Does music have any inherent meaning all on its own? “Can the compositional process of any music, from 12-bar blues to spectralism, be “publicly intelligible” without some kind of grounding in its conventions? If you’ve never heard a nursery rhyme in your life (difficult I know, for arguments sake imagine an extraterrestrial sentient being), wouldn’t it seem baffling on first listen?”
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The Real Drama Is Just Offstage
The Minneapolis-based Playwrights’ Center has a unique mission – distributing seed money and creative support to local dramatists – and it has long been a welcome part of the Twin Cities’ theatre community. But a new artistic director has begun to take the center in new directions, some of which have ruffled some powerful feathers. Now, the controversy over the center’s direction has burst into the open with the wide distribution of a scathing e-mail written by a local playwright and former theatre critic. The e-mail may even have caused the center to lose $25,000 in funding from a local foundation.
Even Harry Potter Affected By Bombings
A London bookseller came up with the perfect place to launch the new Harry Potter book this weekend – the city’s central King’s Cross train station, where Harry himself catches a train to Hogwarts School. But after the terrorist attacks on the city’s subway last week, one of which occurred at King’s Cross, the event is being moved out of central London entirely.
Good News, Bad News In Seattle
The Seattle Symphony and the Seattle-based Pacific Northwest Ballet will both finish their fiscal years in the black, or at least close to it, but Seattle Opera has dipped into the red for the first time in over a decade. The opera’s deficit could be as much as $280,000 and comes just as the company is preparing to embark on a complete Wagner Ring cycle later in the summer, which will push its annual budget up by some $8 million. Meanwhile, no one’s really breathing easily at the symphony, where the accumulated deficit has been reduced but is still impressive, and the musicians’ contract is up for renegotiation.
Wage Freeze, Unpaid Furlough For Houston Symphony
After weeks of negotiations, the musicians and management of the Houston Symphony have tentatively agreed on a revision to their current contract. The revised deal includes a wage freeze, an unpaid three-week furlough, and an eventual 1% raise for the 2005-06 season. Negotiations went considerably better than the last time the orchestra was at the bargaining table, in 2003, when a bitter three-week strike left all sides unhappy and at serious odds. The revised contract is meant to lessen the organization’s dependence on capital campaigns for ongoing operating funds.
Why Perform The Complete Shakespeare?
“Why Shakespeare now more than ever? There’s no end of blah-blah about eternal values, which remains as eternally true as it is eternally dull. There is also the less-banged-on-about simple pleasure of watching his plays. If we are on an island we would prefer to be deserted with the complete Beethoven than the collected John Barry. This is yet more dramatically the case with Shakespeare, who is not just head and shoulders above the playwriting competition, he’s floating around in a hot air balloon waving benignly at everyone from Aeschylus to Caryl Churchill. But beyond the eternal blah-blahs and the sheer devilry of it, there is a sense now that Shakespeare is moving into his moment.”
Do-It-Yourselfers Reinvent Gadgets
“In the digital era, every consumer-electronics product comes with microchips and software programming, and for a new generation of tech-savvy users, these are the raw materials needed to make a digital toy or appliance do tricks that its creators didn’t envision. Sometimes, tinkerers become a consumer electronics maker’s unofficial research-and-development team, with innovations winding up as built-in features down the line.”
PBS Chief Support Investigation Of CPB Boss
“PBS President Pat Mitchell said Tuesday she supports an investigation of what she called a “very troubling” use of federal money to track the political leaning of programming on public television…”
Box Office Blues? It’s Those Damn Liberal Media Elites!
Why is movie box office down? One actress has a theory: “Hollywood’s ruling liberal elites keep going out of their way to offend half their audience. Constant gibes about Republicans, Christians, conservatives and the military litter today’s movies and award show presentations like so many pieces of trash on theater floors. Did we really need to hear another anti-Bush diatribe from Chris Rock at the Oscars this year?”
CPB Ombudsmen Offer Ringing Endorsements Of Public TV
Now public broadcasting has four ombudsmen. And the two appointed by Kenneth Tomlinson to point out bias? They have been “positively glowing in their assessments of the journalism heard on NPR and seen on news shows distributed by PBS. So glowing, in fact, that [there] reports, which are posted on CPB’s Web site could easily be excerpted in the shorthand style of a movie ad quoting favorable reviews.”