A doctor from East Essex, England, has donated a box containing 88 works by prominent composers including Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg to Caius College in Cambridge. The contents of the box, which sat undiscovered until Dr. Philip Marriott inherited it recently, could be worth millions of dollars. The college is expected to sell the manuscripts to raise money.
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Outdated Classism, Or Individualized Education?
A new British reality TV show is taking its contestants on a sociological journey to the past, and possibly the future, of public education. The participants, all mediocre-to-abysmal students, are plucked from their regular classes, and placed in specific vocational training programs, as many UK students were in the 1960s. “At the end of the series, the results of the pupils’ exams in woodwork, metalwork and domestic science will be compared with their GCSE results. But the most interesting aspect of the programme will be whether they thrive on learning practical skills in a disciplined environment.”
Flapping Desperately Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
The hottest ticket at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival is a new stage adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The show is already set to move to London’s West End once the Fringe run is over. But the production has been in trouble from the start: director Guy Masterson quit three weeks into rehearsals, headliner Christian Slater came down with a nasty case of chicken pox, and opening night has already been delayed.
It’s Still A Long Way From “Hollywood Squares”
The long-running BBC game show “Mastermind” has been catching a great deal of flak lately for abandoning its traditional focus on intellectual topics for a lighter mix of pop culture and current events. In fact, one Conservative politician has even leaped into the fray, accusing the show of dumbing down in a blatant ratings grab, saying “It used to be about Jane Austen novels and Beethoven symphonies.”
A Gesture Worth All The Marbles? (Probably Not.)
“It’s not quite the Parthenon marbles, but Oxford University is sending back to Greece a small cultural treasure with roots almost as ancient, in honour of the Olympic games. At the closing Olympic ceremony in Athens on August 29, a British former Olympic fencer, Dame Mary Glen-Haig, will recite lines in a poetic form first heard there 2,500 years ago… The treasure is a Pindaric ode – a strict verse form which is regarded as one of the most perfect and most imitated in poetry.”
The Great Pink Way
A stage version of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” may be headed for Broadway. Roger Waters is currently working on the book, and will arrange and orchestrate the music for the show, which will be produced by Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax.
Getting Classical Back On The Cultural Radar Screen
John van Rhein writes that a unifying idea in classical music just isn’t as important as a unifying commitment to bring the form back to prominence: “Rather than worry about Big Ideas and where they’re coming from, let’s create the societal conditions that allow many schools of composition to flourish and composers to do their best work… Being reasonably conversant with classical music, its traditions and history used to be considered one of the marks of an educated person. No longer… No wonder our symphony orchestras are going in for spoon-feeding [audiences.] Daniel Barenboim said it best: ‘Music has lost a large part of its place in society.’ Full stop.”
A Photographer’s Legacy
“Henri Cartier-Bresson invented the grammar for photographing life in the 20th century,” says Robert McFarlane. “From his earliest photographs, Cartier-Bresson captured life in flight, sometimes literally. In perhaps his most famous picture, ‘Behind the Gare St Lazare, Paris 1932’ a man leaps to the right, taking off from a wooden ladder lying in a shallow puddle near curved metallic debris. Cartier-Bresson’s reflexes are so precise his Leica’s shutter records the leap at the exact moment before the man’s right heel descends to the mirror-like surface of the water. It is a moment pregnant with possibilities and as if to add visual value, Cartier-Bresson’s camera records a poster in the background showing a dancer leaping in the opposing direction.”
Grotesque Beauty
This year’s Site Santa Fe Biennial is notable for its focus on art that is, well, decidedly ugly or disturbing. “The intent is to make a case that what is grotesque can also be beautiful, if viewed from the proper perspective. There’s nothing really new or even strange about that concept. The grotesque is just a fuzzy catchall for what might also be called anticlassicism. It encompasses distortions of the body, hopped-up colors, cartooning, horror, the gothic, camp, burlesque — all forms of envelope-pushing, convention-busting expressionism, with its implicit strain of dark comedy. It has been around forever.”
Alpine Bliss Vs. Southern Pride
“In terms of museums, the only thing better than an outstanding exhibition is an outstanding exhibition with a worthy opponent, a second show that energetically counters and contradicts its position. Such is the fruitful overlap, in time if not in space, achieved by ‘Austria West: New Alpine Architecture,’ at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Manhattan, and ‘Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture,’ at the National Building Museum in Washington. These shows reflect very different worlds, literally and philosophically, and are also housed in buildings that enrich their individual focus while accenting their differences.”