Architect Chosen For St. Louis Museum Expansion

British architect David Chipperfield has been chosen to design a major expansion of the St. Louis Art Museum. The expansion will increase space by 40 percent. “The St. Louis Art Museum is bursting at its seams. Strategic acquisitions by the Museum and gifts from local benefactors have created a great collection that cannot be properly shown. Major works by such artists as Matisse and Picasso are confined to storage, and entire collections can only be viewed on a rotating basis. Chipperfield was chosen after a 10-month search.”

The Bionic Eye

A Scottish scientist has been “using digital camera technology to create the ‘bionic eye’. He has developed a microchip that can replicate the role played by the retina, the sensitive lining at the back of the eye that converts light into a signal that is sent to the brain. The implant would allow doctors to restore the sight of more than 800,000 people in the UK.”

Shakespeare How We Originally Heard It

London’s Globe Theatre is staging Shakespeare in its original pronunciation. “All this has a certain fascination, and, as “Troilus and Cressida” unfolds, the rolled “r”s, the elided pronouns, and the longer, tenser vowels give the audience a frisson of extra drama. The earthy regional sounds ruffle the familiar strut of Shakespeare’s eloquence and root the language more in the belly than in the larynx. As the antique idiom washes over the mostly roofless auditorium, the audience struggles to suss out the odd bouquet of sound, savoring the hints of Irish, Yorkshire, and Welsh, each with its own verbal spice.
Still, sound must also serve sense.”

Sontag’s Take On The Movies

Susan Sontag’s last writing about movies was in 1995; “in retrospect, it was her farewell to film criticism. Renunciation, along with such reverberant partners as epiphany, retraction, and reaffirmation, was one of her familiar dramatic modes. She brought a certain histrionic (i.e., Parisian) quality into American intellectual life—position-taking as existential drama—and, if you regard her seriously, the portentous turning points of her journey have to be endured. What she renounced, of course, was nothing like regular movie criticism. Sontag wrote only a dozen or so articles about film. Yet all of them were substantial, both as intellectual performance and as a challenge to conventional assumptions about movie form and routine reviewing.”

What’s Wrong With Today’s Music Conservatories

“The conservatory’s emphasis is on one overriding subject: How to survive and succeed at an audition. Much time is devoted to teaching a student to stress the tried and true and to value unchanging metrical lines above expressiveness and rubato. The best performer is the one who can play a cliche in the most reliable manner. As a result, students pursue a gingerly course. This is now so entrenched in the nation’s top schools that many of the soloists below the age of 35 I hear in concert are guilty of plodding and ciphering; they trudge through the music unscathed but without communicating its substantive meaning.”

Chicago’s Weekend Of Free Music

“Blockbuster Weekend was how the City of Chicago billed its trifecta of free performances that included concerts by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Sunday afternoon and the Lyric Opera of Chicago on Saturday night. Each event attracted blockbuster crowds — some 10,000 for the CSO and 12,000 for the Lyric, according to a city spokeswoman. Now, all the symphony and opera have to do is translate that great wave of popular enthusiasm into paying customers, and nobody will be crying deficit.”

After Katrina – Where The Artists Went

“Since Katrina slammed into this region of soggy landscapes and resolute people, Baton Rouge has become a temporary command center for businesses and planners drawing up blueprints for the area’s comeback. Many artists, on the other hand, have passed over the buttoned-down state capital and headed for laid-back Lafayette. It’s likely that hundreds, if not thousands, of musicians, artists, photographers, writers, designers and other creative talents have fled New Orleans in Katrina’s wake, both the world-famous and the not-so-famous. Some have strayed as far away as Memphis, Nashville, Houston, New York and Los Angeles.”

Understanding The Complete Webern

This thurday the UK’s Radio 3 is broadcasting the complete works of Anton Weber in order. “The timing is right. Even as recently as 20 years ago, Webern’s music was, to most folk, an arid curiosity – a period-piece belonging to a faction of early-20th-century modernism that was experimental, clandestine, even frustrated. In reality, Webern, Schoenberg and Berg were passionate individuals, seeking new paths for music as it struggled to come to terms with the suicidal excesses of 19th-century Romanticism. In this postmodern age, Webern’s insistent, challenging and single-minded voice has a renewed vigour and relevance.”