Aurelia Butler

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    Richard Crawford, Leading Scholar of American Music, Dies at 89

    American Music was a marginal subfield in the 1960s when he began his research as a student, and then as a faculty member, at the University of Michigan.Richard Crawford, a longtime professor of musicology at the University of Michigan who helped legitimize and popularize the study of American music, died on July 23 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 89.His wife, Penelope (Ball) Crawford, said the cause was congestive heart failure.“He was a pioneer who shaped the scope of American music research,” Mark Clague, a musicologist and professor at Michigan who studied with Mr. Crawford, said in an interview. “It wasn’t about celebrating an unchanging canon, but about opening up the magic of musical experience.”While studying at Michigan in the early 1960s, Mr. Crawford began examining a trove of papers that had been acquired by the school’s library concerning the 18th-century musician Andrew Law, who taught singing and compiled hymnals in Connecticut. The study of American music was a marginal subfield at the time; most scholars considered music history to be about the European classics. (The “American” part of the American Musicological Society, founded in 1934, referred to the nationality of its members, not their subject of inquiry.)Whereas Mr. Crawford’s adviser, H. Wiley Hitchcock — also a major force in American music studies — had traveled to Europe for his doctoral research on Baroque opera, Mr. Crawford preferred not to uproot his young family.So despite the potential career risk, he wrote his dissertation — and then a 1968 book — on Law, becoming one of the first scholars to dedicate his life’s work to music of the United States.His timing was fortuitous: Preparations for the 1976 U.S. bicentennial celebration spurred a new public interest in reviving early American music, and Mr. Crawford helped build its scholarly infrastructure. He was a founding member of the Sonneck Society, later renamed the Society for American Music; wrote the first biography of the Revolutionary-era composer William Billings, with David P. McKay in 1975; and, through painstaking bibliographic work, excavated large swaths of repertory from the beginnings of American sacred music.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

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    An Epic Summer Olympics Playlist

    Hear triumphant tracks from John Williams, Whitney Houston and, of course, Celine Dion.Celine Dion performing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.Mike Hewitt/Getty ImagesDear listeners,I just got out my thermometer to confirm and, yep, it’s official: I have Olympic Fever.Like much of the world, I have been glued to my TV watching the Paris Olympics for the past few days. I confess that I am, at best, a fair-weather fan of most of the sports that take place during the Summer Games, but one symptom of Olympic Fever is suddenly caring deeply about things you recently knew next to nothing about. Several days ago, if you asked me to name a male gymnast who is currently competing at the elite level, I would have stared at you blankly. But after Monday, when the U.S. men’s gymnastics team won its first medal in 16 years thanks in part to the bespectacled pommel horse specialist Stephen Nedoroscik, everything has changed. Don’t even get me started on the U.S. women’s rugby team.Today’s playlist, naturally, is a soundtrack for Olympic Fever: A collection of past Summer Olympic songs from the likes of Whitney Houston, Gloria Estefan and Björk, among others — plus a certain Èdith Piaf song that took on new resonance at this year’s opening ceremony.Subtlety is not exactly a virtue when it comes to an Olympic song, so be warned that this playlist contains grandiosity, majesty and even a little schmaltz. But it also has the power to transform whatever you’re doing into an Olympic event, whether that’s running a 100-meter sprint, successfully flipping a pancake or — like Nedoroscik, man of many talents — trying to solve a Rubik’s cube in under 10 seconds. Use it wisely.I want one moment in time,LindsayListen along while you read.1. John Williams and the Berlin Philharmonic: “Olympic Fanfare and Theme”Let’s begin with some fanfare. The prolific composer John Williams — best known for his film scores — has written four different Olympic themes over the years. But his first, composed for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, is still probably the most widely recognizable. “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” is guaranteed to bring a sense of triumphant grandeur to whatever you’re doing. Put this on at the end of a run and you will be physically unable to slow down.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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

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    ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Is the Type of of Superhero Movie the Franchise Once Mocked

