“The German-Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel has been hospitalised in the western German city of Duisburg after a taking ill ahead of a concert he was due to conduct, the Düsseldorf Opera, where he works, said Wednesday.” Kagel is a respected composer of cutting-edge electronic music, and is credited with doing much to bridge the gap between traditional “classical” music and electronica. He also has a sense of humor, having once composed a work for chamber orchestra, titled Finale, in which the conductor is instructed to fake a heart attack and “die” on the stage.
Tag: 10.02.03
Domingo Falls Ill During Performance
“Tenor Plácido Domingo left the stage of the Vienna State Opera this evening after apparently falling ill during the second act of Giordano’s Fedora, but later returned to finish his performance.”
Texas Mayor Backs Off Slashing Public Art Program
Last week, Fort Worth’s mayor Mike Moncrief suggested axing his city’s public art program. But in the face of opposition from his city council, he’s backed off the idea. “This was an appropriate discussion to have. But we need to move forward and close the debate on public art funding.”
Fuzzy Thinking (No, Really, It’s Good)
“Traditionally, logicians have made a stark distinction between truthhood and falsity. A statement was considered to be either true (given a truth value of one) or false (a value of zero). In the 1960s, Lotfi Zadeh of the University of California at Berkeley came up with the catchy innovation of ‘fuzzy logic’. In this system, things could be sort-of true, or only partially false. A ‘truth value’ of 0.5 meant that a statement was half-true, and so forth.
The Portable Musician
“Working on the go has become standard operating procedure in the music industry. Times have changed: Twenty years ago, a studio was the only place where professional recordings could be made; even five years ago, desktop computers were just starting to get enough horsepower to make great records. Today, a laptop offers plenty of power to make a great-sounding track – and that portability is changing the way music is made.”
Movie Westerns – R.I.P.?
The movie western is 100 years old. But it’s not in good shape. “There hasn’t been a mainstream Western in eight years and no successful Western since Clint Eastwood’s revisionist epic Unforgiven appeared in 1992. For anyone who as a child was enthralled by Gary Cooper in High Noon or John Wayne in one of a dozen great movies (Red River, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Searchers) this has been a sad, even mournful, state of affairs.”
Celebrity Trumps Politics
Arnold Schwarzenegger has brought the big Hollywood machine approach to dealing with the media to politics. Not that the movies and politics haven’t been keeping time together for some time. But this is a whole new level. “If Schwarzenegger wins, he will have done so by studiously and stealthily avoiding the traditional news media, supplanting newspaper interviews with softball entertainment TV appearances along the way.”
Broadway Gets Into Gear
The fall season on Broadway is a crowded one. And advance box office is looking good too…
The Blues – Now For The Facts
The Martin Scorcese blues documentary project currently running on PBS is a riff on the music, but short on the basic facts. So a radio series that looks at the blues from a more clinical chronological perspective was put together. “The film teams knew that once the films aired there would be an outcry because they’re not traditional documentary. There was a feeling that there was a need for that kind of content. So the folks who put the project together – Scorsese and the Seattle-based Experience Music Project – settled into a 13-part documentary that would be a true chronological documentary on what is the blues.”
Remembering Vladimir Horowitz
In the last three years of pianist Vladimir Horowitz’s life, he was forever being labeled the last Romantic virtuoso. “As a younger generation of cooler-headed, more intellectual pianists came to the fore, Horowitz came to be regarded as a lovable dinosaur. The truth, as demonstrated by an outpouring of Horowitz films and CD’s re-released in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth, is that he was that rare artist who sums up nothing but himself.”