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How To Choose Piano Competition Contestants

Thirty-five pianists have been chosen for the Cleveland International Piano Competition. “The pianists – 11 women and 24 men – hail from 17 countries: China (seven), the United States (five), Russia (four), Japan (three), Bulgaria (two), France (two), South Korea (two), Australia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Serbia, Sweden, Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia. The competition’s new screening process began with 243 hopefuls from 43 countries. After viewing applications, competition officials invited 143 pianists to tape videos in Cleveland, Akron, New York, Tokyo, Munich or London.”

Chick Lit Moves Down A Generation

“Since the late 1990s, teen chick lit — think Bridget Jones in high school — has been gaining popularity, reaping profits for publishers and booksellers, prompting established adult authors to target younger audiences and giving teens and tweens (9- to 12-year-old girls) their own heroines. Teen chick lit is still growing each year by double digits.”

In Canada – It’s A Mystery

Mystery novels are hot in Canada, and the genre is filling publishers’ lists. Some “40 per cent more mystery novels were published this year than the year before, and there has been a 50-per-cent increase in juvenile mysteries. And the number of nominations for the Arthur Ellis Awards, the CWC’s annual mystery prize, has spiked dramatically. This year 67 novels were submitted to the fiction category, 43 for best novel, and 24 for debut works.”

Tuning Out Michael Jackson And The “Ick Factor”

It seems that there really is a point at which audiences don’t want all the lurid details. They’re turning off salacious coverage of the Michael Jackson trial. “As the trial in Santa Maria, Calif., has become more graphic — particularly in the last week, when a former security guard testified in detail about a sexual act he claimed to have seen Jackson perform on a naked 10-year-old boy more than a decade ago — what some have called the story’s ‘ick factor’ has lowered the appetite of listeners, viewers and readers nationwide.”

Who Owns Our Musical Heritage?

Recent cases concerning the release of older recordings and the editing of ancient music have thrown the ownership of our musical heritage in danger. “Hardly a month passes without someone in a black gown having to lay down the law on matters so fluid they might be more fittingly served in a saloon bar. At stake is our access to musical heritage and unless some judge draws a line in the sand pretty soon we could all go blundering back to ignorance and deprivation.”

What Defines A Modern Painting?

“It used to be so simple: a painting was the mediated result of an artist’s application of wet paint on a flat surface. No more. Having absorbed high culture and low, painting has turned itself out in mixed-media assemblages that include both organic and synthetic materials and occasionally involve photography and digital printing. It has borrowed from commercial illustration and architectural, tattoo, and textile design, and exhibited itself as sculpture or in various combinations of all the above, in both abstraction and representation. At this point, even those distinctions seem quaint.”