“City officials and artists who call New Orleans home announced Tuesday that they would team with Habitat for Humanity to build a village for musicians chased from their homes by Hurricane Katrina. The alliance, which includes the Marsalis family and Harry Connick Jr., will use $1 million in seed money generated by two recent concerts in New York to launch the development. Plans call for as many as 200 homes surrounding a cultural center named for Ellis Marsalis — a patriarch of New Orleans jazz and the father of three accomplished musicians: saxophonist Branford, trumpeter Wynton and trombonist Delfeayo.”
Tag: 12.07.05
The Christmas Conundrum
The Christmas season may be a boom time for retailers and a joyous occasion for families, but it’s become a giant headache for public schools. Vague court decisions and virulent disagreement over the extent to which religion must be kept out of schools have resulted in a patchwork of rules governing what is and is not allowed in a school’s “holiday” concert and celebratory display. “Schools often fall into two camps: They quietly avoid religious songs in favor of more generic tunes such as Frosty the Snowman and Jingle Bells. Or they offer a sprinkling of songs from different religions and fill much of the concert with secular holiday songs.”
Assessing SF Opera: The Rosenberg Years
Pamela Rosenberg, who will step down as general director of the San Francisco Opera this month to take a job with the Berlin Philharmonic, was as prominent a figure as an opera company can have at its head. A true music lover, Rosenberg nonetheless found herself battling financial troubles throughout her 5-year tenure in San Francisco. “Beset by a post-Sept.11 free fall in ticket revenues and contributed income, the sobering contraction of a local economy reeling from the dot-com collapse and a dangerously thin endowment fund, Rosenberg was forced to mandate one of the largest cutbacks in the company’s history… Embattled by financial woes and trying labor negotiations, Rosenberg was routinely blamed for problems that were largely beyond her control.”
What To Do With All These New Actors?
More colleges are producing more actors than ever and the job market is stagnating. So schools are adapting. “Instead of the pure education-of-an-artist approach that dominated in undergraduate acting programs through the 1980’s and 90’s, there is now a growing emphasis on helping students find work in a famously competitive field. The result is something of a confounding dilemma both for educators and for some professionals, who fear, on the one hand, that vocational training robs student actors of necessary artistic exploration and, on the other, that schools have to do a better job of preparing actors for the grim realities of professional life.”
Norway’s Golden Age Of Jazz
“As jazz heads into its second century as an international language, it’s in Oslo that its conversation is now at its most animated and productive. Thirty years ago, when the saxophonist Jan Garbarek and the guitarist Terje Rypdal became the first Norwegian jazz musicians to make an international impact, no one could have predicted that their country, with its population of 4.5 million, would now be enjoying such pre-eminence.”
A La Scala First On Opening Night
“No first night at La Scala is ever without its dramas, demonstrations and exaggerations, even now, when Italian opera is in historic decline. This year is likely to be no exception, since the first night of the 2005-6 season, a performance of Mozart’s Idomeneo, is thought to be the first time an Englishman has had the honour of conducting on this grandest night of the Milanese year.”
Publishing Industry In A Slump
“A look back at the fall publishing season, when publishers typically release their biggest books hoping to cash in on the holidays, reveals that the publishing industry is still struggling. The Association of American Publishers reported last month that sales of adult hardcover books, sluggish for several years, have fallen by 2 percent so far this year. Similarly, the American Booksellers Association, a trade group representing bookstores, said that overall bookstore sales in the first nine months of 2005 declined 2 percent from a year ago.”