Matthew Westphal – Page 814 – ArtsJournal Wayback

French Government And Auctioneer Battle In Court Over 12th-Century Manuscript From Mont-Saint-Michel

“The priceless tome was brought to an Alençon (Orne, Normandy) auctioneer specialising in the sale of religious objects, by an anonymous owner several months ago. It was discovered to have been a collection of texts written in the scriptorium of the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey, and includes Latin writing from Saint-Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, the founder of the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey; as well as poems, geographical notes, and music scores.” The government, which argues that it is the rightful owner of the manuscript, is trying to halt the sale.

World’s Largest Performing Arts Center Is Now In Taiwan

“The sprawling 1.5-million-square-foot National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, designed by Dutch firm Mecanoo Architects, was recently completed in the southern port city of Kaohsiung … Slated for an October opening, the futuristic-looking mega space, called ‘Weiwuying’ for short, incorporates five performing spaces – including a 2,260-seat opera house, 2,000-seat concert hall (boasting a 9,085-pipe organ) and a 470-seat recital hall.”

The Last Of Istanbul’s Public Scribes

The arzuhalciler, petition writers or public scribes who set up shop in the streets, go back to the early years of the Ottoman Empire, composing and writing legal documents for citizens to submit to courts and government offices. There are still a very few of them left (despite the efforts of Turkey’s legal profession to get rid of them), and reporter Joshua Allen meets two of them.

‘Albee Would Never Have Allowed This’ – Joe Mantello Talks About Directing ‘Three Tall Women’

“I also think that he was a playwright who was very confident in his interpretation of the play. I once heard him say, ‘No actor or director has ever shown me anything in one of my plays that I didn’t intend to be there.’ I think what he meant by that was not that he had all the answers, but that if you found it, on some unconscious level he meant it to be there. I found that statement – there was something very sad about that statement to me. Because one of things I like most about rehearsal is when somebody brings something to it that I’ve never thought of.”

How Liesl Tommy Carved Out A Career For Herself As Director, Tony Nominations And All

It was, in her words, “a fucking compulsion,” says Tommy, a mixed-race native of Cape Town who came to Massachusetts with her family at age 15. “I believed the lie that the reason that there weren’t more of us [directors of color] working was because they didn’t believe we were qualified. So I was like, ‘Here I am! Here are the reviews, here’s the sales, here’s the work.'”

Collecting All The Music Written In Nazi Concentration Camps

“Jewish Italian musicologist and pianist Francesco Lotoro has devoted his life to unearthing thousands of songs and scores written during the Holocaust. … Lotoro has catalogued symphonies, operas, scores and songs written on everything from coal sacks to toilet paper and by anyone who composed it in the captivity of a concentration camp: Jews, gypsies, prisoners-of-war. He has collected more than 8,000 pieces of music, with the goal of both preserving them for posterity and repairing a ‘gap’ in music history, a time when innumerable composers were murdered in the Holocaust.”

Solresol, The 19th-Century Invented Language Based On Music

“Jean-François Sudre, a music teacher in 19th-century France, … [had a] vision of a universal language [that] transcended linguistic boundaries. From written and spoken word to melody, gesture, number, and even color, there are few ways that one can’t express Solresol, the language that Sudre spent more than three decades developing. But after his death in 1862, it was largely forgotten. Fittingly, the global connections made possible by the digital age have forged a 21st-century life for Solresol.”

A New Boom In Ceramic Art

Call them potters, ceramicists, or clay sculptors, but there are getting to be more of them, amateur and professional – and their work is fetching higher prices. Reporter Amy Fleming looks at how the trend has developed and the reasons for it.

The Difficult Birth Of The Tate Modern

“The Tate briefly flirted with the idea of splitting in two and setting up an entirely separate Museum of Modern Art, inspired by the success of MoMA in New York. This was in the early 1990s, before the gallery decided to remain a single institution with two London venues: Tate Britain and Tate Modern. The behind-the-scenes efforts of Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s director from 1988 and 2017, to create Tate Modern are revealed in the gallery’s trustee minutes for 1991-92.”

Author: Matthew Westphal