A History Of The Toy Piano As Serious Concert Instrument

“Even now, 70+ years since John Cage’s seminal Suite for Toy Piano from 1948, the toy piano still feels like Duchamp’s upside-down urinal (Fountain): out of place on stage, it elicits giggles and scoffs, is the star of the show, and at least promises a memorable experience, musical and otherwise.” Yet now there’s an entire concert repertory for the little contraption. – NewMusicBox

Who’s Giving: Small And Medium Donators Are Disappearing

Big donors have grown and small/medium-size donors have gone away. Empirically, this does not seem to have hurt total giving much in the recent past. However, what happens in the long run? Will bigger and bigger donors continue to bail out philanthropy? Will the elimination of the tax deduction for most former tax itemizers continue to erode household giving? – NonProfit Quarterly

How Did Tony Kushner Try To Fix His Problematic First Play? By Writing Himself Into It

“For the revival of his first professionally produced play, A Bright Room Called Day, open now at New York’s Public Theater, Kushner has in classic Kushnerian style wildly rewritten the script … In so doing, he’s created an impossible play that circles two impossible problems — how the left could have responded to the rise of Hitler, and how art can respond to our present moment — and offers no easy solutions.” – Slate

Adam Peiperl, Known For Kinetic Light Sculptures, Dead At 84

“From [his chemistry] studies came an idea that he could translate science into art by using polarized light to bring rainbow colors out of transparent plastic shapes. In the late 1960s he used this process to create kinetic, or moving, sculptures. … Over the next 50 years, Mr. Peiperl’s kinetic art would be displayed at the Hirshhorn, Kreeger and other galleries in Washington and at art spaces in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and in Europe.” – The Washington Post

Why Vinyl Records Are Cool Again (And Getting More Expensive)

For some, buying records is no longer about owning the same piece of music as everyone else but owning a version of it that few others have. It reflects a change in contemporary relationships to owning music, says Sevier. “Owning a limited or special edition is doubling down on the closeness you feel to an album or artist. You can’t display your streaming history like a trophy.” – The Guardian

Cultural Appropriation? Let’s Understand Exactly What It Is

Increasingly there’s this repeated story in our country where actually a whole lot of people don’t get to profit off of the creative insights that they have. That is totally racially structured. That is totally class-structured. So this connection between race and wealth that I’m trying to establish is that the rules of who gets to profit from what they make are totally unequal. We can see this in [areas] that seem to be as frivolous as the makeup you put on your face or the clothes you put on your body. But it all trickles from this initial system of inequality. – Vox

Dilbert Creator Proposes “Mulligans” For A Kinder Internet

He lays out two such rules in his new book, Loserthink. His first proposal, which he calls the “48-hour rule,” states that everyone should be given a grace period of a couple of days to retract any controversial statement they’ve made, no questions asked. “We live in a better world if we accept people’s clarifications and we accept their apologies, no matter whether we think—internally—it’s insincere,” he says. His other idea is the “20-year rule,” which states that everyone should be automatically forgiven for any mistakes they made more than two decades ago—with the exception of certain serious crimes. – Wired