    Making fun of schlocky, overwrought superhero movies used to be the Deadpool signature. But with “Deadpool & Wolverine,” and Disney’s push into the Marvel Universe, that thread is lost.Deadpool movies might as well begin with a fun qualifier for audiences: This isn’t a typical superhero movie; in fact, all genres and tropes are ripe for mocking by this foul-mouthed mercenary hero.In the first “Deadpool,” in the midst of a fight that includes decapitation and maiming, Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool says, “I may be super, but I am no hero. And yeah, technically this is a murder. But some of the best love stories start with a murder. And that’s exactly what this is: a love story.” In the sequel, Deadpool says, “Believe it or not, ‘Deadpool 2’ is a family film. True story,” as he creatively murders a whole warehouse of Russian criminals. Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” plays in the background.We’ve got a violent superhero movie that’s also a low-key sendup of tender rom-coms, then another violent superhero movie that pokes fun at the loving family film. So what’s “Deadpool & Wolverine”? Nothing as exciting — just another formulaic Marvel Cinematic Universe movie with a saucier rating.This third installment of the Deadpool franchise fails to deliver on that same knowing play with genre. The jokes are mostly about leaning heavily into the rules and standards of the superhero genre as orchestrated by Marvel — a bad omen for the Deadpool brand, formerly of 20th Century Fox before Disney acquired it in 2019.The new movie picks up a thread from the previous one when Deadpool uses a time-travel device to save the love of his life, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). It’s a blatant deus ex machina, and the film casually undercuts its own emotional arc in order to make meta jokes about whether time travel could have changed the trajectory of Reynolds’s career.“Deadpool & Wolverine” seems to have forgotten its own joke about the earnest use of cheap plot devices like that — it dives headfirst into the commercial wholesomeness, overextended plotlines and shameless fan service that have come to define the majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the last few years. In the latest film, Wolverine’s back from the dead (see the end of “Logan” to catch up), thanks to the multiverse, and he and Deadpool team up to keep Deadpool’s timeline from being decimated by the Time Variance Authority (see “Loki” to catch up).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

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    Hannah Kendall Writes Music With a Vocabulary of Her Own

    This composer’s latest work, for Lincoln Center, is in conversation with Robert Schumann’s music and mental health struggles.“Violent congestion, inexpressible terror, failure of breath, momentary unconsciousness — these overtake me in quick succession, though I am better than I was,” the composer Robert Schumann wrote in a letter to his mother in 1833. He was 23, and the recent deaths of his older brother and sister-in-law surely cast a pall on his state of mind. “If you had any notion of the lethargy into which melancholia has brought me,” he continued, “you would forgive my not writing.”Hannah Kendall, a prominent young British composer based in New York, was struck by that passage a little more than a year ago, while reading Schumann’s letters, which provide glimpses of a decades-long struggle with mental illness, diagnosed during his life as exhaustion, and posthumously as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.“It felt as though there was a very direct, personal connection to his state at the time, which I found particularly fascinating as a composer,” Kendall, 40, said in a recent interview at Lincoln Center — where her new work, “He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing,” will premiere on Aug. 9. The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center will play Kendall’s piece on a program that also includes Schumann’s Second Symphony.What it takes to be an artist today, Kendall explained, is a regular topic of discussion among her circle of friends and peers. “Our well-being, mental and physical, is something that crops up on a daily basis,” she said. Some composers, like Julia Adolphe, Nico Muhly and Aaron Helgeson, have begun to air mental-health concerns and struggles in public, in blog posts and on podcasts.Kendall was urged to read Schumann’s letters by a longtime friend, the conductor Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Festival Orchestra, who admittedly had an ulterior motive. For his first summer with the ensemble, he had her commissioned to write a piece for a concert that would also feature Schumann. He envisioned Kendall responding to not only Schumann’s music, but also issues of mental health and this moment when performing arts organizations are still struggling to lure back audiences lost during the pandemic.The coming program, which also includes two works by Bach, is surrounded by contextual offerings. “Ghost Variations,” an augmented-reality installation piece in the lobby at David Geffen Hall, explores how Schumann found solace in Bach’s music. And a preconcert discussion will address the question “Can music express mental health?”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

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    Looking for the Best in Black Cinema? Try Brown Sugar.

