Opinion
Kieron Tyler
We all know people who listen to their music from iTunes, aren’t fussed with CDs and use their computer as the sole source for their listening. They’re listening to MP3s, the file format developed for portable players. But MP3s are compressed files with less data than those on a CD. Why listen to this fast-food version of music at home? Do so and it’s a nail in the coffin of sound quality.This isn’t about the pros and cons of downloading or any of the surrounding issues. It’s not about streaming via Spotify – that’s just an advanced form of radio. This is about the creep which is leading to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I can tell you the year (1983). I can tell you the theatre (the newly opened Barbican), the actors (Gambon, Sher), and the speech (“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”). Hell, I can all but tell you the seat number. Lear and the Fool in the storm stood on a platform mounted on a high pole. It was an arresting way of establishing their elemental isolation. Or it would have been if the gantry gaining the actors access to the platform had been withdrawn. “That’s not meant to be there,” said the person next door to me. And then louder, “They’ve got it wrong.” My father. I still remember someone Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Last month I thought I'd gone deaf. After decades of standing too close to the loudspeakers I'd finally got my comeuppance and my ears had given up the ghost. I was at Joan As Police Woman's gig at the Barbican and the music sounded like a muffled whisper, as if someone was talking to me from the other side of the room through a ball of cotton wool.Luckily it turned out that it wasn't me, it was them. Joan apologised for the sludgy mix and explained that it had been perfectly fine during the soundcheck but some gremlins had decided to rain on her sonic parade. The sound improved a little Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sorry if I haven’t seen you since New Year, darling, but I've been non-stop. Last night it was the whatsonstage.com awards, I’m in LA next weekend for the Oscars of course, and I ruined my Jimmy Choos at the Globes - such a riot! I had to pop into a couple of dull old Critics Circle awards, but there's only wine, lovey, and at least Melvyn's South Bank do gives you a decent dinner. Was so hungover I had to positively skulk at the National Television Awards the next night. God knows how I stitched myself together for the BAFTAs last week. At least the Brits were less starchy, but they drink so Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There's been a lot of waffle lately about rock'n'roll being dead. This is down to mainstream radio turning its back on guitar music in favour of a stew of electro-pop and R&B, and the fact that just three spots in the Top 100 UK bestselling singles (ie downloads) of 2010 were held by rock songs (for the record, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing", Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" and "Dog Days are Over" by Florence + the Machine). Whenever this sort of media babble starts, it's time to run for cover because there's undoubtedly another tedious wave of guitar bands waiting gleefully in the wings. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Tainted by its origins and association with the pulp cinema of the 1950s (classics like Bwana Devil, It Came from Outer Space and House of Wax were pioneers of stereoscopic technology), 3D cinema has remained the province of entertainment cinema, a novelty no art-house auteur would touch. Spin The Hurt Locker’s shock Oscar win in 2010 any way you want, it made an emphatic statement about the value the cinematic academy placed on technological advancement. For that was surely the terminal problem with Avatar. A thrilling visual spectacle, it harnessed its innovations to a recycled plot Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The idea of "selling out" has clung to popular music, and indeed most art forms, for a long, long time. In our postmodern techno-consumerist society it's an increasingly outdated and irrelevant concept. The book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor shrewdly takes the whole notion of selling out to pieces, from the blues of the early 20th century to Moby's deconstruction of those blues decades later. Or rather, it simply points out there was never such a thing as a core purity from which anyone could sell out in the first place. Really, Barker Read more ...
David Nice
Most of us don't object to experiments in concert presentation - the occasional one-off showcase to lure the young and suspicious into the arcane world of attentive concert-going, the odd multimedia event as icing on the cake. It's only those pundits obsessed with the key word "accessibility" who tell us that the basic concept of sitting (or standing, as they have at the Proms for well over a century) and listening with respect for those around us needs overhauling. It's a typical journalistic conception of "either/or" instead of "all approaches welcome" - a case of what an American academic Read more ...
carole.woddis
Do Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg have a lot to answer for? Or can we place the blame, if blame it is, elsewhere? I’m referring to the steady, insidious advance of theatre mumbling. You may have noticed it at a theatre near you. It’s the art that disguises itself in “naturalism”, a kind of quasi “Method” style of acting.It’s not always easy to detect. At first you think you may be mistaken. Isn’t this “great acting” I see before me, the eyes furrowed towards the floor, the voice low, even a little seductive? You blink – and blink again. You wait for something to happen on stage. But wait a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Now that The X Factor's finally over, can we please get back to heaping opprobrium on the only Wagner that really deserves it? In the coming year opera houses around the world will be deciding whether to temporarily bankrupt themselves in 2013 to celebrate the composer's centenary. Opera Australia have announced a £10 million Ring Cycle. LA Opera and the Met are in the middle of new bank-busting cycles (£20 million and £15 million respectively). No doubt ours will want in some way to follow suit. Yet they would do well to steer clear. We cannot afford it. And we should not be encouraging this Read more ...
Sarah Kent
With the Frieze Art Fair now upon us, the only sane response for anyone interested in art is to leave London until the wretched event is over. Art fairs are for art what pimps are for virgins, to misquote Barnett Newman. The work, in other words, doesn’t stand a chance. And just as supermarkets don’t give shelf space to products for you to admire the packaging, art fairs don’t display work for you to look at and enjoy. In each case, the point is to purchase.So why should this matter when commercial galleries do it all the time? It’s a question of degree. In galleries, an artist’s work is Read more ...