Aurelia Butler

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    Will Hollywood Learn These 5 Lessons From ‘Barbie’?

    If studios greenlight more movies about toys, they’ll be missing the point. Greta Gerwig’s hit is about smart filmmaking, not brand awareness.Over the past week and a half, Greta Gerwig’s comedy “Barbie” passed the billion-dollar mark at the global box office, and it won’t be long before it overtakes “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” to become 2023’s highest-grossing movie worldwide — a title it’s likely to hold onto. That’s a staggering achievement in so many ways: No movie directed by a woman has ever topped the yearly box office, and it’s been well over two decades since a live-action film without any significant action elements became the biggest movie of the year. (That’d be the Jim Carrey vehicle “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” which ruled 2000.)But can the runaway success of “Barbie” reshape Hollywood? I’m too cynical to think studio executives will learn all the right lessons from it. Instead, they’ll probably just greenlight more movies about toys. Still, “Barbie” proved at least five things to be true, if decision makers are willing to think outside the pink box.1. A summer movie can be smartly writtenWe count on summer movies to deliver spectacle, but how many also come with a witty, thoughtful script? Too often, big-budget blockbusters are rushed into production before the screenplay is finished, and even while shooting, they’re in a constant state of flux, with new writers clambering aboard to stitch everything into some sort of viable patchwork quilt.“Barbie,” by contrast, feels totally thought through instead of frantically rewritten. Despite the outsize scale of the film, it still shares a distinctive comic sensibility and offhand intellectualism with “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America,” the two movies previously written by Gerwig and her partner, Noah Baumbach, and there are actual ideas at play here that have given “Barbie” a conversational shelf life far longer than most summer films. Though “Barbie” proves that a big movie can be both fun and thoughtful, that’s likely to happen only when a studio hires smart writers, resists sanding down their sensibilities, and gives them enough time and space to truly make the story sing.2. Make more female-led event filmsThough movies as varied as “Bridesmaids,” “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Where the Crawdads Sing” have all become breakout hits in recent years, they’re often treated as aberrations: Peruse a typical theatrical calendar and you’ll find little trace of those films’ influence. Studio executives routinely take female audiences for granted, handing their biggest budgets to movies made by and starring men because the conventional wisdom is that though women will go see those titles, male moviegoers are reluctant to watch a female-driven story.“Barbie” has now blown a hole in that argument. It isn’t just that men had no choice but to see “Barbie,” lest they be left out of the cultural conversation — the film also demonstrated how women will show up in record-breaking numbers to watch something that truly speaks to them (often bringing friends and going a second or third time, too). Female-led blockbusters don’t all have to star a superheroine: They can be comedies, romances or dramas based on best-selling books, as long as they’re presented as major events.3. Don’t rely on past-their-prime franchises“Barbie” will end this summer outdrawing every major sequel. That’s in part because those franchises are so long in the tooth: We’re on the seventh “Mission: Impossible” movie, the 10th “Fast and Furious” and the fifth “Indiana Jones.” Younger audiences have no sense of ownership over those older series, and even longtime fans may be experiencing diminishing returns. If any lasting lesson can be drawn from the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon that sent both “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” soaring past their initial projections, it’s that audiences are eager for big movies that feel genuinely new. Films that stoke their curiosity can be even more potent than old reliables.4. A great soundtrack is effective marketingThough studios will explore every possible method to market a movie — from billboards to Instagram ads to Happy Meals at McDonald’s — there are few tie-ins as potent as a really killer soundtrack. We used to count on our big summer movies to deliver radio hits, but loaded soundtrack albums have become few and far between these days, despite films like “Black Panther” and “The Greatest Showman” amply demonstrating the boost a film can get from an album that people can’t stop playing.It’s nice, then, that the “Barbie” soundtrack is filled with bops, like Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” and “Barbie World” from Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice. Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” is destined to make the shortlist for the original-song Oscar, and even Ryan Gosling’s plaintive power ballad “I’m Just Ken” debuted on Billboard’s Hot 100. In an era when TikTok has become a music-industry hitmaker and virality on that platform can rival any paid marketing push, a fun pop soundtrack like the one “Barbie” boasts is worth its weight in rose gold.5. Stop saving the good stuff for the sequelWith “Barbie” on a path to become the year’s highest-grossing movie worldwide, Warner Bros. will inevitably try to conjure a franchise from it. Yet much of what makes “Barbie” feel fresh is that it tells a complete story and doesn’t spend time setting up spinoffs or sequels. In fact, it ends in a place that would be hard to roll back: with its lead at the definitive end of her character arc. Gerwig and her stars aren’t signed for “Barbie” sequels, and when I spoke to Gerwig after her blockbuster opening weekend, she said she’d put every idea she had into this movie without the thought of doing more: “At this moment, it’s all I’ve got.”A “Barbie” sequel would certainly make money, but there’s no way it could capture the lightning-in-a-bottle moment that makes this movie feel like such a collector’s item. Would Warner Bros. and Mattel have the guts to preserve the value of “Barbie” by letting it stand on its own? As a top-tier legacy title undiluted by shoddy sequels, it could continue to generate untold amounts of revenue in the years to come. So although it’s unlikely that studio heads will ever choose common sense over cynical cash grabs, the idea of “Barbie” as a one-and-done deserves consideration: After all, a toy only lasts forever if you know when to put it away. More

