Songs that take flight from Liz Phair, John Denver and more.Liz Phair, not pretending she’s in a Galaxie 500 video.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesDear listeners,If you’re anything like me, you’ve already spent way too much of this summer in airports.* Flight delays are up, and the recent spate of severe weather hasn’t exactly helped. This means you’re going to need something to listen to while killing time in the terminal.Brian Eno understood. In the mid-1970s, he got the idea for one of his most enduring works during a long, stressful flight delay at an airport in Cologne, Germany. Wouldn’t the whole experience be a bit more tolerable, he wondered, if the airport piped serene, unobtrusive sounds throughout the terminals? He began experimenting with this concept, and it eventually led to the gorgeous and indefatigably useful “Music for Airports” (1978), his first declared work of what he called “ambient” music. The album and his subsequent installments in the ambient series spawned a fruitful, still thriving genre, and in a 2016 list of the 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time, Pitchfork ranked “Music for Airports” at No. 1.I’m not saying your flight delay needs to be as productive as Eno’s; I won’t judge if you fail to conceive an entirely new genre of music before boarding ends. All I’m saying is that you could use some music to soothe your nerves and put your plight into a larger context. That’s where today’s playlist comes in. A few of its songs — from Liz Phair, John Denver and the Byrds — are explicitly about flight, inspired by the fresh perspective that changes in scenery and altitude can bring. Others aren’t quite as direct but still have a kind of weightless expansiveness. One of them is, at least ostensibly, about a hot-air balloon, but I think that still counts.Hopefully this playlist is longer than your flight delay. But if you still need something to listen to when it’s done, there’s always “Music for Airports.” (And Jon Pareles’s playlist of Eno’s 15 best ambient tracks.)Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Caroline Polachek: “The Gate”Hopefully you won’t spend too much time “standing at the gate,” to quote this ethereal, tone-setting opener from Caroline Polachek’s 2019 album, “Pang.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: “Learning to Fly”As on many of the songs here, flight serves as a kind of emotional metaphor on “Learning to Fly,” the 1991 hit from Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Jeff-Lynne-produced album “Into the Great Wide Open.” (In October 2017, shortly after Petty’s death, Bob Dylan played a beautiful cover of this song live, as a tribute to his fellow Wilbury.) (Listen on YouTube)3. Neko Case: “Lady Pilot”“We’ve got a lady pilot, she’s not afraid to die,” Neko Case sings on this impressionistic adventure from her great 2002 album, “Blacklisted.” (According to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots, only 5.8 percent of the world’s airline pilots are female. Not even close to enough!) (Listen on YouTube)4. The Byrds: “Eight Miles High”Commercial planes don’t actually fly eight miles high, but the Byrds apparently thought “Six Miles High” didn’t sound as cool. What does sound unequivocally cool, still, is Roger McGuinn’s 12-string guitar; his playing on this pioneering psych-rock song was influenced by both Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane. (Listen on YouTube)5. Liz Phair: “Stratford-on-Guy”The perspective-shifting experience of flight makes poets of us all — especially when you have a window seat. Liz Phair perfectly captures the view from 27D on this track from “Exile in Guyville”: “As we moved out of the farmlands and into the grid, the plan of a city was all that you saw.” (Listen on YouTube)6. Howlin’ Wolf: “Mr. Airplane Man”On this song from the compilation “Change My Way,” the blues great Howlin’ Wolf implores Mr. Airplane Man to fly down to Jackson and deliver an urgent message to his baby: “Aahhhheeeeeee, ahhhehehehe!” (Listen on YouTube)7. John Denver: “Leaving on a Jet Plane”Next time you’re not sure what to do with yourself while waiting for a connecting flight, remember that John Denver wrote this song during a layover. Pretty good use of his time, I’d say. (Listen on YouTube)8. The 5th Dimension: “Up, Up and Away”Hopefully by the end of this playlist, you’ll be taking flight, like this exuberant, comfortingly retro 1967 tune by the Fifth Dimension. Preferably in an airplane and not a hot-air balloon, but at this point I don’t blame you for looking into alternate forms of transportation. (Listen on YouTube)Aahhhheeeeeee,Lindsay*Remember Friday’s Amplifier, when I told you about my experience seeing the North American opening date of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour? I almost didn’t make it to the show at all because my flight to Toronto was canceled — and then my flight out of Toronto was canceled as well. I was stranded there for two extra days, which I mostly spent on hold with various airlines. Now I know how Drake felt when he was runnin’ through the 6 with his woes.The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Music for (Waiting in) Airports” track listTrack 1: