Category: people

For 28 years David White has been executive director of Dance Theater Workshop in New York and “one of the movers and shakers” in the dance world. There’s not much he’s set out to accomplish along the way to producing 1000 or so artists that he has been unable to do. Now, at age 55, he’s leaving New York for St. Paul, Minnesota…

John Adams is the classical music’s star composer. “While working within classical conventions, Adams has done more than anyone to smudge the lines between rock, jazz and classical. His music used to be called crossover or minimalist – intended more as insult than as technical analysis. Now such epithets are outmoded, thanks in part to his own willingness to write music with direct appeal, not generally a habit among avant-garde composers in the late 1970s when he started. Tunes then were on a par with antimacassars or lace doilies: redundant and declasse, you simply didn’t. Adams reminded us: you could and did. Critics who sucked in their cheeks at the blatant melodies of his best-known work, the 1987 opera Nixon in China, now sheepishly concede that it is a modern masterpiece.”

Let’s say you’re an old jazzer who just happened to notice that a record you released in 1961 was just reissued on CD, and you haven’t seen a dime, or even heard from the record company. Or maybe you’re the artist behind that great ’80s dance track that never catapulted you to stardom, but which keeps showing up on those compilations they sell on TV. Who do you call? Meet Jon Hichborn, the Royalty Hunter. “In an industry that treats discarded talent like spoiled milk, Hichborn is an anomaly. He works to get artists royalties they are owed. He doesn’t care if you’re a one-hit wonder or dead bluesman. Just as long as you feel you’ve been cheated.”

Placido Domingo has been awarded an honorary music degree from Oxford University. Oxford chancellor Chris Patten said to Domingo, in Latin: “You are the darling of audiences, a champion of music, the Orpheus of the age.”

“Uris died Saturday of natural causes at his home on New York’s Shelter Island, photographer Jill Uris said from her home in Aspen, Colo. Energetic and unafraid, the author was as much an adventurer as a writer, traveling tirelessly and sometimes risking his life. In researching `Exodus,’ he logged thousands of miles and ended up reporting on the 1956 conflict in the Middle East.”

“At 55, Mikhail Baryshnikov plies his trade with wonder, grace and more than a touch of genius. He is not so much fighting the effect of time as he is miraculously making time his ally: The man looks almost as beautiful now as he did a generation ago, and his charisma grows with the passing decades. No one holds the stage with as much ease and command.”

“When Arthur D. Murphy, the dean of box office reporting, died Monday, he left a legacy that has exploded far beyond anything he anticipated or wanted. He was the first to analyze and research studio box office grosses when he worked as a writer for the entertainment trade newspaper Variety. Based on extensive calculation, Murphy created economic indicators and began writing the monthly Variety Box Office Index as a measure of film performance. But not unlike Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, Murphy’s meticulous analysis of hard numbers has mutated into a wild-horse-race story.”

Dana Gioia turned down the Bush administration when they first asked him to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. The second time he said yes. “It sounds terribly Jimmy Stewart, but I guess I’m a terribly Jimmy Stewart kind of guy. I felt a certain duty to put aside my own artistic career for however many years and try to rebuild this agency.”

Yo-Yo Ma is the most popular classical musician in the world, at least according to sales figures. But unlike most of the other musicians at the top of that particular list, Ma is neither a gimmicky tenor nor a barely-clothed, barely-classical string quartet. In fact, Yo-Yo Ma may have the answer to the long-pondered question of whether classical music can truly appeal to a mass audience in today’s pop-culture-obsessed world. “A musician needs to know one tradition deeply, to know one room in the mansion of music. And then he needs to have the skill to be able to work with musicians from other traditions – it’s a question of transferability… Working in different musical worlds opens up new areas of expression.”

British poet laureate Andrew Motion wanted to do something special for the 21st birthday of Prince William. Remembering that the prince had spent some time learning the art of DJing, Motion decided to present the lad with a “rap poem,” ostensibly written with hip-hop sensibilities standing in for more traditional poetic style. The result is, well… embarrassing, according to most Brits who’ve read it. Amateur reviews posted to the BBC web site range from “excruciating” and “so terribly wrong,” to “The greatest argument for the abolition of the monarchy yet.”