Incentivizing innovation by funding play: “Creative Grants” instead of UBI “The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.”Stephen Hawking, Dec. 1 2016Tweet There has been a lot of serious talk about implementing UBI (universal basic income), especially now in the wake of the pandemic and rising automation. But already since the early 2010s there has been a divergence between productivity and employment – between wealth and work – in what…
Did you ever wonder what “blackbird” was in German? Now you can never forget! Amsel app, now available for free until Jan. 2022 at https://amselapp.com What began as a way to improve digital teaching online via Zoom resulted in a viable voice training app that everyone in the English- and German-speaking world can use. The free version for iPhone/iPad and Android devices is now available! Check the amselapp.com website for the right link for your smartphone. Thanks to the grant from the German project Neustart Kultur, coordinated by the Deutscher Musikrat, my new app remains free to all users around…
Between nature and the city If anyone knows about flexibility and adaptability, it’s mothers – and probably fathers too. Finally everyone is dressed and ready to go, you’re about to step out the door – and the baby throws up all over everything… scrap the plan, time to improvise. I imagine there isn’t a parent alive who doesn’t know the scenario. Sometimes it goes that way in music too – we spend hours, days, weeks preparing our songs according to a “plan,” according to the notes written down. But inevitably at some point in life, SOMETHING goes wrong. Every musician…
This past election was a much bigger surprise to me than any other. According to the media (at least the ones that reach me), it shouldn’t have been a close race at all – but 74 million Americans to 70 million Americans hardly constitutes the landslide win that was forecast in all of the major media outlets. I take this shock as evidence of a further descent into the rabbit hole of my own private echo chambers, which I thought I had woken up from four years ago already and was well forewarned about. Mostly I think I was angry…
As a classically-trained musician, I grew up listening to Tchaikovsky, Handel and the piano music of Debussy, because their beauty drew me in as a teenager. Sure, my childhood was heavily influenced by the hallmark Disney movies and popular musicals of the time, and somehow I didn’t live “under a rock” COMPLETELY unaware of pop culture (although many of my high school and college friends would argue otherwise!)… but those kinds of influences were somehow subconsciously put in a separate drawer as “unserious music,” to be rather ignored by my developing professional self. A couple of decades later I teach…