Caroline Polachek, “The Gate”Track 2: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Learning to Fly”Track 3: Neko Case, “Lady Pilot”Track 4: The Byrds, “Eight Miles High”Track 5: Liz Phair, “Stratford-on-Guy”Track 6: Howlin’ Wolf, “Mr. Airplane Man”Track 7: John Denver, “Leaving on a Jet Plane”Track 8: The 5th Dimension, “Up, Up and Away”Bonus tracksFor more practical air travel advice, some of my colleagues at the Travel desk put together this handy guide that I really should have read before my trip to Toronto.And, RIP Jane Birkin, so much more than the namesake of a bag! Among many other things, Birkin was also a catalyzing collaborator with both the incomparable Serge Gainsbourg and the great filmmaker Agnès Varda, and of course a singular vocalist and songwriter in her own right. Spin “Jane B.” and “Di Doo Dah” today in her honor. More

To say goodbye to a transformative tenure at the Komische Oper in Berlin, this director staged an “All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue.”BERLIN — It’s difficult to pinpoint the most outrageous moment of “Barrie Kosky’s All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue,” which opened at the Komische Oper here on Friday. Is it the 1960s-era pilot and flight attendant in drag belting “My Way” (sorry, “Mayn Veg”) under a shower of golden confetti? The subtle camp of an imaginary Choir of Temple Beth Emmanuel singing with straight-faced sincerity? The “message from our sponsors” advertising “delectably light, always right, gefilte fish in jars”?But maybe the evening is less about those moments than about Kosky himself: the Australian-born director who has become an essential figure of the Berlin, not to mention European, opera scene, an erstwhile foreigner who speaks in a fluid blend of German, English and Yiddish and has risen to being addressed on Friday by Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture commissioner, as “lieber,” or dear, Barrie.So much of the “Revue” embodies the ethos of the house he has built during the decade of his leadership, which comes to an end this summer. Queer, Jewish, entertaining and executed at a high level, the show is a quintessential production of the Komische Oper, the city’s most reliably interesting and revelatory opera company.Under Kosky — a showman through and through, who operates with a young idealist’s belief in the power of theater and a brazen disregard for divisions between so-called high and low art — the Komische Oper has been the kind of place where you could see Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron” one night and Mozart the next, followed by a Broadway musical, a Weimar-era operetta and, for good measure, something Baroque.Thankfully, that spirit will survive once he leaves and the house is jointly led by Susanne Moser and Philip Bröking. And, as Kosky said during a curtain call speech on Friday, the “Revue” is “kein Abschied”: no farewell. At 55, and more comfortable working as a freelancer than taking on a new house, he will remain at the Komische in an advisory role and direct one musical each of the next five seasons. His first? Jerry Herman’s “La Cage aux Folles,” given a grand treatment and sharing the calendar, in typical fashion, with Luigi Nono’s avant-garde, borderline strident “Intolleranza 1960.”“That must be the only time in history that the words ‘Nono’ and ‘Jerry Herman’ are in the same sentence,” Kosky said in a recent interview. “It’s even the same orchestra and the same chorus. My God, I mean, that’s just sensational.”Compare this atmosphere with those of the city’s two other major houses: the respectable but relatively stuffy Deutsche Oper and the Berlin State Opera, a company hopelessly wed to a core repertory heavy on Strauss and Wagner. The Komische, fittingly, attracts a varied audience that Kosky — true to my experience over the years — described as “five leather queens” next to “two tattooed lesbians” next to “grandpa and grandmother” next to “four Japanese tourists.”Kosky at the Komische Oper, the company he has run for 10 years, and where he will remain in an advisory role after he steps down this summer.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesKosky’s crowning achievement may be the degree to which he has elevated and restored operetta — a genre “stopped dead in its tracks” by the Third Reich, he said, and “Aryanized” in post-World War II performance — on the Berlin stage. He has either directed or invited guests to mount productions of long-neglected works including Paul Abraham’s “Ball im Savoy,” Oscar Straus’s “Die Perlen der Cleopatra” and Jaromir Weinberger’s “Frühlingsstürme,” which is considered the last operetta of the Weimar Republic.“These pieces were a fundamental, important part of the landscape of Berlin culture before 1933,” he said. “And we’re not just talking about Jewish composers. We’re talking about Jewish librettists, we’re talking about Jewish choreographers, we’re talking about Jewish singers.”It can be tricky to stage an operetta convincingly and compellingly; Kosky and his team have performed some dramaturgical surgery as part of their rescue missions. But above all, he has avoided linking his productions with history. Absent are Nazi intrusions or attempts at “setting the thing in Buchenwald, which a German director might probably do,” he said.