Purple Memorials Fit for a Prince: Members of the music community and the general public have been mourning since news broke of the death of iconic singer/songwriter/producer/showman Prince last week. Prince, a Minnesota native, died in his home at the age of 57, with the cause of death yet unknown. As a seven-time Grammy winner, Prince made a lasting legacy in the music world, defying genre boundaries and gender stereotypes. Best known for his own hits including “Little Red Corvette,” “When Doves Cry,” “Kiss,” and “Raspberry Beret,” Prince also wrote for many other artists, including Sinead O’Connor, the Bangles, and Chaka Khan. His 1984 film “Purple Rain” told a fictionalized version of his own life story, focusing on a biracial, ambitious, talented individual. Purple memorials have popped up around the nation, adorning his Paisley Park estate in Minnesota and even prompting the famous rain room exhibit to turn purple in his honor. The New York Times’ Jon Pareles calls Prince a “unifier of dualities,” as he broke boundaries and stretched conceptions along racial, gender, sexual, musical, and cultural lines. Even in his death, Prince acts as a unifier–bringing together artists and music listeners worldwide to celebrate his life and his undying devotion to the celebration of identity in all its unique forms.

Shakespeare Legacy 400 Years Strong: April 23rd of this year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and theater lovers around the world are celebrating the Bard’s unmatched legacy. The most grand celebration, however, took place in the playwright’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, a town in England’s West Midlands. The “Shakespeare Live Show” included performances of scenes from the Bard’s plays as well as live music and dancing. The show, screened live on the BBC Two channel as well as to 368 cinemas in the UK and Europe, also included performances from British acting greats such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Sir Ian McKellen, Meera Syal, Dame Judi Dench, and David Tennant. A surprise royal guest appearance by Prince Charles, who acted in a Hamlet sketch based on the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, proved to be a highlight of the event. Shakespeare’s legacy lives on not only in these wonderful theatrical celebrations, but even in our daily use of language, as we use terms everyday coined in his plays. It will certainly be interesting to see how Shakespeare continues to influence society, the world of theater, and our use of language over the next 400 years.

Bringing Dance to Every Public School: The National Dance Institute has partnered with 40 schools, serving 6,000 students each week with programs that bring dance instruction to typically underfunded New York City public schools. The NDI programs vary–some place NDI instructors in schools throughout the city for 45 minutes each week, while others bring students from Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan to its Harlem headquarters for practice. Many of the schools that have partnered with NDI, typically located in diverse, low-income communities, would otherwise be unable to offer arts education to students. The NDI programs themselves aim to teach the importance of teamwork and discipline, exercising students’ brains and bodies as they learn combinations and push themselves our of their comfort zones. Bianca Johnson, one of the dance teachers and herself a graduate of the NDI program, explains that “by the end of the school year, everyone has learned to work as such a powerful and strong team.” Statistics from 2014 reported by The New York Times revealed that 20% of NYC public schools had no arts teachers, and that number rose to more than 42% in some low-income areas like the South Bronx. NDI board member Charlotte d’Amboise argues that this is just the beginning: “I believe that [the program] should be in more public schools and expand nationally…It would be great if it were in every school, because truthfully, it’s important and should be part of everyone’s education.” Certainly the NDI’s efforts have been a big step in the right direction of providing arts instruction for all children.

Biological Factors in Considering Orchestra Layout: Richard Kunert of the Donders Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics brings together psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and music to explain how biology impacts the listening experience of audience members. According to Kunert, higher pitches tend to be processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, and the instruments that produce such pitches (e.g. violins, violas) are generally to the left of the audience. Lower-pitches, conversely, are processed by the right hemisphere of the brain, and the instruments that produce those pitches (e.g. cellos, double basses) are generally to the right. Because of complicated right-left processing crossover, however, this arrangement is actually not ideal for the audience’s listening experience. In fact, though the left part of the brain processes higher pitches, it is the right ear that hears them better (and then projects them to the left auditory cortex). The orchestra’s seating arrangement, ultimately, does not take into account how audience members’ brains actually work. The arrangement, as is, “mirrors the listening bias of human ears.” Kunert argues that “the seeming cultural oddity of who sits where in an orchestra could actually be the result of a biological oddity of brain organization…In the concert hall, the cultural and the biological are closely intertwined.” His work certainly brings up some important considerations as we consider optimal audience listening experience!