Classic Arts Showcase
Date:
[]
Categories:
[Blog]
Tags:
[Art],
[Music]
I have added a link for the Classic Arts Showcase (CAS) to my Links page.
Classic Arts Showcase is a non-commercial television channel whose mission is to promote the arts. The foundation behind CAS provides the channel free to cable companies. Wikipedia has a good article on CAS and on its founder, Lloyd Rigler.
CAS broadcasts an eight-hour montage of short video clips, repeated to fill 24 hours. Every Friday they release a new montage for the week.
My local cable company doesn’t carry CAS, and I’ve missed it since we moved a few years ago. I only recently thought to check whether they had a website, and am pleased to find that they do! The broadcast program is available to stream on their website.
Many of the videos CAS shows are classical performances, concerts, opera, and ballet, but they also show excerpts from documentaries, theatre, films, and modern works. Some works will be familiar to viewers, many others are more obscure.
For example, watching recently for 20 minutes or so, I saw an excerpt from a documentary on Aaron Copeland and Kurt Weill, followed by a scene from the 1927 silent film “It” with Clara Bow, followed by a scene from the Romanian opera La Seceris, by Brediceanu (a composer I had never heard of).
A few of my favorite discoveries on CAS:
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The music videos Stairway to Lenin, and the Funeral March, two of the pieces from the film The Orchestra by Zbig Rybczynski.
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A live performance of Steve Reich’s Eight Lines.
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A 1930 video of the Comedian Harmonists performing Wochenend und Sonnenschein (Happy Days Are Here Again).
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Steven Malinowski’s Music Animation Machine. I saw some of his early material on CAS, and his website has recent, more complex visualizations.
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Animusic: Incredible 3D animation of imaginary musical instruments playing original compositions. Sadly, the Animusic website seems to be defunct. There is an official YouTube channel with several pieces, and another channel with remastered versions of many of the Animusic videos.
It makes me happy to know that something pure like Classic Arts Showcase can still exist. Something with no advertising, no affiliate links, no monetization, no commercial purpose. Their mission is simply to enrich people’s lives and encourage them to support the arts in their own communities.
Today, rapacious billionaires are destroying our institutions and our environment in the pursuit of unconscionable wealth. Lloyd Rigler used his wealth to bring the beauty of the arts to everyone.