Why does music at sports stadiums all sound the same wherever you go? “Turns out that the folks who make decisions about stadium music are less interested in crafting a unique, venue-specific soundscape than in giving the people what they want—and they are not too proud to steal. If fans in Sports Market A love a given song, you can bet that it’ll soon be pumping out of speakers in Sports Markets B, C, D, etc. Forget about regional music. These days, stadium music functions pretty much like mainstream radio—a combination of lowest common denominator hits and reliable standards, all played to death until they seem inescapable.”
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Miami Cops Sting Art Thieves
A Renoir and a Monet stolen from a Florida mansion in December have been recovered by Miami police. The police used their acting talents as much as their investigative skills to recover the art. “A Miami-Dade officer posed as a seedy high-roller with a penchant for gold jewelry. A private investigator, hired by an insurance company, adopted the role of an Eastern European businessman with a professorial air and an appetite for boosted art treasures. Another Miami-Dade officer posed as a chauffeur-body guard to the artistic impersonator, driving him to the decidedly unswanky Hialeah hotel in a pricey Lincoln…” And the sting was on…
Cabin Fever – An Actor’s Inflight Torture
Think the inflight entertainment is bad? For actors it’s worse. “The overcrowded cabin, tasteless food and germ-infested air-conditioning usually found on aeroplanes held no terrors for me – after all, I’ve worked at the Barbican – but I also knew that, with a journey time of just over 11 hours, the in-flight entertainment was likely to include several hours of recent television favourites. Actors go on holiday to forget all the jobs they have missed, not to be reminded of them, and I braced myself for the worst.”
Recreating A Difficult Time
The lives of people in North Yorkshire were ruined a few years ago when foot-and-mouth virus was detected, and livestock by the thousands were destroyed. Now a local theatre has produced a play about that time, using local people. “The non-professional cast have had only minimal rehearsal time, which gives the production a rough-and-ready quality. That doesn’t diminish its effect, however. In fact, the lack of ‘acting’ only adds to the piece’s power and the sense that what you are witnessing, rather than a mere performance, is a genuine dialogue between stage and audience.”
Learning To Improvise
“For almost as long as we’ve had digital computers, enterprising programmers have been trying to teach them how to play music. Perhaps the most challenging remaining hurdle is the spontaneous back-and-forth flow of improvisation. Machines are quick to learn when it comes to rolling out standard chord progressions and following predictable rhythms. But they turn out to be lousy at riffing, precisely because riffing is a much more chaotic sort of pattern, one that relies on intuition more than structure. But as daunting as it sounds, free improv may yet become a part of the computer’s musical repertoire, thanks to sophisticated software programs.”
A Real Deal On Culture?
Britons spend £3 billion a year on culture.” According to one study, “the amount spent by UK adults on going to the theatre, cinema, concert or art gallery is more than 15 times that spent on tickets to Premiership football matches in a season (classical musical ticket sales at £359 million a year account for almost twice the revenue of Premiership tickets). Yet how many of us are getting our money’s worth?”
Cultural Council Comes Back After Disastrous 9/11
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council lost everything on September 11—and “not just their offices in 5 WTC, the databases, the archives, the stage on the plaza. An artist in their residency program died in his studio on the 92nd floor of Tower One. Others had harrowing close calls. A tech crew was mopping the plaza stage for that night’s dance performance as debris started falling. Another artist made it safely down the steps from the 91st floor. And executive director Liz Thompson was on the last elevator out of Windows on the World.” Now they’re into a new home. “They didn’t just survive—they bounced back, stronger and more necessary than ever. Founded 30 years ago to help revitalize a moribund downtown, they face that challenge anew, but this time with a long track record of arts advocacy behind them.”
Seeing What They Say On Stage – Captioning Catches On
An increasing number of English theatres are “introducing a captioned performance in the run of their plays. The obvious beneficiaries of being able to read, and therefore ‘hear’ performances, are people with hearing loss. But the technique also helps those for whom English is not their first language, but who want to experience and enjoy English theatre – i.e., tourists.”
The Next Children’s Book Phenom?
An English woman and her daughter are being touted as the next children’s book phenomenon. “Lionboy, the tale of a boy who talks to cats, has been created by Louisa Young and her 10-year-old daughter Isabel. Publisher Puffin, the children’s arm of Penguin, has signed the pair in a ‘substantial’ three-book deal said to be ‘in the high six figures’. The amount dwarfs the £2,000 paid to J K Rowling for her first Harry Potter tale, The Philosopher’s Stone.”
Another Large Publisher Moves To Unload Unprofitable Division
McClelland & Stewart, which used to bill itself as “the Canadian Publisher,” is selling off a small but prestigious press it bought three years ago. “If no buyer can be found, the rights to its backlist of some 60 titles — as well as future projects already in the works — will revert to McClelland & Stewart and MW&R’s core employees will lose their jobs. Non-fiction (MW&R’s specialty) has been an increasingly hard sell, and the company “blames the loss of book review space in newspapers and magazines, new book-unfriendly programming by the CBC, and fewer and more tough-minded booksellers for the failure of many good non-fiction books to find their intended audience.”