By manipulating stem cells, scientists have found they can grow beating cardiac tissue in a petri dish. The cells "self-organized" to form microchambers, which slowly began to beat like a full-sized heart.
I recently spent a decade developing a project that aimed to grow the repertoire of shorter compositions (“encore pieces”) for violin and piano. It involved 26 commissions and an open contest that drew more than 400 compositions. Amid all of that newness, I was drawn to go back to a pair of personally meaningful concertos from my more distant past, pieces that had extensive pasts themselves: Mozart’s “Violin Concerto No. 5” and Vieuxtemps’ “Violin Concerto No. 4.” As I threw myself into my work with living composers, and felt rewarded by the results, I could see that it does music no favors to consider only the newest works the most tantalizing. An artistic statement rarely emerges from a vacuum. It grows out of some kernel of inspiration that eventually becomes an individual creation.
I recently spent a decade developing a project that aimed to grow the repertoire of shorter compositions (“encore pieces”) for violin and piano. It involved 26 commissions and an open contest that drew more than 400 compositions. Amid all of that newness, I was drawn to go back to a pair of personally meaningful concertos from my more distant past, pieces that had extensive pasts themselves: Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Vieuxtemps’ Violin Concerto No. 4. As I threw myself into my work with living composers, and felt rewarded by the results, I could see that it does music no favors to consider only the newest works the most tantalizing. An artistic statement rarely emerges from a vacuum. It grows out of some kernel of inspiration that eventually becomes an individual creation.
Kelley Watts went away to college just six weeks after her mother, Marilyn Sage Meagher, was killed during a break-in at their Houston apartment. Determined not to be known as the Girl Whose Mother Was Murdered, Watts maintained the facade of a normal student: getting decent grades, partying enthusiastically, making friends who prized her for her sense of humor.