Locked out of the concert hall because of global coronavirus concerns, endangered in physical and financial terms, classical music is fighting to survive and finding more paths than ever to listeners. Part of this phenomenon is that we’re quite literally a captive audience. But another part is the odd compatibility between classical music and digital media. – Washington Post
Tag: 03.31.20
The Music Schools That Were Quite Prepared For Distance Learning
Unlike so many other institutions, the major music schools of America were uniquely prepared to make the transition to online instruction. The fact is, they’ve been preparing for it for years by enhancing and expanding their Wi-Fi capabilities, installing and becoming adept at the use of multiple learning and communication platforms, developing and honing online teaching skills, all while working with a student body that is totally comfortable with the relationship between education and online technology. – San Francisco Classical Voice
How Can A Director Shoot A Thriller While Maintaining Social Distancing? Put The Lead Actor Inside A Video Game
“Timur Bekmambetov, best known outside Russia for making the Angelina Jolie thriller Wanted, was midway through filming his second world war fighter-ace film V2: Escape from Hell when the coronavirus pandemic broke. So [he] sanitised his shooting schedule and, last week, pulled off what he believes was a cinematic first: a feature-film scene shot entirely inside a live video game.” – The Guardian
Chloe Aaron, Who Molded PBS Into A National Network, Dead At 81
She helped create the series Live From Lincoln Center, Dance in America, and Live From the Metropolitan Opera. And in 4½ years as PBS’s senior vice president for programming in the late 1970s (she was then the highest-ranking woman in American television), she convinced the various local member stations to carry the same prime-time programming for four evenings a week — giving PBS a national identity as a network for the first time. – The New York Times
The Culture We’re Losing Beyond The Non-Profits
Los Angeles is full of odd and quirky cultural enterprises, many of them precarious in the best of times. Mandatory closures that may extend for weeks, if not months, might end up converting temporary shutdowns into the permanent closures of some of Southern California’s most overlooked fountains of culture and history. – Los Angeles Times
Jerry Saltz Obsesses On Bruegel’s Vast Vista Of Mass Death
“This is Pieter Bruegel’s circa 1562 world-masterpiece painting The Triumph of Death, a panoramic pandemonium of an army of skeletons laying waste to a barren burning landscape while murdering every human being in sight. Lately, I have spent so much time contemplating this painting, I feel I have almost been living inside it.” – New York Magazine
Not That It Matters Much At The Moment, But Here Is The List Of 2019’s Most Popular Museums
And shows, where a Dreamworks show took honors. Repeating this year as most-trafficked museum is the Louvre in Paris, which welcomed 9.6 million visitors, easily beating No. 2, the National Museum in Beijing. – The Art Newspaper
Inside The War Room: NY Arts Orgs Deal With Catastrophe
As the covid-19 disease has escalated, turning New York into a crisis epicenter, the resolve of a multibillion-dollar arts community has intensified to try to temper panic and pool advice. And what was once a routine monthly call among 34 arts and cultural organizations that receive significant money from the city has ballooned into a daily emergency call-in with as many as 170 anxious arts administrators and advocates. – Washington Post
The Choreography Of Social Distancing
“In this time of confinement, we have been given one immeasurable gift — the freedom to go outside. In exchange, we must abide by a simple rule: Stay six feet away from others. As choreographic intentions go, that’s not remotely vague. Yet during my runs and walks in Brooklyn over the past few days, I’ve noticed that six feet doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody.” Gia Kourlas looks at how (and why) social distancing plays out as it does — and gives instructions to the more oblivious among us. – The New York Times
Attendance At Public Events May Not Recover Post-Pandemic: Study
“In a survey of 1,000 consumers in the U.S., 44% of respondents said they would attend fewer large public events, even once they are cleared by the CDC, with 38% saying they’d attend about the same number … And 47% agreed that the idea of going to a major public event ‘will scare me for a long time.'” (They’re most leery of theme parks and indoor concert and sports venues.) – Variety