“You know, it doesn’t work if you’re going to batter people,” Kosky added. “I feel the audiences have been enabled in the last 10 years to sit here and enjoy it without guilt. What I’ve tried to tell the German audiences, and the Berlin audiences, is, listen: The best way you can honor these people that your grandparents or parents killed or sent into exile is enjoy it.”So he has aimed for humor, charm and, of course, a little subversiveness. And operetta allows him to be “completely ludicrous,” as he said. “I can put in my Mel Brooks Barrie Kosky moments, and then I can be very heartbreakingly real the next moment, and it’s authentic to the pieces. I think most German directors don’t do that. They haven’t watched ‘The Muppet Show.’ I always say to people, if you want to understand my work, it’s basically a combination of the Muppets and Franz Kafka.”For now, Kosky plans to step away from operetta and make room for others: “I’ve opened the sweets shop, and I’ve said, ‘Look, guys, look at these delicious, fabulous things. And I’ve given you the keys. Take over the shop.’”Hence his future directing musicals, which after “La Cage” will include “Chicago” and “Sweeney Todd.” He is committed to opera projects throughout Europe in the coming years, but he would gladly take on Broadway as well. That, however, would entail getting a foothold where he has been woefully underrepresented. Productions by Kosky have traveled to Los Angeles and Houston; in September, his Komische “Fiddler on the Roof” will open at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. But aside from a co-directed, not-truly-his staging of “The Magic Flute” that appeared at the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2019, his work hasn’t found the audience it deserves in New York. (The Metropolitan Opera had planned to present his “Fiery Angel” in fall 2020, but it’s now in pandemic purgatory.)Dagmar Manzel, one of the house’s stars, in a sober turn from her comedic roles, such as the title character of “Die Perlen der Cleopatra.”Monika RittershausFirst, though, Kosky needs to finish the run, through July 10, of the “Revue,” an original creation he arrived at after not wanting his final production to be something expected, like an operetta, and after the pandemic upended his plans for a Stravinsky marathon. Few directors would, or could, dream up the result: a tribute to the Yiddish entertainment common at resorts in the Catskill Mountains during the mid-20th century.“The list of performers who were there — it’s like a who’s who of American culture, all going to this Jewish utopian, sort of summer kibbutz,” Kosky said, mentioning the likes of Joan Rivers, Danny Kaye and Brooks. “I mean, what was the Catskills if not a kibbutz without politics?”Paced like a playlist — with the accompanying ups, downs and, at times, lulls — the show features popular music arranged and conducted by Adam Benzwi (called Adam Benski from the stage) and follies-like choreography, with an eye for physical comedy, by Otto Pichler. Company members and guest stars appear in different guises, none more surprising than Dagmar Manzel in a rendingly sober turn from her riotous Cleopatra earlier last week.Throughout, Kosky — who also hosts the show through prerecorded introductions — is committed to the bit in a delicate balance of irony and camp. Both men and women sing in drag; borscht belt humor (“below the girdle”) abounds; and the performers assume personas on a Marvel Cinematic Universe scale. There’s the “mezzo from Minsk” Sylvie Sonitzki, a boy band of orthodox Jews, and don’t forget the temple choir. In an ending out of something like Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Kosky brings out everyone, an enormous ensemble backed by an enormous orchestra, for a spectacle that, joyous and celebratory, sends off the audience with a command: “Dance!”Kosky couldn’t have said goodbye any other way. More

A singer, composer, curator and founder of the vocal group Sweet Honey in the Rock, she provided a gospel soundtrack for the civil rights movement.Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose stirring gospel voice helped provide the soundtrack of the civil rights movement, then went on to become a cultural historian, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution and the founder of the women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 81.