“In interviews with the German broadcaster DW, he said the vote to leave the EU felt like a personal defeat and he was particularly upset to hear aggressive ‘war rhetoric’ during the referendum campaign.”
Tag: 09.05.16
Music That Hovers Between Appearing And Disappearing: Alex Ross On The Wandelweiser
“This is not music for everyone. No music is for everyone, just as no language or no religion is for everyone. But [the work of this group of composers] poses a particular challenge to long-established notions of how a piece should unfold. Silence overtakes sound to the point where the work seems on the verge of vanishing.”
How Upright Citizens Brigade Turned Improv Into Big Business
“In 2003, the Times reported that ‘some 500 students’ were enrolled in ’30 or so improvisation and sketch-comedy classes’ at U.C.B. In 2011, New York had the figure at approximately eight thousand. The organization doesn’t reveal numbers (the better to avoid quibbling about not paying its performers), but one current employee let slip the latest tally: last year, U.C.B. trained twelve thousand students. That’s about five million dollars in revenue.”
Yuja Wang And Her Dresses Get The Janet Malcolm Treatment
“As she performed, the thigh, splayed by the weight of the torso and the action of the toe working the pedal, looked startlingly large, almost fat, though Yuja is a very slender woman. Her back was bare, thin straps crossing it. She looked like a dominatrix or a lion tamer’s assistant. She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels. Take that, and that, Beethoven!”
Enlightenment Philosophers Posed Questions About The Modern World (We’re Still Trying To Figure Them Out)
“Modernity cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us. Modern life, which we tend to think of as an accelerating series of gains in knowledge, wealth, and power over nature, is predicated on a loss: the loss of contact with the past.”