San Antonio Symphony Music Director Sebastian Lang-Lessing: Orchestras After The Virus

“I’m very convinced that people after this are more hungry for intellectual and artistic inspiration than before. So the wrong approach, I think, is to do a populist approach to the arts industry and just play happy tunes that everybody wants to hear and nothing profound. I think that would be the wrong approach. I think it should be the extreme opposite. I think now we can challenge our audience more than before. That’s my gut feeling. And I’m not alone with that.” – San Antonio Express News

How Luminato Scrambled To Reinvent Into A Virtual Festival

“It’s not a festival in the same way a live festival is, since the conditions are completely different, our ability to present work in so many of the ways we normally do is nonexistent, our audiences can’t come out and be with us in public…I mean, most of the people who work at the festival have long careers in performing arts. We’re used to creating work for crowds of people to experience in close quarters. But it didn’t feel right to not do anything.” – Broadway World

How Museums Can Take Advantage Of Lockdown

Museums have an opportunity to make a contribution to civic discourse that plays to their intrinsic strengths. It is obvious that many of our political and civic institutions have failed in the promotion of the interests of humanity and the planet. We are entering a period where questioning the status quo ante and its values and priorities is of existential importance. – The Art Newspaper

Unions Set Conditions For Reopening Theatres. But It’s Unlikely To Happen Anytime Soon

“Clearly, we’re not bringing anybody back to work anytime soon in person, based on those guidelines,” Aurora Managing Director Julie Saltzman Kellner told The Chronicle by phone. “To be honest, we weren’t anyways. They are really similar to the guidelines we had set out for ourselves, in terms of when we imagined we could produce again.” – San Francisco Chronicle

Here Are Hollywood’s New Production Rules For Shooting During Pandemic

The instructions detail how to deal with a confirmed case of COVID-19 on a set. Anyone in the cast or crew that was within six feet of the infected person for more than 15 minutes may need to be quarantined, potentially bringing a complete halt to filming. The name of the ill employee must not be disclosed, according to the rules. Physical distancing will be required, which will be a challenge for crowded sets. – Los Angeles Times

Sonny Rollins On Surviving A Pandemic

“This is O.K. for me because I am trying to live in a different world, besides the world of the illness. I’m trying to live in a world of the spirit wherein I am concentrating on things such as the golden rule. This is my big thing; I am trying to live by it. The main thing is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Sure, everybody knows it, but nobody lives by it. We live in a world where it’s about “I’ve gotta get mine, and—too bad for you—I’ve gotta get mine first.” – The New Yorker

#TakeTwoKnees And The Art Of Transforming Familiar Music In Troubled Times

Anthony McGill, New York Philharmonic principal clarinetist, launched a new mini-genre of musical protest on May 28 when he tweeted a video of himself playing “America the Beautiful,” transposed into a minor key, in honor of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and “the struggle for justice and decency.” David Patrick Stearns surveys some #TakeTwoKnees responses and some similar musical repurposings from earlier years — from Leonard Bernstein’s famous Beethoven 9th at the fallen Berlin Wall to Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock to Judy Garland on live TV transforming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” into a funeral march for JFK. – WQXR (New York City)