“Musicians at the Minnesota Orchestra have agreed to contract concessions in the face of financial pressures on the organization. The deal saves about $4.2 million – from salary, pension reductions and frozen positions – over the remaining three years of [a] contract that expires Sept. 30, 2012.”
Tag: 08.04.09
Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center Gets $12M For Education
“The Woodruff Arts Center, which has increased its role in education in recent years, received a major boost in that effort Tuesday with the announcement of a $12 million grant from the Goizueta Foundation.”
Ethics: They’re Different For The Bosses
“Are rules made to be broken – or obeyed? Newly published research suggests your answer to that question depends largely upon whether you are mulling it over from a position of power. ‘In determining whether an act is right or wrong, the powerful focus on whether rules and principles are violated, whereas the powerless focus on the consequences,’ states [a new] study.”
Britain Working On Changes To Visa System For Performers
“Arts leaders have welcomed a report by the Home Affairs Select Committee [of Parliament] which recommends a raft of changes to the controversial points-based visa system, including the introduction of a fast track process, so that performers can enter the country at short notice in ‘exceptional emergency cases’.”
This Gives ‘My Fair Lady’ A Whole New Meaning: LA’s Center Theatre Group Developing Musical On Porn Industry
“Thank goodness there are no MPAA ratings for the live theater. A new stage musical about the San Fernando Valley’s porn industry is currently in the development phase. The production is a partnership between New York’s experimental group the Civilians and L.A.’s Center Theatre Group. The still-untitled show ‘will explore the real-life stories of the people who work in California’s pornography industry,’ according to CTG.”
Architect Charles Gwathmey Dies At 71
“Charles Gwathmey, an architect who turned his love of Modernism and passion for geometrical complexity into a series of compelling houses and sometimes controversial public buildings, died in Manhattan on Monday. … Mr. Gwathmey was part of a generation of architects who put their own aesthetic stamp on the ‘high Modernist’ style developed in the early 20th century by Le Corbusier and others.”
Children’s Laureate Lobbies For Drawing In The Classroom
Children’s laureate Anthony Browne, an author and illustrator, “is concerned that the pressure of national curriculum tests means priority is given to reading rather than drawing. He believes that the two should be prized in equal measure and any failure to promote art could lead to a shortage of talented artists in later years.”
When Opera Is A Pro-Am Enterprise
Welsh National Opera, Birmingham Opera Company, Dorset Opera, London’s Chelsea Opera Group and University College Opera, and Haslemere’s Opera South all have a history of using amateur choruses in some of their productions. They’re not the only ones. “Many of these groups have a reputation for presenting challenging or unusual repertory,” and “[a]ll of them aim higher than a good old romp through G and S.”
Ian McEwan Is Writing What He Knows: A Media Firestorm
McEwan says the protagonist of his next novel “is a Nobel prize-winning physicist who faces media attacks after he suggests that men outnumber women at the top of his profession because of inherent differences in their brains, rather than any gender discrimination. McEwan found himself under a similar kind of fire last summer, besieged by the media after he told an Italian newspaper that he ‘despise[d] Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest’.”
Netflix’s Freakishly Fast Service: How Do They Do That?
“After a period of pretty-pleasing Netflix to let me poke around its clandestine Chicago-area hub, and see what wonders await and how its ubiquitous red-enveloped packages are processed, I was given an address and a time to arrive and asked not to blab about it. … To get there, I was told to go to Carol Stream, to be there around sunrise. I imagined it was like coming upon Narnia — one stares at it awhile until the entrance becomes evident, which turned out to be sort of true.”