Hello. Since the last time we spoke, I have:
Purchased a flight to Amsterdam, as well as tickets to see Dutch National Ballet and Nederlans Dans Theater (which will me require to hop on a train to the Hague right after checking in to my hotel). Will probably also get a ticket to see Scapino Rotterdam Ballet. Right after typing this, I purchased a ticket to see Dutch National Opera perform Boris Godunov because I have accepted I always regret the shows I don’t see. Mulling over some other thoughts—let me know if you have any recommendations.
Finished Severance…!
Now, the news.
Last week, we talked about how to get more people to the opera. Then, the New York Times published a profile of Hudson Hall—the opera house in upstate New York that takes regional theater to new heights. Basically, director R.B. Schlather is fostering a culture of opera appreciation up in Hudson by allowing for open rehearsals and getting community members involved as cast members, costume designers, etc. It does help that Hudson just so happens to have had a strong influx of well-to-do New York City residents, especially since Hudson Hall reopened post-renovation in 2017. That’s not to say that other regions can’t take a page from Hudson Hall’s seemingly successful playbook: to get people excited, it helps to let them in.
Here’s an interesting opera that Virginia Opera will be debuting this month: Loving v. Virginia tells the story of the Supreme Court case that famously legalized interracial marriage. The opera is the creation of composer Damien Geter and librettist Jessica Murphy, and it was commissioned by Virginia Opera artistic director Adam Turner in 2022, for the Virginia Opera’s 50th anniversary season this year. “I create art that responds to social justice issues—not all my music, but a lot of it does—and I will continue to do that. It’s just sort of a privilege and a lucky blessing that this is happening right now, because I think it’s serving its purpose,” Geter told the Washington Post.
What’s it like to become an opera composer in a maximum-security prison? Read more at The Marshall Project.
For my full-time job as an editor at Inc., I wrote a feature about how ballet dancers are naturally suited to entrepreneurship. I’m very happy with how it turned out (especially with the beautiful photos and videos our art team commissioned). You can read it with this gift link.
The latest batch of Guggenheim Fellows has been announced. Here are a few honorees you might not already be familiar with:
Donald Byrd is a modern dance choreographer whose work often explores themes of social justice. He is the artistic director of Seattle’s Spectrum Dance Theater.
Theaster Gates is a multi-disciplinary artist who was profiled in T magazine’s Greats issue in the fall.
Farah Al Qasimi is a talented photographer (whose work I saw at the Tate in 2023).
Katherine Balch is a composer who often incorporates dynamic—and unexpected—percussive movements in to her pieces.
What even is classical music? For The Atlantic, composer and conductor Matthew Aucoin argues that it should be defined as written music—rather than by nebulous descriptions, like “music from central European countries.” But isn’t all music written, you may ask? Yes, but that’s not precisely what Aucoin means:
The reference point for a given piece of music is the score, rather than a studio recording or a live performance. Beethoven’s symphonies have been recorded hundreds—if not thousands—of times, and they’ve been performed many more times than that, but every one of those performances and recordings refers to the same score. For a composer, the score is the foundational site of creativity, and the act of score-making links together artists who could hardly sound more different from one another—say, an Italian composer of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period like Claudio Monteverdi and a 20th-century American avant-gardist like John Cage. Even an extreme case, such as Cage’s famous 4’33”—a work in which performers refrain from playing their instrument for four minutes and 33 seconds—depends on its score, a simple and playful set of written instructions.
Jazz, by contrast, is noted for musicians’ individuality and improvisation, while authority in rock and pop is granted more to a studio album, rather than sheet music.
This is, ultimately, a broader definition of “classical” than we may have previously considered. Aucoin argues that big band music a la Duke Ellington actually shares more commonalities with Stravinsky than more improvisational jazz. “If we understand that writing, in music as in language, has the potential to be a force for liberation, and that it can transcend localized questions of style and aesthetic, we might come to a fuller sense of what music can be in our lives—the many forms it can take, the many truths it can tell,” he says.
Performance art alert: Marina Abramović and pianist Igor Levit are collaborating on a 16-hour concert in London on April 24, which will involve Levit playing Erik Satie’s “Vexations” 840 times. Levit has done this once before, in 2020. At the time, the New Yorker covered the feat. You can see an edited clip of Levit playing the composition here. You will note he appears to get more and more vexed…
There is actually a long history of musicians—including John Cage—marathoning “Vexations.” Satie, after all, had written on his score that the piece was to be played 840 times…but literally no one knows why he came to that number. Pianist Richard Cameron-Wolfe told the NYT in 2023 that the eccentric Satie had dated the piece not too long after he’d allegedly gone through a breakup. I guess we all have our own coping mechanisms!
