The male choral group had been active in South Africa for two decades when Paul Simon featured them on his 1986 album Graceland — after which they shot to international fame, won five Grammy Awards, and brought Zulu music to a global audience. – BBC
Author: Matthew Westphal
Entire Hong Kong Arts Festival Is Cancelled Due To Coronavirus Epidemic
“Due to officially open on February 13 with a concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the month-long festival was to have featured more than 120 performances of dance, music, theatre and opera. Last year’s festival drew a combined audience of nearly 90,000 people.” – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
Singing & Signing: How Christine Sun Kim Brought Her Whitney-Biennial “Rage” to the Super Bowl
After making a powerful impression at last year’s Whitney Biennial with her six drawings of pie charts plotting Degrees of Deaf Rage, deaf artist Christine Sun Kim reached a much wider, more diverse audience — at the Super Bowl. – Lee Rosenbaum
The Best of the “Black Symphonies”
Over the past decade, both William Grant Still and Florence Price have acquired new prominence. But the buried treasure is William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony of 1934. – Joseph Horowitz
Roberto Magris And Two Good Czechs
An Italian of Slovenian ancestry who grew up in Trieste, pianist Roberto Magris frequently tours in Europe and the United States. Here, we see and hear him and his colleagues in the Birdland Jazz Club in Neuburg a.d. Donau, Germany. – Doug Ramsey
How Greenland Developed A National Theatre Company
The National Theatre of Greenland stages three to five productions per year, adapting material ranging from traditional lore to contemporary Greenlandic literature to Shakespeare, at its home in the capital and on tour all over an island the size of Western Europe, most of whose towns and villages have no roads in and out. – The Stage
Should The Classical Music World Just Cancel The 19th Century?
Musicologist Doug Shadle introduces his new blog/newsletter by suggesting that both the professional concert ecosystem and conservatory education can’t modernize, as everyone seems to think they should, because of “nineteenth-century elitism designed to exclude and punish rather than help students thrive. These values are so pervasive that we often can’t see them for what they are.” – The Classical Alternative
When Dorothy Parker Got Fired From Vanity Fair
She had been the magazine’s theatre critic for less than two years, and in trouble with her editor for much of that time, when one column enraged both David Belasco and Florenz Ziegfeld so much that libel suits were threatened. Her dismissal became a minor cause célèbre in the press, made her famous enough to maintain a freelance career ever after, and launched the Algonquin Round Table on the road to renown. – The Public Domain Review
Banksy Is Brilliant At Manipulating The Media And Art Market. But Is He A Brilliant Artist?
The one part of the art world that has seemed resistant to him is the ultimate conferrer of status: museums. Will he be remembered as an important artistic figure? And if so, will that be as a painter, an activist, or a Duchamp-like “conceptual prankster”? – The New York Times
The Strange Superstitions And Pre-Show Rituals Of Ballet Dancers
Some of them are sweet and sentimental, but they can be every bit as weird as those of actors and athletes. Sarah Kaufman talks to a dozen or so dancers from several companies about what they do and why. – The Washington Post