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    A Farewell to Mostly Mozart, and to Its Music Director

    Louis Langrée led a week of concerts to conclude his two-decade tenure with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.After 21 years, Louis Langrée’s tenure as music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra has ended. As a farewell, he conducted two programs across four evenings last week, and the music he made was uplifting, staggeringly beautiful and, finally, triumphant.The ensemble used to be associated with a festival of the same name, but that was quietly shuttered after the 2019 season. Next year, the players will have a new name and a new music director. But the sound of the orchestra — which draws its musicians from the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Orchestra of St. Luke’s and several other groups — as it is known today was built by Langrée.“What I have learned and shared has made life more beautiful,” Langrée told the audience on Friday, during an evening that became an extended goodbye, with breaks for recollections, reflections and even musical demonstrations à la Leonard Bernstein (whom he cited as an influence). Langrée struck up the band as he explained the deceptive simplicity of Mozart’s melodic writing or the off-kilter minuet of the 40th Symphony. But he caught himself: “It’s a concert, not a lecture,” he said with a chuckle.His first program of the week, on Tuesday, was a motley assortment of pieces by Lully, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Kodaly and Valerie Coleman, taking the orchestra’s tasting-platter approach to an extreme. Coleman’s “Fanfare for Uncommon Times,” written without strings or woodwinds, was a study in layered, graduated brass timbres. The orchestra dug into the saturated colors and whiz-bang energy of Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta” and brought a bountiful tone to a Mozart overture and selections from Lully’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.”The 27-year-old violinist Randall Goosby, making his Mostly Mozart debut, was luminous in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto — his tone luscious, elegant and sweet without being syrupy. His unforced ease and alluringly relaxed vibrato gave his legato suppleness, and his trill was an act of gracefulness instead of athleticism. When the orchestra re-entered with the first movement’s main theme, it felt like a catharsis of the joy Goosby had cultivated.Compared with the stylistic whiplash of Tuesday, Friday was magnificently lucid: a jubilant tour through Mozart’s final three symphonies. Langrée referred to the pieces as the “holy trinity” of Mozart’s symphonic output, all written in the summer of 1788. The program’s sense of occasion, its feeling of culmination, turned Langrée wistful; he thanked the ushers, stage crews and security personnel and expressed pride in the Mostly Mozart players, most of whom he hired himself. “This place will stay magical for me,” he said.At the final program, Langrée was presented with a bouquet of roses that he then gave out to each member of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterLangrée is a Mozartean of vibrancy, potency and efficiency. Mozart is about harmoniousness — requiring an orchestra to balance color, style and execution in a reflection of the music’s essential consonance — but Langrée treats that quality as a starting point. Then he finds expressive freedom, something like romance, but attacks it incisively. The music bursts with feeling as it flies by in tidy fashion.The works came in chronological order, starting with the Symphony No. 39, in which the players unleashed sonorous drama in the Adagio-Allegro and wholly conceived melodic statements in the Andante con Moto (which featured Christopher Pell’s dreamy clarinet). Langrée didn’t shortchange the minuet’s clipped phrases, and the concluding Allegro had a windswept quality.He brought expansiveness to these late symphonies without distending them and let them breathe without slowing them down. In the 40th, Langrée crafted a fast, finely wrought opening filled with slender sound that kept anxiety and release in constant tension. The Allegro Assai, full of life, had dash as well as elegant form.After intermission on Friday, Langrée got candid. He pushed back against the way “Lincoln Center wants to present less classical because it’s elitist,” adding that the center can and should embrace hip-hop and R&B without abandoning Mostly Mozart fare. He pleaded with the audience to return next year to support the musicians, even if Mozart’s name is being “erased from the orchestra.”Langrée located the greatness of the “Jupiter” Symphony in its compassion rather than its grandeur. He cushioned the assertive opening and deftly scaled back to something human — a sly smile, a sense of generosity. The winds peeked through with their peculiar colors, and the fugato finale churned briskly.There will invariably be lapses in music whose finery never allows players to hide. Occasionally, the violins turned gray, or the horns lost their gleam. The endless runs of the Andante Cantabile in the “Jupiter” had an admirable singing quality most, if not all, of the time.On Saturday, for Langrée’s last concert with the orchestra, the audience greeted him with a standing ovation when he entered, and applauded him and the players for nearly 20 minutes at the end.The previous night, Langrée had talked — and sung — through the five parts that make up the “Jupiter” fugue before leading the orchestra in an even more effervescent encore of it. At each of the final two concerts, he was presented with a bouquet of red roses and gave out stems to each of the players. He tossed one to the audience, then kept one for himself. More

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    Travis Scott’s ‘Utopia’ Repeats at No. 1

