“Gradually, conservatories and university music schools across the U.S. have come around to the notion that for young musicians today, the standard training — a grounding in technique, repertory and interpretation, along with music theory and history — is only part of the toolbox. Most now take the view that for musicians who hope to make careers in an increasingly competitive and rapidly changing performance world, an understanding of how that world works is crucial.”
Tag: 08.13
Why Do Some Ideas Just Catch On?
“Certain innovations have the power to reset reality. Cubism, like Darwin’s theory of evolution, Edison’s lightbulb, or Apple’s iPhone, was an idea that made everything around it seem instantly obsolete. When we think about why such ideas succeed, our instinct is to hail their creators as godlike visionaries, and their success as somehow inevitable.”
Copyright Crisis – Copyright Laws Have Wiped Out Publishing Of Mid-20th Century Books
“There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.”
Why Writing Matters In Business
“Poor grammar and jargon-riddled writing are rampant. We’re great at inventing terms — the instruction manual for my toaster refers to the lever that pops up the toast as the ‘Extra-Lift Carriage Control Lever’ — but poor at communicating what we actually mean.”
Conservatories Add Entrepreneurship Classes To Mandatory Curriculum
“When we started offering these classes, music was being taught using a model that had not changed for seventy, eighty, 100 years. … But the world has changed, and many of us felt that there was no point in preparing our students for 1950s careers.”
Have We Forgotten How To Use History?
“What has become problematic is the assumption that general historical knowledge, an informed consciousness of our past, is the essential framework for Western civilisation. It is the decline of history in this sense that lies behind the heated debates about the teaching of history at school and university.”