At the end of March, Gardners announced that it could not keep staffers at a safe distance from each other and still pack and send out books. Four days later, the company was back at work — shipping orders to home customers, a skeleton staff standing well apart. – Melville House
Author: Matthew Westphal
A New Non-Toxic, Natural Blue Pigment Made From (Of All Things) Beets
“No matter how much people enjoy looking at it, blue is a difficult color to harness from nature. … Plants seldom produce blue hues. When they do, their pigments rarely remain stable after extraction.” (There’s indigo, of course, but any friction on the fabric causes it to fade.) Molecular chemist Erick Leite Bastos writes about how he and colleagues found a way to derive the pigment he named BeetBlue from the red root vegetable. – The Conversation
Schubert and Mendelssohn on the verge of nervous breakdowns (like the rest of us)
Hundreds of performances of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 (“Death and the Maiden”) have come my way over the decades, but none seized me from the very first notes like the new recording by the vision string quartet, titled Memento, recently issued on Erato. – David Patrick Stearns
Future Jazz past: Hal Willner, circa 1992
The death of this funny, smart, idiosyncratic, unique music producer at age 64 saddens me. We were East Village neighbors in the go-go ’90s, flush with ideas to try in the future. Here’s my entry about him from Future Jazz. – Howard Mandel
Arts Philanthropist Anne Bass Dead At 79
The first wife of Fort Worth oil billionaire Sid Bass, she ultimately “became one of New York’s most respected philanthropists, supporting, in large but unflashy ways, the New York Botanical Garden, the Museum of Modern Art and … the New York Public Library and its Jerome Robbins Dance Division.” She was best known for her long support of New York City Ballet and its school, though she left its board in 2005 after giving warnings, then unheeded, about the behavior of the company’s and school’s leader at the time, Peter Martins. – The New York Times
‘Quarantine Soirées’ And ‘Confinement Concertos’ — How Classical Music Performance Is Developing In The Days Of Social Distancing
“So far, nothing has approached the embarrassment factor of the quarantine meditations from Madonna’s bathtub. But is this classical music’s brave new world? A temporary novelty? A dead end? And will there be some viable mechanism for getting the artists paid?” David Patrick Stearns looks at how some of the new content turning up online for homebound fans is (or isn’t) panning out. – WQXR (New York City)
France Orders Google To Pay News Outlets For The Snippets It Displays In Search Results
“The French antitrust agency gave the Alphabet Inc. unit three months to thrash out deals with press publishers and agencies demanding talks on how to remunerate them for displaying their content. The search engine giant may have abused its dominant market power, causing ‘serious and immediate harm’ to the media, the Autorité de la concurrence warned in its statement on Thursday.” – Bloomberg
Budapest Festival Orchestra Saved By The Government Its Conductor Keeps Criticizing
Iván Fischer, who founded the ensemble and led it to become one of the most admired in the world today, has been a vocal critic of the increasingly autocratic rule of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Nevertheless, Orbán’s government and the city of Budapest have announced an arrangement to increase the subsidies that the long-strapped BFO needs to survive. – OperaWire
Disney Plus Has Signed 50 Million Subscribers In Five Months
“Disney has taken an especially hard hit from the pandemic, with its theme parks shuttered, movies postponed and ESPN cable channel without live sports to televise. But the company on Wednesday offered an upbeat update on its newest business — one that may as well have been built for home quarantining.” – The New York Times
NEA Releases Guidelines For Distributing Its $75 Million In Coronavirus Relief To Arts Organizations
“A wide variety of non-profit organizations can apply for a share of the money, including ‘arts organizations, local arts agencies, statewide assemblies of local arts agencies, arts service organizations, units of state or local government (and) federally recognized tribal communities or tribes.’ But all applicants … must be previous NEA award recipients from the past four years.” – Chicago Tribune