Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.18.15

John Luther Adams makes the earth speak (while tourists cover their ears)
John Luther Adams often seems like an Alaska Impressionist – or so I’ve said in the past, perhaps misleadingly. The implication of that moniker implies pretty-sounding Nordic Debussy, something more descriptive than Sibelius … read more
AJBlog: Condemned to Music Published 2015-11-19

Twyla Tharp: Fifty Years of Making Dances
Twyla Tharp premiered her first work, Tank Dive, on April 29, 1965, in room 1604 of Hunter College’s Art Department (where she was not a student). It was the only dance on the program and lasted four minutes, which she considered to be the longest amount of time she thought she could fill to perfection. Besides, she noted in a 1976 interview, the event was free. Who would have dared complain? … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2015-11-19

Experiments in humanity
The writer Veronica Horwell likes to describe acting as laboratory for human behaviour, and believes that actors try out ways of expressing and inhabiting ideas and emotion. It’s a brilliant idea … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2015-11-19

Whitney Museum’s Adam Weinberg Movingly Mourns Paris Massacre’s Impact on Creative Community
Addressing the press on Tuesday, the Metropolitan Museum’s director, Tom Campbell, had reacted to the Paris massacre forcefully but formally, detailing how his institution had mentored colleagues from countries in crisis. Yesterday, the Whitney Museum’s director, Adam Weinberg, showed how to make it personal and heartfelt. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-11-19

Liebman And Intra Over The Rainbow
Since I first heard soprano saxophonist David Liebman and the Italian pianist, composer and conductor Enrico Intra play a duet on “Over The Rainbow,” it has been in the back of mind to share it … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-11-19

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Acclaimed Canadian Novelist Suspended From Teaching Job (But The University Won’t Say Why…Yet)

Steven Galloway, 40, is the author of four novels, including The Cellist of Sarajevo, an international bestseller that was nominated for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and long-listed for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize. His most recent novel, The Confabulist, about the death of Harry Houdini, was published last year.

Opportunism Begets Great Theatre: Shakespeare And James I

“To see Shakespeare as a court official working to please his political masters is not to reduce him to the level of functionary or propagandist. It is to marvel anew at the ways in which he could use even such humbling demands as sources of imaginative energy. … We begin to see a Shakespeare for whom the distinction between freedom and necessity is scarcely relevant. Here is Shakespeare as an opportunist in every sense, a political operator taking advantage of a shift in power and a voracious artist for whom the need to please new masters is not a restriction but a creative stimulus.”