Arts News

UNT in Denton scores $200K federal arts grant for newspaper project

UNT will be digitizing old newspapers from Texas.

Photo courtesy of VishwaGujarat.com

The University of North Texas in Denton is one of eight recipients in Texas to score a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. According to a release, the federal agency will dole out $28.4 million in grants for 239 humanities projects across the U.S., with eight of those projects located in Texas.

The NEH was created to support research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities. It's taxpayer funded, and for four years in a row, the Trump administration threatened to cut its budget. However, during that time, the NEH budget actually grew from $148 million to $237 million (including CARES Act funding). Joe Biden of course proposed an increase.

Most of the funded projects are arcane and/or super-academic such as the creation of an app to make it easier to research digitized ancient manuscripts from St. Catherine's Monastery in Egypt, the world’s oldest continually operating library. That is clearly a gotta have.

Or translation projects, like an annotated translation of classical Chinese commentaries on Confucius' chronicles of court history. Or the first comprehensive, freely available edition of all extant Greek and Latin inscribed legislation from classical Rome.

Other grants will enable the publication of books such as a biography of neuroscientist and writer Oliver Sacks; a book on the making and legacy of 1950 film Sunset Boulevard; and a narrative history of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

This round of funding also marks the addition of the Boston Public Library as a hub for the National Digital Newspaper project, expanding the reach of the Chronicling America online database of historical American newspapers to include newspapers published in Massachusetts between 1690 and 1963. Additional funding awarded in this round will support ongoing newspaper digitization work in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Montana, Rhode Island, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Texas received $864,675 total for these eight projects:

Austin
City of Austin: $50,000
Title: A Geographical Approach to Inclusive History at Oakwood Cemetery
Description: The creation of an innovative digital model to help determine the location of and provide historical context for marginalized individuals in unmarked graves in an Austin cemetery.

Lance Richardson: $60,000
Title/Description: A Biography of the American Writer and Naturalist Peter Matthiessen

College Station
Texas A & M University: $198,289
Title: Toward a People’s History of Landscape: Black and Indigenous Histories of the Nation’s Capital
Description: A three-week, residential institute for 25 college and university faculty on social and landscape history in Washington, D.C., focusing on AfricanAmerican and Indigenous contributions.

Denton
University of North Texas: $208,888
Title: Lone Star Ink: Texas NDNP 2021
Description: Digitization of 100,000 pages of Texas newspapers dating from 1887 to 1939, as part of the state’s participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

Farmers Branch
City of Farmers Branch: $7,500
Title: Keenan Cemetery Assessment
Description: A preservation assessment of a Texas state historical site, the Keenan Cemetery. Established in 1843, the cemetery is the burial place for many pioneer families, as well as veterans ranging from the War of 1812 to Vietnam. The assessment would result in guidance for the preservation of each grave, facilitating research and related educational and public programming initiatives about the lives of those buried there.

Houston
University of Houston System: $249,998
Title: Democratizing Politics: Mapping the Stories and Significance of the 1977 National Women’s Conference
Description: Preparation of an open-access website on the legislative, political, and social impact of the 1977 National Women's Conference.

Prairie View
Prairie View A & M University: $15,000
Title: Preserving Our History through Assessment
Description: A preservation site assessment for the archives of Prairie View A&M University. The archive holds a number of distinctive collections, including over 1,000 rare books. Collection highlights include information on African-American bibliophiles from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the Blacks in the Military Collection documenting the contributions of African Americans to military history.

San Antonio
Witte Museum: $75,000
Title: Reinterpreting Texas at the Witte Museum, Where Nature, Science and Culture Meet
Description: Planning for a reinterpretation of the museum’s permanent exhibition on the history of Texas.

media galleries museums charity

A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

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