"Disney goes to Anaheim late at night to help repair the animatronic Disneyland Lincoln, which has been malfunctioning and attacking members of the audience. Disney gets in an argument with the robot about blacks, and Lincoln goes crazy again and whacks Walt...." (
source). Starting today at 2 PM Eastern time (just under 3 hours from now) and for the next 90 days,
medici.tv will stream, free of charge, Teatro Real's January 22 premiere performance of
the new Philip Glass opera The Perfect American. It's based on the
novel of the same name by Peter Stephan Jungk, which the NY Times called "a surreal, meditative, episodic account of the last days of Walt Disney."
Four minute preview video. ENO rehearsal trailer. (Happy belated 76th, Mr. Glass.)
[more inside]
posted by maudlin
on Feb 6, 2013 -
21 comments
28 years ago this summer,
Leo Arnaud's "Bugler's Dream" suddenly found it had competition for the title of The Olympic Theme. Composer John Williams was commissioned to create a new fanfare, and
"Olympic Fanfare and Theme" was the result, with the Fanfare portion being played at every medal ceremony in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. But that wasn't the only music created for those Olympic Games...
[more inside]
posted by hippybear
on Jul 26, 2012 -
24 comments
So maybe you've caught
some recent iPhone commercials and wondered, "Is that Philip Glass? Surely Glass wouldn't do an Apple commercial, would he?" Well, not yet (although he did
appear at the Manhattan Apple Store a while back).
That piece you hear in the commercials, which sounds a lot like
Truman Sleeps, but faster and tinklier, is by
Keith Keniff. But if you want to hear
Truman Sleeps covered a little faster and and a lot tinklier, you have to go to Carlo Castellano, a guy with a studio, a glockenspiel, and lots and lots of
ping pong balls.
posted by maudlin
on Nov 12, 2011 -
34 comments
"The day with its cares and perplexities is ended and the night is now upon us. The night should be a time of peace and tranquility; a time to relax and be calm. We have need of a soothing story to banish the disturbing thoughts of the day, to set at rest our troubled minds, and put at ease our ruffled spirits. And what sort of story shall we hear? Ah, it will be a familiar story. A story that is so very, very old, and yet it is so new. It is the old, old story of …" the
2012/13 touring production of
Einstein on the Beach.
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posted by williampratt
on Mar 2, 2011 -
21 comments
They Were There is a 30 min video from IBM, who is turning 100 this year. "
told by first-hand witnesses—current and retired employees and clients—who were there when IBM helped to change the way world works."
posted by finite
on Jan 22, 2011 -
52 comments
Akhetaten (a.k.a. Amarna) was the city built by Pharaoh
Akhenaten, famous for his
monotheistic beliefs and his queen,
Nefertiti and son,
Tutankhamun.
The Amarna Letters has translations of correspondence sent to the Akhenaten, but a trove of it was found at the Amarna site. During his reign a
distinctive style of art rose to prominence, only to vanish after his death. The Boston MFA
has 40 objects from the era in its collection. Perhaps the most famous of the cultural artifacts of Akhenaten is the Great Hymn to Aten (
hieroglyphics, four different English translations:
1,
2,
3,
4). This poem was
set to music by Philip Glass for his opera Akhnaten (
information about the opera). Some see
direct parallels between The Great Hymn to Aten and Psalm 104. Though it was billed as a new beginning, like many utopias, Amarna was
no haven for the regular folk who lived there.
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 4, 2008 -
23 comments
Philip Glass, Late Twentieth-Century Music And Your PC, Sort Of... Andante's
Carte Blanche is a new multimedia magazine dedicated to contemporary music. Its first guest-editor is Philip Glass and he's assembled an interestingly unscholarly, offbeat and pleasantly accessible issue. At least for those of us who generally pay contemporary music (too) little attention. I wonder why this is, as it's invariably challenging or enlightening when we do. Who knows? Perhaps Carte Blanche may convince some of us pop-obsessed philistines to change our ways... [
Composer John Adams, writer Susan Sontag, choreographer Mark Morris and British director Jonathan Miller will follow in what promises to be an unmissable online proposition.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Aug 1, 2002 -
12 comments
Dig through the Glass Engine. A truly cool little app that indexes Mp3 samples of over 60 compositions by Philip Glass. Play with the buttons or drag the blue bar at the top of the screen to browse by year (with or without a filter thrown on to get just film scores, opera, etc.). Drag the second series of blue bars to get presented with other selections with more or less joy, sorrow, intensity, density and velocity. Even if you don't care for Glass, think how you could use something like this elsewhere. (via
Jerry Kindall)
posted by maudlin
on Mar 1, 2002 -
26 comments
