Anne Midgette: “No figure in classical music is more iconic than the conductor, or more misunderstood. … No job in music is harder to quantify, and no job is, when it’s done well, more important. So here’s a brief look at the function of the conductor.” – The Washington Post
Blog
Abstract Expressionist Painter Mary Abbott Dead At 98
“[She] painted bold, colorful works, often inspired by nature or music, and traveled in the same circles as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other artists who were redefining painting in the years after World War II. … [But her] vivid description [of Pollock] conveys what women trying to make a name for themselves in that world were facing.” – The New York Times
Minneapolis Institute Of Art Selects Its New Director
“The Minneapolis Institute of Art named an art expert with a entrepreneurial past Tuesday as its next director and president: Katherine Luber, of the San Antonio Museum of Art. … Luber, who has led the San Antonio institution for eight years, possesses not only a Ph.D. in art history but an M.B.A. and experience launching an organic spice company.” – The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
What Paul Badura-Skoda Did For Classical Piano
Richard Brody: “Though he didn’t have the most immediately recognizable or ravishing sound at the keyboard, he succeeded in revising, by way of scholarly passion, the very basis for pianistic sound and beauty — and, for that matter, the physical relationship of pianists to their instruments.” – The New Yorker
Curious: LA Phil Names A New Executive Director But He Declines To Talk About It
The orchestra names Chad Smith new chief executive of the orchestra, succeeding Simon Woods. “In a sign of how awkward the upheaval has been, and how quickly the change of leadership was put into place, Mr. Smith declined to be interviewed, which is rare for the incoming chief executive of a major orchestra.” – The New York Times
Zadie Smith: On Reconsidering Fiction
What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not “cultural appropriation” but rather “interpersonal voyeurism” or “profound-other-fascination” or even “cross-epidermal reanimation”? – New York Review of Books
Study: Inventors Are More Productive When They’re Geographically Clustered
Inventors are significantly more productive when they are working in larger geographic clusters. The study finds that when inventors move from a smaller to a large cluster, they experience increases in both the number of patents they generate and the impact of those patents, based on their subsequent citations. – CityLab
Prose Poetry: So If Everything Is A Poem, Then Nothing Is
It’s the insiders—the poets, the tenured—who like to “problematize” poetry and wield their whatabouts. The “prose poem” is one of the most abiding whatabouts. It remains an outlier, a problem. – The Walrus
The Tech Revolution Was Supposed To Be Fun. So What Happened?
For many years, Silicon Valley and the machines that came out of it were presented as personally, economically, and socially transformative, agents of revolution at both the level of the individual and the whole social order. They were democratizing, uncontrolled, anarchic, and new. Most of all, they were supposed to be fun—to open up a space of play and freedom. How is it, then, that just a few decades in, we find ourselves trapped in a dreary spectacle that seems to replicate the old patterns of exploitation and dominion in almost every sphere, but with a creepy new intimacy? – The New Republic
What Effect Do Morals Have On Our Political Leanings?
Peter Ditto created a survey website to learn to what extent different moral frameworks shape outlooks on political questions, and indeed the greater world. His findings were compelling, but likely unsurprising if you’ve ever had an irreconcilable political squabble at the dinner table: it’s our moral filters, not facts or rational thinking, that mould our ideological outlooks. – Aeon