Culture in Indiana

Bloomington—Let us approach Indiana University’s new Musical Arts Center from the perspective of taste. This approach has its disadvantages—the most remarkable being that, in doing so, we must omit discussion of the single most outstanding feature of the Center: namely, that it cost $11 million. Table the consideration of cost and it becomes wholly in order to inquire whether or not the physical education department mightn’t have put this presumptuous edifice to better use.

Surely, a well-rehearsed troupe of traveling isotonic basket-weavers would have done more justice to the Dedication Week festivities than did John Eaton and his simpering operatic rendition of Sophocles. Heracles may charitably be described as a gruesome catastrophe of the first magnitude. Eaton himself prefers to think of it as his “last major attempt to work in the grand tradition”— and one ceases wondering, after hearing Heracles, why he so quickly moved into the shady cacophonies of electronic music.

BE

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Brad Evans

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Bloomington—Let us approach Indiana University’s new Musical Arts Center from the perspective of taste. This approach has its disadvantages—the most remarkable being that, in doing so, we must omit discussion of the single most outstanding feature of the Center: namely, that it cost $11 million. Table the consideration of cost and it becomes wholly in order to inquire whether or not the physical education department mightn’t have put this presumptuous edifice to better use.

Surely, a well-rehearsed troupe of traveling isotonic basket-weavers would have done more justice to the Dedication Week festivities than did John Eaton and his simpering operatic rendition of Sophocles. Heracles may charitably be described as a gruesome catastrophe of the first magnitude. Eaton himself prefers to think of it as his “last major attempt to work in the grand tradition”— and one ceases wondering, after hearing Heracles, why he so quickly moved into the shady cacophonies of electronic music.