“After eight months of negotiations, the gulf between the two sides remains wide, with management claiming a $2.4 million discrepancy [between the sides’] proposals.” Jenny Jarvie looks at those proposals and the background to the lockout, the orchestra’s second in just over two years.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Columbus Symphony Names New Music Director: Rossen Milanov
The 49-year-old Bulgarian native, currently music director of New Jersey’s Princeton Symphony and Camden-based Symphony in C and a former associate conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, begins his initial four-year term next fall. He replaces Jean-Marie Zeitouni, “whose contract was not renewed last year by mutual agreement.”
New All-Classical Radio Station To Debut In North Carolina (Well, That’s Bucking A Trend!)
“The non-commercial, around-the-clock station [in Wilmington] will join the newly expanded non-commercial news and information station 91.3 FM WHQR News.” The broadcast frequency and programming schedule will be announced next week.
Royal Ballet Dancers Become Canvas For Chris Ofili
The Turner Prize winner personally paints the leotards of all six dancers in Unearthed, a collaboration with choreographer Aakash Odedra that mixes ballet with kathak (North Indian dance) to retell the story of Prometheus and the creation of the first man from clay.
So Who *Is* The New President Of The Kennedy Center? Meet Deborah Rutter
Says one former colleague, “She has great skills at bringing people together, keeping conversations at a very, very high strategic level, and not getting bogged down in the weeds. She has a wonderful graciousness about handling divergent points of view.”
Drinking Tequila With Sam Shepard
“I don’t know how to explain it [what he’s currently writing]. I really don’t. Hopefully it’s a novel, but I have the hardest time sustaining prose. I feel like I’m a natural-born playwright but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?”
The Kennedy Center Honors Go Pop
Alex Ross: “As in previous years, the [2014] selection demonstrates the degree to which the awards have diverged from their original mission – to pay tribute to luminaries of theatre, dance, classical music, and show business – and instead become one more temple of celebrity culture, magnifying the fame of already familiar faces. … The logic that has taken hold of the Honors is one of pop triumphalism: it’s not enough for pop culture to dominate the mainstream; it must colonize the spaces occupied by older genres and effectively drive them from the field.”
When Frankfurt School Philosophers Examine Pop Culture
Theodor Adorno, on an LA Times astrology column that advised, “Accept all invitations.”: “The consummation of this trend is the obligatory participation in official ‘leisure-time activities’ in totalitarian countries.” Alex Ross considers how Adorno and Walter Benjamin “were pioneers in thinking critically about pop culture – in taking that culture seriously as an object of scrutiny.”
Smartphones And Map Apps Are Messing With Our Spatial Thinking
“When people plan a route based on their mental representation, they have to form a sequence of these landmarks, and follow this plan by reaching landmark after landmark. When people use navigation systems, they don’t do this planning any longer. … Basically, people don’t really learn their environments.”
Partying With The Hedheads
Those are the superfans of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Sarah Larson joins them for an old-style (as in 1990s) punk concert with the Hedwig band – called The Angry Inch for the show but, when on their own, performing under the name Tits of Clay.