“Rostropovich is a genuine hero of the Soviet era and what followed, having stuck up publicly for his friend Alexander Solzhenitsyn when the wrath of the Kremlin was upon him, and having flown to Moscow from the West in 1991 to support Boris Yeltsin, who at the time was facing down an attempted coup. He has lived his life as though borders and limits to freedom don’t exist, which hasn’t exempted him from sometimes having to accept that they do. He’s also a human cyclone. Rostropovich turns 75 in March.”
Blog
Asian Gallery Sells Fakes Backed By “Scientific” Claims
Seattle Times reporters buy art purported to be Chinese antiques hundreds of years old from a local gallery. Turns out the art isn’t hundreds of years old – it’s only a few years old, practically new. “The pieces sold by Thesaurus Fine Arts are a trickle in the flood — but notable in that, unlike many fakes, they are purportedly backed by scientific evaluation. Experts say they know of no other art dealer in the United States that makes such sweeping claims on obviously phony pieces.”
Copyright Extension Discourages Performers
The recent decision of the US Supreme Court to uphold the extension of copyright terms to 95 years might be a good thing for music publishers. Might. But it discourages performers, particularly small non-profit school ensembles, from performing music written in the past century. And that can’t be good in the long run, even for publishers.
Wrecking The Music Business – Plenty Of Blame To Go Around
So now the music industry is going to go after people who download big quantities of music. “The RIAA says somewhere out there is a person who downloaded 600 songs in a single day. That’s about 40 full CDs, retail value: $720. He or she is the one the RIAA is looking for – to make an example of them and put fans on notice that downloading is a prosecutable crime. The day of reckoning nears. Consumers must face the fact that they can’t get music for free forever. And the industry needs to understand that it never would have lost all those customers in the first place had it not been so consumed with greed.”
Profit Shouldn’t Be A Bad Word
The shakeup at Random House in the past few weeks has many fuming about the health the quality book publishing business. But is that really what the message of this story is? So “the country’s major publisher made no bones about what’s important – profit. And, is that a bad thing? There’s no reason why a quality piece of fiction can’t make money, and so far, despite the schlock and superficiality found in the bookstores, publishers will continue to offer books worth reading because they sell, too.”
Acoustics Vs. Democracy?
“Many acousticians agree that the safest way to ensure a good sound environment for orchestral music is to emulate the old, aristocratically modeled halls of 18th and 19th century Europe: a shoebox shape, with a proscenium arch and a horseshoe of ornate boxes to diffuse the sound. The current wave of concert halls, though, favors a ‘vineyard’ style, featuring terraced seats rising above the stage and arrayed around its flanks and rear. This arrangement is acoustically risky (though it has also produced wonderful results in the Philharmonie in Berlin), but socially desirable. It blurs visual borders between different sections of the house and brings each seat much closer to the stage than is possible in a traditional ‘shoebox,’ thereby creating a feeling of intimacy even in a very big room.”
Al Hirschfeld, Artist
“As an artist, Hirschfeld, who died at 99 on Monday, cared about visual cues: gestures, mannerisms, the way an actress dashed across the stage or cocked her head while he sat in the dark of the theater jotting shorthand impressions to take home and translate into drawings. Call them abstractions of the drama, which became loopy lines, dashes, dots, curlicues and crosshatches. He was a genius at capturing likenesses in a few serendipitous strokes — as good as they got, week after week, since the 1920’s, turning the viewing of his work on this page into an American ritual. But what really separates him from other caricaturists is the vitality and suppleness of his line, an abstract matter.”
Copywrongs – Locking Up Happy Birthday
It’s a myth that copyrights are owned by creative artists. Big companies own them. Take “the ubiquitous ‘Happy Birthday,’ whose tune was composed by Mildred Hill, a kindergarten teacher in Louisville, in 1893, was copyrighted in 1934 by her sister Jessica Hill, after the ditty with new lyrics attached appeared in the Broadway musical The Bank Wagon and had been used by Western Union for its singing telegram. Rights to the song changed hands several times and today they are owned by Summy-Birchard Music, which in turn is owned by AOL Time Warner, for which it earns $2 million a year in royalties for public usage. (Don’t worry about singing it around your dining table; AOL Time Warner has not figured out how to collect on that yet.)”
LA PBS Station Lays Off 14
Los Angeles’ KCET, the West Coast PBS flagship station, has laid off 14 people. “A spokeswoman for the station said that the cuts were due to lower-than-expected revenue from subscribers and corporate sponsorships. The projected station budget at the beginning of the fiscal year was $48 million, a figure that is now being reformulated.”
Can A Machine Be Artistic?
With computers getting smart enough to beat even the best chess players, some are asking about the “artistic” abilities of machines. If a machine, by the use of sheer calculation, creates something artistic, is the machine artistic? Can machines practice art? “Is the system intelligent? It is because it produces intelligent behavior. If it does something artistic, then it is artistic. It does not matter how it did it.”