Arts Funding In Decline

Arts funding across America is declining – in some states being cut altogether. “Although national state arts funding for fiscal year 2004 won’t be known until current legislative sessions conclude, it is almost sure to be less than the $354 million in 2003, which was already 20.8 percent smaller than the high of $447 million in 2001.”

Was Degas The Transformer Of Modern Dance?

“The importance of photography for Degas, a decades-old theme in scholarship about the artist, pops up again here. So, more surprisingly, does the prospect of Degas as an unwitting forefather of experimental dance of the 1960s and `70s. Degas, a political reactionary, certainly would have disavowed any such kinship. But his dance pictures foreshadow the way the work of Yvonne Rainer, the young Twyla Tharp, and their New York contemporaries would blend formal and informal movement almost a century later.”

Acting Retreat Becomes Historical Center

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne werre America’s greatest theatre couple. In the early 1900s the Lunts built an estate in Wisconsin as a retreat, “filling it with treasures of antiques and decorative arts, and luring such luminaries as Laurence Olivier and Noel Coward to rest here outside the spotlights’ glare. Now it has joined the ranks of Wisconsin’s historic home-museums. Upwards of 20,000 visitors a year are expected to tour the Lunts’ estate, which has been turned into a world-class center for theater history and arts.

Music That Makes You Move

John Adams on why is music is good for dancing: “I feel that what makes my music different from a lot of contemporary or avant-garde work is that there is always a sense of the body in it. I think that was largely missing in so much of the cerebral contemporary music that started with Schoenberg and was so pervasive from the 60’s until the 80’s. I never had any interest in that kind of composition; I always conceived of music as something that comes from the physical being, from one’s body.”

A Good Reason To Tour

“For most of the last two weeks, North Dakota’s major cities, and nooks and crannies all around, resonated to the strains of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington and its individual members. The visit was part of the orchestra’s American Residencies program, which has so far consisted of 11 tours to 12 different states over a dozen years.”

The New New Composing

A new music learning program – a toy – teaches kids about composing music. “Hyperscore, the composing portion of Tod Machover’s ‘Toy Symphony’ trinity, is a sophisticated musical tool in the guise of a simple computer game. Children position drops of sound and colored lines on the screen, building up layers and length into a texture that is as complex as they can manage. It is not, however, just a matter of drawing a picture and getting a pretty tune…”

What Makes A Great Piano?

“Yes, pianists grouse that Steinways are not what they used to be. Yes, pianists ascribe whatever faults they found in whatever Steinway they just played to every Steinway. And no, the majority would never play anything but. Steinway knows all this. Every new piano that rolls out of the Steinway & Sons factory — in Astoria, Queens, next to oil tanks that block the view of the Rikers Island jails — is an attempt to refute the notion that the only good Steinway is an old Steinway.”

MPR’s New Take On Contemporary Music

MPR’s new “American Mavericks” series explores contemporary music. “In some ways as daring as the composers it brings to life, the show departs from the standard classical-radio recipe, using sound effects from train whistles to ocean waves to shrieking cats. It plays rock and art music in the same episode. It deftly moves music from background to foreground and back again. It tells complicated stories with a breezy, youthful irreverence underpinned by airtight research and writing, courtesy of Village Voice music critic Kyle Gann.”

Wanted: Books In Translation

How come there are so few translations of books by Europeans in UK bookstores? Britain’s Minister for Europe tries to answer the question. “It is weird that in the age of globalisation, we are more provincial and parochial than ever. Like the eager young Marxist who decided to learn Russian to read Karl Marx in the original we tend to get foreign wrong as often as right. Still, the best way into any country is to read one of its books.”