Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.
- Probably everyone in the world has seen it by now, but if you missed it, check out three brass players from the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra trying to show that real music can be played on vuvuzelas. [The Rest Is Noise]
- Germany will knock England out of the World Cup. So says a psychic octopus. Just follow the link. [Cronaca]
- After the news that the Musée du Luxembourg would close earlier this year, the French Senate has decided not to relinquish control of the museum to another private management company. Instead, the state will take control, through the Réunion des Musées Nationaux. [Libération]
- With hat tip to ArtsJournal, artist Bruce Munro has created CDSea, an installation in a 10-acre field in Wiltshire, England, said to resemble "an ocean of light that from one angle glows with a soft blue haze and from another, dazzles with the light of 600,000 mirrors." The medium? Discarded compact discs. [BBC]
- French composer Pascal Dusapin premiered his new Opéra de feu on the beach at Deauville this week, as part of the city's 150th anniversary celebrations. It involves his music coordinated by computer with the explosion of fireworks created by pyrotechnicians Groupe F. [Le Monde]
- When you are hungry and want to have another of those perfect tacos from that
roadside food truck you saw that one time, how do you find it again? Follow its Twitter feed, of course. [DCist]
- Terry Teachout dismisses some masterworks because they are difficult. [Wall Street Journal]
- Plácido Domingo talks to Jessica Duchen, about retirement among other things. [The Independent]
2 comments:
Teachout is somewhat unfair, I think. Finnegans Wake is perhaps the far-out-point of modernism. I don't think any of the Carter Quartets is over 30 minutes, so one need not devote one's life to listening to them to learn to appreciate their language. None of Boulez's music is that long. Many of Ashbery's poems are quite short. And so on.
Thus, an intellectual lazy piece of writing that serves only to comfort the comfortable.
Martin, I had more or less the same reaction. It is quite a jump to go from not liking complicated modern music or literature oneself to broadly claiming that there is a scientific basis for not liking it. There was a similar over-simplification in Terry's article mentioned in last Sunday's roundup: I enjoy listening to recordings of my favorite orchestral pieces more than going to the orchestra, so all regional orchestras should face reality and fold.
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