“Author Kristoffer Leandoer said he was leaving because he had ‘neither the patience nor the time’ to wait for the committee to complete its reforms” called for after the scandal that led to the postponement of last year’s award to this year. He said that his resignation had nothing to do with the very controversial choice for this year’s prize of Peter Handke, but the other departing member, Gun-Britt Sundström, said her decision was for just that reason. – Reuters
Author: Matthew Westphal
As Police Spray Tear Gas, Hong Kong Museum Of Art Closes One Day After Reopening
“Hong Kong police deployed tear gas during a protest yesterday that took place close to the city’s Museum of Art just one day after it reopened its doors to the public. The use of tear gas at the museum, which re-opened after a three-year renovation with a travelling show from the Tate, prompted concerns over whether the police’s wide use of the substance is putting important works and museum visitors at risk.” – The Art Newspaper
Conductor Mariss Jansons Dead At 76
He was born and raised in Soviet-occupied Latvia and trained in what was then Leningrad; he became well-known in the West as music director of the Oslo Philharmonic and then the Pittsburgh Symphony. “In the first decades of this century he was frequently awarded the accolade of greatest living conductor. His tours in those years … with his two primary orchestras, the Bavarian Radio Symphony and the [Royal] Concertgebouw [Orchestra] of Amsterdam, were eagerly awaited events and rarely did they disappoint.” – The Guardian
Can Dance Make a More Just America? Donald Byrd Is Working on It
“The choreographer’s commitment to dance as a catalyst for social change can be seen at a museum show in Seattle and in a new work for the Alvin Ailey company.” – The New York Times
Who Actually Wrote, Or Wrote Down, The Epic Of Gilgamesh?
“The poem we call Gilgamesh is based on copies of a work assembled over a millennium after the earliest stories were written in Old Babylonian. … A specific scribe, editor, collator, poet is given credit for bringing it all together. He may also have been an exorcist, magician, diviner, priest or seer; or a combination of these not unrelated vocations. He was active between 1300 and 1000 BCE. … He goes by the name of Sin-leqi-unninni.” – Literary Hub
Audible Is Becoming A Serious Theatre Company
“It’s not that plays are new to recordings, or that corporations never before invested in the stage. What is novel is how this company is commissioning dramatists to write plays for its global listener base and at the same time curating them for a narrower market of theatergoers. You might say that Audible is assembling a digital repertory company, with platforms both on air and on legs.” – The Washington Post
‘Star Wars’ Saga As Kabuki, Literally
“Star Wars Kabuki-Rennosuke and The Three Light Sabers, which are being staged in Tokyo, will combine plots from each of the franchise’s latest trilogy, substituting plots drawn from the days of feudal clan rivalry with drama from a galaxy far, far away. Ichikawa Ebizo XI, Japan’s pre-eminent kabuki actor, will take to the stage as Kylo Ren … in front of 50 winners of an online lottery.” (The performance will be live-streamed for the rest of us.) – The Guardian
Heirs Of Nobel-Winning Author Naguib Mahfouz Have Been Fighting His Publisher For Years
The daughters of the author, the most internationally famous Arabic-language writer in modern history, have repeatedly sued the American University in Cairo Press for what they claim are large-scale copyright violations and failure to negotiate a new licensing agreement following Mahfouz’s death in 2006. – Literary Hub
Every Society On Earth Has Music, Confirm Scientists, And It’s Used In ‘Strikingly Similar Ways’ Throughout The World
“To arrive at this conclusion, researchers spent five years painstakingly creating a database that features music created by people across the globe. They dubbed it the Natural History of Song.” – Newsweek
Hearing Octaves As The Same Note Is Culturally Learned, Not Hardwired In Brain: Research
“Musical systems around the world and across historical eras have been diverse, but octaves are commonly a feature of them. The acoustic structure of octaves is always the same: The frequency of a note in one octave is half the frequency of the same note in the octave above,” and that fact of physics has led to the general assumption that “octave equivalence” is universal. But research with an indigenous Bolivian ethnic group that has limited outside contact indicates otherwise. – Quanta Magazine