“No Sondheim song comes easy to me. You depend on Rodgers and Hart for that. Those songs have easy brilliance. Stephen Sondheim gives you complicated brilliance. But once you get him, you got him. He makes you think a little bit. But those hours in a rehearsal room learning a song – those hours are rough.”
Tag: 04.16.10
Survey: Foundation Funding Fell 8.4% In 2009
It was “the largest decline ever tracked by the Foundation Center. Grants made by the nation’s 75,000 foundations fell to $42.9 billion from $46.8 billion in 2008. The drop is a huge contrast to giving in 2008, when grants actually rose by about 2.8% over 2007 levels.”
National Gallery Puts Its Forgeries On View
“The gallery’s mistaken acquisitions have at times paid off: some paintings thought to have been by unknown artists or copies of genuine works have since turned out to be the real thing, created by the hand of the greatest Master Painters. The downgraded paintings, do, however, outnumber the upgraded ones.”
France As Melting Pot? Musically, Yes.
“France has become a center of stylistic blending. They do it so well in part because it resonates with their cultural history, but also because the current wave of immigration from Africa has produced a conflictual combination of obsessive anxiety and fascination. … In French pop one hears what France could become if it got over its hysteria about immigrants.”
Needed: A Reading Revolution For The Arab World
“The latest winner of the International prize for Arabic fiction – the “Arabic Booker” – puts Arab countries’ censorship in the spotlight.”
Tighter Economy Finds Museums Digging Deeper Into Their Storerooms
“As museums around the country confront tight budgets and shrunken endowments, many are turning to a tactic well-suited to challenging economic times. They’re cutting back on costly exhibits that travel among several venues and involve complicated art loans. Instead, they’re dusting off the works they already have.”
Music Under The Volcano – How Ash Is Disrupting Classical Music
“Travel disruptions from Europe’s volcanic ash problem have brought a heavy measure of turmoil to the classical music world. More than in many other fields, its practitioners — conductors, singers, pianists and other instrumentalists — depend on plane flights.”
Is There An Art Market Blacklist?
“At its heart, the $8 million suit is a fairly ordinary contract dispute about confidentiality agreements and sales promises. But the details of the disagreement have provided a rare view into a normally very private world of high-end art selling in which membership rules, responsibilities, rewards and reprisals can be so complex and changeable that even art world veterans say they sometimes struggle to decode them.”
Embattled Aspen Music Festival Head Faces Further Trials
“In an interview with The Aspen Times on Thursday afternoon, [Alan] Fletcher said that a meeting of festival trustees and faculty is likely to be held in around two weeks’ time, at which a vote will be proposed to weigh in on whether Fletcher should continue in the position he has held since early 2006.”
Pulitzer-winning Cartoonist Gets iPhone App Reconsideration
“After Mark Fiore received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning — and after he mentioned his app’s rejection in an article published on niemanlab.org on Thursday — he was encouraged by Apple to resubmit it. Mr. Fiore did so on Friday morning and is awaiting a response.”