Arts education in public schools in New York City is haphazard.”It’s completely hodgepodge. We have in some schools almost no arts, in many schools no music, schools that are not taking advantage of the cultural resources of the city, arts educators who may be asked to decorate the school for Halloween.” Now the schools chancellor has proposed a standardized arts regime for the city.
Blog
Broadway Closes Season With Record Box Office
“After a season battered by more than its fair share of bad shakes – four orange terror alerts, an Iraqi war, a brutal winter, an ongoing sluggishness in tourism, and a bitterly divisive musicians strike – the League of American Theatres and Producers reported total season grosses up 12%, to a new high of $720.9 million. Attendance was up to 11.4 million, a half-million-ticket rise over last season, and playing weeks, an indicator many consider key to assessing Broadway’s health, also rose — to 1,544 weeks, up 7.7% over last season. But do these seemingly sunny statistics entirely reflect Broadway’s well-being?”
Korean Theatres Must Show Korean Movies
The South Korean government denies it is thinking about easing a law that forces Korean movie theatres to show Korean movies 40 percent of the time. “The screen quota is not just an issue for the film industry, it is vital to the future of our visual media industry as a whole. If we lower our guards on film, then the rest of the market is lost.”
San Francisco – A Music Education Program That Works
The San Francisco Symphony has been running its Adventures in Music education program for 10 years. So it’s time to evaluate. “Among the findings: 86.9 percent of teachers and 85.5 of principals said students are more interested in music and the arts because of AIM; 68 percent of teachers interviewed said participating in AIM helped them find new ways of thinking about curriculum; and 58 percent said they believed the program made them better teachers.”
Members Of Congress Seek To Overturn FCC TV-Ownership Ruling
Sensing a national mood that opposes the FCC’s decision Monday to relax television media ownsership rules, members of Congress are drafting bills to reverse the FCC decision. “Identical bills have been introduced in both houses to overturn Monday’s decision on television-station ownership. The old rule said a network cannot own a group of stations that combine to reach more than 35 percent of the national viewing audience. Monday’s vote raises that threshold to 45 percent.”
Creativity – An Overused And Abused Idea
Everyone seems to talk about creativity as if it were this force innate to every person, and that some sort of spigot is all that is required to cause it to gush forth. Barbican director John Tusa’s new book explores what it means to be creative. “Creative, creation, creativity, as Tusa says in his introduction, ‘are some of the most overused and ultimately debased words in the language’, which are liberally applied by everybody from bureaucrats to politicians to thinktanks…”
Secret To Success: Promoting The Unconventional
The secret to why animation film-maker Pixar keeps turning out high quality movies? “If you don’t create an atmosphere in which risk can be easily taken, in which weird ideas can be floated, then it’s likely you’re going to be producing work that will look derivative in the marketplace. Those kind of irrational what-ifs eventually lead to something that makes you go, ‘Wow, I never would have thought about it.'”
Exploring American Music In Its Many Flaovors
Minnesota Public Radio’s American Mavericks series is a collection of first-rate radio shows about American music. But it’s also a valuable website, the “latest attempt to find a home on the Internet for progressive classical music, which is played sparingly in concert and on the radio. “For Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony’s music director and co-host of the “American Mavericks” radio series, the Internet is a logical place for young people to discover new music. Just as cutting-edge composers push beyond common assumptions, he said, a certain adventurous nature is needed to explore cyberspace.”
Mobile Phones – Your Music Here
“With sales of CDs on a three-year slide, the music industry sees mobile phones as powerful outlets for promoting artists and distributing music for profit – something it failed to do in the early days of Internet music-swapping. In recent months, recording labels have entered deals with wireless carriers and other companies. The music companies are selling rights to their musicians’ recordings and images for use in screen savers, digital images and song snippets that are then sold to mobile phone users.”
The End Of Music As Object?
“I believe the era in which music is treated as an almost fetishistic object of desire is coming to an end. Not for me, perhaps, even though I have been busy recently uploading my entire music collection to my computer, clearing acres of valuable shelf-space by transforming stacks of CDs (never the most beloved format, with their easily cracked plastic boxes, tiny covers and tatty booklets full of microscopic print) into digital sound files on a kind of virtual juke box. And quite possibly it is not yet over for you, either, certainly if you grew up in the vinyl era and have developed a soft spot for albums with distinct identities, the running order of songs identified on the sleeve, just as the artist intended. But it is a very different situation for the teenage students…”