Blog

Adventures In Choral Singing From A Safe Distance

Over the last few months, over 270,000 choirs nationwide have been trying to figure out how to move forward. While making a high quality musical product is the common call for any music ensemble, the pandemic has made it clear that it is just as much the MEANS rather as it is the ENDS that is the raison d’être for many choirs that makes the choral experience so widely popular. The question becomes not only, ‘how do we make a quality musical product?’ But, ‘how can we continue to have meaningful musical and social experiences?’. For music educators, there are existential questions about what the intended learning outcomes are for the choral classroom and if they can be achieved without singing in the same room at all. – NewMusicBox

Virtual Theatre Is Changing The Notion Of Theatre

Given social-distancing protocols that prohibit physical gatherings, theatre makers have responded creatively to the COVID-19 pandemic by turning to online, digital and lo-fi or “non-embodied” modes of performance that use radio and phone. This change in how to perform theatre has required a reconsideration of longstanding ideas of what it means to be a theatre audience member: How has access to theatre changed? What etiquette is expected? How have ideas of privacy and intimacy shifted? – The Conversation

Aristotle Defended Slavery and thought Women Were Inferior. Cancel Him?

If cancellation is removal from a position of prominence on the basis of an ideological crime, it might appear that there is a case to be made for canceling Aristotle. He has much prominence: Thousands of years after his death, his ethical works continue to be taught as part of the basic philosophy curriculum offered in colleges and universities around the world. – The New York Times

Gunman Frees Hostages After Ukraine’s President Endorses ‘Earthlings’

A 44-year-old “animal rights activist” named Maksim Krivosh, who recently finished a prison term for fraud and weapons charges, ended a 12-hour standoff and released 13 hostages in the city of Lutsk after President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly endorsed a documentary about industry’s use and abuse of animals titled Earthlings and narrated by Joaquin Phoenix. – BBC

Hollywood Releases Its Movies In US First. Rest Of The World Is Waiting As Its Theatres Reopen

Reasons for synchronising release dates globally, such as minimising piracy and coordinating marketing, hardly seem like priorities given present circumstances. The US is still the largest single cinema market, but in 2018 it made up just 27% of the global box office. The longer the “America-first” principle remains, the worse things get for everyone: cinemas and related businesses, Hollywood itself and moviegoers – whose expectations for Tenet are now so sky-high, the movie will have to singlehandedly cure the coronavirus to live up to the hype. – The Guardian

Christopher Dickey, Journalist And Memoirist, Dead At 68

“A foreign correspondent who wrote books about terrorism and international intrigue” — he worked at The Washington Post and Newsweek for many years and at his death was world news editor of The Daily Beast — “but who was perhaps best known for a revealing memoir about his tortured relationship with his father, the renowned poet and novelist James Dickey.” – The Washington Post