“Set against a backdrop of the dreamy mountains of Labëria in southern Albania, Washed by the Moon, British/German filmmaker Dan Shutt’s directorial debut, is a rich journey through the region’s musical history. … We invited the director to compile a mix that encapsulates the ancient Albanian tradition of isopolyphonic singing.”
Tag: 09.07.18
John Steinbeck’s Second Wife Says He Was ‘Sadistic’ In Newly Published Memoir
“My Life With John Steinbeck recalls a troubled marriage that spanned 1943 to 1948, a period in which he would write classics including Cannery Row and The Pearl. During their marriage, Conger Steinbeck described a husband who was emotionally distant and demanding. ‘Like so many writers, he had several lives, and in each he was spoilt, and in each he felt he was king,’ she wrote. ‘From the time John awoke to the time he went to bed, I had to be his slave.'”
Arts Centers Need To Evolve – And There Are Exciting Opportunities
“When I got the job as artistic director if you’d told me that the centre I run would have bedrooms, a co-working space for 150 businesses and a family play room, I might not have believed you. But cultural venues are changing. And they need to change more.”
Why Composing Operas Feels So Natural To Missy Mazzoli
“Since I was a little kid, I was interested in figuring out other people and why they did the things they did. Even when I was doing purely instrumental work, I always thought of the melodies and the form as a kind of interplay between characters. Different forces in the piece, maybe chords, were working with each other or against each other. I was putting human dramas onto this music all the time, even if I was the only one who ever knew it.”
Jerusalem City Gov’t Evicts Gallery For Hosting Anti-Occupation NGO
Last year, the conservative mayor’s office, backed by Netanyahu’s controversial national culture minister, Miri Regev, began moving against the Barbur Gallery, which has been operating in a city-owned building for 13 years. The reason? Barbur hasted several events by Breaking the Silence, an organization founded by former Israeli soldiers who oppose the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories. Last week a judge approved an eviction request, even as he acknowledged that the request was blatantly political.
Study: Disabled People Participating More In The Arts
While disabled people are still less likely to engage with the arts than others, 75.7% did so last year, the highest level since records began, and significantly above the average of 71.2% recorded between 2005/06 and 2016/17.
When Jazz Really Mattered (And Still Does)
“More people in the United States listen to and enjoy jazz or near-jazz than any other music. Jazz is of tremendous importance for its quantity alone.” That was Marshall Stearns, one of the founders of academic jazz studies, writing in 1956 to argue why his subject was worthy of serious scholarship. As Nate Chinen says in his fascinating and vital new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, that passage now sounds bizarre, like a report from “a vanished culture.” In fact, the music’s status today is the complete opposite: Most people vaguely recognize jazz’s cultural importance, but no one’s expected to get too excited about it
Shakespeare And The Political Resistance
Two new books argue that Shakespeare wove oblique political critiques of the English establishment into his works, and that we can learn a thing or two from them in our own troubled times.
Have Researchers Taught AI How To Recognize And Understand Language?
The most widely tested model, so far, is called Embeddings from Language Models, or ELMo. When it was released by the Allen Institute this spring, ELMo swiftly toppled previous bests on a variety of challenging tasks—like reading comprehension, where an AI answers SAT-style questions about a passage, and sentiment analysis. In a field where progress tends to be incremental, adding ELMo improved results by as much as 25 percent.
A Movie Where Opera Doesn’t Signal Evil
Of course, it had to be the adaptation of Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto. The movie, which comes out on September 14, “is the rare film that does not use opera to comment ironically on bloodshed, or signal sinister depravity, or provide the sonic equivalent of a heart-shaped box of chocolates in a moment of slightly cloying Valentine’s Day-style romance.”