    The rapper’s latest solo album is the first hip-hop release to spend more than a single week atop the Billboard 200 in over a year.Travis Scott is No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for a second time this week, while Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” logs its 16th time as the top single.“Utopia,” Scott’s first new solo album in five years — and the first since his Astroworld Festival in 2021, where 10 people were crushed to death — holds the top spot on the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 147,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total includes 146 million streams and 37,000 copies of the LP sold as a complete package.With fewer rap albums topping the charts these days — country, pop, R&B and Latin have been more in favor — “Utopia” is the first in over a year to notch more than a single week at No. 1. In April 2022, Tyler, the Creator’s “Call Me if You Get Lost” logged its second time at the top, thanks to the delayed release of that album’s vinyl version. (“Call Me” had opened at No. 1 nine months before.) The last rap album to spend at least its first two weeks at No. 1 was Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” in September 2021; it held at the top for three weeks, then later returned for another two.Wallen’s album “One Thing at a Time” is No. 2, while his song “Last Night,” a monster hit on streaming services and pop radio, holds at No. 1 on the Hot 100. With 16 weeks atop the singles chart, “Last Night” is on a rare streak, tying Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito,” from 2017, and “One Sweet Day,” by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men, from 1995. Only Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” with 19 weeks in 2019, had a longer run at the top.Also this week, the “Barbie” soundtrack, featuring Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and Lizzo, is the No. 3 album, and Taylor Swift logs four albums in the Top 10: “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” (No. 4), “Midnights” (No. 5), “Lover” (No. 6) and “Folklore” (No. 9). More

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    At Time Spans Festival, New York Shows Off New Music

    The festival is a bright spot on the August calendar, with casual yet tightly plotted concerts of modern and contemporary music.Classical music’s global summer season is full of destination-worthy presentations. In August, New York makes a contribution: The Time Spans Festival, a modern and contemporary-music event that is the equal of anything on the international circuit.So after a couple weeks covering operas and starry premieres in Europe, I made sure to be home in New York for the first shows in this year’s festival, which runs through Aug. 26. It all takes place in the refreshingly cool, subterranean hall of the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Hell’s Kitchen.Saturday’s opener was dedicated to works by the 20th-century composer Luigi Nono. This Italian modernist worked frequently with the resident electronic specialists of the SWR Experimentalstudio, a German public radio electronic studio from Freiburg. At the DiMenna Center, this group collaborated with musicians in Ensemble Experimental, giving these performances the feeling of deep investment and institutional know-how.Brad Lubman conducting the Nono concert.George EtheredgeFirst up was “Omaggio a Emilio Vedova” from 1961. A fixed-media piece — for tape only — it was spatialized in the hall by the SWR technicians, with eight speakers surrounding the audience. And though just over four minutes in length, this slashing, vertiginous work made a strong impression: its brief metallic shards of prerecorded sound revolving around audience-member eardrums with a grace that made Nono’s supposedly harsh aesthetic seem balletic.The short presentation also blasted into dust the recent, expensive and much-ballyhooed spatial-music presentation at the Shed, the Sonic Sphere. There, audience members were hoisted up into a giant dome, only to listen to a surround-speaker system with blurry low-end sonic fidelity. At the DiMenna Center, listeners kept their feet on the underground floor, but the whirling sound production was pristine — and transporting.When live instrumentalists from Ensemble Experimental joined the fray, this sense of fun continued, even during gnomic works with generally quiet dynamics, like Nono’s “A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum” (1985).Maruta Staravoitava (flute) Andrea Nagy (clarinet) and Noa Frenkel on Saturday.George EtheredgeJozsef Bazsinka.George EtheredgeHere, the subtle electronic processing of live instrumental playing was a consistent delight: When astringent live notes, played by a bass flutist and a bass clarinetist, came back around in the electronic part, they seemed somehow softened by the electronic merging and transformation. With those newly mellowed-out sounds crawling across the back of your head — courtesy of speakers in the rear of the room — the piece then turned its bass clarinetist loose, by asking for yawping but controlled overblowing from the reed player. (Here it was Andrea Nagy making those striated and punchy sounds.)That piece and one that came next — “Omaggio a Gyorgy Kurtag” — have been recorded on a fine SWR release on the Neos imprint. But that’s a two-channel stereo recording. Here, as led by the guest conductor Brad Lubman, both took on greater depth in the immersive surround-sound setting.The festival’s second night kept the European-experimentalist trend going, but in a fully acoustic fashion, with the JACK Quartet’s renditions of the second and third string quartets by Helmut Lachenmann.Electronic processing of live instrumental playing in the Nono concert was a consistent delight.George EtheredgeSpeaking from the stage between pieces, the violist John Pickford Richards described Lachenmann’s reputation as someone who makes Western classical instruments seethe and twitch in ways previously inconceivable. (His influence can be felt on other German composers of his generation, as well as adventurous American composers like David Sanford.)Richards also noted that “Grido,” the third quartet, which the ensemble had just played, was one that the JACK instrumentalists had performed together before they were a formal group. And so they think of Lachenmann as a father of the ensemble.That deep familial relationship was already apparent in JACK’s reading of that third quartet. That performance seemed to say: Forget everything you think you know about how weird this guy’s sound-production techniques are; just get lost in the confident, persuasive flow of these unusual ideas.

