Author: Matthew Westphal

How Conductor Alan Pierson Brought ‘Ten Thousand Birds’ Indoors

Back in 2014, Alarm Will Sound — the contemporary music ensemble Person founded at Eastman and has been leading ever since — played the world premiere of John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds (which is basically a big catalogue of birdsong transcriptions in no prescribed order) as a sort of outdoor sound installation. This year, as the coronavirus confined Pierson and his colleagues in their homes, he got the idea to reconceive the piece as Ten Thousand Screens, an online video in which the musicians each played from their own homes. Author Garth Greenwell, a friend of Pierson’s going back to college days, talks with him about why and how he did it. – The Paris Review

How A 15-Year-Old Cartoon Series Became One Of The Most-Watched Shows In America

“Avatar: The Last Airbender … first ran from 2005 to 2008 on Nickelodeon, and swiftly made a name for itself as a politically resonant, emotionally sophisticated work — one with a sprawling but meticulously plotted mythos that destined the show for cult-classic status. Last summer, after Game of Thrones flubbed its finale, fans and critics held up Avatar as a counterexample: a fantasy series that knew what it wanted to be from the beginning.” – The New Yorker

For The Second Time In Two Years, Fire Shatters A Brazilian Museum

“In September 2018, a devastating fire ravaged Brazil’s National Museum [in Rio de Janeiro]. Now, yet another Brazilian cultural institution — the Federal University of Minas Gerais’ Natural History Museum and Botanical Garden (MHNJB) in Belo Horizonte — has fallen victim to an inferno.” This is, in fact, the sixth museum fire in the country in the past decade. – Smithsonian Magazine

Two Radical Publishers Celebrate 50 Years

“Our sales go up with political and economic turmoil and down during times of prosperity,” says Jake Stevens of Verso. “It’s really amazing to see all the different types of books that we experimented with as a publishing company, and the varied directions our publishing vision has traveled,” says Jisu Kim of Feminist Press, “but also how much we still stick to our foundational editorial pillars.” – Publishers Weekly

America’s Largest Arts Funder Is Pivoting To Social Justice Causes. Its President Explains Why

Elizabeth Alexander of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: “We were going to do it anyway, [but in] this moment … it seems very clear … that we all need to be thinking very sharply about how the work that we do contributes to a more just society.” But that doesn’t mean Mellon will stop funding the arts: “The way that we’re interpreting social justice is very broad. It’s very important to Mellon in all of our grant-making to say, ‘Who haven’t we reached? Who haven’t we supported?” – Artnet

Earl Cameron, Pathbreaking Black Actor In British Cinema, Dead At 102

A native of Bermuda who settled in the UK after World War II, he performed — “against the odds,” he once said — to perform in 40 feature films as well as numerous TV movies and series. “His big screen roles ranged from James Bond’s secret service minder Pinder in Thunderball (1965) to the dictatorial president in Sydney Pollack’s thriller The Interpreter (2005).” – The Guardian