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A First Report On The Acoustics Of Philadelphia’s Newest Concert Hall

Peter Dobrin on the 270-seat hall in the Rhoden Arts Center at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: “New halls take a while to settle in, and this one, which employs an extensive sound system of speakers both on stage and overhead, seems more complicated than most. On first hearing, though, it sounded awfully dry.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Producers Of Broadway ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ And Publishers Of Older Play Version Could Be Headed To Court

Scott Rudin, lead producer of the Aaron Sorkin adaptation now on Broadway and likely to tour eventually, has been trying to block stagings of the older version, written half a century ago by Christopher Sergel Sr. and still published by his family firm. (One tour of regional Britain was recently cancelled after Rudin threatened to sue.) Christopher Sergel III says this is doing real damage to his business. – Crain’s Chicago Business

France Drops One Rape Charge Against Director Luc Besson But Starts Another

“Prosecutors dropped the rape investigation into allegations by the actor Sand Van Roy who told police in May that she had been repeatedly raped by Besson, 59, during an on-off relationship. … But the Paris prosecutor’s office said a new preliminary investigation was launched on 21 February after a different, unnamed woman reported an allegation of sexual assault.” – The Guardian (AFP)

Soprano Hilde Zadek, Postwar Star Of Vienna State Opera, Dead At 101

“Throughout her career, Ms. Zadek was praised by critics for her dark-hued voice, dramatic intensity and fine musicality. Before retiring from the stage in 1971, she also sang at the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden and other major houses. But her primary work was in Vienna. There, in the city she feared would revile her [as a Jew], she sang more than 700 performances in dozens of roles; taught for years at the Vienna Music Academy; [and] presided over the International Hilde Zadek Voice Competition, a prestigious contest for young singers.” – The New York Times

Micro-Serialized Novels Are Big In The Far East – Can They Catch On In The States?

“In China and Korea, millions of fans make micropayments to writers for incremental updates in their serialized stories.” Now a Korean entrepreneur has launched Radish, which offers a similar service to the American market: writers for TV soap operas develop serialized stories, mostly romance and horror, that get regularly updated in installments that take ten minutes to read on a smartphone. – Publishing Perspectives

This Museum Handles One Of The World’s Touchiest Subjects

“How do you memorialize a holocaust that even now, seven decades after it took place, may still not be entirely safe to talk about?” India’s Partition Museum, which opened in 2017 in Amritsar, in Punjab state and hard by the border with Pakistan, uses documents, photographs, and eyewitness testimony — carefully — to do the very tricky job. – The New York Times

Reading In The 1940s: Let’s Not Idealize it – But There Are Some Fascinating Lessons About Culture

George Hutchinson’s first chapter, “When Literature Mattered,” summarizes a brief era unlike any other, when Americans of all classes and backgrounds turned hungrily to novels, plays, and poems, provoked by a “need to recapture the meaning of personal experience.” Soldiers who had never picked up a book now read free Armed Services Editions paperbacks—more than a hundred million came off the presses from 1943 to 1947—first for relief from wartime tedium, then because the books offered them new ways to understand their relationships and inner lives. Educated readers, meanwhile, grew impatient with both the collectivist ethos and the formalist aesthetics that had governed intellectual life a few years earlier. Later, after the 1940s ended, literature lost its importance in general culture—it no longer mattered—partly because, as Hutchinson writes, “other media drew leisure-time attention,” but also because it “became increasingly (but not exclusively) a professional specialization supported by universities.” – New York Review of Books