    The streaming service highlights some of the finest movies starring, and often directed by, Black artists.As the name-brand streaming services struggle to show profits and broker cable-esque bundling packages to cut costs, the most successful streamers are proving to be niche services, which curate specialized libraries for a specific target audience. We’ve spotlighted several such streamers in this space, most of them focusing on clearly defined genres or sensibilities; this month, we look at a service with an eye on one particular culture.Brown Sugar, which started in 2016, promises on its site “hit movies and TV shows along with the largest collection of classic Black cinema, uncut and commercial-free.” Its library features programming about the Black experience, predominately by Black creators, and aimed primarily at Black audiences (while recognizing that those audiences are seeking all sorts of entertainment). There is a robust selection of Black cinema from the 1970s, the vaunted blaxploitation era, including titles from Ossie Davis, Rudy Ray Moore and Richard Roundtree, as well as cult titles like “The Harder They Come” and “Putney Swope,” and ’80s favorites like “Hollywood Shuffle” and “Beat Street.”That era initially dominated the service’s library, but it has since broadened its offerings to include more contemporary romantic comedies, action thrillers, heartwarming dramas, and historical and true crime documentaries. It’s also cultivated a partnership with Bounce TV that gives viewers access to such long-running and popular shows as the soap opera “Saints & Sinners,” the rags-to-riches sitcom “Family Time” and the barbershop-set comedy “In the Cut.”Subscription is a bargain, running only $3.99 per month (after a one-week free trial) or $42 for a year. Brown Sugar is available on desktop and a variety of streaming devices, including Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire. Image quality varies wildly — some films and shows are Blu-ray quality, but occasional older and less-cared-for titles may well have been mastered from VHS. But it’s worth the risk for the hidden gems the service offers.Here are a few highlights from the current library:Pryor plays an outlaw and Williams a federal agent in Sidney J. Furie’s film.Paramount Pictures‘Hit!’: “Lady Sings the Blues” was one of the first and most successful (critically and commercially) films of ’70s Black cinema; this 1973 effort reunited that film’s director, Sidney J. Furie, with two of its co-stars, Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor, this time for an action extravaganza that more resembled “The French Connection” than “Lady.” Williams plays a federal agent who goes after an international drug cartel after his daughter dies of a heroin overdose; Pryor is one of the team of outlaws and outcasts he puts together to get the job done when his superiors veto the mission. The result is fast-paced and funny (thanks primarily to the always-reliable Pryor), and filled with thrilling action beats.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

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    Wolfgang Rihm, Prolific Contemporary Classical Music Composer, Dies at 72

    Likened to a “court composer” for Germany, he wrote more than 500 pieces and was considered one of the most original and independent musical voices in Europe.Wolfgang Rihm, a composer whose forceful, shape-shifting output reinvigorated contemporary classical music, died on Saturday in Ettlingen, Germany. He was 72.His death, in a hospice outside the city of Karlsruhe, where he lived, was announced in a statement by his publisher, Universal Edition. It did not specify a cause, but Mr. Rihm had been treated for cancer since 2017. His illness and his efforts to compose despite it were the subject of a 2020 German documentary.Mr. Rihm was considered one of the most original and prolific musical voices in Europe and the most performed German composer of contemporary classical music. Among his prominent commissions was “Reminiszenz,” an “arresting, broody orchestral song cycle,” as Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim described it in The New York Times. The work, for a tenor and large orchestra, premiered at the 2017 opening of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg.Mr. Rihm composed more than 500 works, though the exact number remains unclear because some pieces have not yet been published.He received the 2003 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the 2010 Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale and the 2014 Robert Schumann Prize for Poetry and Music, among many other awards. He was named composer in residence for the 2024-25 season at the Berlin Philharmonic.“At times he was even like a court composer” for Germany, the music critic Manuel Brug wrote in Die Welt.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

