“[N]early two dozen institutions,” including, this week, the New York Philharmonic, “have received grants from the Leon Levy Foundation since 2007 to identify, preserve and digitize their archival collections and to make them available online to scholars and to the public.” Some organizations “barely realized they held potentially valuable archives.”
Tag: 10.14.09
Alt-Classical Music Is Reshaping The Classical Landscape
“Once upon a time, young conservatory musicians wanted to grow up to play as soloists with major orchestras. Today, many of them are forming bands instead. The ensembles of the new alt-classical world are poised somewhere within the Venn-diagram intersection of traditional classical music and contemporary culture.”
Bookstore Finds Niche In Fiction For Inner-City Readers
“[A] Philadelphia bookstore that specializes in urban fiction is flourishing. Many of the titles are written by people who live in Philly.” And what, exactly, is “urban fiction”? “[G]ritty, explicit tales that involve drugs, crime, and violence set in urban neighborhoods like the one surrounding this bookstore.”
Lookingglass Theatre Company Taps New Artistic Director
“Andy White is taking over the artistic helm of the 23-year-old Lookingglass Theatre Company,” which “rotates its chief artistic role among its ensemble members.” White is a founding member and past artistic director of Lookingglass.
Brandeis Won’t Sell Rose Museum Works Given By Plaintiffs
In a hearing, a probate court judge also “denied a motion to dismiss the suit filed by museum benefactors Meryl Rose, Jonathan Lee and Lois Foster and set a June 2010 trial date.”
McSweeney’s Quarterly Morphs Into A Broadsheet
Coming out next month, “San Francisco Panorama will be a fat fellow, Sunday-edition-sized, and include news features, sports, short fiction, arts coverage, original graphics and pages and pages of original comics. … The editors promise that Panorama is a one-off and not Volume One, No. 1 of a new publication.”
And The 2009 National Book Award Finalists Are …
“Books about Henry Ford’s failed jungle experiment and a Faulkneresque novel about the lasting effects of war on memory are among the finalists for the 2009 National Book Award,” given by the National Book Foundation.
New Licensing Database Offers One-Stop Music Shopping
“Employing proprietary musicDNA software, the website offers a database of 10,000 pre-cleared tunes from 50 countries for instant licensing to film, TV ads and videogames. Company touts its services as an alternative to laborious song clearances and use of production music.”
Shakespeare & Co. Restructures, Slashes Budget
“Being $6.8 million in debt and struggling with diminished fund-raising, leaders of the Shakespeare & Company theater in Lenox, Mass., announced on Tuesday afternoon that they were cutting jobs, restructuring the theater’s business model, and taking other steps in hopes of shoring up its year-round productions and education programs.”
Damien Hirst Can’t Paint: London Critics
“Hirst has chosen to put [dead animals in formaldehyde and such] all to one side and return to the craft of painting. The exhibition of his new work, which has opened at the Wallace Collection in London, has been scrutinised by numerous art critics.” A typical comment: “They’re thoroughly derivative. Their handling is weak. They’re extremely boring.”