At some point in the 1980s, the pop music genre known as R&B went crushingly, horrifyingly commercial, and became less traditional “soul” music than overproduced pap designed to be as inoffensive as possible to as wide a range of consumers as could be snookered into buying it. Then, in the mid-’90s, a new breed of talented young singers – the “neo-soul” movement, they were dubbed – began to revitalize the genre with original albums that picked up where artists like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye had left off back in the ’70s. But the movement has stalled out, the neo-soul musicians are flying well under the pop culture radar, and slick commercial R&B is again dominating the charts. Still, there may yet be hope for serious soul musicians.
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Looking To The Future In Baltimore
A new $20 million art education center on the campus of the Maryland Institute College of Art is big, futuristic, and chock full of the kind of cutting-edge sub-disciplines that didn’t even exist a decade ago. The just-completed Brown Center “will house newly created departments in fields such as digital imagery, video, animation, interactive media and graphic design… With the Brown Center, administrators aim to position MICA as a leading art school for art and digital technology studies.”
Trouble In Paradise
The Honolulu Symphony Orchestra has become the latest American orchestra to make drastic cuts to its infrastructure in order to avoid fiscal insolvency. The musicians of the HSO this week accepted a stunning 20% salary cut, reduced pension benefits, and a 4-week reduction in their season. Prior to the new agreement, HSO musicians earned $30,345 for a 34-week season. The cuts are all the more ominous because the HSO’s musicians were in the middle of a 5-year contract when the orchestra’s management informed them that they would not be able to honor its terms.
Amazing What You Can Find In A Basement
“A collection of 18th century paintings featuring Canadian landscapes has been discovered in a basement at Oxford University. It will go to auction next month. The paintings – possibly the earliest renderings of Quebec in existence – were the work of British army officer Major-General Benjamin Fisher.” The watercolors were painted in the late 18th century, when Fisher was instructed to survey the Canadian shore, and send documentary evidence of its contours back to Great Britain. The paintings are of more historical than artistic significance, but they are expected to fetch as much as CAN$100,000 at auction.
iTunes: Not Just For Toy Computers Anymore!
When Apple launched its music downloading service, iTunes, last spring, it marked a seismic shift in the computing and music industries towards an eventual embrace of the new technologies which have caused so many headaches for copyright holders. Now, Apple has (finally) launched a version of iTunes that runs on PCs, thereby greatly expanding the company’s reach and share of the legal downloading market. Cross-promotions with Pepsi and AOL will follow soon, and just like that, Apple CEO Steve Jobs hopes to do what the music industry has been insisting isn’t possible: convince consumers to pay for music they can still find for free on other services.
Marvelous Merce At 50
Interest has been intense on Merce Cunningham’s dance company celebration of 50 years, writes Tobi Tobias. “For the opening night gala, attended by a packed house of the rich, the famous, and the curious, augmented by squads of rock music fans and their Cunningham-reverent equivalent, as well as an extra component of security folks, the dice rolling was done onstage, in the presence of the musicians who would later be hidden in the pit and a few dancers picturesquely warming up. It featured New York’s Mayor Bloomberg at his most aggressively exuberant (to compensate for Cunningham’s decades of under appreciation?), with the rolling done by celebs like former Cunningham collaborators Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cunningham ur-dancer Carolyn Brown. Eventually, after all the brouhaha, here it was, another Merce Cunningham dance, and this time, as chance would have it, not a particularly distinguished one.”
The Death Of The Middlebrow?
“Middlebrowism, which dominated mid-century culture in the Anglo-American world, can be a complex subject beset by issues of status and social power, but at its heart lay the duty of all educated persons to become “well-rounded” citizens, especially by exposing themselves to great ideas, great art, and great literature. The precipitous decline in middlebrow culture is in large measure a function of technological innovation, which has had the effect of redrawing culture’s sociological map. ‘Cable, VCRs, satellites, and the multidimensional changes wrought by the home computer have not only opened a vast array of new cultural choices to people, they are achieving something much larger: They are moving the consumption of culture out of the city and into the home.
Out Of Cuba: When A Dance Is More Than A Dance
“It is not an exaggeration to say that the Ballet Nacional de Cuba is among the best in the world. That alone makes watching its dancers take flight on stage a thrill for any lover of the arts. But for us, Cuban exiles from Miami of different generations in emigration and age, this evening was more than a performance. It was an act of rebellion against a 44-year-standoff, my entire lifetime, and of faith that not all is lost.”
A Snapshot Of Scotland’s Artists
There’s the romantic notion of what an artist’s life is like. Then there’s the economic reality. A new study of Scotland’s artists shows that “40% of artists under 35 made work that generated no income. Only 17% of the artists earned more than £10,000 a year from artistic practice alone, and many supplemented their income. The figures also contain a fascinating snapshot of contemporary Scottish artists as economic players. In the past two years, they pumped £4.6m into the economy through their expenditure on art materials, transport, and premises, of which £443,000 was spent on assistants.”
Frankfurt Pulls Out Of Deal For Forsythe Project
“The nitty-gritty details of a contract for a ballet ensemble directed by William Forsythe and funded by the cities of Frankfurt and Dresden and their respective state governments had all been worked out months ago. But when representatives of the contractual parties met in Dresden on Tuesday to sign the deal, two chairs remained empty. On the same day, Frankfurt’s city council passed a decision that Frankfurt would pull out of the cooperation, to which it would have contributed EUR200,000 ($232,600) per year.”