446 stories by "George Hunka"
On 9 December 1911, Arnold Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden für gemischten Chor a cappella (Opus 11) was premiered at Vienna’s Großer Musikvereins-Saal under the baton of Franz …
As readers of this blog know, if everybody’s doing something, I feel compelled to do it too. Below is a list of the most popular posts on Superfluities Redux over the past 12 months. M…
One of the major reasons for my growing disillusionment with contemporary American drama criticism and practice –Â I’m one short step away from saying “I don’t car…
It’s not too late to enjoy Marilyn Nonken’s new album of music by Hugues Dufourt and Joshua Fineberg, Voix Voilées, for the holidays. The Métier release features a selection of…
Tickets go on sale at 2.00pm today for a by-public-demand additional performance of Mike Daisey’s Fucking Fucking Fucking Ayn Rand at Joe’s Pub on Thursday, 17 January 2013, at 7…
“In general, I make the demand that whoever wishes to make himself acquainted with my philosophy shall read every line of me,” Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in Chapter 40 of Volume 2…
To round out this week’s essays and links on criticism, and at the risk of boring Cameron Woodhead further (at least when there’s a hoary, 50-year-old Sondheim musical comedy to …
It’s Old Home Week in the comments section of my post “Theatre blogosphere dead; no services planned” from Tuesday (which, curiously, garnered even more page views than Mon…
About twenty years ago, more or less as a dare to myself, I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, all 1,088 pages of it, from cover to cover. About 150 pages into it, I began to develop a sl…
When Michael Billington began his “A to Z of modern drama” series for the Guardian late last year, he began with a look at Absurdism. I responded shortly after it was posted; the…
“I actually think one of the reasons why the theatrosphere essentially died is that things got better on our big issue (new play development),” someone wrote on a Twitter account…
The Fall 2012 issue of Modern Drama features “The Canonization of Christopher Shinn: A Modest Proposal on Ethics” by Stephen Bottoms, the first major academic consideration of th…
To prepare for a new year, I will be moving several of my previous posts on eroticism, transgression, and tragedy over here over the next few weeks. They have been getting a little lost in t…
Culturebot, which will celebrate its tenth anniversary next year, has launched a new initiative called the “Citizen Critic Project,” which seeks to empower writers and thinkers o…
Most of the obituaries and remembrances of composer Jonathan Harvey that I’ve read this week cite not only the quality of the man’s work but the also quality of his character. &#…
Jonathan Harvey, who passed away yesterday, was considered one of the most important new music composers of the past 40 years (which explains why the New York Times hasn’t yet run an o…
UPDATE: The first obit to appear is this, from the London Times; Alex Ross writes that “Some celebrated composers fade after death, their fame dependent on personality and on networks …
Given the climatic events of the past few months, theatregoers may wish to avail themselves of the reading of Karen Malpede’s Extreme Whether, a new play with music (by Arthur Rosen), …
There appears to be something of a revival of good old Chekhovian Realism at the moment in New York, both in its original Russian and Clifford Odetsian forms. In that spirit, I repost below …
Tony Kushner says that “Heiner Müller was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and will undoubtedly be among the most indispensable of the twenty-first, the terrors of…
Mine, in the December 2012 issue of TCG’s American Theatre magazine, that is, where I review two new books about the British playwright Harold Pinter. It is not online, I am afraid (po…
Originally published last January. I have been reading about a recent event that took place in Afghanistan — wondering why it hasn’t raised the same outrage in the U.S. as the Ab…
One of the many Greenwich Village denizens of The Recognitions is Esme, a young woman who poses as an artist’s model for Wyatt Gwyon, the central character of the novel. A heroin addic…
The shelf containing book-length critical writing on William Gaddis’ novels is short, but growing. A more comprehensive and exhaustive bibliography of the critical literature can be fo…
Alison Croggon recently announced that she was hanging up the “Gone fishing” sign at her blog Theatre Notes after eight years. In her “Last Post,” she writes: The rea…
