“[His] epochal play As Is was in the vanguard of Broadway’s coming to grips with the AIDS epidemic and [he] wrote the groundbreaking libretto for John Corigliano’s opera The Ghosts of Versailles.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.01.17
“Everybody dance now!”
Last night I was at a birthday party for a kid in Rafa’s class … Three [moms] were on their phones, looking at the summer concert schedule at Wolf Trap. Big performing arts center in the DC area, for anyone who doesn’t know it. These were educated, professional women, age around 40, I’d guess. And they were going wild over this show: … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2017-05-01
Whatever happened to International Jazz Day?
April 30 — yesterday — was celebrated as the sixth annual International Jazz Day with a global webcast from Havana, hosted by Will Smith, headlined by pianist Herbie Hancock and including a couple of dozen top notch musicians from six countries. Did you know? … read more
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2017-05-01
Monday Recommendation: Charlie Haden Speaks
Woodard and Haden: Conversations With Charlie Haden (Silman-James)
Interviews transcribed from tape recordings and transformed into print are often boring substitutes for writing. With judicious editing, however, the technique can be illuminating. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-05-01
Philadelphia Orchestra’s Mongolia Tour Is – Well, Not Cancelled, Exactly … (Yet)
The country has been undergoing a financial crisis for most of the past year and had to get a $5.5 billion IMF bailout in February. So the Mongolian government can no longer afford its portion of the expense of a visit by the full Philadelphia Orchestra (which would have been the first U.S. orchestra ever to perform there). A reduced contingent of musicians might travel to Mongolia, though even that isn’t certain. David Patrick Stearns has details.
How Wikipedia Found Its Way Toward A Definition Of Happiness: 6,000 Edits By 3,000 Users
“In this way, Wikipedia understands something that most philosophers after Socrates didn’t – definitions are not static, and cannot be perfected and finalized. They must be constantly challenged, updated, reverted, and discussed. Wikipedia is like a Socratic dialogue on a massive scale.” Nikhil Sonnad did a deep dive into the 14 years of edits (some of them pretty ugly) that led to the impressive entry the site has now.
The Human Brain Is A Sort Of Time Machine
Neuroscientist Dean Buonomano argues our brains are “constantly tracking the passage of time, whether it’s circadian rhythms that tell us when to go to sleep, or microsecond calculations that allow us to the hear the difference between ‘They gave her cat-food’ and ‘They gave her cat food.’ In an interview with Science of Us, Buonomano spoke about planning for the future as a basic human activity, the limits of be-here-now mindfulness, and the inherent incompatibility between physicists’ and neuroscientists’ understanding of the nature of time.’
What It Was Like Being A Black, Left-Wing Pundit Facing Bill O’Reilly On Fox News
Rich Benjamin: “Despite my disgust with the format and with Fox [News] in general, I felt that if I could get a sizable slice of O’Reilly’s viewership to think fairly, for a few moments, about undocumented immigrants, corporate wage theft, or police brutality, my time would be well spent. … I could gauge the quality of my performance on The O’Reilly Factor by the response from viewers. When I received no response, I knew my efforts had fallen flat. In other instances, just minutes after wrapping up an appearance, my inbox would be flooded with choice feedback from his fans.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between The World And Me’ To Be Made Into Theater Piece
“Mr. Coates’s fiery work – which made him the National Book Award winner and a Pulitzer Prize finalist [and, arguably, earned him a MacArthur ‘genius award’] – will be adapted into a multimedia performance, with excerpted monologues, video projections, and a score by the jazz musician Jason Moran. Portions of Mr. Coates’s letters to his son would be read aloud, while narratives of his experiences at Howard University and in New York City could be performed by actors.”
Ah, Where Are The Avant-Garde Art Movements Of Yesteryear? (A Trip Down Memory Lane)
With Jerry Saltz just having ruminated on “The Avant-Garde That Lost By Winning,” what about the ones that simply lost? Alex Greenberger and Andrew Russeth offer “an unabashedly opinionated deep dive into the terms, artists, and movements that may once have seemed destined for the canon but that now chart as footnotes, as well as many that have returned to the forefront.”
How Playwrights Have Been Putting A Spotlight On Gun Violence In America
“Cite the numbers, and the problem instantly becomes too vast to grasp: More than 33,000 people killed and upward of 78,000 wounded by firearms each year in the United States … This is where the stealthy power of theater has an advantage, at least theoretically. … News reports arrive after the fact, but theater can meddle with time and dimension, showing us the before, the during, the yet to come.” Laura Collins-Hughes surveys the plays that have been exploring the issue.
‘A Modestly Shattering Discovery’ – Alex Ross On The Lost Stravinsky Score That Surfaced Last Year
“Like thousands of other Stravinsky fans, I listened to a live stream of the première, my anticipation heightened by descriptions that the composer had supplied later in life. (He called it ‘the best of my works before The Firebird, and the most advanced in chromatic harmony.’) Like many others, I felt mild disappointment. Funeral Song contains no thrilling premonitions of the Stravinsky to come. … Yet, after spending more time with the piece … I felt a growing fascination. The music has a veiled power, and hints at otherwise hidden sources of inspiration. A spectre haunts the scene: the spectre of Wagner.” (includes sound clip)