    Complete String Quartets (mode267) by Helmut LachenmannAs on a recording for the Mode label, the JACK players proved they know how to get the most out of this pathbreaking music, savoring the crisscrossing flurries of steely motifs. (They did it with enviable clarity, creating a spatialized feel through purely acoustic means.) At other points, the violinist Christopher Otto in particular seemed to relish the brief touches of more familiar vibrato that Lachenmann allows into the piece.Lachenmann’s second quartet, which on Sunday followed the third, came across more like a notebook of ideas — ideas that would later find their ideal expression in the third quartet. Still, it was a pleasure to experience such a focused, hourlong tour through this composer’s string writing.George EtheredgeAnd audiences seem to have caught on to the Time Spans model — of casual yet tightly plotted concerts, usually lasting an hour to 90 minutes, with no intermission. This weekend’s programs looked close to sold out. And affordable tickets, just $20, are still available to most remaining shows.There are no dress codes, and no complicated advance-festival planning is required. In this way, Time Spans is part of the (necessary) genre-wide effort to make classical music more approachable. Crucially, the festival does that assuming that new audiences can handle new music. More

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    ‘Barbie’ Debuts in Saudi Arabia, Sparking Delight, and Anger

    Denounced in some Middle Eastern countries for undermining traditional gender norms, the hit movie is finding an audience in Saudi Arabia, illustrating the region’s shifting political landscape.On Friday night, Mohammed al-Sayed donned a pale pink shirt and denim overalls to join a friend at a movie theater in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, where the men settled in to watch a film about a doll on a mission to dismantle the patriarchy.Similar scenes played out across the conservative Islamic kingdom last weekend, as women painted their nails pink, tied pink bows in their hair and draped pink floor-length abayas over their shoulders for the regional debut of the movie, “Barbie.” While critics across the Middle East have called for the film to be banned for undermining traditional gender norms, many Saudis ignored them.They watched as the movie imagined a matriarchal society of Barbie dolls where men are eye candy. They laughed when a male character asked, “I’m a man with no power; does that make me a woman?” They snapped their fingers in delight as a mother delivered a monologue about the strictures of stereotypical femininity. Then, they emerged from the darkened theaters to contemplate what it all meant.“The message is that you are enough — whatever you are,” said Mr. al-Sayed, 21, echoing the Ken doll’s revelation.“We saw ourselves,” said Mr. al-Sayed’s friend, Nawaf al-Dossary, 20, wearing a matching pink shirt.Watching Barbie’s search for identity and meaning, Mr. al-Sayed said he was reminded of the fraught period when he started college and wasn’t sure of his place in the world. He said he believed that the movie had important lessons for men as well as women.“I felt like my mom should see the film,” he said.“All of our families — all families,” Mr. al-Dossary said, laughing.That this was happening in Saudi Arabia — one of the most male-dominated countries in the world — was mind-boggling to many in the Middle East. When “Barbie” opened on Thursday in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, it arrived suddenly and overwhelmingly. Moviegoers rushed to prepare Barbie-pink outfits. Some theaters scheduled more than 15 showings a day.Moviegoers wore pink during a screening of “Barbie” in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Thursday.Ali Haider/EPA, via ShutterstockA snide headline in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat declared that Saudi cinemas had become “havens for Gulf citizens escaping from harsh restrictions” — a twist in a country whose people once had to drive to Bahrain to watch movies.Eight years ago, there were no movie theaters in the Saudi kingdom, let alone any showing films about patriarchy. Women were barred from driving. The religious police roamed the streets, enforcing gender segregation and shouting at women to cover up from head to toe in black.Since he rose to power, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 37, has done away with many of those restrictions while simultaneously increasing political repression, imprisoning conservative religious clerics, leftist activists, critical businessmen and members of his own family.Even now, despite sweeping social changes, Saudi Arabia remains a state built around patriarchy. By law, the kingdom’s ruler must be a male member of the royal family, and while several women have ascended to high-ranking positions, all of Prince Mohammed’s cabinet members and closest advisers are men. Saudi women may be pouring into the work force and traveling to outer space, but they still need approval from a male guardian to marry. And gay and transgender Saudis face deep-seated discrimination, and sometimes arrest.So as word spread through the kingdom that “Barbie” would debut on a delayed schedule — a sign that government censors were most likely deliberating over it — many Saudis thought the movie would be banned, or at least heavily censored. Bolstering their expectations was the fact that neighboring Kuwait banned the film last week.Lebanon’s culture minister, Muhammad Al-Murtada, also called for the film to be banned, saying that it violated local values by “promoting homosexuality” and “raising doubts about the necessity of marriage and building a family.” It is unclear if the government will follow his recommendation.Even in Arab nations that have allowed the film to be shown, it has faced intense criticism. The Bahraini preacher Hassan al-Husseini shared a video with one million Instagram followers calling the movie a Trojan horse for “corrupt agendas.”Even while Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has done away with many social restrictions in Saudi Arabia, he has increased political repression.Pool photo by Ludovic MarinAnd in Saudi Arabia, not everyone is receptive to the film. To the entrepreneur Wafa Alrushaid, who suggested that the film be banned in her country, its messages are a “distortion of feminism.”“I’m a liberal person who has called for freedom for 30 years, so this isn’t about customs and traditions, but the values of humanity and reason,” she told The New York Times. The film, she argued, excessively victimizes women and vilifies men, and she objected to the fact that a transgender actress had played one of the Barbies.“This film is a conspiracy against families and the world’s children,” Ms. Alrushaid, 48, declared.Many Arab critics of the movie expressed views similar to those of some American politicians and right-wing figures who have castigated the film as anti-male. The tussle in the Middle East over the movie illustrates how battles that sometimes echo the so-called U.S. culture wars are playing out on a different landscape.The animated film “Lightyear,” which showed two female characters kissing, was banned in several countries in the region last year. And six Gulf Arab countries issued an unusual statement last year demanding that Netflix remove content that violates “Islamic and societal values and principles,” threatening to take legal action.In Kuwait, religious conservatives have become more vocal in recent years, Gulf analysts say, broadcasting views that many Saudis would be hesitant to express in public now, fearing repercussions from the government.“Banning the movie ‘Barbie’ fits into a larger tilt to the right that’s increasingly felt in Kuwait,” said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University. “Islamist and conservative forces in Kuwait are relishing in these culture wars to prove their ascendancy.”Some Kuwaitis expressed astonishment that they would have to travel to the Saudi kingdom to watch the movie. Many pointed out the irony that Kuwait and Lebanon, despite objecting to the film, had long provided greater freedom of expression than many other Arab countries.Streaming out of movie theaters in Riyadh, people who watched “Barbie” seemed to leave with their own understanding.Lining up for “Barbie” in Dubai. Many Arab critics of the movie have expressed views similar to those of some American right-wing figures who have castigated the film as anti-male.Ali Haider/EPA, via ShutterstockYara Mohammed, 26, said that she had enjoyed the movie, dismissing the Kuwaiti ban as “drama.”“Even if kids saw it, it’s so normal,” she said.To Abrar Saad, 28, the message was simply that “the world doesn’t work without Ken or Barbie; they need to complete each other.”But to teenage girls like Aljohara and Ghada — who were accompanied by an adult and asked to be identified only by their first names because of their ages — the film felt deeper.“The idea was pretty realistic,” said Aljohara, 14, wearing a hot pink shirt underneath her black abaya. She said she liked that the film ended with a type of equality between men and women.“But it wasn’t nice that it ended with equality,” interjected Ghada, 16. “Because I feel like equality is a little bit wrong; I feel like it’s better for there to be equity because there are things a boy can’t do but you can do them.”Asked if they ever thought they would watch such a movie in Saudi Arabia, both exclaimed, with laughter: “No!”“I was expecting them to censor a lot of scenes,” Ghada said.In fact, it did not appear censors had cut anything major. A scene in which Barbie declares that she has no vagina and Ken no penis remained, as well as a scene with the transgender actress. The Arabic subtitles were rendered faithfully — including the word patriarchy.Hwaida Saad More

