Once upon a time, young conservatory musicians wanted to grow up to play as soloists with major orchestras. Today, many of them are forming bands instead. The ensembles of the new alt-classical world are poised somewhere within the Venn-diagram intersection of traditional classical music and contemporary culture.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Bookstore Finds Niche In Fiction For Inner-City Readers
“[A] Philadelphia bookstore that specializes in urban fiction is flourishing. Many of the titles are written by people who live in Philly.” And what, exactly, is “urban fiction”? “[G]ritty, explicit tales that involve drugs, crime, and violence set in urban neighborhoods like the one surrounding this bookstore.”
Lookingglass Theatre Company Taps New Artistic Director
“Andy White is taking over the artistic helm of the 23-year-old Lookingglass Theatre Company,” which “rotates its chief artistic role among its ensemble members.” White is a founding member and past artistic director of Lookingglass.
Standard & Poor’s: Cultural Groups Will Ride Out The Storm
“[C]redit analysts at Standard & Poor’s say they believe that the nearly three dozen nonprofit cultural institutions the company rates will ‘manage their businesses reasonably well during this recession,’ just as they have weathered past economic downturns.”
The Right Wing’s Absurd, Online Obama-Art Freak-Out
The list of art borrowed by the White House “had been generally known since spring, but that story had appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s culture pages, not in its hard-right Op-Ed section, so the right wing paid scant attention. Now the Free Republic website was busily declaring ‘Fraud,’ with delightful blogger Beelzebubba gloating, ‘Freeper breaks the story.'”
Brandeis Won’t Sell Rose Museum Works Given By Plaintiffs
In a hearing, a probate court judge also “denied a motion to dismiss the suit filed by museum benefactors Meryl Rose, Jonathan Lee and Lois Foster and set a June 2010 trial date.”
McSweeney’s Quarterly Morphs Into A Broadsheet
Coming out next month, “San Francisco Panorama will be a fat fellow, Sunday-edition-sized, and include news features, sports, short fiction, arts coverage, original graphics and pages and pages of original comics. … The editors promise that Panorama is a one-off and not Volume One, No. 1 of a new publication.”
And The 2009 National Book Award Finalists Are …
“Books about Henry Ford’s failed jungle experiment and a Faulkneresque novel about the lasting effects of war on memory are among the finalists for the 2009 National Book Award,” given by the National Book Foundation.
New Licensing Database Offers One-Stop Music Shopping
“Employing proprietary musicDNA software, the website offers a database of 10,000 pre-cleared tunes from 50 countries for instant licensing to film, TV ads and videogames. Company touts its services as an alternative to laborious song clearances and use of production music.”
Public Libraries Embrace Digital Books, And Patrons Like It
“Eager to attract digitally savvy patrons and capitalize on the growing popularity of electronic readers, public libraries across the country are expanding collections of books that reside on servers rather than shelves.”