Author: Matthew Westphal

Furtwangler and the Nazis

Joseph Horowitz, whose Understanding Toscanini (1987) deals extensively with the American career of Wilhelm Furtwängler, traditionally seen as an artistic opposite pole to Arturo Toscanini, reviews Roger Allen’s Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical.

How History Classes Helped Create a ‘Post-Truth’ America

“By providing students an inadequate history education, [sociologist and historian James W.] Loewen argues, America’s schools breed adults who tend to conflate empirical fact and opinion, and who lack the media literacy necessary to navigate conflicting information.” A Q&A between Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, and Atlantic writer Alia Wong.

Has This Scholar Figured Out How To Perform Ancient Greek Music?

Despite the wealth of information we have about ancient Greek musical theory, actually transcribing the musical notation that has survived, let alone working out practical performance issues, has been a problem unsolved for centuries. Oxford classicist Armand D’Angour writes about the recent advances and discoveries that have led to his five-years-long-and-counting project to find, transcribe, and perform the surviving repertoire of ancient Hellenic song.

The Lost Yiddish Songs Of World War II

Many of these lyrics – unperformed since 1947 and rediscovered six decades later in the National Library of Ukraine – “seethe with resentment but emphasize triumph. ‘Victory Song,’ recorded in 1947, encourages listeners to drink heartily and rejoice; soon ‘those German murderers will be out of our lives forever.’ Others mock their invaders, scoffing at their incompetence. … Some songs are plainly heartbreaking.”

‘Etymythologies’ – Bogus Memes About The Origins Of Words, And How They Get Around

Last month, for instance, it started going around the web that “tag” (as in the game) was an acronym for “touch and go.” (Merriam-Webster was not amused.) “Etymythology [was] coined by the Yale linguist Laurence Horn for the general phenomenon of using fabricated etymologies (acronymic or otherwise) in the service of telling attractive origin stories, doing for words what Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories did for animals.”

‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Author Turned Down Buckets Of Money – Twice – To Get The Movie Version He Wanted Made

Kevin Kwan’s satirical rom-com novel sold over a million copies in more than 20 languages, and the studios promptly came calling. First, he sold the rights for $1, in exchange for the right to keep some control over the development process and keep Hollywood from whitewashing the Asians out of it. Then Netflix offered an eight-figure package that included complete artistic control for Kwan and director Jon Chu. They turned it down in favor of Warner Bros., just for the chance to get an all-Asian cast on the big screen in a major Hollywood production.

Casting Directors Share Secrets Of The Trade

“As a new award seeks to give casting directors overdue recognition for their key role in shaping productions – not to mention actors’ careers – leading practitioners in the job tell Nick Clark what they believe makes a good casting director, how they started their careers, and what actors can do at auditions to impress them.”