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    Fans Celebrate Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary

    The start of hip-hop dates to Aug. 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc created continuous break-beats by working two turntables during a party in a rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Ave in the Bronx. On Friday night, exactly 50 years later, a concert was held at Yankee Stadium — roughly a mile and a half from hip-hop’s birthplace — to honor the occasion, featuring Run-DMC, Slick Rick, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Lil’ Kim and Nas. DJ Kool Herc, 68, also appeared onstage to accept an award.Before the show, which was billed as “Hip Hop 50 Live,” the scene outside the stadium was heavy with fans of the sounds from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Middle-aged couples on date nights arrived wearing matching Adidas track suits. A man strolled the promenade carrying a boombox and wearing a Kangol hat. Hawkers sold pins with pictures of Biz Markie and The Notorious B.I.G.Outside a McDonald’s opposite the stadium, a street musician performed Tupac Shakur hits, while an in-line skater entertained the crowd with basketball tricks. Stationed beside a subway entrance was an 8-year-old rapper, Hetep BarBoy, who, accompanied by his father, was selling CDs of his album. “I prefer old-school hip-hop,” Hetep said. “I like Rakim because of his flow and the clean message he was putting into the world. He rapped about positivity, and that’s also what my music is about.”In the edited interviews below, attendees reflected on hip-hop’s 50th. Some recalled witnessing the park jams and parties that defined the genre’s beginnings.Tamika TalbotExecutive assistantJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesPick a side: Old-school hip-hop or new? Old-school all day. I was at the rap battles in the parks. Hip-hop came from the dirt. You had to be a lyrical assassin then. If you weren’t, you were trash. I feel if you have something to say now, you’re seen as wack. Back then your flow had to be intact.Your old-school hero? Big Daddy Kane was once the prince of hip-hop. He had crazy lyrical flow. He was super-duper fly. He was unmatched.Richard ByarsCelebrity chefJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhich old-school hero are you here to see? Ice Cube. To me he represents the beginning of hip-hop’s renaissance. But I’d never use the term “old-school.” I call artists like him “true-school.”What’s a significant hip-hop history moment for you? The public access television show “Video Music Box” was essential to hip-hop’s growth in the 1980s. All the forefathers appeared on that show.Adam JenkinsFiber optics specialistJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOld-school or new? I saw the birth of hip-hop as a kid growing up in the Bronx. I was at those Sedgwick Avenue parties. I saw Cold Crush Brothers and Afrika Bambaataa. So this all goes way back for me. It’s amazing to see how hip-hop has become a global force, but when I was a kid, it was just about having fun in the park. It wasn’t about how nice your car was or how much money you had.Do you ever boast about seeing hip-hop’s birth? I do sometimes tell young people that I saw the beginning of all this, but it usually falls on deaf ears, and they don’t get it. But that kind of response is also part of hip-hop to me, because it’s a genre that’s supposed to be always evolving from its past.Lesley SmithHome-care aideJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOld-school or new? For me it’s still all about Melle Mel, the Sugarhill Gang and Kurtis Blow. They’re the originals. Back in the day hip-hop was wholesome and fun. I don’t even understand it now. Primo GonzalezSecurity guardJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhat’s a significant hip-hop history moment for you? I remember seeing “Beat Street” in the movie theater in the 1980s. It was a world I already knew from seeing B-Boys on University Avenue, but for many people, that was the first time they ever saw break dancing culture.Mary Olivette BookmanFordham University music studentJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWho do you consider a pioneer? Missy Elliott. She had something to say. What she was doing was sonically unique, and her skill and individuality were always immediately visible in her rap style.Who are you here to see tonight? I’m here to see them all. I want to see hip-hop history. Tonight is music education for me.Gearni ThompsonMusic marketing professionalJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhat’s a significant hip-hop moment for you? I can still remember riding in a car with my friends when I heard “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang for the first time.Old-school or new? I love the old-school. I feel like the new school is about all the wrong stuff, like buying jewelry and expensive cars. Grandmaster Flash was reaching the kids in a good way. Old-school rap was about community and where we came from. It changed our lives.Ricardo VaronaStreet ball entertainerJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesYour old-school hero? Snoop Dogg. When he and Dr. Dre came out with “The Chronic” it shook the world. Everyone followed their way after that.What’s a significant hip-hop moment for you? An important artist who I feel is too little known now is Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. Her hit “Can You Feel the Beat” was impossible to not want to sing and dance to when it came out.Wisdom McClurkinHospitality professionalJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWho do you want to see tonight? Lil’ Kim. She’s a pioneer. She’s from the block. She’s the queen of everything. She was the blueprint. If it wasn’t for her, there would be no Nicki Minaj.William GainesRetired chefJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOld-school or new? I grew up in the boogie-down Bronx, so I went to all those legendary park jams. They’d hook up the turntables and speakers, and the cops would eventually come to turn it all off. You’d see Biz Markie and Doug E. Fresh. It was a good time. It all started from nothing and became something. But it all began with us just saying to each other: “Yo, they’re having a party on Sedgwick Avenue tonight. Want to go?” More

