Category: today’s top story

“Whatever you have read about the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra – and the astonishing Venezuelan system of musical education that brought it into being – can’t convey the brilliance and disarming exuberance of their playing, or the importance of Dudamel’s role in channelling that energy. There are some great youth orchestras around today, but none of them is as exciting to behold as this.”

This summer in Las Vegas, scientists at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness’ annual meeting learned from the pros: stage magicians. “Secretive as they are about specifics, the magicians were as eager as the scientists when it came to discussing the cognitive illusions that masquerade as magic: disguising one action as another, implying data that isn’t there, taking advantage of how the brain fills in gaps — making assumptions, as The Amazing Randi put it, and mistaking them for facts.”

In the 30 years since its foundation, El Sistema has evolved into one of the most successful community arts programmes in the world. There are 250,000 children studying music under its auspices across Venezuela, from the most remote rural villages to the poorest barrios of Caracas. Its founder, the composer/statesman José Antonio Abreu (according to legend, he started with 11 children rehearsing in a garage), has said that it heralds a “new era in which great art is created by the majority, for the majority”.

The latest advertising experiment is messages that are ambiguous. “With all the ways out there to advertise — TV, newspaper, radio, billboards etc. — word-of-mouth is often much more powerful. Designed to tease, these messages get people wondering and, hopefully, talking. The truth is you’re more likely to listen to and believe a co-worker or friend than a 30-second TV commercial.”

“The inherent eroticism of dance — with all its sweaty bodies in any sort of motion — can shift from discreet to overt with even the subtlest of movements. But there was nothing subtle about Elvis Presley, whose death, 30 years ago today, has been widely commemorated this week. Those loose, jutting hips gave America in the mid-1950s enough eroticism via dance to stop and stare.”

“It’s a hot day in Athens and a builder working on the new $178 million Acropolis Museum pauses to wipe his brow and stare up at the 2,500-year-old Parthenon. At the same time, Elly Kouremenos looks out of the apartment she’s lived in for 72 years and wonders why the view from the museum means her home must be razed. … The future of her block, once declared a work of art by the Greek Ministry of Culture, and its neoclassical neighbor … has caused a furore, pitting architects against archaeologists.”

“Gustavo Dudamel is a musician of precious and precocious talents.” He’s also Esa-Pekka Salonen’s designated successor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and caution is in order. “The crucial thing is for Dudamel to be given time to mature naturally. … We as music-lovers must respect the fact that, however excited we might be by his infectious bonhomie on stage and his undoubted rapport with orchestras, he has not attained his full heights at the age of 26.”

“Wherever you look, from opera houses and live theaters to movie houses and museums, the machinery of fantasy and make-believe has been working overtime to captivate audiences of all ages.” Is this a symptom of a culture of arrested development or a much-needed way of viewing “the dizzying complexity, dark ambiguities and pressing urgencies of contemporary life”?

“(I)s there a place for humour in art? … Is it even morally justifiable, in the current climate, to be anything less than furious? We are trained, both as viewers and as consumers, to accept only the grave and magisterial as great. And while Romantic sturm und drang has fallen from favour … the respect accorded the playful, the determinedly slight, has dropped even further.”

“Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims. But now it seems quite possible. In fact … it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.”