Good Morning,
Classical music training still runs on a guru model — teacher as oracle, student as supplicant — and an argument in The New York Times says the deference is damaging the people it’s meant to turn into musicians. The useful question isn’t who behaved badly, it’s what should mastering your craft actually require you to hand over.
One field over, the question is getting harder to answer. Young writers are finding that the small, unglamorous, paid assignments where you used to learn the craft are being absorbed by machines before anyone earns a first byline (Fast Company). The training ground was always the low end of the market. That’s the part being automated first.
At the other end of mastery, Boston Symphony musicians have voted to authorize the first potential strike in the orchestra’s history (WGBH).
Audiences, meanwhile, keep choosing to go physical. Young buyers are pushing CD players back into stores (The Guardian), and country has taken over the Billboard charts largely by being the genre people still buy deliberately rather than absorb passively (Slate).
Elsewhere, the LAPD is investigating a Nicolas Cage movie that went missing at Netflix (MSN). Someone mislaid an entire film.
The rest of our stories below.
