Royalties for music streamed over the internet is beginning to add up to serious money. And, unlike conventional broadcast radio, royalties are paid not to composers, but to performers and copyright holders.
Tag: 12.28.04
Sontag – An Intellectual With Style
Susan Sontag was an intellectual original. Her work “made a radical break with traditional postwar criticism in America, gleefully blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture. She advocated an aesthetic approach to the study of culture, championing style over content. She was concerned, in short, with sensation, in both meanings of the term.”
Berlin Operas Get First Director
Michael Schindhelm, currently director of Switzerland’s Basel Theater, has been apointed the first general director of “a foundation set up this year to oversee Berlin’s three opera houses. In 2003, the city threatened to merge two of the opera houses until the federal government stepped in with extra arts funding. This year, the three houses were placed under the new foundation in a move meant to enhance coordination and cut costs.”
Susan Sontag, 71
“The writer, who had suffered from leukaemia, died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Calling herself an “obsessed moralist”, Sontag was the author of 17 books and a lifelong human rights activist.”
An Obsession With English
“Why do people get so agitated about linguistic misuses and even about changes in the language? Is English in a bad state? Are things getting worse? These questions have been made topical by Lynne Truss’s bestselling Eats, Shoots & Leaves and by the spate of books (and a television show) on similar themes by authors hoping to benefit from her success.”
Romania’s HellHouse Of Contemporary Art
Romania has a new museum of contemporary art in a giant palace built by dictator Nikolai Ceausescu. “The building is monstrous, a megalomaniacal blend of baroque, neo-Gothic and modernism, sprawling over the middle of Bucharest. Its cruel facade is lined with row upon row of windows: Romanians call them “the big eye of Ceausescu”. The critic Ami Barik, meanwhile, describes the Palace as “architectural pornography … meant to exhibit the organs of power in colossal erection”. Twenty per cent of the city, including some of its oldest churches, was torn down to make way for it. Workers died in near-forced labour conditions; others are said to have been killed to protect its secrets. No wonder Bucharest’s inhabitants view the House/Palace with a respect tinged with bitterness.”