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    Nechama Tec, Polish Holocaust Survivor and Scholar, Dies at 92

    She wrote about heroic Jewish resisters in her book “Defiance,” which was later made into a film starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber.Nechama Tec in 2018 at her home in Manhattan. A sociologist, she wrote about Jews as resisters of the Nazis and why certain people became rescuersvia Tec familyNechama Tec, a Polish Jew who pretended to be Roman Catholic to survive the Holocaust and then became a Holocaust scholar, writing about Jews as heroic resisters and why certain people, even antisemites, became rescuers, died on Aug. 3 at her home in Manhattan. She was 92.Her death was confirmed by her son, Roland.In “Defiance: The Bielski Partisans” (1993), Dr. Tec’s best-known book, she described the courageous actions of Tuvia Bielski, who commanded a resistance group that fought the Germans and, more important, saved some 1,200 Jews. The partisans entered ghettos under siege and brought Jews back to the Belarusian forest, where Mr. Bielski had built a community for them.“Defiance” gave Dr. Tec a platform to show that Jews saved other Jews during the war and were more active in resisting the Nazis than some have commonly believed.When a friend suggested to the filmmaker Edward Zwick that “Defiance” would make a good movie, he was not immediately persuaded.“Not another movie about victims,” he recalled his response when he wrote in The New York Times about directing the film, released in 2008, which starred Daniel Craig as Tuvia Bielski and Liev Schreiber as his brother Zus.“No, this is a story about Jewish heroes,” he said his friend told him. “Like the Maccabees, only better.”As Mr. Zwick put it, “Rather than victims wearing yellow stars, here were fighters in fur chapkas brandishing submachine guns.”By then Dr. Tec had written “When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland” (1986). Her interviews with rescuers for that book yielded a portrait of Christians who hid Jews, despite the likelihood of being imprisoned or killed for providing such aid. They were, she concluded, outsiders who were marginal in their communities; had a history of performing good deeds; did not view their actions as heroic; and did not agonize over being helpful.The cover of Dr. Tec’s book “Defiance.”“Many were casually antisemitic, but that wasn’t their prime purpose in life,” said Christopher R. Browning, a Holocaust expert who is a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina and who edited, with Dr. Tec and Richard S. Hollander, a collection of letters written by Mr. Hollander’s Polish Jewish family from 1939 to 1942. “Using her skills as a sociologist, she was able to portray a more complex spectrum of interactions than the simplistic ones that people who didn’t collect empirical data as she had.”Nechama Bawnik was born on May 15, 1931, in Lublin, Poland. Her father, Roman, owned a chemical factory. Her mother, Esther (Finkelstein) Bawnik, was a homemaker.Soon after the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939, Mr. Bawnik transferred title of his factory, rather than have the Nazis confiscate it, to his foreman, who also gave him a job and a place for the Bawniks, including Nechama’s older sister, Giza, to live on the top floor of the building. Nechama hid in the living quarters, her only link to the outside a hole in a wall that let her look onto the courtyard of a convent school.As conditions for Jews worsened and rumors of deportations frightened them, the family considered relocating to Warsaw but found it too perilous. In mid-1942, Nechama’s parents sent her and Giza to live with a family in Otwock, Poland, a half-hour’s train ride from Warsaw. Nechama had false papers that identified her as Krysia Bloch. To help her play the role, she learned Catholic prayers and a family history.The sisters, who both had blond hair and blue eyes, were able to pass as orphaned nieces of the family they were living with and moved around without hiding. In the summer of 1943, they and their parents moved in with a family in Kielce.When the Bawniks needed money in Kielce, Nechama’s mother baked rolls and sent Nechama to sell them in a local black market. Nechama also sold bottles of vodka that had been distilled by a local farmer, Roland Tec said. Once, he said in a phone interview, a retailer denounced her and the Gestapo chased her away; when she returned, her father told her to run into nearby fields, while her parents hid under floorboards, until it was safe.After the war, the family returned briefly to Lublin and then moved to Berlin. In 1949, Nechama immigrated to Israel, where she met Leon Tec, a Polish-born internist who later became a child psychiatrist. They married in 1950 and moved to the United States two years later.Daniel Craig, left, as Tuvia Bielski and Liev Schreiber as Zus Bielski in the 2008 film “Defiance,” based on Dr. Tec’s book.Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock PhotoNechama studied sociology at Columbia University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1954 and a master’s in 1955.After working at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, she began teaching sociology in 1957 at Columbia. She then taught at Rutgers University, returned to Columbia and moved to Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., before joining the sociology faculty of the University of Connecticut’s Stamford campus, in 1974. She remained there for 36 years.She earned a Ph.D., also in sociology, from Columbia, in 1965.Dr. Tec said that she had been determined to put her Holocaust past behind her, but that in 1975 her childhood experiences demanded her attention.“When these demands turned into a compelling force,” she wrote in “Defiance,” “I decided to revisit my past by writing an autobiography.”In that autobiography, “Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood” (1982), she recalled the attitude that Helena, the grandmother in the family of rescuers in Kielce, had toward Jews.“I would not harm a Jew,” Dr. Tec recalled Helena saying, “but I see no point in going out of my way to help one.” She added: “You and your family are not like Jews. If they wanted to send you away now, I would not let them.”In another book, “Into the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen” (1990), Dr. Tec explored the life of another Polish Jew, who hid his identity, worked as a translator for the German police and helped save about 200 Jews in the Mir ghetto.“Especially riveting are the details of his translations for his German superiors,” Susan Shapiro wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “in which his careful change of two words could save an entire Jewish community.”After his identity was revealed, Mr. Rufeisen took refuge in a monastery, converted to Catholicism and joined partisan fighters, according to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance and research center in Jerusalem. He became a Catholic priest after the war and moved to Israel, where he joined a monastery on Mount Carmel.In addition to her son, Dr. Tec is survived by her daughter, Leora Tec; two grandsons; one great-grandson; and a half sister, Catharina Knoll. Her husband and her sister, Giza Agmon, both died in 2013.During the filming of “Defiance,” Dr. Tec was pleased to see that the Bielski partisan camp in the Belarusian forest had been faithfully recreated in Lithuania, with a kitchen and workshops to repair shoes and watches and to tan leather.“She was in awe of what they had built; it was really incredible,” said her son, who was a co-producer of the film. He added: “As soon as Daniel Craig saw her on the set, he cornered her and spent an hour or an hour and a half asking her questions. It was wonderful.” More

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    Taking in Jennifer Walshe and Anthony Braxton at Darmstadt

    In between the four operas of the “Ring,” a critic traveled to take in world premieres by Jennifer Walshe and Anthony Braxton.It’s not a typical week in Germany when a staging of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” on the composer’s own turf at the Bayreuth Festival finds itself outdone for world-consuming sadness, rage and the possibility of redemption.But that’s what I experienced recently when I traveled between the four operas of the “Ring” at the festival and the Darmstadt Summer Course, a hotbed of avant-garde works since 1946.On Wednesday in Darmstadt — during a day off between “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” in Bayreuth — Ensemble Nikel backed the Irish experimental singer and composer Jennifer Walshe in the world premiere of the complete song cycle “Minor Characters,” which she co-wrote with Matthew Shlomowitz.The morning after “Minor Characters,” I traveled back to Bayreuth for “Götterdämmerung” as staged (to much polarization) by Valentin Schwarz. Experiencing both back-to-back, I had the feeling that the song cycle had managed to steal the fire of the “Ring” cycle.I had expected “Minor Characters” to have a keyed-up, smash-cut musical aesthetic. Shlomowitz’s “Popular Contexts” series, for piano and “sampler keyboard,” after all, uses snatches of vocal growls, drooping water sources and Ping-Pong volleys, plus piano and beat-work, to create a disorientating, groovy effect; then nervier piano marches, alarming synths and distorted guitar samples.

    Popular Contexts / Performed by Mark Knoop by Matthew Shlomowitz / Peter AblingerWalshe’s compositional practice often revolves around her wide range of vocal inflections. Her approach incorporates extended technique experimentalism and free improvisation in addition to composed elements.But also many, many accents. In a 2020 profile, the New Yorker critic Alex Ross celebrated her ability to channel “Irish bard” and “California surfer girl” alike — a style which reaches a high state of refinement on solo Walshe efforts like “All the Many Peopls.”

