Archives for the 'Cultural Affairs' Category
It’s been a while, coming and going, etc.
All the while I wasn’t blogging, two journalists have started blogging and one journalists with a blog is no longer a journalists. Let me start with the latter: Marc Geelhoed, who wrote for Time Out Chicago, has joined the dark side and we now have two Marcs with a Dutch last name working at the [...]
It’s 2008
It’s 2008. I spent the holidays in Texas and it turned out to be a very American, and maybe even more Texan experience, including barbeque in Lockhart, outlet malls in San Marcos, and walking out of a church in protest against a horribly inappropriate homily that rambled about the homosexual threat against families (clearly a [...]
Adams’ Doctor Atomic at the Lyric: a review
Ever since my first opera attendance, when I saw Parsifal at the Vienna Staatsoper with Placido Domingo in 2002, I have not seen a better opera. Maybe it was the first impression that counts. Growing up, opera wasn’t present in my life; all that I knew of opera was packaged in those tedious concerts with [...]
Proving once again, there’s more than corn in Indiana…
The recent discussion surrounding Richard Taruskin’s piece in The New Republic made me think of Indiana. I swiftly sifted through the article, but it required a printer, as 12,000 words are no friend to eyes staring at a computer screen. In its stead, I read Marc Geelhoed’s and Drew McManus’s commentaries. Paul A. Alter, in [...]
Others on Liverpool phil in Second Life
I decided to give some more thought to the Liverpool Philharmonic’s Second Life adventure. One of the questions at the post concert Q&A was if the orchestra had made any money with this concert. The short answer was a no. I can only imagine it actually cost the orchestra quite a bit to produce the [...]
Liverpool phil live in Second Life
Today, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra performed live in Second Life. There were only 100 passes available, but I was one of the lucky ticket holders. Since it was work-related, my employer was gracious enough to have me install Second Life on my work computer. (The concert was at 7:30 p.m. in Liverpool, which means [...]
Boorstin’s Composing for Community
I am currently reading Daniel Boorstin’s The Creators, a most original perspective on arts history focusing on several “heroes of the imagination.” I’ve been reading it for a while, as I do, in phases. I recently picked it up again and I have just finished the chapter entitled “composing for community.” I thought I would [...]
Museum 2.0: Does Dresden read this blog?
Dutch Perspective on December 5, 2006:
“Now I’m imagining a grand museum—a collaboration between the world’s greatest museums perhaps?—where Second Life residents can roam through virtual galleries, where paintings are replaced by high-resolution images […] This museum has lecture rooms, where world-famous curators or art historians can lecture before an audience of Second Life residents. This [...]
Live blogging about cultural participation
The folks at Arts Journal are currently live-blogging from the ASOL conference in Nashville. In anticipation of the book Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life they started a discussion last week on a specially created blog. This afternoon they have taken the discussion partly out of the blogosphere with a presentation [...]
Brahms the vandal?
Let me start by saying that I am probably the only Chicagoan who likes the 2003 addition to Soldier Field.
This week conductor Kent Nagano programmed Brahms’s A German Requiem with interludes by Wolfgang Rhim, a contemporary composer. Few were happy about it, some even offended.
For example, Sounds & Fury author A.C. Douglas:
“By the time of [...]
