The UK’s Radio 3 is playing the complete works of Anton Webern in one session. “No amount of historical importance and peer endorsement will persuade anyone to love Webern. Nor will the copious amounts of ink spilt by the theorists who’ve shown just how beautifully ingenious his music is, as full of mirror-forms and symmetries as the rock crystals Webern loved to collect on his Alpine walks. But in any case, I suspect Radio 3 controller Roger Wright doesn’t want to lecture us. He just wants us to love Webern’s music as it deserves. That will be a tough call…”
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Untangling Tippett
Composer Michael Tippett’s music went out of fashion after he died in 1998. But “the fact is that, at his best, Tippett is a highly individual composer and a hugely important figure in 20th-century British music. His interest in the culture of other countries and his endless fascination with literature and the workings of the mind helped to keep him looking some 15 years younger than his true age. Rather than compare him to Britten, we should celebrate the fact that the two composers had such utterly contrasting minds.”
Charlotte Church, Pop Princess
Charlotte Church has completed her transition from precocious child to pop princess. Church accepts that she should be more careful about looking after her voice than she is, but not to the extent that she’s going to do anything about it. “I love my voice and if I lost it I would be devastated, but I just don’t want to live my life like that. I am thinking of giving up smoking for general health reasons, and it was really embarrassing last weekend when I had overdone it and couldn’t sing at all, which meant that I had to mime at a big outdoor festival. I felt really bad about that.”
Libraries Offer Audio Downloads
More and more American public libraries are offering audiobook downloads to be “borrowed”. “A patron with a valid library card visits a library Web site to borrow a title for, say, three weeks. When the audiobook is due, the patron must renew it or find it automatically ‘returned’ in a virtual sense: The file still sits on the patron’s computer, but encryption makes it unplayable beyond the borrowing period. The patron doesn’t have to do anything after the lending period. The file expires. It checks itself back into the collection. There’s no parts to lose. It’s never damaged. It can never be late.”
Read My Book (Through Cell Phones)
Publishers are experimenting with marketing books through cell phones. Just around the corner? Delivering mobile text books…
Broadway Invades Vegas
Avenue Q opens this week in Las Vegas, the first of several big-nman eBroadway shows to take up home in the gambling mecca. “In investing heavily in Broadway theater, Vegas hoteliers such as Steve Wynn, whose deal bars Avenue Q from touring in North America, are banking on the notion that at least some of the city’s 40 million tourists a year will embrace entertainment with plots, characters and — gasp! — life lessons. Wynn hopes the change of pace will mature the town and ‘add another dimension to the entertainment menu’.”
The New Communication (But What Are We Saying?)
“People hardly blink, anymore, at the potency and omnipresence of technology and its attendant powers of transformation. The information stream that was not so long ago channeled by newspapers, network television and radio, has become an unrestrained torrent that surges through cable and satellite television, cell phones cellphones, Internet blogs, podcasts and chat rooms chatrooms. It’s all changing faster than even the most keen-eyed futurists can predict. And so are we, in culturally pervasive ways, changing as well.”
The Clothing Lady, The Shopping Network, And 34,534 Books Sold
Jeanne Bice, a clothing entrepreneur, wrote a book. Instead of hyping it the conventional way, she went on the TV shopping network QVC. She sold 15,000 books in 8 minutes. “Then she sold roughly 9,000 and 10,000 more books this month during two more sessions on the channel, for a total of 34,534 books ordered in less than half an hour of accumulated air time.”
A Protest Against A New Berlin Castle
The German government wants to tear down the old East German parliament building and replace it with a castle. The government hopes to start construction by 2007 on the new building, which the study says could cost $650 million to $950 million. But a vocal group of artists and architects oppose the idea. “Arguing that the building should be preserved as a reminder of postwar history, about 160 artists and architects from around the world banded together this month to create a mountain inside the Palace of the Republic.”
LA Times Names New Book Review Editor
The Los Angeles Times has a new books editor. He’s David Ulin, 44, a longtime champion of West Coast writers. He’s “written for numerous publications, including The Times, and served for three years as book editor of the Los Angeles Reader. John Montorio, the top editor of The Times’ feature sections, said that Ulin would be empowered to accomplish a complete makeover of book coverage when he starts in October. “I think that the review will remain urbane and sophisticated, but we want it to be far more accessible and far more attuned to what is really hot in the book world.”