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter, Toshi Reagon, who did not give a cause.Bernice Reagon, the daughter of a Baptist preacher in Albany, Ga., grew up in a church without a piano, and the first music she absorbed, rooted in spirituals and hymns, was performed by human voices to the accompaniment of clapping and foot stomping.She was an original member in 1962 of the Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that provided anthems of defiance for civil rights protesters preparing to confront the police or as they were hauled away to jail. The Freedom Singers were associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which sent them across the South as well as to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1963.Ms. Reagon once wrote, “I sang and heard the freedom songs and saw them pull together sections of the Black community at times when other means of communication were ineffective.”She went on to earn a doctorate in American history from Howard University in 1975 and to direct the Black American Culture Program at the Smithsonian. There, she amassed a collection of blues, gospel and spiritual music and presented that heritage to the public.During one gospel music presentation, in the 1980s, Ms. Reagon encouraged the audience to hum and sing along with the performers. “And if you can’t do that, grunt or sigh a little,” she instructed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The chop turns string players into beatboxers. After it developed organically over decades, musicians are making new efforts to notate it.Change is hard. All the more so for an old, set-in-its-ways instrument like the violin.But it happens. And in the hands of the five-string fiddler Casey Driessen and the jazz violinist Oriol Saña, change sounds like an unexpected crunch. A scratch. A drag of the bow on the string that ramps up to build an intricate undercurrent of rhythm.How to describe it? “Like a DJ who scratches records,” Driessen offered in an interview. “A little chunky,” Saña said.This small revolution is known as “the chop,” a percussive technique that opens up a new world of rhythm and groove for the bowed string player. The chop turns a violinist into a beatboxer. To play it is to break basic conventions of what most listeners expect from a typically sweet, melodic instrument.For over half a century, musicians around the world have brought the chop to different genres, including bluegrass and jazz, Celtic and funk, far-flung regional traditions and beyond. Composers like Kenji Bunch, Jessica Meyer, Daniel Bernard Roumain and Mimi Rabson have featured it in new works. With all this activity, it has evolved into its own percussive language. This naturally raises the question: how does it get written down?It’s been a long path to trying to notate and codify the chop. “It’s not that often that somebody creates a whole new instrumental technique for the violin and that it actually becomes widespread,” said Laura Risk, a fiddler and assistant professor of music and culture at the University of Toronto Scarborough, who has documented the chop’s diffusion across North Atlantic string communities. “With the chop, it’s so recent and it’s so unusual that we can trace it.”In 1966, the bluegrass fiddler Richard Greene invented the basic chop and put it to work as a showpiece while soloing. It passed to the violinist Darol Anger, who developed it as a tool for backup in the Turtle Island Quartet, a genre-bending jazz group. The chop offered a way to mimic a full rhythm section using only string players.In 1973, Bill Keith, Clarence White, Richard Greene and David Grisman in the bluegrass band Muleskinner.via Richard GreeneIt’s in this form that the technique took off — “dangerously,” Anger has said. “I feel like Oppenheimer sometimes. I’ve released some kind of monster.”He recalls a watershed moment at a music camp in the 1990s, when he offered “Darol’s Chop Shop” to a group of virtuosic young fiddlers eager to discover new sounds. Among them were Driessen and Saña, who have since made chopping central to their musical lives. Driessen has extended the chop’s vocabulary through new moves, even introducing the “triple chop,” which makes a tsk-tsk-tsk triplet, as if calling to a stubborn cat; Saña has brought it to string communities in Europe; and both have passed it on through performance, workshops and online instructional videos.The chop’s spread has been raucous, organic, primarily learned player-to-player; at first glance, inventing a written form for it might seem strange or sacrilegious. Notation is a deliberate act of definition. It’s a bet on standardization in exchange for dissemination. Written down, a musical idea can be captured, preserved, studied and recreated.Written down, a musical idea can be captured, preserved, studied and recreated.Casey DriessenAnger and the Turtle Island Quartet used a simple “x” or a slash in place of the standard notehead to mark different flavors of chop. When the group started publishing their own arrangements, those symbolic choices became quasi-codified, establishing a baseline notation. Two years ago, Saña and Driessen started The Chop Notation Project, an effort to recognize the technique on the page and create a shared language. The project is a multimedia mixture of musical glossary, historical record and pedagogical tool.Of course, there is a tension in writing something down. Is a notation a description of a particular musical personality? A set of instructions for someone to follow? “With a score, there is usually leeway for interpretation,” Risk said. “That’s where your own sense of musicality, the style and genre, that’s where all of that comes in.”For Anger, writing at an earlier point in the chop’s development, the simplicity of the symbols was crucial. In its arrangements, the Turtle Island Quartet opted to use the minimal amount of information possible to make space for the somatic experience of the music: listening and feeling. They worried too