NJN’s State of the Arts Brightens November with
A Look at New Jersey Arts and Cultural Programs
On NJN Public Television
Fridays at 8:30 pm; rebroadcast at 11:30 pm

Friday, November 5, at 8:30 pm; rebroadcast at 11:30 pm
Foreign Affairs reveals how globetrotting artists from the European destinations of Estonia, the Czech Republic, France and Italy found a home in New Jersey.

• The Maestro: Neeme Jarvi
  The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra is on the rise with Neeme Jarvi, one of the most celebrated and extensively recorded conductors of our time, who become the NJSO’s twelfth music director at the beginning of the 2005/2006 season. Born in Tallinn, Estonia, Jarvi, an American citizen since 1987, is one of today’s busiest conductors, making frequent guest appearances with major orchestras and in opera houses throughout the world. State of the Arts profiles this remarkable musician through interviews with the maestro and his musicians and with behind-the-scenes footage from recent rehearsals and concerts.
• The Bonaparte Brothers It is a complete surprise to many people that Napoleon Bonaparte’s older brother Joseph Bonaparte, who was at one time the King of Naples and later the King of Spain, secretly fled Europe after Waterloo in 1815 and established a palatial residence in Bordentown, New Jersey. He lived there for almost 20 years, his home becoming a cultural center containing the largest collection of European paintings in America during the first half of the 19th century. Scholar Patricia Tyson Stroud entertains viewers with this remarkable story, drawing upon her soon-to-be-published book: The Man Who had Been King: The American Exile of Napoleon’s Brother Joseph. State of the Arts also talks with New Jersey State Museum curator and historian James Turk, historian Roger Moss from the Athenaeum in Philadelphia and curator John Zarabell from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
• Rule of Four
  State of the Arts catches up with rookie novelists Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, authors of the New York Times best-selling intellectual thriller The Rule of Four. The success of their novel, released earlier this year, launched their careers as writers and propelled them into a Hollywood deal. Childhood friends, they began writing together as undergraduates, Caldwell at Princeton and Thomason at Harvard. Partially set on the campus of Princeton University, Rule of Four is a tale of Ivy League murder, apocryphal Renaissance history and a mysterious coded manuscript entitled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Caldwell first learned of the 15th-century text in a course called “Renaissance Art, Science and Magic” taught by Princeton University historian Anthony Grafton.
• Global Modernist
  Jan Matulka, a Czech-born modernist, was influenced by his contacts with Native Americans during his travels to the southwestern United States in the first part of the 20th century. “Jan Matulka: The Global Modernist,” an exhibit at the Montclair Museum of Art through January 16, 2005, brings this painter’s achievements to a wider audience. State of the Arts gets an exclusive tour of the show from museum director Patterson Sims.

Friday, November 12, at 8:30 pm; rebroadcast at 11:30 pm
An encore presentation, The New New Thing depicts the art world and its continuous search for “the new new thing.” From today’s New York gallery scene to Paris in the 1920s, State of the Arts takes a look at a hundred years of art on the cutting edge.

• The Bad Boy of Music
  Born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1900, George Antheil was a musical genius, concert pianist and avant-garde composer. In his teens and twenties, he was “the new new thing” in classical music, famous for his mechanically inspired works “Airplane Sonata,” “Ballet Mecanique” and “Death of Machines.” Antheil lived in Paris where he was embraced by moderns such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Erik Satie. His colorful autobiography is entitled Bad Boy of Music. Featured in this episode are performances by the Composers Guild of New Jersey.
• Music From the Ether
  Imagine a musical instrument played without actual contact- that was the sales pitch for the theremin, an eerie sounding device invented by the Soviet musician/scientist who went on to create secret listening devices for the KGB. Presumed to be the next big thing by many, RCA went on to construct 500 of these contraptions. Unfortunately the theremin never really took off except as an oddity. Almost impossible to play, the instrument can be heard in old science-fiction movies. However there are still several theremin aficionados out there. Scott Marshall of East Windsor, for example, had built his own theremin, taught himself to play and is a passionate student of its history. On this edition of State of the Arts, Marshall gives us a theremin demonstration, walking us through the strange world of “Music from the Ether.”
• The Rutgers Avant-Garde
  With some of the first “happenings” taking place, Rutgers University was a hotbed of the avant-garde during the years 1957 through 1963. State of the Arts takes a closer look at the time period through rare archival film and interviews with participating artists George Segal, Allan Kaprow and Lucas Samaras.
• Internet Art
  The beginnings of computer and web-based art can be traced to early experiments at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. State of the Arts explores the conditions that allowed the new art form of the 1990s to flourish in a science lab, talking to artists who utilize the internet as their medium.
• The Tank
  From performances that explore the Nintendo Game Boy as a musical instrument to presenting holiday shows like A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, The Tank is a new home for up-and-coming artists as well as very experimental art forms. A site for performing and visual arts in Manhattan, The Tank was co-founded by New Jersey natives and Princeton Day School alumni Justin Krebs and Daniel Greenfeld, along with a small community of twenty-somethings. Bit Shifter, performing at The Tank since its kick-off, has a unique stage performance consisting of a drum machine, two Nintendo Game Boys and a laptop. State of the Arts catches up with Shifter at his home in Astoria, Queens, to find out all about this new musical trend. Style guru and former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren describes it as the “humanization of electronic music…the beginning of the look and sound of 21st-century pop culture.”