“Many, many questions remain. Considering how personality-driven the festival was during Helmut Rilling’s long tenure, will a significantly sized audience be willing to show up for a festival that changes direction year to year? Will the festival hold to its Bach roots, or consider them disposable? What is the “true story” behind what appears to be a divorce?”
Blog
NYT Bestseller For A Day – The Rise And Fall Of A Book Few Had Heard Of
Lani Sarem’s “Handbook for Mortals” improbably topped the NYT Bestseller list last week. Then booksellers called foul, and the book was removed from the list. When Sarem saw the tweets circulating about her book, “my first thought was to just ignore it. It was just a couple of — you know, in my mind — silly tweets.” But as the day stretched on, and as she says neither Stamper nor West reached out to her personally, she reached a different conclusion: “I’m being cyberbullied, basically.”
Why Ecological Art Has Largely Failed
“Looking for years for land art that utilizes the environment as complexly as artists have long done with their subjects through paint (even using paint as a subject), I’ve come up largely disappointed. Land artworks are typically aesthetic interventions forced onto the environment by artists with little to no deep understanding (geologic, ecologic, botanic, etc.) of the materials they are using. Instead, artists who make these works favor aesthetic, surface-level intervention, which documents well for exhibition and (hopefully) sale later, upon return to an art-world setting, be it via a gallery or a coffee table book. Where is the communion with the land’s complexity?”
We Still Have To Defend Free Speech? Here’s Why
“A 2015 Pew Research Center poll reported that 40 percent of millennials think the government should be able to suppress speech deemed offensive to minority groups, as compared to only 12 percent of those born between 1928 and 1945. Young people today voice far less faith in free speech than do their grandparents. And Europe, where racist speech is not protected, has shown that democracies can reasonably differ about this issue.”
Do Philadelphia’s Theatre Awards Need A Rethink?
Can an awards system recognize theatrical excellence and simultaneously accomplish something more? Friends responded to my post with suggestions including awards for community engagement and partnerships, physical or devised work, theater for young audiences, interdisciplinary collaboration, museum work, a rotating “surprise” category that changes every year, and even a category called “Anything that isn’t about or by dead white men.”
Why Are There So Few Female Audio Engineers?
“Women in audio deal with unique challenges that come from working within a cross-section of two traditionally male-dominated fields. Because of the technical nature of their jobs, they experience issues similar to those many women in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—face, such as struggling for respect and being second-guessed by their peers. On top of that are the added pressures of the competitive and fickle music industry.”
Cultural Appropriation Yes! It’s Who We Are
“Few of us doubt that stealing is wrong, especially from the poor. But the accusation of “cultural appropriation” is overwhelmingly being used as an objection to syncretism — the mixing of different thoughts, religions, cultures and ethnicities that often ends up creating entirely new ones. In other words: the most natural process in a melting-pot country like ours.”
Pamela Z, The Sum Of Found Sounds
“Pamela Z is a collector of “found” sounds, memories, objects, and sensations. She can imagine a sound in nearly anything, a cabinet for example. It’s not unlike Philip Glass’s notion that music is innate in all things. Her studio is filled with found things, including old typewriters, rotary telephones, bits of technologica; plastic water jugs — a staple for sound artists; three gas masks from World War I, picked up for one of her gigs with a trio called The Cube Chicks; a floor-to-ceiling collection of LPs that could fill a record store. In the 1980s, she worked for five years at Tower Records in North Beach.”
Edinburgh City Council To Explore Minimum Wages For Fringe Festival Performers
The report will examine which conditions could be attached as a requirement of council funding at the festival to further these aims. This could result in minimum-hour contracts (as opposed to zero-hour contracts) and the living wage introduced at all council-supported venues, which include the Assembly Rooms.
Case Study: The Crash And Burn Of “Great Comet” On Broadway
“Even in a flop-prone industry, the sudden crash of the musical stands out, reflecting competing challenges for commercial theater: the benefits of star power, the hunger for diversity and the high costs of producing on Broadway. Add in Twitter, and things can get messy.”