With both the timing and the conditions of the return of live performances uncertain, organizations are considering numerous possibilities, from outdoor shows (free or ticketed) with spectators carefully spaced apart to playing in half-full halls (but what about box office and bathroom lines?) to booking in-high-demand artists in smaller (and half-empty) venues and charging hundreds of dollars for the few tickets. – The Washington Post
Author: Matthew Westphal
Just For This Year, Oscars Will Relax Rule That Contenders Must Be Shown In Theaters
“During a meeting on Tuesday, the [Academy’s] board of governors approved a temporary hold on the requirement that a film needs a seven-day theatrical run in a commercial theater in Los Angeles County to qualify for the Oscars. Instead, films will be allowed to be released digitally without playing in theaters. However, … to be considered, the streamed film must have already had a planned theatrical release.” – Variety
Simone De Beauvoir Has A New Novel Coming Out
Yes, she’s been dead for 34 years. She started writing the book, titled The Inseparables and based on her best friend (who died at 21), in 1954, the year she won the Prix Goncourt for The Mandarins and five years after she published The Second Sex. Jean-Paul Sartre, her partner, was unimpressed with the novel, and de Beauvoir put it aside. Scholars wondered what had happened to it; turns out she had kept the manuscript and typescript in her archives. – The New York Times
Cellist Lynn Harrell, 76
“Over the course of his wide-ranging career, Harrell performed as a soloist with just about every major orchestra in the U.S. and Europe. Within the classical music world, Harrell was also widely beloved as a generous chamber music colleague, a respected teacher and a musician’s musician.” – NPR
James Weaver, Period-Instrument Pioneer And Founder Of Smithsonian Chamber Players, Dead At 82
He was part of the first generation of American musicians to work seriously on the revival of historical keyboard instruments and their repertoire. He used the Institution’s instrument collection for both solo work and to start one of the first professional Baroque-instrument groups in the U.S., the Smithsonian Chamber Players (1976), and expanded into the Classical era with the launch of the Smithson String Quartet and the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra. – Early Music America
New Online Sales Hub For Indie Bookstores Is Doing Great Business, But Not All Is Well
“Bookshop launched in January with the intention of offering independent bookstores an improved online commerce hub that will help them woo customers away from Amazon. … The site has seen a 2,000% increase in sales in the past month compared to the month before and has become a lifeline for many stores that have been temporarily closed by the Covid-19 pandemic. … Despite its success, the site has critics.” – Publishers Weekly
The First Published Black Composer Went Into Print In 1551
His name was Vicente Lusitano, he was son of a Portuguese father and African mother, he worked in Italy and (later) Germany, and his first book of motets contains daring chromaticism and dissonances that precede Gesualdo by decades. His place in European music history was obscured not (or not only) by racism: it was a case of sharp aesthetic disagreement with, and professional enmity from, an influential colleague. – Van
There’s A Brilliant Ballet Choreographer At Dance Theater Of Harlem. Why Isn’t The Rest Of The Ballet World Using Him?
Robert Garland, the company’s resident choreographer and director of its school, “for all of his talent, is still one of the most underused choreographers working today, which is odd in a time that diversity has come to matter so much to the ballet world,” writes Gia Kourlas. “Why isn’t [his] phone ringing off the hook?” – The New York Times
Per Olov Enquist, One Of Sweden’s Greatest Modern Writers, Dead At 85
His enormous body of prose fiction, poetry, stage dramas and screenplays (including the Oscar-winning Pelle the Conqueror) won him virtually every major Nordic literary prize other than the Nobel. As he once told an interviewer, “Every time I feel depressed that I’m not doing anything, I look at this bookshelf [of my work] and say to myself, ‘Well, that is seven meters and I have done a little bit, so I can die.'” – The Washington Post
Discovery At World’s Oldest Temple Suggests Prehistoric Humans Understood Geometry
“[Archaeologists’] study of the three oldest stone enclosures at Göbekli Tepe” — a site in present-day Turkey whose monoliths are thought to be 11,500 years old — “has revealed a hidden geometric pattern, specifically an equilateral triangle, underlying the entire architectural plan of these structures. … Thus, thousands of years before the invention of writing or the wheel, the builders of Göbekli Tepe evidently had some understanding of geometric principles and could apply them to their construction plans.” – Haaretz (Israel)