An investigation of Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman Kenneth Tomlinson turns up emails showing consultations with a former White House official about the public TV politics. “The e-mail messages are part of the evidence being collected in a broad inquiry by the inspector general of the corporation into whether Mr. Tomlinson violated any rules that require that the corporation act as a buffer between politics and programming.”
Blog
The University That Dumped Rare Books
“The Octagon library at Queen Mary, University of London, in Mile End, east London, is in the process of refurbishment and decided that it would have to dispose of its surplus books. These have now been dumped in skips outside the library, to the outrage of staff and students who were clambering through them yesterday to find what they described as literary gems.”
A Dancer’s Special Place
New York City principal Jock Soto retires this week after 20 years. “At 40, he can look back to a special place as one of ballet’s most creative personalities. While choreographers are essential to the art, dancers like Mr. Soto – and they are few – also define and redefine choreography with bold individuality and implicit collaboration. Peter Martins and Christopher Wheeldon have used him repeatedly in their new works. Just as significantly, as Mr. Soto has proved in familiar ballets, interpretation can become a creative act.”
Moral Center – Teens Go For Broadway Fare
“Musicals attracting large mother-daughter audiences have long been a staple on Broadway but have been on the rise in the last decade. Interestingly, the most popular shows have themes that explore some aspect of prejudice — not exactly light, youth-oriented fare.”
Not Your Parents’ Pops…
“Seventy-five years after Arthur Fielder took over the Boston Pops and turned it into the most famous and influential series of its kind, pops concerts are very different. Increasingly, in Boston and elsewhere, pops means Rockapella, medleys of TV themes, Doc Severinsen, celebrity crooners doing music from last year’s blockbuster movie. It means what Richard Dyer, the Boston Globe’s classical music critic since 1975, calls ‘the hits of 25 or 30 years ago — the favorites of the target audience, when young’.”
Pop Grows Up
“Pop got its start by making fun of the platitudes that second- and third-generation Abstract Expressionism had settled into, mocking the increasingly popular movement’s increasingly shrill insistence on gestural spontaneity, existential anxiety and psychological authenticity.” But Pop Art has grown up. “Pop and connoisseurship are no longer opposed. Sophistication is not limited to highbrow cultivation but encompasses enthusiasms that cut across classes, arising wherever passion has room to pursue its own ends, on its own terms.”
Great Design… But Why Not Show It To Us?
“In five years, the Cooper-Hewitt has handed trophies and honors to more than 100 of the most creative people in the country. Collectively, they have helped foster a golden age of American design. That matters because design is the new competitive edge in business. It’s also one of the only aspects of modern manufacturing that China doesn’t yet own.” But wait – awards are nice, but shouldn’t the C-H offer an annual exhibition of the best work? After all, isn’t that what Smithsonian museums do?
In Chicago – Dueling Contemporaries
The Chicago Art Institute is building an enormous addition that will result in the largest museum of contemporary art in Chicago. So where does that leave the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art?
Sex And The Music Career (Or: How To Get Ahead)
Oboist Blair Tindall says she has figured out how getting jobs works out in the classical music world. “Tindall claims that sex played a decisive role in her musical career. She says she was simultaneously involved with three leading New York oboists — two married — who gave her work in their orchestras. One had a maxim: ‘The section that lays together plays together’.”
Giving Up Music On Moral Grounds?
A “successful” violinist in a small town in the western US decides to give up music. “There are too many music schools and departments, and too many string players being trained as it is. Could I live with myself by pandering to the dreams of young and blissfully unaware musicians? Even if I were to be offered a tenure-track position at a music department, I would face some moral dilemmas about doing the job. I know that I would be under pressure to recruit string students to fill my studio and the school symphony, thus ensuring my own position. But how could I do that knowing the abysmal state of the job market?”