New Mozart just dropped
Plus, questions to ask the publishing industry.
Happy first day of autumn. Since we last spoke, I:
Finished reading Farewell, Ghosts, an excellent Italian novel translated by the inimitable Ann Goldstein.
Saw New York City Ballet twice, as their fall season officially launched on Tuesday. While Balanchine always pleases, I most enjoyed the Jerome Robbins pieces I saw: The Four Seasons (set to music by Verdi—not Vivaldi—from his opera I Vespri Siciliani) and Glass Pieces. You have one more chance to see the latter this coming Thursday, though if you can’t, there is a pretty good recording on YouTube of the Paris Opera Ballet. It is worth seeing in person if you can, especially with the Philip Glass score.
Watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) on Criterion. Really stunning. The first of his I’ve seen!
Started listening to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on audiobook. Forty-five minutes down, 56.5 hours left.
Now, the news:
Organizing works. Congratulations to the New York Philharmonic, which has reached a new labor agreement that is expected to be ratified by the end of the week, the New York Times reported. The musicians—who have not received an increase in pay since 2019—will receive a 30 percent raise over the next three years, bringing base pay to $205,000. We love to see this! Artists at the absolute peak of their craft absolutely deserve this kind of compensation, especially in one of the most expensive cities. This base salary is on par with other major orchestras in the U.S., including those in Boston, LA, and Chicago; currently, the base salary is closer to $150k.
The New York Phil is the oldest orchestra in the country and one of the most prestigious. It has also struggled—along with many other orchestras across the U.S.—to hire Black and Latino musicians. To improve on this front, the Phil will enact new audition processes that aim to eliminate bias (like making musicians play behind a screen during final-round auditions), and work with several organizations that are pushing for diversity in classical music, like the Black Orchestral Network and Sphinx Organization. Sphinx, a non-profit founded by violinist Aaron P. Dworkin in 1997, operates a number of programs to support access to the arts, including educational opportunities for children, scholarships, competitions, an annual conference for leaders in the music industry, and more. Its National Alliance for Audition Support provides Black and Latinx musicians with mentorship, financial support, audition prep, and guidance to help them navigate a space where they may be systemically disadvantaged. A 2023 report from the League of American Orchestras found that Black and Latinx individuals make up 2.4 and 4.8 percent, respectively, of U.S. orchestra populations; comparatively, Black and Latinx populations make up 12.6 and 18.9 percent of the U.S. overall population, according to census estimates.
Clearly, there’s more work to be done, but it is encouraging to see a major orchestra raise its salaries to level the economic playing field for those who don’t have family money to fall back on, but ultimately, there’s still a lot more support for musicians to get to even get to this point. What I’d love to see more of is increased arts funding (obviously) and access.
Speaking of classical music. A previously undiscovered composition by teenage Mozart was found in a German library. The 12-minute piece—Ganz kleine Nachtmusik—is composed for a string trio and was performed in Austria last week and in Germany on Saturday. You can listen to it here.
The British Museum’s new director says that he is “going to lead the biggest transformation of any museum in the world,” he told The Times. Surely you know what my biggest question is. Which is, of course: Is he going to give back the Elgin Marbles?
Sadly, no. “That issue is not within my purview. It depends on other parties,” says Nicholas Cullinan. He’s right: the 1963 British Museum Act forbids the museum from removing artifacts from its permanent collection. Still, Cullinan suggested that partnerships with other museums around the world could be worth exploring.
So what are his plans for the museum? Digitizing the museum’s collection of 8 million items, which will prove helpful should it run into any future thefts, and some renovations that will help the museum manage its increasing visitorship. Hearteningly, it does seem like access is paramount to Cullinan in his vision for the museum. He told The Times of his upbringing: “We had very little money, but we were fortunate in that my parents, who were extraordinary in overcoming social and economic barriers and broadening their horizons, exposed us to reading, music, visiting museums and the theatre from a young age.” My kind of guy.
On my side of the pond, museums are also undergoing various shifts. The Frick is finally expected to reopen at Frick Mansion in early 2025 after a lengthy renovation, during which its Rembrandts and Vermeers found a temporary home in the aesthetically antipodal Met Breuer. The Frick has also tapped Axel Rüger as its next director; he will succeed Ian Wardropper after he finishes out his 14-year tenure through 2024. Rüger previously ran London’s Royal Academy of Arts and Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum.
A few other openings to look forward to: the New Museum’s expansion in 2025, the Bronx Museum in 2026, a new building for the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2025, and the Met’s renovated modern and contemporary wing in 2029.
