Tired of seeing its audience lured away by satellite radio, traditional radio stations are beginning to broadcast in high definition. “The hitch is that a special – and expensive – radio is needed to hear the new offerings, and a consumer would be hard-pressed to find such a radio in a store. The radios are available online, through hdradio.com. Undaunted, 12 of the nation’s top radio companies last week started a $200 million advertising campaign to tout HD radio in the first 28 markets where it has been launched.”
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UK Plagiarism Case Heads To The High Court
“On Monday, the High Court in London will hear a lawsuit which will either make publishing history or be dismissed as a storm in a teacup. The reason for the fuss is that it relates to one of the most successful novels of modern times and the lifting of “the whole architecture” of a body of research, a largely intangible entity which, not without reason, has caused paranoia throughout the literary world. Plagiarism is not a grounds for litigation in the UK, so instead the plaintiffs are alleging copyright infringement, which, of course, amounts to much the same thing. What makes the situation all the more titillating, and bizarre, however, is that they are suing their own publisher.”
Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Enjoying Myself
David Mamet can be a hard playwright to love, especially for those who have met him. But despite the difficulty of some of his plays, and his notoriously prickly persona, Mamet has become a bona fide icon. Still, he can’t resist playing the victim: “I think basically people hate artists,” he says. “They observe or they intuit that the artist is having a great time, that the artist doesn’t have to work, that the artist gets the girls, the boys, the adulation, the money. And it’s true. Once a studio executive or a journalist does that math, they are, of course, enraged.”
Making Art, Making Money
Success and profitability are quite different things in the cutthroat world of New York theatre, and achieving one is no guarantee of making headway towards the other. “What exactly makes the business so tough? Well, expenses, which keep growing, and audiences, which don’t.”
A Complex World, Reduced To A Buzzword
In much the same way that conventional wisdom in the Arab world tends to view “America” as a monolithic place speaking with a single, domineering voice, Westerners have begun to discuss “the Islamic world” as if such a thing could really be reduced to a simple set of ideas and actions. By extension, “Islamic art” is often seen as monolithic and single-minded, when the truth is far more complex. “It’s a political story, an ancient and universal one, about how an image, and almost any image will do, once it is fused to cultural identity — Islam, in this case — can end up being used as a weapon.”
New York’s Unsettlingly Profane Season
“Sweet are the uses of perversity in the theater. Throw a kink, a curve, a warping twist into a time-honored dramatic formula and tried-and-true suddenly looks eye-poppingly new and unsettling. The spring season in New York is, happily and atypically, plump with demonstrations of such genre bending, with entrancingly wicked shows that extract the profane from the sacred and the rot from the pillars of society.”
Training Leaders, One At A Time
Being a concertmaster is a very different job than being a rank-and-file orchestra musician. In most orchestras, the concertmaster must play a double role in the life of the ensemble, consulting with conductors and commanding respect while simultaneously maintaining a collegial connection with the other players, who are unlikely to respond well to dictatorial tactics. It is also a job for which there has never been an official way to train, until now. “The Concertmaster Academy [at the prestigious Cleveland Institute of Music] is intended to groom a person for the specific leadership demands of the job. Unlike performance programs, which one might argue are glutting the marketplace with players, this program has an intentionally tiny enrollment: one per year.”
Philly Breaks New Ground In The Low Brass
The Philadelphia Orchestra has hired a new tuba player. Who is twenty years old. And female. And if you think that’s not a major departure from the orchestral norm, you clearly haven’t spent much time scanning the low brass rosters of prominent ensembles. Still, “if brass players have a reputation for macho banter and a certain amount of antics, Carol Jantsch should have no trouble keeping up. She once won a tuba-throwing contest at a tuba conference in Finland, casting an old instrument into a lake, landing first prize in the women’s division.”
Look Alive, Dammit!
Why do American orchestral musicians always look so unhappy onstage? Are they actually that cynical? Is it merely a desire not to show up one’s fellow musicians? Are the players exhausted from what is admittedly a tough schedule of rehearsals and concerts? Or is the music really so difficult that looking happy to be playing it becomes a physical impossibility? “Classical music, it seems, is the only genre that abides and encourages such affectlessness… Well-intentioned though it may be, this stoic style does nothing to bridge the communication chasm between orchestras and audiences.”
Other People’s Money
An ongoing dispute between the Edmonton Symphony and the family of one of the orchestra’s biggest supporters has taken the form of an ugly public battle over an $800,000 bequest. “Stuart Davis, Edmonton’s philanthropist of the year in 2003, didn’t like lawyers and accountants. He didn’t use their services when he wrote a will giving his millions to local charities and six family members. Charities ended up getting 80 per cent of his $13-million estate.” But the lack of legal advice means that parts of the will are unclear, and Davis’s son says that he cannot afford to be as generous with the symphony as his father might have been.