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Long Live The Trashy Summer Read

Sure, there’s a place for the literary work we all read in the winters. But “sometimes, in place of a two-page long vivid description of a wooded area or a contemplative soliloquy, all you really want — nay, all you really need — is simplicity. In summer— when one is most consumed by a uniquely ceaseless craving, for a good story, a delicious meal, skin against skin; when patience for artifice is low and the thirst for a fast and painless escape is high — this is particularly true.”

Three Orchestras, Three Conductors, 109 Players, And One Just Slightly Ambitious Symphony

When you want to perform Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” in the Tate Modern, and you really, really, don’t want the three orchestras to fall out of sync, you have to take rather a lot of meetings. The three conductors: “Pencils in hand, they laid out their scores on a table and mimicked their orchestras’ parts in a cacophony of hummed notes, whoops, grunts, bleats and birdlike sounds — and every once in a while, in unison, a triumphant’Bang!'”

The Pre-‘Hamilton’ History Of History Musicals (And Operas)

Here’s a journey that starts 100 years ago: “A remarkable centennial few are paying attention to is the premiere of the first meaningful American opera to have any real national success: The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Charles Wakefield Cadman’s ‘Shanewis (or The Robin Woman).’ The 1918 opera is about a Native American singer who leaves her reservation in Oklahoma to study voice with a Santa Monica socialite at a ‘bungalow by the sea’ (I’m not making this up).”

A Feminist Ballerina On A Mission To Change Classical Ballet

Ashley Bouder isn’t OK with how few women get to choreograph, or become company directors, in the world of ballet. So the City Ballet principal is trying to change that through her own company, in her free time. But it’s not necessarily easy: “Ballet is both a largely nonverbal art form and one that prizes conformity. ‘We’re used to being told to shut up and get in line and point your foot and turn out,’ Ms. Bouder said, noting that this pressure tends to weigh more heavily on women, who are more easily replaced than men.”

British Writers And Publishers Are Very, Very Unhappy With Each Other Right Now

Full-time writers in the UK earn less than ten thousand pounds a year, a new survey says. This seems … unsustainable for authors (publishers dispute the number): “The Society of Authors chief executive Nicola Solomon estimating that authors were paid just 3% of publishers’ turnover in 2016, based on their profits. ‘What concerns us is that during the same period that we see authors’ earnings plummet, the large publishers are seeing their sales rocket,’ she said.”

What’s The Best Way To Try To Understand Ourselves?

As the philosopher Noam Chomsky has said, “we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology” – something the critic and author David Lodge has explored. In his 2004 book Consciousness and the Novel, Lodge argues that “literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have… The novel is arguably man’s most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time.”

Norman Lebrecht, Confessor Of The Music World

[The gossip] is the human comedy, that’s what I like. I came into music because nobody was writing about it in a way that interested me. Musicologists were writing arcane and abstruse things which had no relation to who the composer was, where he or she was at that particular time in her life. They weren’t answering the questions of, “Why is this piece meaningful to me, why is this phrase meaningful to me?” In the way that you’d ask in every other human transaction from the restaurant to the bedroom. And so I started asking those questions.