David Dubal is back on radio, spinning his musical comparisons. “While much of classical radio these days seems to consist of little more than DJs dispensing tuneful wallpaper, on any given Wednesday evening, “Reflections From the Keyboard” invites the listener to deepen his or her musical experience. “Where else, within a six-minute span, can you hear a movement of Schumann’s ‘Carnival’ played by Rachmaninoff, Cortot, Hess, Arrau, Godowsky and Michelangeli?”
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Why You Should Listen To Music You Hate
“How can you possibly have your mind open to a brand new piece of music if the only music you’ll allow into your life is music that you already like?” That’s why Frank Oteri goes out of his way to collect music he despises…
Hollywood – Direct To Classroom
In Australia, “big film distributors are paying a professional teachers organisation to create study guides based on the latest blockbusters, bypassing the NSW Department of Education or the Board of Studies. The study packs – about films such as Kingdom of Heaven, Robots and Ice Age – are emailed directly to tens of thousands of teachers, who are also offered free entry to special screenings.”
Did Big Media Really Win In Filesharing Case?
“Recent history is littered with examples of the entertainment industry panicking about technologies that ended up proving harmless – and which might not exist today had they been subject to a ruling like this one. “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone,” Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in 1982. Those arguments don’t apply here, the court said.”
TV Reality? Working On These Shows Sucks
“While the reality genre has matured, creating shows that commonly compete in the ratings with scripted entertainment, conditions for those who work on the shows have worsened, not improved, those workers say. Although the most popular reality shows compete with scripted entertainment, the genre remains a seat-of-the-pants culture, with some shows taking only weeks, rather than months, to be bought, produced and appear on the air. This has made for intense competition among reality-show producers.”
Filesharing – Friend Or Foe? (Maybe Both?)
So Big Media has decided that filesharing networks are a threat to their existance and the courts hav backed them up. “Six years after Napster arrived, it should be clear that geeks and fans are simply going to bypass a legal framework that was built for sales of sheet music and discs. As they did with radio and television, copyright holders should make those volunteers their allies in marketing because, try as they may, they’re never going to find the Off switch.”
Columbia Starts Producer Fellowship
Columbia University has announced a new fellowship program for theatre students. “Producer Harold Prince said the new program, which will invite one or two students a year to follow a specific study and producing plan, was created for fledgling producers who ‘want to nurture new work, encourage new artists, and take chances’ but ‘recognize that the current climate on Broadway makes that almost impossible.’ The Fellowship “will emphasize that the creative producer’s role is to be the instigator, the collaborator, and the leader who gets art on the stage and to the public.”
Danish Really Modern (A New Opera House)
Tobi Tobias comes back from Copenhagen’s Bournonville Festival with vivid impressions of the city’s new Opera House. “The Opera is masterly in its command of space and light and typically Danish in its harmonious juxtaposition of materials: glass (miles of it, it would seem), stone (in subdued shades of grey and sand that give it an eerie lightness), steely metal, and lovingly treated wood. The interior of the building continually echoes the curved shape of the façade. At the hub of the public space is a gigantic bowed form clad in glowing maple veneer. Fantasy suggests it’s the work of a violin maker operating on a Brobdingnagian scale.”
Art Of Corporate
“Large companies have been buying art as never before, and for a very particular purpose: to make the workplace — from the smallest and most intimate of meeting rooms to the most grandiose of lobbies — a more stimulating environment in which to work. This week an exhibition opens in London that will show off some of the art acquired in recent years by some of the top corporations in the UK…”
Carey: UK Shuts Out Foreign Lit
The chairman of the International Man Booker Prize jury John Carey says that “foreign literature was “neglected” in the UK, and to an outsider the British publishing industry could “seem like a conspiracy intent on depriving … readers of the majority of the good books written in languages other than their own”.