Here’s One: “The pitches in musical scales are likely derived from language. Turns out, aspects of spoken English and Mandarin correlate to the intervals between notes in a chromatic scale (the black and white piano keys in an octave). Is it music we love or the sound of our own voices?”
Tag: 06.15.08
Movie Ad Spending Increases
“On- and offscreen ad revenue in 2007 rose 18.5 percent each to $494.6 million and $45.3 million, respectively.”
South Pacific Cleans Up At Tonys
“The lavish production of “South Pacific” picked up seven prizes — more than any other show — including musical revival, actor-musical for leading man Paulo Szot, director-musical and four design awards: sets, costumes, lighting, sound. (The show won nine Tonys in 1950.)”
Music Performance Fund Hits Hard Times
For 60 years, the Music Performance Fund, an unsung charity financed by a small fraction of record company sales, has “helped to bankroll thousands of free concerts annually all over North America.Now, though, the popularity of music downloads and file-sharing via the Internet has eaten away at record company revenues. And as the industry has dwindled, so has the performance fund’s ability to underwrite pro bono shows.”
The Role Every Ballerina Wants
“When Kenneth MacMillan choreographed Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Ballet in 1965, he created the most fiercely coveted ballerina role of them all. The canon isn’t short of tragic heroines – Giselle, Odette in Swan Lake, Tatiana in Onegin – but it’s the beautiful, doomed Juliet every ballerina dreams of dancing.”
An Actor Explains Why He Hates The Theatre
“I have a big problem with the audience. I don’t feel the desire to engage them. Which is what theatre is all about. And I also dislike an environment where people feel free to bandy about words like ‘Brechtian subtext’. As if we’re all supposed to know what that means. Do we? I don’t.”
Bollywood Takes It To The West
“For all Bollywood’s flash, it cannot compete with Hollywood. India makes about 1,000 movies a year, 10 times Hollywood’s total. Unlike the US, though, its films don’t travel. Nor has it achieved the crossover successes of films from Britain, Japan and, more recently, China and South Korea.” Now a push to go head-to-head with Hollywood.
How Do You Control TV When It’s Everywhere, Any Time?
“Today’s wealth of customer-driven, see-it-when-you-want TV is a revelation for adults, who have won a glorious freedom from the networks’s long hegemony. For more and more people, live TV has become a special, rarefied category of viewing, reserved for sports and “Idol”-style reality contests.”
The Inner Buckminster Fuller
“Recent research has shed new light on Fuller’s inner life and what really drove him. In particular, it now appears that the suicide story may have been yet another invention, an elaborate myth that served to cover up a formative period that was far more tumultuous and unstable, for far longer, than Fuller ever revealed.”