The new Harry Potter book is available in dozens of languages, but J.K. Rowling and her publisher appear to have forgotten to market to one key demographic: technogeeks. The lack of an officially sanctioned eBook version of Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince infuriated some readers, and a pirated version of the book sprang up within hours on BitTorrent, thanks to an impressively coordinated effort by hundreds of readers.
Tag: 07.21.05
Get Ready To Pay For Your Surfing
At the moment, the internet is a consumer’s paradise, with endless mountains of information and entertainment available to anyone with a connection, absolutely free of charge. But will all that content really stay free? Not likely, say some observers. “The only thing slowing down the move away from free content is the sorry state of micro-transactional software. Once all the bugs are worked out, the free internet gateway in which publications generate revenue from ads will slowly morph into another, more-lucrative business model: gated content.”
China’s Next Generation Of Classical Stars
As China becomes an ever-more-important player on the world stage, the clash between its relatively closed and controlled Communist society and its desire to compete with Western countries on every front possible is leading to some incongruous situations. Case in point: the rise of China’s stable of young classical musicians, bred almost from birth to be the next generation of superstars. On the one hand, the cultural push is giving rise to some phenomenal talents who might otherwise never have had the opportunity to learn the musical craft. On the other hand, some Europeans have been dismayed by the Chinese approach, claiming that children deprived of a normal childhood in favor of intense study in a single area will not grow into well-rounded musicians.
Marin Makes Peace
Before signing her contract as the Baltimore Symphony’s next music director, Marin Alsop spent some time with the orchestra’s musicians in an attempt to put aside any hard feelings and articulate her artistic vision for the ensemble. The musicians, in return, assured Alsop that they would “always give [her] 110%.” Meanwhile, various BSO board members have begun to publicly explain their decision to appoint a music director opposed by 90% of the orchestra’s players, and Alsop herself has described the controversy, which seems to have been about principle as much as personality, as “a warning light about other issues the musicians have that need to be addressed.”
No One Won This Dust-Up
Richard Dyer says that there’s plenty of blame to go around in the Baltimore mess. “At this point, no one should be patting themselves on the back except perhaps Alsop, the innocent bystander/victim in an ugly management-vs.-musician conflict. The management and board should never have let the news out before it had all the ducks lined up. And once the announcement was made, the players should not have made a public issue of their dissatisfaction. What possible purpose could this serve?”
SF Opera Chief Heads To Berlin
“San Francisco Opera General Director Pamela Rosenberg will return to Germany next year to become intendant, or administrative director, of the Berlin Philharmonic. In making the move, Rosenberg, 60, whose term at the Opera ends Dec. 31, will be going back to the country that has been her home and base of operations for most of her career. Although she was born and raised in California, her children and grandchildren live in Germany… Rosenberg’s appointment in Berlin comes as a surprise. She has little or no experience in the orchestral world, having spent her career in opera. And for an administrator who has always taken a hands-on role in artistic decisions, Rosenberg’s new job will involve a much higher degree of fund raising and financial oversight.”
Why Don’t We Value Talent?
“Nowadays, if someone is vastly more talented than us, we don’t congratulate them – we envy them and resent their success. It seems we don’t want heroes we can admire, so much as heroes we can identify with. We want to think we could be like them, and so we make sure to select heroes that are like us. This is the real reason for the astonishing rise of reality TV. We allow halfwits to become celebrities precisely because there is no great gap separating them from us. We can’t bear the idea that some people might be better than us, so much better that we could never be like them, no matter how hard we tried. That upsets our democratic ethos, our belief that all people are born equal. But raw talent is not distributed equally…
A Powerhouse Principal
Svetlana Zakharova, now 26 and a principal dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, based in Moscow, is a remarkable onstage force. For seven years, Ms. Zakharova was the brilliant young face of the Kirov Ballet, in St. Petersburg, where she spent one year in the corps before being promoted to principal dancer; in 2003, she surprised the dance world by defecting to the Bolshoi.”
Why Reading Aloud Is So Compelling
What I notice as I sit listening with children is how much harder they concentrate on a heard story than a seen one. They can’t cheat and follow the pictures to make sense of it, so they listen acutely. They ask questions, too: always relevant, though sometimes tangential. You can almost see their brains working.