The seven-day, 26-hour avant-garde behemoth requires not only vocal and instrumental soloists, choir, orchestra, ballet dancers, and electronics, but four helicopters as well. (Yes, the notorious “Helicopter Quartet” is from LICHT.) The Dutch, being practical folk, have now devised a smaller-scale adaptation: aus LICHT, which runs a mere 15 hours of music over three days. Reporter Simon Cummings finds out how they did it (and convinced the famously controlling Stockhausen Foundation to cooperate).
Tag: 03.21.18
#MeToo Meets Reality TV (It Had To Happen): New Series Busts Harassers On Camera
“[The Israeli series] The Silence Breaker is billed as an investigative factual entertainment format that will expose real-life sexual harassment at the workplace. Using hidden cameras, the show will go undercover to document harassment while also telling the victims’ stories. Each story will end with an on-camera confrontation with the harasser.”
The Science Of Crowd Behavior: Every Crowd Has A Psychological Personality
Crowd psychology has been around since the 19th Century. But it’s only in the last few decades that there’s been a major shift to seeing crowds as more than mindless masses. “The crowd is as psychologically specific as the individual,” says the University of Sussex’s John Drury, an expert on the social psychology of crowd management.
So A Librarian Just Sits Behind The Desk And Reads All Day, Right?
Hahahahhahahaahah (despairing laughter): no. “I cling to these happy memories whenever somebody breaks the copy machine for the fourth time that day by jamming a ballpoint pen inside the feed tray. Or spills their kale smoothie down the side of the circulation desk. Or when a person decides to eat an extra large pizza while vaping in the women’s bathroom. I think: remember why you chose this job? The elegance? And I laugh.”
Scottish Arts Funding Mess Suggests Need To Reconsider How We Support The Arts
“The increase in the number of network bodies in the Creative Scotland portfolio signals an acceptance of a model of competitiveness inherited from the Thatcherite government. We quite liked pretending to be business people, but we didn’t anticipate that we would need to accept responsibility for the future of cultural delivery. It’s hard work running a successful non-profit organisation and it takes skill to get it right all the time. The priority of artistic quality can easily become lost in project managerialism.”
‘The Parrotheads Were After Me’ – New York Times’ Jesse Green On Writing Negative Theater Reviews
“I don’t take writing pans lightly. For one thing, I’m as thin-skinned as anyone else, and don’t enjoy being excoriated on Twitter or mocked as a theater snob or told on Facebook to just ‘relax’ – as if my being uptight were what made the show bad. … So when I get home from the theater with my notebook bristling with scribbles like ‘what is happening?’ and ‘kill me now,’ I ask myself a few questions. Was there anything at all I admired? Can I imagine why someone else might like it? Are there people I would send to the show despite my own distaste for it?”
Why Studying Dance Is As Important As Studying Math (Or Science)
“The low status of dance in schools is derived in part from the high status of conventional academic work, which associates intelligence mainly with verbal and mathematical reasoning. The studies collected by Nielsen and Burridge explore how a deeper understanding of dance challenges standard conceptions of intelligence and achievement and show the transformative power of movement for people of all ages and backgrounds. Dance can help restore joy and stability in troubled lives and ease the tensions in schools disrupted by violence and bullying.”
‘Opera Isn’t Elitist. If I Can Learn To Love It So Can Anybody.’
British comedian Chris Addison writes about how a chance event in a bar on a beer-soaked Friday night helped turn him into an opera fan – and how the same thing could happen to most anyone. “I’ve never seen a four-pints-down crowd focus like that; there was a stillness to the place – a wonder, really – as she sang. And when she finished, they went crazy. Standing screaming crazy.”
How Archie Bunker Transformed The American Sitcom
In the first generations of television, reflecting the idea(l) of the “classless” American society, the families in sitcoms tended to be solidly middle-class: Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver, I Love Lucy, etc. Even the Addams family and the Munsters were middle-class, if not wealthy. (The only real exceptions were The Honeymooners and the stereotyped “ethnic” comedies The Goldbergs, Amos ‘n’ Andy, and The Beverly Hillbillies, on which everyone but the Clampetts was rich.) Sascha Cohen offers a reevaluation of how things changed after Norman Lear created All in the Family.
What Exactly Do We Do? Everything! (A Librarian Tells You What The Job Is Really Like)
“Librarianship asks you to do 12 things at once and then when you’re in the middle of those projects wonders if you’ve got any tax forms left or an eclipse viewer. It’s endless questions. It’s ‘my two dollar fine pays your salary.’ It’s a grubby little hand at storytime grabbing your leg and smearing glitter glue down the side of pants you’ve already worn twice that week. It’s finding the right answer to a question and reveling in that small joy for a bare moment before another patron comes up to ask you something even weirder.”