Tag: 05.31.17

What I Learned About Preparation From My 11-Year Old Son As He Practiced To Get Into Juilliard

“He learned to practice by changing the rhythm of the piece. He learned to play one note at a time with a tuner. He learned to play each measure with a different metronome timing, and then he played the piece so slowly it took 20 minutes instead of just four. During these insane lessons where Amy and my son spent one hour on five notes, the more we worked on the art of practicing the more I saw that practice is a method to do anything ambitious and difficult. He learned to create a system and process instead of just focusing on the goal itself.”

The World’s Longest String Instrument, Tethered To A Skyscraper In L.A.

“Installing and tuning the Earth Harp is a two-day process. On this day, [inventor William] Close is getting ready to drop 42 strings, weighted by water bottles, off the edge of the 700-foot building. His tech, Jonathan Golko, will catch them and attach them to the harp’s main resonating chamber. The following day, Close will tune the harp, a process that he’s got down to a science. He can vibrate four notes out of each string.”

Martin Scorsese: The Particular Art Of Making A Movie

“Over the years, I’ve grown used to seeing the cinema dismissed as an art form for a whole range of reasons: it’s tainted by commercial considerations; it can’t possibly be an art because there are too many people involved in its creation; it’s inferior to other art forms because it “leaves nothing to the imagination” and simply casts a temporary spell over the viewer (the same is never said of theatre or dance or opera, each of which require the viewer to experience the work within a given span of time). Oddly enough, I’ve found myself in many situations where these beliefs are taken for granted, and where it’s assumed that even I, in my heart of hearts, must agree.”

Why Don’t Literary Journals Pay?

Only about 8 percent of current literary journals pay anything like a professional wage to their contributors (and slightly more pay their staff, but that’s a different question). So maybe “the whole enterprise of writing literary fiction is a complete waste of your time”? It’s a valid question.

Why A Portland Theatre Wanted To Cast A Black Actor In Virginia Woolf (And Why Edward Albee’s Estate Said No)

The Albee Estate wouldn’t speak directly to NPR about the decision. Instead, it sent a statement, saying Albee had remarked on several occasions that a mixed-race marriage in the early 1960s would not have gone unnoticed in the script — though Albee did approve the casting of a black actress as the older professor’s wife when the playwright was still alive. This is the first time the estate has had to deal with this issue since Albee’s death in September 2016.

‘Ibsen Cross-Pollinated With The Marvel Cinematic Universe’ – Only It’s About Nigerian Immigrants

Diep Tran profiles actress/playwright Mfoniso Udofia and her “Ufot Cycle,” a planned series of nine plays. (About two of them, the New York Times‘s Jesse Green wrote, “[they] offer a moving and powerful corrective to the notion that what immigrants leave behind is always awful, and that what they find is always worth the trip.”