Apparently the Kennedy Center will now be permanently be lit up in red, white, and blue at night, as a “powerful symbol of unity and our nation’s commitment to bringing people together,” said Roma Daravi, the center’s vice president of public relations. It looks quite ugly and gauche.
On Friday, the Center reportedly dismissed another half-dozen employees, who were on the government relations, marketing, social media and rentals teams, the NYT reported; that marks about 20 dismissals since Trump’s takeover. The five unions representing workers at the Kennedy Center also started a website last week to help those workers and the public stay up-to-date about these goings-on.
Bloomberg reports that DOGE has also visited the National Gallery of Art to discuss its legal status. The NGA, which does receive funding from Congress, hosted a Trump-Vance fundraiser pre-election and, in January, dismantled its DEI programs, as we’ve previously discussed.
In spite of—sweeps arm—all of this, U.S. Senators Alex Padilla (a California Democrat) and Ted Cruz (who’d rather be in Cancún) introduced a bill, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino Act, to establish a museum on the National Mall “that recognizes the accomplishments of Latinos.” In 2020, Congress passed a bipartisan bill to establish a Latinx history museum.
The White House also replaced the official portrait of President Obama with a painting depicting Trump raising his fist in the air, moments after his assassination attempt….which is….something….
Everyone has been talking a lot about the Frick’s reopening. Sadly I have not yet made my way there (maybe I should get a membership?). But we also have two other museum openings to look forward to in New York in the fall: the New Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The NYT recently checked in with the directors of each museum—Lisa Phillips and Thelma Golden, who also happen to be friends. Here are the key takeaways:
Each museum receives less that 1 percent of their annual budgets from federal grants, which means they are not in the line of danger from DOGE.
However, finances are a tricky are for any museum, which is why both museums are intent on diversifying their income streams.
At a time when museum admission in the U.S. averages $30, both museums want to make sure they are accessible to their communities—but they do still depend on ticket sales. The New Museum has a number of discounts available, including pay-what-you-wish Thursdays, and is looking into offering community membership for those within its zip code. Golden suggests there needs to be a cultural shift, “that values what it means to make the experiences in museums accessible, so that underwriting wouldn’t seem such a hard thing to make happen universally.” That’s not impossible: remember the pilot program in Boston that’s made nine cultural institutions in the city (temporarily) free for K-12s and their caregivers? That’s thanks to private donors!
We have mentioned Cairo’s Grand Egyptian Museum a few times, and finally the New York Times offers a peek inside.
London’s Hampstead Theatre in Camden has launched a program to help adults dealing with social isolation. It offers writing and performance sessions, as well as performance tickets, in the efforts to ease loneliness in what is—according to polling, anyway—London’s loneliest borough.
Frances is making some questionable moves on the global stage when it comes to museum-building. Le Monde reports that France Muséums—a consultancy that operates as a private entity with public shareholders—is working with India’s government to create a new national museum in Delhi, the Yuga Yugeen Bharat (“The Museum of Timeless and Eternal India”). The ambition to create the largest museum in the world is one being driven by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been noted and criticized for his promotion of Hindu nationalism, at the exclusion of all other religions and languages in the South Asian country.
Basically, there is ample (and justified concern) that Modi will use this museum project as a way of furthering Hindu supremacy in the nation. This isn’t the first time that France Muséums has waded into tricky curatorial territory; it formed, initially, to develop the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and at the time, critics purported that Sharia law would “censor nude paintings and religious subjects,” a concern that did not end up being realized. France Muséums general director Hervé Barbaret told Le Monde that the agency gives its partners frameworks and advice, but it does not have any involvement in the selection of artworks or curatorial strategy. He’s confident, however, that this project will turn out just fine since works of art “don’t lie.” They can, however, be excluded from a narrative.
I guess the Pope is really excited that Sagrada Familia will allegedly be completed in 2026, because he has put architect Antoni Gaudí on the path to sainthood—but he still needs to get proof that he caused a miracle after he died in 1926 when he was hit by a tram on his way to church…!
What will it take to make the harp more modern? Professional harpist Parker Ramsay explores this question in an essay for the NYT. “The harp has a remarkably small footprint in the field, whether in funding commissions or presenting concerts,” he writes. “When was the last time you went to a harp show? Could you conceive of a world in which a harp work occupies your attention like an opera or a violin concerto?” I actually can conceive of such a world, and luckily Ramsay is putting on a performance of new commissions at the 92Y on May 9. If you’re not in NYC, livestream tickets are available for $25. ▲