A recording company executive says his industry must change its attitudes about consumers trading music files or else their business will die. As Thomas Jefferson wrote: “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.”
Tag: 02.01.03
Kids – Forgetting The Classics?
Are kids losing touch with the literaryt kids’ classics? A survey in Britain reports that only three percent of children had read “Little Women.” “Only 12% had actually read Alice in Wonderland, only 2% ‘Swallows and Amazons’, and only 6% ‘The Secret Garden’. By contrast, 81% had read ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ scored 31%.”
Wanted: Someplace You Can Hear
Atlanta has an active arts scene. But the city is practically barren of good performance spaces. Those theatres and concert halls that do exist are acoustically dead. But a new arts center at Emory University holds out some promise the city might get its first real concert space, writes Pierre Ruhe.
Have Images Of Atrocities Ceased To Register On Us?
Back in the 1930 Virginia Woolf believed that just seeing pictures of the atrocities of war would provoke a strong reaction against the waging of war. Susan Sontag wonders if that ios the case today in our media-soaked world. “Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses: a call for peace; a cry for revenge; or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.”
Hollywood’s New Plots – Government Get The Bad Guys
It wasn’t so long ago that Hollywood’s favorite movie was the little guy against the bureucrat – the rogue CIA, the power-hungry FBI, even a misbehaving Congress or White House. But that’s all changed. “Big and small screens are awash in portrayals of honorable officials struggling to hold back a menacing tide. “The old, tired and hackneyed representation of us as a bunch of rogue operatives, with everything dark and gloomy and sensational, that doesn’t wash any more.”
A New “Self-Tuning” “Microtonal” Piano?
A British composer claims to have “revolutionised” the design of the piano. The instrument has until now relied on “only 88 notes from their 88 keys. This limitation has made the piano’s ‘fixed tuning’ unable to cope with the differing scales of Persian, Chinese and Indian music. Mr Smith’s device could open up whole new markets for the instrument in places where it has previously been seen as an expensive piece of western furniture. The innovation threatens to make professional piano tuning defunct, since players will be able to perform ‘user-friendly’ corrections to their instrument themselves, possibly while they are playing.”
Nunn’s Parting Shot – A £2.5 Million Gift
Outgoing National Theatre director Trevor Nunn has made a surprise gift to the London theatres – £2.5 million. Nunn was severely criticized during his tenure when it was learned that he was making as much as £25,000 a week from the West End transfer of his award-winning revival of My Fair Lady. “But in a move that will silence his detractors, Nunn has given the theatre £208,000 this year as a first instalment of a legacy to support new work, with £2.3m more coming over the next two years. All the money he has earned from the transfer of ‘My Fair Lady’, as well as ‘Oklahoma!’, which is now on Broadway, will go back into the National’s coffers.”
Martha Graham Company – Putting A Life Back Together
The 26 dancers of the Martha Graham Company are back, finishing a week in New York. They “expect to go on tour soon, to engagements that are being negotiated and should be announced in coming weeks. With a current annual budget projected at $7 million, the company is seeking at least $3 million in outside funding. Next week, the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance is moving from various Manhattan locations to a building on East 63rd Street where Graham had taught for many years. The property was sold during the company’s financial crunch of the 1990s, and repurchased recently.”
Get The Picture? Supersize It!
“Like S.U.V.’s and television screens, photographs throughout the 90’s swelled to almost irrational dimensions. As technology allowed huge color prints to be processed with ease and buyers paid top prices for them, big became the norm. Younger photographers and students, when asking themselves how large an image should be, often opted for the McDonald’s answer: supersize it.”
A Grand Night For Booing
Does an audience have the right to boo? Certainly there’s a long tradition of it (and some would say not enough booing goes on) at the opera. But “at some point, doesn’t loud booing cross the line from an expression of displeasure to a disruption of the performance? The issue was raised recently at the Metropolitan Opera during the season’s first performance of Mozart’s ‘Entführung aus dem Serail’…”