“Had it been down to him, [director Calixto Bieito would] have called the show The Anatomy of Melancholy, after the encyclopedic study by 17th-century scholar Robert Burton, whom he calls the British Montaigne. With a nod to the box office, however, he’s gone for a title that sums up a show in which the Heath Quartet will play angsty Ligeti, while four actors draw on texts ranging from WH Auden’s The Age of Anxiety to Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
At What Age Do We Lose The Ability To Really Master A New Language?
“The older you get the more difficult it is to learn to speak French like a Parisian. But no one knows exactly what the cutoff point is – at what age it becomes harder, for instance, to pick up noun-verb agreements in a new language. In one of the largest linguistics studies ever conducted,” researchers concluded that the cutoff is later than many experts thought.
Protecting Rare Books And Manuscripts From Climate Change
“While the threats that climate change poses to material history are well-known and frequently studied, researchers have tended to focus on immovable assets … Archives, because they are technically mobile, have received less attention … Sadly, relocating buildings full of old and fragile documents may be too expensive and complicated to undertake.”
Soprano Nina Stemme Wins $1 Million Birgit Nilsson Prize
“The Prize is established on a substantial endowment left at her death in 1997 by another Swedish soprano, the legendary Birgit Nilsson, who was born a hundred years ago this month on a farm near Malmö. Stemme’s voice and personality may be very different in character from Nilsson’s … but they both excel in the same repertory. Previously the Prize has been awarded to Plácido Domingo, Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.”
Why Michelle Terry Is Going All-In On Gender-Blind Casting At Shakespeare’s Globe
“There are no character descriptions in Shakespeare. There is nothing prescriptive about who can and should play what. Our job as actors is to offer up the impression of a person’s character in all its complexities and ambiguities. For me, that is what Shakespeare was doing within the limiting constraints that he was writing in. We don’t have those constraints anymore. When the timeless, mythic, kaleidoscopic worlds he has created collide and collude with ours, then the possibilities are truly endless.”
Researchers Try To Determine Why People Spew Bullshit
“Taken as a whole, the findings indicate that bullshitting is more than just a psychological phenomenon rooted in our own delusions – it’s socially constructed.”
Did Steve Wynn Just Stick His Elbow Through Another Picasso?
“It’s the art world’s equivalent of a man struck twice by lightning. On Friday, the 1943 Pablo Picasso painting Le Marin (‘The Sailor’), valued at $70 million, was ‘accidentally damaged’ at the presale exhibition of Christie’s Tuesday evening auction of Impressionist and Modern art.” Christie’s won’t say so publicly, but the owner of the painting is reportedly former casino magnate Steve Wynn, who made headlines when he stuck his elbow through Picasso’s Le Rêve back in 2006.
Guitarist-Composer Glenn Branca Dead At 69
“Even among the many underground artists, musicians and misfits who populated downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and 80s, he stood out as one of the weirdest. His music – with its stark sheets of minimalism and overwhelming guitar-oriented symphonies – filtered into rock and noise, and it’s hard to imagine bands such as Sonic Youth and Swans without him. Originally trained in theatre, with no formal musical education, he brought intense drama to experimental music.”
Columbia University MFA Students, Grads Share Horror Stories
While there was praise for the faculty (and sympathy for their heavy workloads), there was blistering criticism of administration and, especially, of the decrepit physical plant. Said one grad of her damaged studio, “Facilities entered the space after it flooded, and cut into the walls with my ceramic sculptures still on the shelves. I returned to my studio to find a pile of my broken artwork on the ground, with no forewarning. I spent more money than I have to have my most valuable possessions destroyed.”
Daniel Webster, Longtime Philadelphia Inquirer Classical Music Critic, Dead At 86
“The Inquirer‘s classical music critic from 1963 to 1999, Mr. Webster occupied his spot as Philadelphia commanded national and international attention through an orchestra that toured, recorded, and broadcast widely. … [His] era was bookended by artists like tenor Richard Tucker and conductor Hermann Scherchen in the 1960s, and the arts boom of the 1990s that created hundreds of millions of dollars in custom-built arts facilities and one of the most bustling music scenes in the country.”