Duncan McGhie, the chairman of Scottish Opera, has quit in protest of the Scottish Executive’s treatment of the company. The board McGhie has led, which also oversees Scottish Ballet, is slated to be disbanded under the terms of the Executive’s much-criticized plan to keep the opera company afloat. The resignation is only the latest high-profile protest against the plan.
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Boulez At Bayreuth, 35 Years Later
It was 1966 when the fiery iconoclast Pierre Boulez, who had once suggested solving “the problem of opera” by blowing up all opera houses, came to Bayreuth to conduct Wagner’s Parsifal. “Famously, he conducted the quickest and least pompous Parsifal ever seen at Bayreuth. This year, he’s back [at Bayreuth] with Parsifal after a gap of 35 years… To conduct Parsifal as a slow, grandiose celebration of religiosity could all too easily turn into a proto-nationalist ritual, so it’s no wonder Boulez wanted to strip away these connotations.”
Sir Simon’s Extracurricular Activity
Famed conductor Sir Simon Rattle is making headlines of a sort usually reserved for pop musicians. This week, Rattle admitted that he has separated from his wife of eight years, and is living with the famous Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena, who is 18 years his junior. The affair is causing quite a stir in Europe’s normally staid classical music scene…
The Law That Could Kill New Ideas
“The Senate Judiciary Committee will consider a bill Thursday that would hold technology companies liable for any product they make that encourages people to steal copyright materials. Critics say the bill would effectively outlaw peer-to-peer networks and prohibit the development of new technologies, including devices like the iPod.”
Pumping Up Stratford And Shaw
Ontario’s Shaw and Stratford Festivals have been hit hard by a decline in tourism in the past two years, what with SARS and a surging Canadian dollar. So the Ontario government is stepping in to help, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in promotional assistance.
The Cole Porter Effect
Though he’s been dead for 40 years, Cole Porter has continued to have a huge influemce on music. “In a sense, Porter has never been away, though his reputation rests mainly on songs he wrote between the late 1920s and late 1940s, and he died in 1964 at age 73. He’s remained an icon in cabaret music and gay culture by virtue of both his music and his glamorous, if contradictory, lifestyle.”
Books, Books, Books! Everywhere! (Too Many?)
A new study says America is reading less. But the number of books being published is soaring. “In a market where people are reading less, not more, there are 20 books published every hour in the day, every day. Why the outpouring of books? For some reason, everybody thinks they can write a book, and book publishing seems glamorous to them. But there’s no way the market can absorb all those books.”
Big Bucks In Piracy
Pirated music is now a $4.5 billion industry each year says the International Federation of Phonographic Industries. “It is estimated 35% of all CDs sold in the world are pirate copies.”
Is It Art? Or Is It A Copy? (Is There A Difference?)
“Scanners, computer-aided design software and automated milling devices are assisting sculptors and in some cases replacing them, creating detailed pieces from slabs of marble and reverse-engineering complex forms. The result is the seemingly oxymoronic concept of mass customization, in which infinite copies of infinite variations are possible as long as there is stone to quarry. But the harnessing of these granite-grinding Xerox machines, able to duplicate just about any sculpture, may also blur the line between what is authentic and what is not. Is such a sculpture art, or merely a computer-aided copy?”
Artists (In Record Numbers) Against Bush
“Not since the height of the Vietnam War have so many actors, writers, artists, and musicians mobilized politically during an election year — the vast majority of them against Bush. It’s not just the usual liberal Hollywoodites, either, like Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, and Rob Reiner. Artists of every type are speaking out, from the hip-hoppers involved in impresario Russell Simmons’ nonpartisan voter-registration drive to literary lions such as novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Franzen to respected visual artists such as Matthew Barney and Cecily Brown.”