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    Sinead O’Connor Died of Pulmonary Disease and Asthma, Death Report Says

    A death certificate filed last week revealed the natural causes behind the death last July of Ms. O’Connor, the Irish singer and activist.Sinead O’Connor, the Irish singer who shot to fame in the 1980s and ’90s and was known for her activism, died at age 56 last July of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and bronchial asthma, according to her death certificate.In January, a coroner in London said that Ms. O’Connor had died of “natural causes” but did not provide details. The police said at the time of Ms. O’Connor’s death that it was “not being treated as suspicious.”Ms. O’Connor’s death certificate, which was registered last week, filled in some gaps. The singer died of “exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and bronchial asthma together with low-grade lower respiratory-tract infection,” the report said. It was submitted by John Reynolds, Ms. O’Connor’s first husband.Ms. O’Connor become a global star in the 1990s with a cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” The album the song was on won a Grammy Award in 1991 for best alternative music performance.She also wielded her fame as an activist, speaking out against sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, misogyny, the British subjugation of Ireland and other issues. In her later life, she spoke about her mental struggles and her recovery from child abuse.Ms. O’Connor’s death shook Ireland, which mourned her as a national treasure even though she had been a controversial figure for her political provocations onstage and off. In 1992, Ms. O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II during a “Saturday Night Live” performance to protest sexual abuse of children in the Roman Catholic Church.In the year since she died, debates have continued over Ms. O’Connor’s legacy and representation.In March, a risqué performance honoring her life and her first studio album opened in London and drew crowds in New York. And last week, a wax museum in Dublin removed a figure of her after her brother said it was “hideous” and “looked nothing like her.”“She was something grander than a simple pop star,” Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times, wrote in an appraisal of Ms. O’Connor’s career.“She became a stand-in for a sociopolitical discomfort that was beginning to take hold in the early 1990s,” he continued, “a rejection of the enthusiastic sheen and power-at-all-costs culture of the 1980s.” More

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    Review: Grand Opera Makes a Comeback With ‘Le Prophète’

    Meyerbeer, one of the 19th century’s most popular composers, is out of fashion today. But his work is receiving a rare revival at Bard College.Giacomo Meyerbeer was the toast of Paris in the 19th century. Nowadays, when he’s mentioned at all, he’s the object of backhanded compliments.“The man may not have been a genius, but he was a craftsman,” the critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The New York Times when one of Meyerbeer’s grand operas, “Le Prophète,” came to the Metropolitan Opera in 1977.Long on spectacle and long on length, “Le Prophète” has five acts with ballets and choruses galore; a coronation scene; and a grand finale in which an entire palace goes up in flames and kills, well, everyone. Based on a historical event, it tells the story of an Anabaptist uprising in 16th-century Germany led by Jean of Leiden, who is declared a prophet and king. The world premiere is remembered for its coups de théâtre, which included ice-skating (indicated with roller skates) and a sunrise (the first use of electricity on the Paris Opera stage).The notion of Meyerbeer’s exploitation of the public’s taste for dazzle persists. To give you an idea of how severely he has fallen out of fashion, the Met performed three — yes, three — of his operas in its first six months of operation in 1883-84, and hasn’t staged any of them since 1979.Fortunately, there are opera die-hards like Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, who has a penchant for reappraisal. He mounted a persuasive argument for “Le Prophète” at the Fisher Center at Bard College on Friday. Because of modest resources, the spotlight was less on the staging and more on an often-overlooked element of Meyerbeer’s art: his fantastic instincts for vocal writing.For nearly all of Act IV, the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Feinstein held the stage as Fidès, the pious mother of the false prophet Jean (John) and the opera’s richest role. Mad with anguish and thinking her son dead, Feinstein’s Fidès stitches together an unforced, just-hefty-enough sound from a mellow bottom to a ringing top in writing that was vocally gracious and terrifically exciting.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