“Under a new interpretation of WorkCover rules, players in the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra can’t be exposed to sound levels higher than 85 decibels averaged over a day. This will have implications for orchestral music generally, but its immediate impact is being felt on, of all things, the Australian Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty. To avoid any one musician being exposed to excessive sound, the orchestra is working with relay teams of extra musicians: four separate horn sections, four of clarinets, four of flutes, and so on. The orchestra that begins a particular performance isn’t necessarily the same one that finishes it.”
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Chicago Music School May Drop Music
The Choir Academy of Chicago, a charter school serving underprivileged minority youth and operating in a model based on the Boys Choir of Harlem Academy, is “perilously close to dissolving its music-based curriculum, if not the whole institution.” The school, which opened in 2001, has had financial problems from the beginning, and relations with the Chicago Childrens’ Choir, which oversees the school, have been strained in recent years. The board collapsed in 2004, and as the school desperately tries to stay open, those in charge now appear willing to scrap the music that has always been at the core of its educational approach.
Rediscovered Beethoven Manuscript Sells for Nearly $2m
“A unique manuscript by Ludwig van Beethoven that was lost for more than a century was sold at auction on Thursday for £1.13 million ($1.95 million) to an anonymous buyer. The final price was at the low end of the pre-sale estimates of up to £1.5 million… Discovered in July at the bottom of a dusty filing cabinet at a religious school in Philadelphia, the manuscript sold Thursday is a work in progress for the Grosse Fuge in B flat major — one of Beethoven’s most revolutionary works… Sotheby’s said it was the most important Beethoven manuscript to have come to market in living memory and would prompt a complete reassessment of the German composer’s works.”
Dead Wrong?
Faced with virulent opposition from its fans, the Grateful Dead is reconsidering its decision to disallow free downloading of its concerts…
Met To Italy: Where’s The Proof?
Italian officials have little concrete evidence that objects in the Metropolitan Museum are stolen. “For six of the seven pots, Italian evidence doesn’t tie them to any clandestine digs or tomb robbers, according to a judge’s conviction of Roman art dealer Giacomo Medici, who was charged with smuggling the pots. Italian negotiators are using evidence from his trial in their negotiations with the Met. For the seventh vase, a 2,500-year-old pot painted by the artist Euphronios, an allegedly incriminating journal found in an American art dealer’s Paris apartment makes no mention of the object ever being in Italy.”
Ahhh…Ahhh…Ahhh…
Giles Coren’s book Winkler has won this year’s Bad Sex Award. “The food critic’s book describes a sexual act between a man and a woman, in which she ‘she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands’. The rest of the winning passage is unprintable for a family audience. The annual award pitted Coren against writers including John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Ben Elton and Paul Theroux.”
Arts Buildings To Save Downtown? How About Killing It?
“Large scale arts buildings have recently been opened in Madison, Dayton, Denver and Omaha; new ones are in the pipeline in Miami, Dallas, Orange County and Nashville. Given the economics, it seems likely that these buildings will have a major adverse impact on wider ecology of the arts in these communities as they preempt and siphon off existing audiences and philanthropic resources rather than generating new ones. This is hardly the regenerative function that the planners will have had in mind.”
Giles Worsley: A Golden Age Of Children’s Theatre
“We are entering a golden age of children’s theatre. The impulse that has piled bookshops with brilliant novels for children, and packed cinemas with well-made, enticing movies, has swept across Britain’s stages, filling them with more varied and attractive shows for young people than I can ever remember seeing there before.”
Some Literary Product Placement That Backfired
A pharmaceutical group thought it would hype its products by commissioning a novel. “The plan was to commission a fictional thriller to hype the dangers of buying prescription drugs from Canadian pharmacies. But now the authors have rewritten their novel to make a drug company the villain, and PhRMA wishes it had never heard of the idea.”
Launch Of NPR Podcasts A Big Winner
“It took only six days after launch for NPR’s ‘Story of the Day’ podcast to reach the coveted No. 1 spot on iTunes for most downloaded podcast. On Nov. 21, NPR’s podcasts held down 11 spots on the iTunes Top 100, more than any other media outlet. But NPR has done much more than simply repurpose its own material for podcasts. The radio giant is hosting podcasts for member stations, and selling and splitting underwriting revenues with them.”