Florida Orchestra music director Stefan Sanderling likes contemporary music. So do many of his musicians. Sadly, the orchestra’s core audience appears to hate it, to the extent that angry letters are received whenever Sanderling programs something new or complex. What’s a forward-thinking orchestra to do?

Girl poets are jamming at Fort Worth’s downtown public library for Girls Inc., Tenacious Root is gigging at Poor David’s Pub and in Carrollton, “The Color of Loss,” photos of post-Katrina New Orleans, is at the Sun to Moon Gallery. For more, here’s Gini.

Is Tristan und Isolde a jinxed opera? That’s an old question. It goes back to 1865, when the opera was premiered on June 10 in Munich. The first Tristan and Isolde were German tenor Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld and Danish soprano Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, his wife. For their premiere performances the pair were praised [...]

    … by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Or so goes the argument in a new edition of Faust. Two Romantic literature scholars, Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick, believe that they have proved Coleridge composed a blank-verse translation of Goethe’s Faust that was published anonymously in London in 1821. Late last year, Oxford University Press published [...]

Another conference, another cry to bring back arts education. And another project that may be inspired by Dallas’ Big Thought and DISD program — DALI or the Dallas Arts Learning Initiative: Nearly every arts organization can trace malaise and marginalization to a lack of arts education in schools. Several generations now have made it to adulthood [...]

The Dirtbombs are at the House of Blues, contemporary Dallas-Fort Worth photographers are at the African-American Museum and Aladdin Jr. is at UT-Arlington, courtesy of Theatre Arlington. Check out the rest in the Deep in the Arts calendar.

… would have leveled the old city as surely as any Allied bombing. A new exhibition displays the Fuehrer’s ideas, which he developed with his chief architect, Albert Speer. To give some idea of the grandiose scale: The Volkshalle (People’s Hall), above, was designed to hold 180,000 people. In comparison, the Cowboys’ new stadium in Arlington [...]

In case you hadn’t heard, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain is a “blindingly fascinating” book — as William Leith explains in the Telegraph: Its point is that, when you sit on a chair and pick up a book, a huge amount of stuff is happening. And [...]

A retired Michigan construction worker shows how Stonehenge (or the Easter Island statues or the giant blocks in the pyramids) could have been moved and raised — and he does it by himself. Rotating an entire barn single-handedly is just the start of what he can do. It’s not magic. It’s just leverage and pebbles [...]

Tuna Does Vegas at Bass Hall in Fort Worth, the Women’s Museum celebrates Women’s History Month at the downtown Dallas Public Library and the Festival of Color is at the Images Gallery in Denison. Wait, you want more? Well, listen to Gini.