“In honor of American composer Ned Rorem’s … 94th birthday on October 23, spend seven minutes with the very opinionated Mr. R. This piece was originally made for Studio 360 as part of a Fishko Files-curated series on living composers’ connections to music history.” (audio)
Tag: 10.19.17
Why We Keep Finding Great Artists’ ‘Lost’ Works On Display Right Under Our Noses
“Several Old Master paintings have turned up just this year. In July, two frescoes in the Vatican thought to be the work of Raphael’s students were determined be by the master himself. In October, a New Jersey town announced that a bust of Napoleon Bonaparte, on display for over 80 years in the council chambers of a local borough hall, was actually a long-lost work by Auguste Rodin.” Why are we only discovering them now? Partly, it’s because of newly-available technology, and partly it’s – well, it’s dirt.
A Stolen Caravaggio And A Sicilian Town That’s ‘Wall-To-Wall Gangsters’
“Meet Charley Hill, the legendary bloodhound who has retrieved stolen masterpieces the world over. Most notably, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, taken from the National Gallery of Norway in 1994 and rescued by Charley from the basement of a summer house in Oslo Fjord. … Here, Charley takes us on the trail of his latest lead.”
The New Power Players In Selling Art Online
“No single seller has achieved critical mass, and the model that has gained the most traction is the third-party marketplace, which functions not as a threat to existing, trusted brands but as a facilitator for them. Rather than competing with bricks-and-mortar houses for quality consignments, they help market it to a wider clientele and provide sophisticated live-bidding technology.”
The Story Of The Internet’s Number-One Source For Scores
“In 2006, a New England Conservatory student named Edward Guo founded the online portal IMSLP, or International Music Score Library, a kind of Wikipedia for musicians. Now the site contains some 350,000 scores and 40,000 recordings from 14,000 composers. The works of composers who have been dead for less than 70 years are not in the public domain and don’t appear on the site. Still, IMSLP is omnipresent enough that I’ve encountered music students who assumed there were no scores to Strauss songs at all, since they weren’t showing up there.”
Tourist Killed By Falling Masonry In One Of Florence’s Most Famous Historic Churches
“The stone piece, about 6 inches by 6 inches, fell nearly 60 feet after it broke off near a chapel on the right side of the [Basilica di Santa Croce], where it had been supporting a beam.”
Pierre Audi Of The Park Avenue Armory On Presenting New Work In The U.S. Versus Europe
The complaints we hear over and over again are that European audiences are more open to the new and European institutions are better funded. Audi, who’s spent nearly three decades running the Dutch National Opera and came to the Armory in 2015, says that audiences over here, especially in New York, are hungry for good work from all over the world. The problem is getting that work to the States.
New Brown University Conductor Fired Because He Was Intimidating?
According to The Brown Daily Herald, orchestral students had complained about Brown’s leadership. Orchestra member Katerina Rademacher told the paper that Brown acted “in an intimidating manner that made students fearful and anxious to approach him.”
Are Big Brands The New Arts Patrons?
“Artists have always been the sort of R and D [research and development] department for advertising agencies. You go into agencies and what you see on the wall is artworks that then get transmogrified into advertising. What’s happening now is really fantastic, because it’s actually a much more direct conversation between the client and the artists. It doesn’t have to go through this extra layer of interpretation.”
Man Booker Winner George Saunders Talks About Writing:
“Two different hitters will generally talk the same game, but then one gets in and hits a homer and the other strikes out. (And that hitter is you, the writer, on different days, even.) So: an element of mystery has to pertain—which I really like…this idea of writing as more of a muscular, visceral act, in which the writer brings all that she is to that moment but can’t really explain what happens next.”