“The British music industry, both live and recorded, employs more than 100,000 people and generates around £3 billion a year, yet it is perceived unquestioningly to be in the slough of despond. The hand-wringing reaches its apogee on Wednesday when Britain’s most popular radio station, Radio 2, devotes five hours to The Great British Music Debate.” But British music has never been healthier. Music occupies a central role in our lives, and look at this week’s Glastonbury festival. Each “festival-goer has paid £100 for admission, and all tickets sold out within 18 hours of going on sale.”
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Old Style Historian
Kenneth Clark would have been 100 this year. “Clark was the incarnation of a deeply outmoded type: the white upper-class worthy. He is best remembered for his 1969 television series, Civilisation, about the history of Western European culture, an inscrutable, perfectly turned-out English gentleman lecturing on high culture and its values to the masses. By the mid-1970s, his brand of art history was already being criticised for being too elitist, an old-fashioned upper-class amateur connoisseurship that was being superseded by ways of looking at art that emphasised society and politics. By the 1980s, when he died, his series had come to seem the epitome of what some now call heritage TV.”
Rap With Andy And Will (Or Not)
Britain’s poet laureate Andrew Motion last weeke wrote some rap for Prince William’s birthday. What a mistake. “The poet laureate going hip-hop is like Mel C going punk – except without quite so many flying bottles. Even so, within hours of the rap being published, an online petition was launched demanding, with a rather sinister turn of phrase, that Motion ‘be removed’. The factor which will prevent MC Motion being sprayed in 20ft letters across the Buck House gates is not that he attempted the rap, but that it is so toe-curlingly off-the-mark, that instead of putting William – and the royal family – in some sort of modern context, it’s more like a trap door beneath William on the gallows of cool, with Motion being forced to yank the lever.”
Let Me Introduce You To Music
This trend of classical musicians speaking to their audiences before performing a piece of music is becoming very popular. But why? Why is it necessary to introduce the music? “Perhaps this thirst for the human voice has been created by television and radio. We are so used to being talked at, bombarded with information, never left in silence for a moment, that it has become unthinkable for a performer to need and use silence. Nobody ever plays on TV without first being talked about, or talked to, or talking themselves. The space between us and the performer always has to be filled.”
Write Canadian (Whatever That Means)
“Of all the elements of Canadian culture, literature may be the most definitive. Canadians are voracious readers of their own writers – from the founding ‘CanLit’ boom featuring Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler to, more recently, Barbara Gowdy, Rohinton Mistry and Yann Martel – and Canadian writing tops bestseller lists and wins awards internationally. How is the next generation carrying on this legacy and how is their work affected by such factors as Canada’s racial diversity, media saturation and changing values?”
Art In The Walls
“As contemporary artists increasingly turn to wallpaper as their chosen medium, this superficial material is gaining some serious respect. In fact, artists have been dabbling in wallpaper since the 16th century (or earlier), among them Albrecht Dürer, Thomas Rowlandson (whose ‘Grotesque Borders’ caricatured the British upper crust) and Salvador Dalí. Andy Warhol used it famously in 1966, when he papered the Leo Castelli Gallery with his ‘Cow Wallpaper,’ a fuchsia-and-yellow series of repeated bovine heads, accompanied by floating silver balloons. Like Warhol, most artists reviving this tradition do so with ironic or subversive results.”
ALA: A Controversy Over Cuban Colleagues
The American Library Association has become embroiled in a controversy over small independent libraries in Cuba. “Small lending libraries run out of people’s homes, they circulate materials that the librarians say are banned by the government. To some members, the [American Library] association has been ignoring the repression of their colleagues and the cause of intellectual freedom; to others, a small group has been trying to hijack the organization to pursue an anti-Castro agenda.”
David White Goes West
For 28 years David White has been executive director of Dance Theater Workshop in New York and “one of the movers and shakers” in the dance world. There’s not much he’s set out to accomplish along the way to producing 1000 or so artists that he has been unable to do. Now, at age 55, he’s leaving New York for St. Paul, Minnesota…
Why The Symphony Orchestra Is Dying
Why is the symphony orchestra dying? Bernard Holland spells it out in clinical style. “Classical music has only itself to blame. It has indulged the creation of a narcissistic avant-garde speaking in languages that repel the average committed listener in even our most sophisticated American cities. Intelligent, music-loving and eager to learn, such listeners largely understand that true talent and originality must find their own voice. What they do not understand is why the commitment to reach and touch listeners in the seats does not stand at the beginning of the creative process, as it did with Haydn and Mozart. This kind of art-for-art’s-sake has much to answer for.”
How Gay Is Gay?
“Openly gay and lesbian artists – writers, directors, actors, composers – are more visible than ever in 2003 America. Indeed, when two men can share a kiss on national TV in celebration of their 25-year relationship and the Tony they have just won, it seems as if a milestone of acceptance and assimilation has been reached. And, certainly, gay characters are more in evidence than ever before on stage, screen, and TV. When a mainstream newspaper like USA Today runs an article asking, ‘How ‘in’ is it to be gay? Let us ‘out’ the ways,’ something must be afoot.”