Why Are Haunted Houses Always Big Old Victorian Mansions?

“Head to your local Halloween haunted house or watch a horror movie, and you’ll probably see a creepy Victorian structure that simply exudes terror. But as art historian Sarah Burns points out, in the 1870s, Victorian houses were just … houses. ‘Half a century later, however,’ she writes, ‘that very same style had become a signifier of terror, death, and decay.’ When did we start to associate these houses with creepiness?” Erin Blakemore explains.

Trifonov, Wolfe, Costanzo, JACK Quartet Win Musical America’s Awards For 2019

The 27-year-old pianist Daniil Trifonov was named Artist of the Year, while Julia Wolfe took Composer of the Year honors. Carlos Miguel Prieto, music director of the Louisiana Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, and the DC-based Orchestra of the Americas, is Conductor of the Year. Vocalist of the Year is countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, and the JACK Quartet is Ensemble of the Year.

A Fascinating Test: An Algorithm That Can Predict Artistic Success?

The idea is simple. Within these algorithms, notes are treated like the DNA of music. It all starts with an initial population of ‘songs’– each a random jumble of notes stitched together. Over many generations, the algorithm breeds from the songs, finding and rewarding ‘beautiful’ features within the music to breed ‘better’ and ‘better’ compositions as time goes on. I say ‘beautiful’ and ‘better’, but – of course – as we already know, there’s no way to decide what either of those words mean definitively. The algorithm can create poems and paintings as well as music, but – still – all it has to go on is a measure of similarity to whatever has gone before.

Rap Is A Russian Art, Just Like Ballet, Says Russia’s Culture Minister

Vladimir Medinsky told a room full of worthies at an Aspen/Davos-type gathering in Sochi, “Soon we’ll be saying that rap is Russian art. Of course, it was born somewhere in America, but its flourishing occurred with us, of course.” Just like ballet. Then Medinsky pronounced that the very first rapper was, in fact, early Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

At Pompeii, Archaeologists Uncover New Room Of Beautifully Preserved Frescoes

The room is a lararium (household shrine), 16 feet by 12 feet, with an altar, a small raised pool, the remains of a garden, and brightly colored wall paintings that “include two serpents, a wild boar fighting unidentified creatures against a blood-red backdrop, and a mysterious man with the head of a dog that may have been inspired by the Egyptian god Anubis.”

New Evidence Changes Scholars’ Understanding Of The Eruption That Buried Pompeii

Until now, the consensus was that the fateful explosion of Mount Vesuvius happened on August 24, 79 CE — this notwithstanding the presence amid Pompeii’s ruins of warm-weather clothing and the remains of autumn fruit. Now excavators have uncovered graffiti with the date October 17. Archaeologist Kristina Killgrove explains why it’s almost certain that this graffiti is from just before the eruption and not a prior year, and why the particular date of the catastrophe matters.