Visitan más de 80 mil personas muestra de Botero

Euforia. Los visitantes admiran la obra del artista colombiano.. (Foto: Archivo )

Muy popular.


Más de 80 mil personas han visitado la exposición "Fernando Botero: Una celebración", en el Palacio de Bellas Artes, de la capital mexicana, la cual abrió sus puertas al público el pasado 29 de marzo, y que reúne 117 piezas de uno de los artistas colombianos de mayor proyección mundial.

Google Art Project

A story in El Universal lead me to this: Google exhibirá en línea más de 30 mil obras de arte. Subtitled En Art Project participan 151 museos de 40 países, entre ellos México, España y Argentina. El programa optimiza la consulta, la riqueza y diversidad de las obras presentadas.

Cada museo o institución asociada decide y elige qué obras quiere dejar para su libre consulta en Art Project. (Foto: Archivo EL UNIVERSAL)

Each participating museum or institution will be able to decide which works of art it wishes to have a prt in the Project.

Más de 30 mil obras de arte de 151 museos de 40 países, entre ellos España, México, Argentina, Colombia y Perú, serán accesibles a partir de ahora por internet dentro del programa "Art Project", que hoy presentó Google en el Museo de Orsay de París. 

Over 30 thousand art works from 151 museums from 40 countries, among them Spain, Mexico, Argentina Colombia and Peru will be accessible online beginning now, in the Project, which Google presented today in the Orsay Museum, in Paris.

Vibe and xylo

On the ride to work today I heard music of Thelonious Monk on WKCR. Specifically, a three song set (perhaps this one) that includes Milt Jackson set me to thinking: what is the difference between a vibraphone and a xylophone.

First, the vibraphone (also known as the vibraharp or simply the vibes) is a musical instrument in the struck idiophone subfamily of the percussion family. So even claves are an idiophone.

An idiophone is any musical instrument which creates sound primarily by way of the instrument's vibrating, without the use of strings or membranes.

The vibraphone is similar in appearance to the xylophone, marimba and glockenspiel. Each bar is paired with a resonator tube having a motor-driven butterfly valve at its upper end, mounted on a common shaft, which produces a tremolo or vibrato effect while spinning. The vibraphone also has a sustain pedal similar to that used on a piano; when the pedal is up, the bars are all damped and the sound of each bar is shortened; with the pedal down, they will sound for several seconds.

A xylophone is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden (not steel) bars struck by mallets. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children's instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use. The term may be used generally, to include all such instruments, such as the marimba and balafon or, more specifically, to refer to an orchestral instrument of somewhat higher pitch range than the chromatic marimba. It is sometimes mistakenly used of similar lithophones and metallophone instruments of the glockenspiel type such as the pixiphone.

A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave in contrast to a heptatonic (seven note) scale such as the major scale and minor scale.

Woody welcomed home

 Oklahoma has always had a troubled relationship with her native son Woody Guthrie. The communist sympathies of America’s balladeer infuriated local detractors. In 1999 a wealthy donor’s objections forced the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City to cancel a planned exhibition on Guthrie organized by the Smithsonian Institution. It wasn’t until 2006, nearly four decades after his death, that theOklahoma Hall of Fame got around to adding him to its ranks. But as places from California to the New York island get ready to celebrate the centennial of Guthrie’s birth, in 2012, Oklahoma is finally ready to welcome him home. The George Kaiser Family Foundation in Tulsa plans to announce this week that it is buying the Guthrie archives from his children and building an exhibition and study center to honor his legacy.

While this poor folks’ hero and the richest man in Oklahoma might not seem to have much in common, Mr. Kaiser’s foundation, with its $4 billion endowment, is dedicated to helping Tulsa’s most disadvantaged. “I cried for an hour after meeting George Kaiser,” Ms. Guthrie said. “This puts together what I’ve always dreamed of.”

Bolívarian musicians

On new book cart. Dudamel is a shining star in orchestral music.
Tunstall, Tricia. (2012). Changing lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the transformative power of music.
New York: Norton.

78s, Photos, Even Sweat

Another fragment of Louis Armstrong’s legacy is back where it belongs. The Armstrong museum and archive in Queens has received a treasure-trove of rare 78-r.p.m. records, bootleg tapes, five personal letters, candid photographs, European posters, news clippings, discographies, even weight-loss tips — 192 cubic feet in all — from the estate of a Swedish man known as the world’s second-largest private collector of Satchmoiana.

Satchmoiana, now there is a word.


There is also a sweat-stained handkerchief that belonged to Armstrong, who was famous for theatrically wiping his brow between the trumpet solos he blew better than almost anyone else. “We’re excited about it because there might be some valuable DNA in it, what with cloning and all,” joked Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona.

One never knows.

The Armstrong Museum's archivist is named Ricky Riccardi; what a hoot.

[Library director] Mr. Cogswell, 58, is a Virginian who played saxophone gigs for a time, did graduate work in both jazz history and library science, and considers his current position his dream job. He shepherded visitors through Armstrong’s house last week, telling them how Armstrong, while on tour, asked his wife to buy them a home, which she did, picking one out in a working-class quarter and paying about $3,500. When Armstrong showed up by taxi from the airport at 3 a.m., he was dazzled by what he thought of as its grandeur, given the stark poverty he had been raised in. “Quit kidding me,” he told the cabdriver. “Take me to the address I gave you.”

Early Chet

One day I decided to look for renditions of "This time the dream's on me" and it was on this compilation. There are 4 CDs to the collection. The first one starts with live pieces, including a couple where Chet played with Bird: the fidelity is poor, but the talent shines through. Discs 2 and 3 have studio pieces. Disc 4 contains a few studio pieces, and a number of live pieces (in which Chet plays with both Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan.

This box set is available for purchase, and is annotated online. For a public library to own it is a gift that, alas, too few will appreciate. Yet it is proof of a wonderful music collection, and the Port Washington Library has that.