Enrique Fernandez is the new classical music critic of the Miami Herald. This is a tricky job, since South Florida lost its symphony orchestra a year ago, its classical radio station this year, and shows very little interest in the form at all. And after all, when serious music is rejected by the community, isn’t that reason enough to just let it die a quiet death? Not a chance, says the critic: “What [we love] best in [our] native traditions is, indeed, classical. Classical in its strict rules, like the rumba of the Afro-Cubans from the province of Matanzas, polyrhythms of a Bachian or Mozartian complexity. Or classical because it was infused with European classicism, like the woodwinds and strings of the danzón — a genre that would lead to the mambo and the cha-cha-chá.”
Tag: 11.21.04
Is Liberal Arts Education Endangered?
Ivy League educators got together recently to worry about the future of liberal arts education. “The fact that professors at Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth are worried about the health of liberal education is noteworthy. If the liberal arts are perceived to be struggling at these institutions, does liberal education stand a chance anywhere?”
Cost may Kill Berlin’s Museum Island Restoration
An ambitious plan to renovate Berlin’s remarkable Museum Island is in danger. “A federal accounting office spokesman said the €130m (£93m) plan was too expensive. ‘We have nothing against the architecture. It’s simply a question of finance’.”
Stonehenge Under Attack (For 150 Years)
Debate is roaring over a plan to redo the Stonehenge site to accomodate tourists. But photographs over the past 150 years show that successive generations have meddled with the site trying to make it more “user friendly.”
NBA – Payback For Stephen King?
The National Book Awards went off last week. “The honors have been around since 1950 and were sponsored in part by publishers who still buy most of the $1,000-a-plate dinners at the ceremony. They were all smiles last year when rainmaker Stephen King accepted the foundation’s honorary medal for distinguished contributions to American letters. They were frowning this year when the fiction finalists were announced. Only one of them had written a book that sold more than 2,000 copies. Was this payback from the literary community for King’s recognition?”
Afghan Treasures Surface
Much of the Afghan art missing after the American invasion has been surfacing. “The bulk of the newly inventoried items were found in April 2003 when a presidential palace vault in Kabul was cracked open to reveal a trove of famed, intact Bactrian gold pieces. But many more artifacts, including giant Buddhist sculptures and ancient ivory statues, have been found in recent months in unmarked boxes and safes stashed for safekeeping during the Soviet-led coup and then during the years of hard-line Taliban rule.”
MoMA – Art In A Frame
“After a period in which strongly sculpted museum buildings have dominated, often upstaging their contents, Taniguchi’s MoMA represents a return to the time-honored way of housing art in lofty rectangular rooms. Because it looks so coolly cerebral, it is hard to imagine people making pilgrimages just to see the architecture, as they do with Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim in Spain. Taniguchi’s exquisite white-walled spaces are so understated that they verge on invisible, which is exactly what MoMA wanted. The art remains the main draw. The architecture merely provides the frame.”
Pina Bausch – Getting Worse?
Tobi Tobias has never much cared for Pina Bausch’s work. But lately it seems to have gone from bad to worse. “I found most of the early work loathsome—hardly dancing, conceptually sophomoric, self-indulgent, and dull—but in retrospect I prefer it to Bausch’s mature-phase tactics.”
The Public’s New Top Man
Oskar Eustis was not an obvious choice to be the new director of New York’s Public Theatre. But “though the 46-year-old Eustis is not a high-profile New York director, the reaction by many in the theater community is that he has earned the right to the job.”
Royal Ballet Goes Billy Elliot
London’s Royal Ballet School is launching a dance inclusion programme which will reach less affluent children in four new centres around Britain. “To prove things are changing, the prestigious school, featured in Billy Elliot, has already selected two children from the East End of London to take up coveted places on its training scheme.”