Saving the planet with skinny books. Here is a story that made everyone on Twitter mad and essentially proved that no one actually read the article. Publishers are increasingly making “skinnier books” to offset the carbon footprints, the BBC reported. Of course, people took this to mean that publishers were trying to publish shorter tomes—which clearly isn’t true (have you ever seen a commercially successful novella?). Instead, what they are doing is experimenting with typefaces that can reduce both the amount of ink required and the amount of paper required to print a book. Ultimately, this is a finance story masquerading as a climate story because have you seen what ink costs? Sometimes, as the owner of a printer, who likes to print things out, I fear I am bringing myself closer and closer to financial ruin. If these typefaces allow publishers to save money, I’m all for it. Let’s just hope they kick back those savings to their authors and their lowest-level employees.
What do we talk about when we talk about diversity in publishing? If you follow news of the book world, you have likely seen, in recent months, the departures (some by choice, some not) of Black book editors from the publishing industry; Lisa Lucas, for instance, who became the publisher of Pantheon and Schocken in 2020, was let go in May. The New York Times explored this disheartening trend in August, in the piece “‘A Lot of Us Are Gone’: How the Push to Diversify Publishing Fell Short,” but I will direct you instead to Thomas Gebremedhin’s piece that published last week in LitHub.
In “Between the Lines: What Is Missing in the Diversity in Publishing Discourse,” Gebremedhin acknowledges the NYT’s recent analysis as something of a trend, an ultimately flattening analysis of a much more nuanced issue. “My background informs how I read a manuscript, the sounds I hear in a text when certain notes are played, my commitment to elevate voices shunted to the margins,” he writes. “But my identity is not limited to my Blackness. Queerness and nationality and generation—my socioeconomic upbringing—also shape my reading of a text. These identities work in tandem and yet, like different colors of light in a prism, they refract in distinct way. A rule of mine? I must run into myself in everything I acquire.”
There is often an assumption, in these conversations, about what kinds of books Black editors may champion; Gebremedhin, for his part, has edited a wide range of books, including debut author Zach Williams’s Beautiful Days, Hua Hsu’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Stay True, and Kyle Chayka’s discourse-sparking Filterworld. And yet, he says, “there are still those agents who will never think of me as a potential editor for a biography of Chaucer or a history of 20th century physics.”
There is also little discussion about the nuances of the environment in which Black book editors must operate. “An utter incuriosity overshadows basic questions,” Gebremedhin writes. “What are the external and internal forces, alongside race, that contribute to the success—or downfall—of an editor? Was their manager supportive? Were they a good manager? What is their sense of aesthetics, culture, politics? How do they advocate for their books? What is their relationship to their authors?”
Nor is there much acknowledgment of the role that diverse hiring plays across an entire organization or much time spent asking why “many white editors are not acquiring more innovative, interesting books written by people of color and other marginalized voices” and why instead, “the burden of fixing these ossified corporate and cultural structures falls on…the ones with the most to lose.” These are important conversations to have when we discuss the issue of diversity in publishing; oversimplification is not a viable solution.
Genuinely cool: Young female academics are gaining massive followings—and subsidizing their incomes—by sharing their knowledge on TikTok, Cosmopolitan reports. People like PhD student Hannah Parker (300.4k followers) share videos about Ancient Roman and Egyptian history while Caroline Hackett (31.4k) shares stories about French women in the 18th and 19th centuries. My friend Dr. Isabella Rosner shares her scholarship on historic embroidery, which offers a great lens into the lives of teen girls in the 1600s.
While so much of academia can feel inaccessible, I love to see TikTok used as a force for driving public curiosity and education. Though it can have some drawbacks, as Cosmo reports: women academics share how they’ve had their authority questioned by male commenters and even how they’ve received threats. The Humanities Guild, a community of scholars that aims to support one another in largely cis white male spaces (so, academia), has emerged to provide online safety training for these creators. There are clear and obvious reasons to support academics of varied backgrounds and to support educated professionals sharing their scholarship freely online in a world plagued with misinformation. These creators, Elena Bowman writes, are “de-gatekeeping research and making history fresh and approachable.” Let’s have more of that.
Is culture dying? asks New Yorker ideas editor Joshua Rothman, contemplating the work of French sociologist Olivier Roy. Essentially, Roy sees the demise of culture: what was once a whole, uniting force that existed for the sake of its own existence has transformed into “a collection of tokens” we display and trade “to position ourselves vis-à-vis other people.” It is an idea worth grappling with—and one I will leave you to contemplate. ▲
Loved this issue. Listened to the Mozart and have followed others links provided. All so interesting.
Thank you for the work you put out for our consumption 💙