“Curtis has seen a significant bump in Chinese applicants, reflecting the growing ranks – and aptitude – of classical music students in China. This spring, 32 Chinese students traveled to Philadelphia to audition for openings at Curtis. A decade ago, there were only six applicants from China.”
Tag: 06.09.08
Spielberg’s Billion-Dollar Dream(Works)
“Steven Spielberg aims to raise more than $1 billion in third-party financing to reinvent DreamWorks as a separate company that once again owns the movies it makes.”
When The Theatre Gets Small
More and more we seem to be consuming art one on one. “You would think that the theatre, that most public of acts, would resist this transformation into private experience. Yet, increasingly, directors, actors and writers seem to be seeking out smaller and smaller spaces for their work.”
A Reason To Rebuild Iraq’s Libraries
“When Saad Eskander talks about his library, he makes it sound a combination of a national healing process, a social crucible for establishing a more egalitarian society and a centre of free inquiry that Iraqi intellectuals have been denied for decades. But what does cultural education even mean?”
Hadrian Loses His Head (Thanks Restorers!)
“The head, with its neatly trimmed beard and fringe of exquisitely crimped curls, is certainly Hadrian but it seems the body it has been attached to for almost 150 years belongs to somebody else.”
Why So Few Women Leading UK Arts Institutions?
“Talk to enough successful women, and you start thinking that women are on an equal footing with men. And yet it’s difficult to reconcile that with the fact that fewer than 25% of British theatres have female artistic directors, that Kathryn McDowell is the only managing director of a British orchestra (the London Symphony), or that four of the 14 senior staff at Tate are women.”
Britannica To Get Some Wiki On
“Once a staple of many homes, the encyclopedia has become increasingly irrelevant in the internet age. A shelf of leather-bound books may look fabulous but, almost by definition, it becomes obsolete the moment it is published (you can look it up). Oh yeah — and they are way expensive.” So Britannica is incorporating some wiki input…
The Radio Audience – Slipping Away
“Over the last 10 years, the average share of Americans listening to radio at any given time has shrunk about 14 percent, or 2.3 percentage points. Teenagers account for a well-recognized chunk of that decline.”
A Golden Age For Cable TV
“For anybody with cable — and that includes most of us — television is in something of a golden age. Cable networks other than the fancy subscription services like HBO and Showtime used to be the realm of stupid human tricks and commercials for six-minute abs, but networks have shot by them in the race to the bottom.”
San Francisco Celebrates A New Contemporary Jewish Museum
“The museum, like its audience, is interested in assimilation, even in the ways in which the larger culture assimilates Jewish ideas and associations. It focuses not on the substance of Judaism, its laws, or history or ritual objects, but on perceptions of them.”