“Composers across the country have been outraged over a competition launched by the Canadian House of Commons in honour of [the confederation’s sesquicentennial].” The main issue is award money so stingy that even former prime minister Stephen Harper might be embarrassed.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Surprise: New V&A Director Is A Member Of Parliament
Tristram Hunt, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent, a Midlands city that’s been dubbed “the Brexit capital” (66% ‘leave’ vote), is leaving politics to take over the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Major Arts Center In Manchester Gets Go-Ahead
“Manchester’s proposed £110m arts centre, the Factory, has moved a step closer to being built after city councillors gave planning permission for the Rem Koolhaas-designed building.” The project is part of a larger plan to make Manchester and northern England “a genuine cultural counterbalance to London.”
St. Mark’s In Venice Is Scaffold-Free For First Time In 23 Years
Unfortunately, this may last only a few months.
How The New York Phil’s Top Timpanist Got Where He Is
Markus Rhoten grew up in Germany with American parents who were professional musicians themselves. (He didn’t take up his father’s instrument, the trumpet, because “I was worried it would make me a bad kisser.”)
Barnes Foundation Launches Three New Contemporary Concert Series
The legendary art collection in Philadelphia has an in-house curation team planning the events, “aiming to elucidate the paintings and sculptures while exploring the concepts behind them.” For one of the series, the museum is even assembling its own ensemble “for intensive two-weeks-or-more workshops and performances [exploring] complex modern works.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.12.17
Good News for the New Year: Reinstallation of the Getty Villa
If you’re down in the dumps about Trump, or just coping with some post-holiday blues, I’m making an effort this month to perk you up with something atypical of the hypercritical CultureGrrl — good news. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-01-12
Frankenwords: How Mary Shelley’s Novel Gave Us A Prefix We Can’t Stop Using
Katy Waldman: “The prefix we use to talk about human efforts to interfere with nature flips between ‘funny’ and ‘scary’ with ease. Like Shelley’s monster himself, an ungainly patchwork of salvaged parts, it can seem goofy until it doesn’t – until it taps into an abiding anxiety that technology raises in us, a fear of overstepping.”
Anonymous Woman Playwright Writes Solo Show About Her Sex Life, And Male Comedians Perform It Sight Unseen
Says the unknown author of Manwatching, “When the idea of it being [performed by] an unprepared man came up, I liked that power dynamic and the act of trust it would require from a man. … An anonymous female voice makes the message so much stronger, and means that any woman who wants to take ownership of it can.” (Her favorite bit of speculation about her identity: “Someone guessed that David Hare wrote it … It’s very funny how quick we are to assume that men wrote everything.”)
Buddy Greco, ‘The Ultimate Lounge Singer’, Dead At 90
“Mr. Greco mixed talent, tenacity and a hot temper in a career that lasted more than 80 years. He was an oft-married ladies’ man and almost but not quite a member of the Rat Pack, the high-living gang of entertainers surrounding Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin that embodied the extravagance of Las Vegas in its glory days.”