Day: July 13, 2006

Pictures from Tanglewood

chamber music hall, inside and out

Just posted a new set of photos from the Tanglewood grounds from the last few days of rehearsal for Gurrelieder. Hopefully it will stop raining soon and tomorrow’s will be a bit brighter.

Many of these photos were taken in the formal gardens on the Tanglewood grounds, which are well hidden near the theatre building and seem a bit forgotten (though the hedges are cleanly clipped, they’ve grown to the point of beginning to obscure some pathways).

Incidentally, the photo to the right may help provide some context for why Maestro Levine had difficulty being heard over the rain. Imagine him sitting just inside the building near the open side, with a 120-voice men’s chorus facing him; then imagine a torrential downpour on the outside.

Georgian revival

International Herald Tribune: Quirky serifs aside, Georgia fonts win on Web. The thesis of the article is that, because of its use in some fairly high profile redesigns (the New York Times website among others), the font Georgia is undergoing a comeback. A slim thread on which to hang an article, particularly when you consider that Georgia has been the font of this blog since at least its redesign in January 2004 (the original custom CSS design used Verdana or Helvetica, depending on availability, as my old stylesheet reveals).

It is sad, as Dave Shea at Mezzoblue notes, that there is practically speaking only a pool of eight or nine fonts through which we can rotate for web typography. In this vein, I have to go back and give Hakon Lie partial credit for at least trying to move the ball forward on web typography, as wrongheaded as he was about the business model implications of what he proposed.