“I’m modestly encouraged by how many readers nowadays pay attention to voices – Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson, Olivia Laing – you would have to call essayistic. It turns out that readers are still well able to engage with works of nonfiction that address the world urgently and at the same time try to reimagine what this venerable form, the essay, may be capable of doing in artistic terms.”
Blog
Michael Jackson Is The Top-Earning Dead Celebrity Of 2017
Jackson is atop the Forbes list of top-earning dead celebrities for the fifth straight year, with $75 million. Forbes says Jackson’s earnings are boosted by a new greatest hits album, a Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show and a stake in the EMI music publishing catalogue.
Edinburgh To Close Famous Music School. And Why?
The local authority hopes to save as much as £383,000 through the closure of the school, which helped launch the early musical careers of Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson and Celtic fusion star Martyn Bennett.
The Stolen Medieval Manuscript That Was Returned In The Mail 50 Years Later
Here’s the story of the Luneborch Prayer Book, a beautiful 15th-century illuminated manuscript in Low German that went missing from the Peabody Library in Baltimore around 1962 – and that an unknown somebody mailed back in 2012.
LA Phil’s New Principal Guest Conductor Makes An Entrance
It is rare enough with American orchestras to appoint a principal guest. The reason for the post more often than not is to fill in something lacking in a music director. The last time the L.A. Phil had principal guests was three decades ago, when it brought in the especially versatile and tuned-in young conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Simon Rattle to complement an old master, Carlo Maria Giulini. In the case of Mälkki, the natural first reaction may be that she’s a woman. While American orchestras have begun hiring female music directors, this is the biggest crack, thus far, in the increasingly fragile glass ceiling about to crash down on top-tier orchestras.
Donald Bain, 82, One Of America’s Best-Selling Ghostwriters
Among the more than 100 books he (actually) authored were Margaret Truman’s Capital Crimes, the Murder, She Wrote books that were a spinoff of the TV series, and the notorious 1967 faux-memoir Coffee, Tea, or Me?, which purported to be the true-life escapades of a pair of swinging stewardesses (as they were called back then).
Philip Glass, The Ultimate Collaborator
For all a director’s authority, film is the most collaborative art form, and Glass is surely the most collaborative artist in history. His dozens of movies are only a small part of his prolific output, which includes music for well over 50 operas, dance works and music theater pieces; 11 symphonies; hoards of concertos and other orchestra and chamber pieces. All that and the reams of music for the Philip Glass Ensemble, which he founded 49 years ago and is still going strong, as it demonstrated at the Ace on Sunday.
Sarah Polley’s 20-Year Journey To Adapt Margaret Atwood’s ‘Alias Grace’
“Today, Polley is an auteur whose movies – Away From Her, Take This Waltz, and the autobiographical Stories We Tell – form a sort of three-part meditation on female restlessness, the complexity of long-term relationships, and the slipperiness of memory and truth. But back when she first tried to option the rights to Alias Grace at age 18 – as a well-regarded young actress with no filmmaking experience – Atwood turned her down. “
Why Is Academic Artspeak So Dense?
“Let’s stop pretending this language reflects ‘research.’ Let the reader decide whether an idea is plausible or implausible by explaining it, not by presenting it as established fact. Let’s have an end to academic artspeak – and while we’re at it, start letting art speak for itself.”
How Bang On A Can Opened The Floodgates For The Alt-Classical Music
In Part II of an extended profile of the new-music powerhouse (see Part I here), Allan Kozinn gives an overview of the now-renowned composers and ensembles that Bang on a Can spawned and/or nurtured – not to mention a record label, a summer festival (popularly referred to as “Banglewood”), an educational program, and an avant-garde marching band – and considers the changes that the Bangers wrought in the entire U.S. musical ecosystem.