Blog

Classical Neglect…

Why is classical music shrinking, asks Julian Lloyd Webber? It’s our own faults. “Yes, we know that there are lots of other kinds of music apart from classical – and don’t we classical musicians fall over backwards to say how wonderful they all are – but while our children are continually being bombarded with pop music, they are also being denied a knowledge of some of mankind’s greatest creations and their adult lives will be much the poorer for it.”

Heppner: Reflecting On His Vocal Crisis

Tenor Ben Heppner reflects on the vocal crisis two years ago that kept him off the stage for eight months. “Those performances are seared on my memory. I had a panic attack. It was like my heart was beating 150 beats a minute. I was sweating in places I never knew I could sweat. Every inch of my body was running in sweat. I was thinking, ‘What are you doing here? You’ve never sung this publicly before.’ And when I sang, this squeaky voice came out… and I thought I was going to die. Somehow I got through it, but it was not my finest hour.”

UK Court Rules Hamilton Photos “Indecent”

A British court has ruled that photographer David Hamilton’s “multi-million-selling images of young, naked women and girls are officially branded as indecent in a landmark British ruling. Anyone owning one of his coffee-table books now risks being arrested for possession of indecent photographs, following a ruling at Guildford Crown Court.
Hamilton’s photographs have long been at the forefront of the ‘is it art or pornography?’ debate.

We Got Music… Your Way!

“Forget the album and corporate radio. Fan-built playlists and mixes are taking over the way people get their music. The popular iPod shuffle is designed around the idea that people like pairing reggae and pop with country and jazz. But music fans are ahead of corporate-endorsed playlists, putting their own clever twists on mixes by holding mixing contests, auto-generating playlists from blog posts and collaborating with others to build theme mixes. People are choosing what they want to hear rather than having it pushed on them.”

After Two Years Of Looting Iraqi Art…

“Archaeological sites in southern Iraq have been systematically looted for more than two years, but experts say the dig will have to go much deeper to find out where thousands of lost artefacts have ended up. The complete lack of knowledge is devastating. One article said that a billion Iraqi dinars worth of artefacts had been smuggled to Syria, but that’s absurd. We just don’t know what’s gone.”

Krump Krump Krump

Krumping is “equal parts break dance, pantomimed battle and demonic possession. As break dancing did 25 years ago in the South Bronx, krumping arose spontaneously some time in the last decade in neighborhoods in Long Beach and throughout South Central Los Angeles. And, just as break dancing was confined at its beginnings to a fragment of a New York borough then in ruins, krumping is still mostly unknown beyond the freeways that border these ragged areas of L.A. Over the past five years or so, though, a phenomenon that began with a handful of dancers has grown to include perhaps a thousand dancers and at least 80 independent crews, loosely organized and all part of a network connected informally but intricately by word of mouth.”

Fair And Balanced (Awwww…Not Really)

Why is public television getting dumped on? “To some degree, public television has positioned itself for abuse. The charter of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting says it must adhere to “objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” Unfortunately, Americans have little appetite for truly “fair and balanced” coverage. If we did, the News Hour With Jim Lehrer would be a smash hit and Fox News would be banished to the media dustbin.”