Tag: 11.03.20

Is Requiring Ethnic Studies In Universities A Good Idea?

“In essence, the California state legislature has made it mandatory for the nearly 500,000 students in the Cal State system to take the classes that student activists and others fought for universities to implement decades ago. While these classes are not without controversy, as a scholar who studies racial dynamics on college campuses, I argue their benefits outweigh their liabilities.” – The Conversation

Alan Pierson On Rehearsing New Music With Conventional Orchestras Vs. Specialists

“You have to listen. It’s not just about following me, you have to know how what you’re doing relates to what other people are doing. Have your ears out. … Another [issue] is time: With a group like Alarm Will Sound, it’s in everyone’s DNA that the default is: We’re going to play in a steady pulse. … That’s not necessarily the ground that people walk on in the orchestral world.” – Van

A Radical Rethink Of San Francisco State University’s Music Program

With the clarion call of the Black Lives Matter movement ringing in the background, Modirzadeh described the SFSU music program as fettered by “a deep intergenerational upholding of that archaic ‘separate but equal’ logic that miseducates, leaving our students perpetually revolving around a musical caste system stuck thick in ethnic myopia.” – San Francisco Classical Voice

Ben Brantley Predicts That, Before Long, Theater Critics As We Know Them Won’t Exist

“I think the notion of criticism may expand, and people will write more culturally comprehensive mixed-discipline pieces. But it’s hard for me to imagine. It will be interesting to see how much people are actually willing to read in the future online, and whether most communication will be single lines, single impressions, condensations.” – The Stage

Jan Myrdal, Radical Writer Son Of Legendary Parents, Dead At 93

He devoted much of his life, and his writing, to rebellion against his parents, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, each of whom won a Nobel Prize. But the body of his work was reportage and advocacy on Communism and those who lived under it; neither Scandinavian social democracy nor the Soviet system was leftist enough for him. He wrote the first Western eyewitness account of the lives of ordinary villagers under Mao, but his later years found him defending the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Khmer Rouge, and Holocaust denial. – The Washington Post