“At least one international author will not be coming to Harbourfront’s International Festival of Authors this fall as a direct result of the recent resignation of Greg Gatenby as the festival’s artistic director and the Harbourfront Reading Series. Argentinian-born author Alberto Manguel, who now lives in France, said in an interview he faxed a letter on Tuesday or Wednesday to Harbourfront officials saying his participation is off because Gatenby is no longer involved. Manguel’s decision follows the resignations of five festival board members, including three high-profile Canadian authors.”
Tag: 07.19.03
Cincinnati By The Numbers
Even with an orchestral success story like Cincinnati, the continued economic malaise has taken its toll. “Since the stock market decline, the CSO endowment has shrunk from more than $94 million to $61 million. To help make ends meet, the CSO has increased its endowment spending rate from 6 percent to 8.35 percent… Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the players’ two-year contract.”
The Museum As Amusement Park: Where Has All The Intellectual Curiosity Gone?
There was a time when science museums, children’s museums, and the like were thought of as teaching tools, as a chance to impart important details about the workings of the world into the minds of visitors, especially children. But no more. “Museums aren’t there to teach a systemic body of information in some prescribed manner, the current ideology goes. Nor, as studies show, are they very good at it — people retain very little data from their visits. Instead, museums offer a kind of neutral platform where visitors explore the drift and dimension of their own curiosity as much as they do the accumulated knowledge about a particular subject or field.”
High Priestess of Bach Dies
Rosalyn Tureck was one of the leading Bach interpreters of her generation, and a celebrated keyboardist who also embraced contemporary music, making her Carnegie Hall debut not on the piano or the harpsichord, for which she would become so well known later, but on the strange and eery electronic instrument known as the theremin. Brash and opinionated, she once snapped to a colleague, “You play it your way; I play it Bach’s way.” She passed away at her New York home this weekend, at the age of 88.