My DownBeat article about the compulsively listenable Last Poets album Transcending Toxic Times includes a lot of quotes from bassist/composer Jamaaladeen Tacuma and poet Abiudon Oyewale. But there’s more to tell. – Howard Mandel
Blog
Hollywood Is Betting Big On Remakes. But New Study Suggests Audiences Aren’t Thrilled
The study found that fully 91 percent of remakes drew a less positive audience score than the original. Among critics, the remakes received a lower Metacritic score just slightly less frequently -— 87 percent of the time. – Washington Post
How Exactly Do You Go About Translating The Words Of An Opera?
Writer Heather O’Donovan looks at the challenges of both translations for singing (fitting new words to the music) and supertitles (fitting the words onto that little screen). – WQXR (New York City)
Bournemouth Symphony Calls On Orchestras To Employ Disabled Musicians, Touting Its Own Successes
It received funding from Arts Council England’s Change Makers initiative to become more accessible and inclusive. Alongside organisational changes like disability awareness training, BSO created a disabled-led ensemble, BSO Resound, and supported a training placement for its Director, conductor James Rose. – Arts Professional
Hungary’s Government Building Huge, Multi-Million-Euro Cultural Complex In Budapest Park
“The so-called Liget project, initiated in 2011, aims to transform Budapest’s city park (Városliget) into a cultural hub, including the new National Gallery, Museum of Ethnography and House of Hungarian Music, alongside the existing thermal baths and an expanded city zoo. The project hit a major milestone in May, as the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán opened one of Europe’s largest museum collections centres on the nearby site of a former hospital.” – The Art Newspaper
Some Science Has Become So Theoretical It Lacks Evidence. Are We Fooling Ourselves?
In the past, experiments played a vital role in developing theory and vice versa. For some time now that back-and-forth has not existed in certain fields where experiments are barely managing to test theories developed over decades. Wherever experimental data can be coaxed out of nature, it suffices to corroborate or refute a theory and serves as the sole arbiter of validity. But where evidence is spare or absent – as it is for a growing number of questions in physics – other criteria, including aesthetic ones, have been allowed to come into play both in formulating a theory and evaluating it. – The Guardian
Vivian Perlis, Who Founded And Ran Who Founded Yale’s Oral History Of American Music, Dead At 91
“[Her] oral history project includes some 3,000 recordings of interviews with composers and other major musical figures, from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter, from Duke Ellington to John Adams. The eminent musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock described it as an ‘incomparable resource.'” – The New York Times
What Happens When We Lose The Capacity To Be Bored?
In the past, work was recognized for its colonizing power, expanding to fill and dominate time itself such that there might exist no clear line between work hours and nonwork hours. Our current condition is worse. The Interface, leveraging boredom, makes us all into unpaid workers for the advertisers who support those apparently cost-free platforms. We ought to recall that there is no such thing as a free transaction. In this species of transaction, you pay with your individuality, freedom, and happiness. – The Walrus
Annabelle Lopez Ochoa On The Challenge Of Creating New Story Ballets
“It’s actually very hard to keep the audience engaged in the development of a story. The struggle is figuring out how literal I can be, and how much I can use the abstract aesthetic of dance to enhance an emotion as opposed to just tell the story. … Storytelling is where ballet started, and then contemporary dance took over and it was all about movement and space and music. I want to revive it, and not feel it has to be an old-fashioned form.” – Pointe Magazine
Read An Unpublished Langston Hughes Essay About An Escaped Chain Gang Prisoner
The piece, a forward written for the Soviet edition of a novel by Georgia investigative journalist John L. Spivak, recounts an incident from the 1927 road trip Hughes took with Zora Neale Hurston in which they were flagged down on the road outside Savannah by a 15-year-old escapee. – Smithsonian Magazine
