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Iraq’s National Symphony Orchestra Hasn’t Been Paid For Eight Months, But It Plays On

“The ensemble has lost more than half its members since the start of the year, when the government issued a directive barring state employees with two jobs from receiving two salaries. The anti-corruption measure was suggested by the World Bank and should affect only about a third of the orchestra’s musicians, but because of delays in carrying out the reform wages have been withheld from the entire group.”

Is Religion An Academic Construct Or Does It Arise Out Of Culture?

A vast number of traditions have existed over time that one could conceivably categorise as religions. But in order to decide one way or the other, an observer first has to formulate a definition according to which some traditions can be included and others excluded. As Jonathan Zitell Smith wrote in the introduction to Imagining Religion: ‘while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterised in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious – there is no data for religion’.

LA’s MoCA Extends Reasons To Question Its Choices

If programming under new director Klaus Biesenbach continues to privilege male artists and spectacle, and the board continues to make decisions that appear more self- than public-serving, how does an art community assert its agency? In recent years, members of the Los Angeles artworld have tried to do just that, protesting decisions by MOCA directors that seemed insensitive to the lived experiences of vulnerable artists.

The British Museum Gave Back Something? Well…

This week’s headlines invoked a fantasy version of the British Museum’s role in international relations. The director of the museum may have shaken hands with Iraq’s ambassador to the U.K., but he has not performed a genuine act of restitution. The British Museum has been styled in the press (and styled itself in its own press release) as a bulwark against looting. But the museum is a cathedral to the practice.

Alfred Brendel On How Music Makes Sense Of The World

For a performer like Brendel, balancing chaos and order requires a capacity for both seriousness and playfulness, and a comfort with some overlap. He holds that a totally logical world would be very regrettable, that there needs to be a balance between the rational and the irrational, the finite and the infinite. The performer and the listener each can think of this productive tension as that between sound and silence. Loving music, Brendel suggests, means embracing its fleeting moments as well as the silence out of which they come.

Giving New Meaning To The Term ‘Dinner Theater’ By Making The Meal The Performance

For more than a year, the Detroit-based experimental theater company The Hinterlands has been staging what they call “µTopian Dinners” – literally preparing and sharing a meal with guests. The company sees the project “as a kind of a laboratory to investigate the cultural values that are reinforced through eating, meals, and cooking. … Implementing this process of non-textual translation via food practices carries a kind of power in the fact of it being a non-verbal form of communication, but one that nonetheless is extremely culturally specific.”