    ALL THE MANY PEOPLS by Jennifer Walshe“Minor Characters” hits a new level of development for Walshe and Shlomowitz. He seems to pull her a bit closer toward more typical song forms; she puts some critical distance between his synths and the way they can seem to self-consciously emulate Muzak. And they put to use, through the piece’s dramatic interrogation of the pleasures and ills of our too-online present, the ferocious chops of Ensemble Nikel — a group made up of a percussionist, guitarist, saxophonist and keyboardist.Walshe’s text moves fast, and the music moves at the speed of thought. One moment, her vocals may seem to be celebrating internet memes — or the “minor characters” who become “main characters” for a day on social media. But before long, she’s chiding the world, or herself, for ignoring weightier matters. The music rockets back and forth between amiable, unhurried rhythms and black-metal blast beasts; between ad-jingle saxophone riffs and free-jazz skronk; between even-keeled, Eddie Van Halen-style finger-tapped motifs on electric guitar and less orderly plumes of distorted noise.She toys with audience expectations, too. Early on, she begins in a confessional mode, relating a #MeToo-style narrative involving a professor luring one of his students down to his basement. But before long, Walshe leaves the audience there, narratively, with no resolution and the professor screaming to no one in particular, in perpetuity.Instead, “Minor Characters” pivots to new fascinations and horrors — an exorcism in a rural country field, reports on a burning planet — as online life tends to do. When Walshe gave wild voice to lines like “they knew, we all knew, and we did nothing about it,” her self-implicating understanding of the climate crisis had a Brünnhilde-like edge — with traces of grace and good humor leavening her grave understanding, similar to Wotan in the “Ring,” of a world order’s undoing by its own designs.Walshe has a wide range of literary inspiration, Wagner included; her contributions to the liner notes for “Peopls” refer to “certain sections from ‘Watt’ by Samuel Beckett,” the rapper KRS-One and “the cast of ‘Lohengrin.’” That Wagnerian citation is no joke. “I don’t do anything ironically,” Walshe said in a brief interview after the performance of “Minor Characters.” “I don’t like any music ironically. But it has to mean something. There has to be something at stake.”“Minor Characters” seems to ask: If everyone is distracted online, following their own taste, how do we solve problems together? Even though the show feels complete, there is no true resolution.It felt more satisfying, even, than the “Götterdämmerung” in Bayreuth. Schwarz’s risky staging seems to run aground in the final opera. He has interesting ideas in the lead-up: making Wotan an even bigger cheater than usual; depicting Fafner’s dragon form as a hospice patient at home, sitting on the hoard of gold as a member of the gerontocracy.And Schwarz offers bleak humor, such as in Mime trying to teach Siegfried fear by introducing him to sex through pornography. But by “Götterdämmerung” none of that seems to have mattered as the opera’s telling sputters in its final moments.Still, there was much fine singing and orchestral playing. The bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny’s Wotan had some of Walshe’s gloriously unhinged energy. In both “Die Walküre” and “Siegfried,” during moments of self-pity, he would crumple to the ground, offering aspirated whimpers; the next moment he would be raging, spurred on by a just as quickly extinguished explosion from the orchestra, led with fire by Pietari Inkinen.And Inkinen’s way with quieter textures provided a ravishing experience of Bayreuth’s fabled acoustics: He and the orchestra produced soft-grained marvel after marvel in the second, contemplative act of “Walküre,” then, as if with whip in hand, he blazed through the final act of that opera and the first act of “Siegfried” with what seemed like one complete surge of momentum.Anthony Braxton, whose new “Thunder Music” system debuted in Darmstadt.Kristof LempIn between those two shows, I traveled to Darmstadt for another world premiere: the debut of American saxophonist-composer Anthony Braxton’s new “Thunder Music” system, which came courtesy of a performance, led by him, of his Composition No. 443.While not strictly dramatic in nature, “Thunder Music” suggested a stagelike feel. In this new category of his compositional practice, individual musicians are responsible for making choices about how to merge their own sound with prerecorded sounds of thunder and nature.At Darmstadt, the musicians in this chamber ensemble — including singers, woodwinds, brasses, an accordion and two double basses — prerecorded a take on No. 443 the day before the concert. Then, at the show, the performers could control the extent to which their own prerecorded material was mixed with thunderstorms or swarms of birds (controlled through an app designed for their phones). Simultaneously, they played Composition No. 443 again — live, this time with the ability to network with other musicians in improvisations, or interpolations of past Braxton pieces.At one point, when the saxophonist James Fei and the trombonist Roland Dahinden collaborated on the theme of Braxton’s Composition No. 131 — in which frenetic riffs are capped with a sashaying figure that seems to wink at listeners — they put a jolt of Braxton’s bebop-tinged catalog into what had been an airy stretch of No. 443.Braxton has in the past declared himself “a complete fool for the music of Richard Wagner” — something that you can sense in operas like “Trillium X,” which I reviewed earlier this month from Prague. But you can also sense Braxton’s affection in the way he encourages musicians to layer his various compositions during the same moment in performance. That bit of No. 131 that cropped up during No. 443? Call it a Braxtonian leitmotif for Charlie Parker. More