The pledge raises the total commitments to $640 million. The $50 million from Keck is the second-largest private pledge to the project, after a $150 million pledge from entertainment mogul David Geffen in 2017. Casino and hotel magnate Elaine Wynn, co-chair of LACMA’s board of trustees, in 2016 also pledged $50 million. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has authorized $125 million in taxpayer funds for construction of the new building. – Los Angeles Times
Blog
Legendary TV Exec Fred Silverman, 82
He was the only executive to creatively run CBS, ABC and NBC. Silverman’s knack for identifying hit shows in the making and programming them into memorable primetime nights led Time magazine to crown him “The Man with the Golden Gut” in 1977. – Deadline
Boris Johnson Review Of BBC Funding Will Blow A Budget Hole
The review comes at a perilous time for the BBC, with insiders and industry observers worried that the broadcaster is facing an existential crisis. As well as a hostile government, which is skeptical about the BBC’s funding model and unhappy with its coverage on Brexit, the broadcaster is dealing with a tsunami of disruption from U.S. streaming services and having to make savings £800M. Head of news and current affairs Fran Unsworth told staff this week that she can’t remember another time in her 40-year BBC career when the broadcaster has been so under threat from external forces. – Deadline
How Schoenberg Evolved Away From Tonality
Schoenberg and beauty are words that rarely occupy the same sentence. Arguably the most influential composer of all time, his fame derived from his abolition of tonality—the harmonic system of the previous centuries, in which melodies and harmonies relate to the tonic (the home) of a given key. While detractors still demonise him for having destroyed music, the largely self-taught Schoenberg saw his work as a logical evolution of tradition. Frustrated that tonality seemed exhausted and had reached its limits (in other words, what did classical music have to say after Wagner?), Schoenberg felt that he must transcend its constraints. – Standpoint
Ratmansky: A Choreographer Intensely Grounded In Music Unhooks From It
“I am discovering the possibility of the choreography coexisting with sound, maybe not being as dependent as I usually am. That opens a field I haven’t really explored. But I don’t have the courage to fully go there; it’s just testing how it feels. In some places the choreography is parallel, not connected, to the music.” – The New York Times
A Brief History Of Punctuation
Classical Greek and Latin writing didn’t use punctuation at all, or even spaces between words; that sort of thing was left to the person who’d be speaking the text. St. Isidore of Seville systematized punctuation in the seventh century, but there were only three marks. “Over the following centuries, the existing punctuation marks became increasingly differentiated in order to prevent confusion. At the same time, new marks such as the question mark … arise when a lack of clarity needs to be redressed, communication controlled and sense disambiguated, an emergency perhaps stemming from greater reliance on written diplomacy as well as the newly fashionable art of letter writing.” – History Today
It’s Beethoven’s 250th Birthday. Is There ANYTHING New To Say About Him?
How did Beethoven’s work — its harmonies, its rhetoric, its formal ideas — become such an exclusive model for what classical music should sound like? What are we going to do to give other models, both past and present, their due? How do we get past our Beethoven addiction? – San Francisco Chronicle
No Matter How Many Problems There Are With The NFL, Hordes Of People Keep Watching The Super Bowl. What Keeps Us Hooked?
“The Super Bowl isn’t just a game. It’s the halftime show; it’s the ads; it’s the chips and guac. It is sport but also music, dance, costumes, TV production and stage design — a pop culture event greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps most important, … the Super Bowl is one of the last true vestiges of an era when we all watched the same things at the same time.” Times journalists Wesley Morris, Caryn Ganz and Austin Considine discuss. – The New York Times
Should Artists Work For “Exposure” When A Museum Asks?
Artists looking to establish themselves often get requests to perform or otherwise lend their creative skills to conferences, private parties, businesses and assorted projects for the promised payment of exposure. But what does it say about the value of an artist’s work when a city’s leading arts institution does the same? – Blue Ridge Public
David Sedaris On His Sister Amy
“Movies and TV can’t capture what’s special about Amy. She’s not an actress, exactly, or a comedian, but more like someone who speaks in tongues. As opposed to myself, and just about everyone I’ve ever known, she lives completely in the moment. ‘What was that funny thing you said yesterday when we saw that old blind woman get mowed down by a skateboarder?’ I’ll ask. And she’ll have no memory of it. When Amy gets going, it’s like she’s possessed.” – Elle