“Back in the 16th century, the composer and lutenist John Dowland was similarly popular – pressing into a vein of moping soppiness that made him famous, and has served English musicians ever since.” (But the first? Perhaps the author forgot about the troubadours.)
Tag: 08.03.17
Classical Music Needs To Drop ‘Elitist’ Trappings To Survive, A Third Of Poll Respondents Say
“One in three [British] adults responding to an online poll highlighted ‘aloofness’ as a challenge for the artform, and a similar percentage said they thought major classical events only ever happened in [London]. 40% of respondents said concerts need to be performed in more everyday places – such as parks and clubs – for classical music to remain relevant.”
Who Gets To Make Art Out Of Black Pain? Two Very Different New Movies Show Why It Matters
Dana Stevens: “Both Detroit and Whose Streets? move from a large-scale panoramic view of an urban community in crisis toward a more intimate portrait of a few of the individuals involved. But Whose Streets? is the more effective and emotionally powerful of the two, perhaps because it constructs its world from the ground up, not from the top down. This is another way of framing a fact that’s difficult to talk about (especially for a white critic) but important to note: The filmmaking team behind Whose Streets? is black, and the one behind Detroit is white. The question – a very live one at this moment in history – of whose story is whose to tell is raised in a stark fashion by the release of these two movies in successive weeks at a moment when the civil rights of people of color (including nonwhite immigrants) are as imperiled as they’ve been since the days of those Detroit riots.”
Think You Can Tell Emotion By Someone’s Body Language? Science Says No
“Copious research, from my lab and others, shows that faces and bodies alone do not communicate any specific emotion in any consistent manner. In addition, we now know that the brain doesn’t have separate processes for emotion and cognition, and therefore one cannot control the other. If these statements defy your common sense, I’m right there with you. But our experiences of emotion, no matter how compelling, don’t reflect the biology of what’s happening inside us. Our traditional understanding and practice of emotional intelligence badly needs a tuneup.”
Half A Century After ‘The Twilight Zone’, Single-Episode Anthology Series Are Back On TV
“Golden-age classics such as The Twilight Zone and Playhouse 90 … delivered a full-course narrative meal within as little as 30 minutes. It was one of the great TV genres, until it wasn’t.” (Yeah, there was also The Love Boat.) Now, with the likes of Netflix’s Black Mirror and the Duplass brothers’ Room 104 on HBO, “all of a sudden, short-form storytelling has found its way back onto the TV menu – and the reasons why have a lot to do with the ripple effects of Peak TV.”
Banning All Ivory Completely Is Not Going To Save The Elephants, But It Could Lead Us To Destroy Important Pieces Of History
Okay, almost no one argues that we should continue to permit trade in new ivory. Yet, argues John Frederick Walker, blocking all sales of older, already-sculpted ivory – and (as is happening now) burning or crushing existing pieces, even certified antiques – will simply increase scarcity and add glamor (and cash value) to the material. And we’ll lose some marvelous historic art as well.
The Dark Side Of Toscanini
“His players often sound as terrified as they must have been: it is worth going to YouTube and listening to a few of the maestro’s rehearsals, which still horrify in their sound and fury, the range of his imprecations, the breaking of his batons and hurling of his score. As Lotte Lehmann said, ‘If we weren’t good, this certainly wasn’t going to make us any better.’”
Are Internet Standards A Threat To Digital Accessibility?
Last March, when a judge ordered the University of California–Berkeley to make 20,000 videos and podcasts accessible to people with disabilities, the university balked. The videos and audio files contained lectures by Berkeley professors that the university wanted to make available to anyone, as an act of public outreach, but disability rights groups had sued on the grounds that the materials lacked captions, were often incompatible with the screen readers that blind people use to access the Internet, and other related issues. So the judge ordered the university to make the materials accessible. Instead, Berkeley shut the program down, locking the formerly public materials behind a firewall. The university said it was just too expensive to retrofit accessibility into their public program.
Meet Today’s Version Of The Yuppies
“On its face, this approach to conscientious living may look like a rejection of the uninhibited greed associated with the ’80s. But the new aspirational class shares more with its predecessors than it wants to admit. As populist surges in the United States and Europe make clear, rising economic inequality has made it more critical than ever to rethink and uproot the status quo. Yet, as Cowen and Currid-Halkett both find, for all the new elite’s well-intentioned consumption and subsequent self-assurance, they have no intention whatsoever of letting go of their status.”
See What Michelangelo’s Marble Quarry Looks Like Today
High in the Apuan Alps of Tuscany sits Monte Altissimo, a 5,213-foot (1,589-meter) mountain, climbed in 1517 by the Italian artist Michelangelo in pursuit of fine marble for his sculptures. There, according to Reuters, he “found the marble of his dreams. It was, the Renaissance master wrote, ‘of compact grain, homogeneous, crystalline, reminiscent of sugar.’”