Category: people

“Robert Lissauer, a music historian whose vast encyclopedia of American popular song, considered the definitive reference book in the field, settled innumerable arguments and started innumerable others, died yesterday… The first edition of Lissauer’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music in America listed more than 19,000 songs, from Aaron Loves Angela to Zsa Zsa.“

Prominent operatic and theatrical director Jonathan Miller is taking shots at the audiences at large venues such as London’s Royal Opera House, saying that “when people pay £150 a seat to see a production funded by the state, there is a sort of desire to see, reflected from the stage, an image of their own wealth.” Miller prefers small theaters packed with devotees, where “you don’t feel like you are waiting for the interval to go to the crush bar where you’ve ordered very grand drinks, and you bear your wife there like an ornamental hawk on your wrist. That’s when I hate the arts. When it’s enjoyed by a group of people who are there to display their privilege.”

Benjamin Britten’s homosexuality was either the most important factor in his life, or completely irrelevant to his career as a composer, depending on which historian is doing the talking. A new collection of Britten’s letters purports to say the latter, and to “rescue” Britten’s legacy from the clutches of historians bent on making him “the gay composer.” But when scholarship starts with an agenda, it usually winds up leaving out a fact or two…

Daniel Libeskind, master planner for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, “has been baptized, metaphorically, in the hellfire of New York politics and architecture and emerged, well, slightly singed. But he’s still ebullient, burbling about the strength of democracy and the value of compromise.”

It was big news when the first volume of legendary singer Bob Dylan’s memoirs were released earlier this week. But the way some readers (and reviewers) are reacting, you’d think that a deity had descended from the clouds and chiseled the book onto stone tablets. “Dylan is, beyond question, a seriously remarkable songwriter. He brought – not alone, but with unique success – the seriousness and jokiness of a poet to popular music… [But the] Dylan priesthood serves a cult of worshippers obsessed with every scratchy bootleg; every relic; every word, or touch, or bit of blood, or piece of his hair or his clothes. Honestly. They’re worse than Grateful Dead fans.”

A new collection of writings by Mark Rothko is casting new light on the professional life and personal tragedy of the artist. “It reflects the author’s intense intellectual curiosity and ambition, as well as a polemical streak. Though Rothko never directly refers to his own art, or even acknowledges that he is a painter, the book reveals something of his life at the time.”

The board of Kansas City’s American Jazz Museum is considering moving the remains of the legendary Charlie “Bird” Parker to a new site in the city’s historic 18th and Vine District. At the moment, Parker’s remains are housed at a local cemetery where a recent trash-dumping scandal caused the museum to consider the move to a more prominent location.

With a newly released set of recordings, contemporary listeners can — and contemporary performance artists should — experience black vaudevillian Bert Williams. “Like so many vaudeville artists, Williams made few film appearances. We might also know his work better if he hadn’t spent most of his career performing in blackface. Blackface has become theater’s equivalent of the mark of Cain. It’s a hard tradition to live with: there’s so much cruelty and shame there. But blackface comedy produced some superb artists.”

New scientific research has concluded that members of the Medici family, which is popularly cited as having funded much of the Italian renaissance, did not kill each other in a bloody slaughter, as had been rumored for centuries. In fact, researchers now say that the allegations that four members of the Medici clan ran each other through with swords and daggers are nothing more than fantasy stories spread by jealous rivals. “Malaria is the most likely cause of death for all four members of the family.”

“Botox hits the headlines these days chiefly as a sort of fashion accessory – the celebrities’ wrinkle-remover. But in the case of the veteran American pianist Leon Fleisher, its effectiveness in treating muscular contraction has given him back the use of his right hand, out of action for more than three decades… Fleisher has now teamed up with the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation to launch his Freedom to Play campaign, aimed at helping musicians – some 10,000, says Fleisher – who suffer from the complaint, either in the hands or, in the case of wind players, the mouth.”