much detail would muddle the groove, leaving players “dreading their way through a thicket of squiggles,” said Anger.Two years ago, Oriol Saña and Casey Driessen started The Chop Notation Project, an effort to recognize the technique on the page and create a shared language.Laura RuizDriessen and Saña debated how to express for players both the location and movement of the bow with precision, while still having the symbols be legible. For composers, software loomed large, with the two men choosing to favor readily available symbols in popular typesetting programs like Sibelius. Elements of taste also shaped how to visually represent a sound, often leaving them comparing which symbols felt “stronger,” “more intuitive” or “crunchier.”Given that the chop was already in widespread use, Driessen and Saña involved the musical community, too, including Greene, Anger and string faculty members at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. One important line of edits came from cellists like Natalie Haas and Mike Block, who pointed out aspects of the notation that they thought were too violin-centric. Driessen and Saña felt things had truly clicked when a colleague told them “it looks like it sounds, which is exactly the way notation should be.”The duo’s notation features a language of compound symbols. Different noteheads mark the quality of the percussive sound, including slashes of varying size for hard and soft chops, and an “x” for the subtle melodic hint of ghost notes. Signifiers for where to chop on the instrument (relative to the player’s body, at the midpoint or beyond the instrument’s bridge) combine with directions for how to move the bow vertically.Other modern chopping moves received their own written forms, taking cues from their corresponding sound and motion. For example, parallel scrapes (which often make a pitchless drag noise) use a headless stroke with a modified arrow indicating their duration and direction of attack. Circular bow scrapes (which sound like a chunky record scratch) resemble an altered “c” to show whether the rotation should be clockwise or counterclockwise.Will writing further spread the chop? The Chop Notation Project has already ended up in the textbook Berklee Contemporary Music Notation, and has been shared with students at gatherings like the Barcelona Fiddle Congress and online. Other chop notation systems continue to circulate, too, which make different choices about the exact information captured in writing and left up to the player.The chop is primarily a “living and evolving aural language,” said Driessen, but both he and Saña believe a standard notation will help find new exponents for its still-transgressive joys.“I teach chops with students who are four years old,” Saña said. “The first time when you teach it, they say, ‘I can do that with my fiddle?’” More

Lisa Streich, an artist on the rise who has found success in Europe, is having a rare American showcase this week in New York.In the golden vastness of St. Mark’s Basilica after night had fallen, the voices seemed to hover in an endless haze. It was the closing concert of the Venice Music Biennale in October, and Lisa Streich’s “Stabat,” written for 32 singers divided into four choirs, blurred over half an hour into a soft yet never quite settled dream.Streich, 39, was represented in Venice not just by “Stabat,” but also by the premiere of “Orchestra of Black Butterflies,” a rigorous yet playful, pleasurable work for four musicians that unfolds like an off-kilter machine. That piece is now coming to New York, where it will be performed at the Miller Theater on Thursday by the piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire in a Composer Portrait devoted to Streich, a rare American showcase for an important rising artist.Born in Sweden and raised in a small town in northern Germany, Streich already has a formidable career in Europe. She was a composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival last summer. She has been commissioned by major institutions like the Berlin Philharmonic and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, which asked her to write a final scene to append to Hans Werner Henze’s one-act “Das Wundertheater.” Conductors as eminent as Alan Gilbert and Matthias Pintscher have led her scores. After hearing her work in Venice, I’m hooked.Streich’s music is often quiet and deliberate. The program note at Miller says that when she was a young composer, her goal was “to find the slowest tempo where a performer could still keep a solid pulse.” Her favorite? Thirty-seven beats per minute. Her pieces tend to fade into oblivion as they end; “Ishjarta,” her Berlin Philharmonic commission, ends with almost the entire orchestra playing an extremely soft pianissississimo.Even when her work skirts inaudibility, it’s complex. Streich has taken to using software to analyze recordings of choirs she finds on the internet. She focuses on gnarly harmonic moments and has compiled some of the results — divided into 14 categories, like “Gloria” and “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” — in “Book of Chords,” alongside her photographs and poetry.

SPUN by Sarah SavietWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More