Category: people

A collection of letters between Oscar Wilde and an Oxford University student are to go on display at the Morgan Library and Museum. The collection’s “whereabouts were unknown to scholars for half a century.”

“Dorothea Rabkin, who with her husband built a collection of American folk art noted for the whirligigs and other sculptures made by anonymous carvers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, died on Nov. 25 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.”

The venerable composer is being feted this week by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whose music director is a longtime Carter supporter. In an extended interview, Carter remembers his life and times in Boston’s community of composers, musicologists, and music schools, and takes a few digs at Harvard along the way…

On his music and its reputation for complexity: “I’m not sure it’s complex. Contrapuntal music always has many lines coming together. What you’re hearing you should not analyze in detail – you’re hearing the total effect. This is not very different from classics, like Mozart… It may sound like some random piece of writing, but it isn’t at all.”
And: “To put it bluntly, when my second quartet was played here at Harvard, my old teacher Walter Piston said to me, ‘you know, if I knew what it sounded like, I would have put the four players in separate rooms and shut the doors.'”

Toni Morrison’s latest novel may be set in the 17th century, but the broader questions it probes are informed by the experiences of countless generations of black Americans. And Morrison’s writing process seems particularly character-driven, as if the subjects of her work are driving her understanding of the plot, rather than the other way around.

MacArthur laureate Alex Ross, whose book The Rest Is Noise, a history of classical music in the 20th century, won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, has just received the £10,000 Guardian First Book Award. “The chair of the judging panel, Guardian literary editor Claire Armistead, said: ‘In some quarters this book has been seen as not having a popular appeal. Our prize – which, uniquely, relies on readers’ groups in the early stages of judging – proves that, on the contrary, there is a huge appetite among readers for clear, serious but accessible books.'”

“It wasn’t easy to take a good photograph of Caldwell, who neglected her appearance and often weighed 300 pounds. But as these two volumes demonstrate, it’s even harder to get a clear image of Caldwell’s personality, her legacy, and whatever it was that drove her to become one of the most respected, and frustrating, opera leaders in America.”

“Odetta, 77, the folk and blues singer whose renditions of civil rights anthems accompanied historic events and made history themselves, died last night in New York. Afflicted for years with heart and lung ailments, she died at Lenox Hill Hospital, which she had entered at the end of October for treatment of kidney failure, according to her manager, Douglas Yeager.”

“Thirty years after he fled the U.S. to avoid sentencing on child molestation charges, Academy Award-winning director Roman Polanski has filed a formal request to have the case dismissed.” His attorneys cited alleged misconduct by the presiding judge and district attorney’s office, as revealed in the HBO documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.