Once again, US troops are using loud American rock music as a weapon against its foes. Last week the Americans blared music into Fallujah, hoping to set militants nerves on edge. “The loud music recalls the Army’s use of rap and rock to help flush out Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega after the December 1989 invasion on his country, and the FBI’s blaring progressively more irritating tunes in an attempt to end a standoff with armed members of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas in 1993.”
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Today’s Music: Give Me That Old Time Religion
Christian music is big business now. “Sales of praise and worship albums have doubled since 2000, to about 12 million in 2003. While music sales over all slumped last year, including Christian music in general, worship music was up 5 percent. A series of CD’s marketed on television by Time-Life, “Songs 4 Worship,” has drawn a million subscribers and sold about 8 million CD’s since 2000.”
This Just In: The Current Thinking On Virgil
Dr. Robert Fagles has spent painstaking years translating Virgil’s Aeneid – “nearly as long as it took Virgil to write the epic poem.” And why, when there are already translations available? “Every age needs classics translated into the idiom of the moment. It gives the works new vitality, new meaning. It offers to the living a connection with those who went before, the accumulated wisdom of the past, a protection from a dangerous provincialism.”
Universal Raises CD Prices (Cutting Prices Didn’t Help)
Universal is abandoning its lower retail pricing plan, and increasing its suggested retail prices. “Universal’s competitors didn’t follow suit with wholesale price cuts. Some record label executives privately dismissed the price-cut plan as a promotional ploy aimed at boosting short-term sales numbers. Moreover, some retailers complained that the new system unfairly squeezed their profit margins.”
Ancient Jewelry Reveals Creative Thought
“In a handful of pierced seashells found in a South African cave, scientists believe that they have discovered the world’s oldest known jewelry and the earliest reliable evidence of creative symbolic thought at work.”
Close Quarters – Art All Around
Washington DC’s Renwick Gallery has hung paintings in the way of old – stacked one atop another, cheek by jowl. “They knew how to blow minds back then. And their trick still works. Paintings palpitate inches apart, in skylit orgies of imagery that revives the now-forgotten aesthetics of the sublime, in particular the sublime of being overwhelmed and transported by sheer mass: by Niagara Falls, by world’s fairs or by molding-encrusted public rooms crammed with oil paintings — everything that the puritans of modernism would oppose.”
California Arts Council Director Resigns
Barry Hessenius has resigned as director of the California Arts Council. “During his tenure, Hessenius has overseen Arts Council budgets that reached a high of $30.7 million in 2000-01 and a low of $1 million for the current fiscal year, a drop of more than 97 percent in funding for the arts by the state. The money had been awarded as grants to more than 4,000 of the state’s arts endeavors, large and small, rural and inner-city – everything from artists in residence in schools to major orchestras.”
Is Schwarz Done In Liverpool?
Why did musicians of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic vote to not renew music director Gerard Schwarz’s contract? “If it’s because the Liverpool orchestra rejects him aesthetically, that might be a problem. If it’s because the orchestra resents some changes he’s making, that’s different. They might resent him for firing somebody’s brother. They might think that just because the tuba player is 80 years old, that’s no reason for him to go away.”
Designing A Museum: A Campaign Of Ideas
Winning a high-profile competition to design a public building is as much a campaign as a proposal of ideas. Mary Voelz Chandler observes the process of choosing an architect for the new Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. “It’s not a comparison of negatives, but a comparison of positive matches with the organization’s goals. All these people could deliver a beautiful building.”
A Crescendo Off A Single Piano Note?
Lars Vogt is a pianist who seems to believe the impossible. “Power, he says, ‘has nothing to do with the force of hitting a key. You see some pianists attack; that’s what makes the sound ugly and not resonant,’ he says, demonstrating with a welter of loud but indistinct notes. ‘If the fingers are very close to the keys, you always have a feeling of drawing the sound out – rather than pushing the sound into the key. You can be a lot more intense in the playing while still making the piano sing.’ Sit down and try to do it yourself, and you realize that much of Vogt’s success comes from his head rather than his hands. He imagines the sound and wills it into being.”