Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Wham!’ Review: They Made It Big, Then Broke Up

    A new movie documents George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s storming of the pop airwaves as the duo Wham! and laughs past the thorny questions.The new documentary about George Michael, Andrew Ridgeley and the music they made as Wham! — it’s just called “Wham!” — found me in a moment of need for a nostalgic, fantastical elixir, something short, sweet and tangential to my feeling of national blues. For one thing, Wham!, the duo, made soul music that popped. And the movie dances past all of the thorny moral and ethical questions of white people making Black stuff. Those questions don’t exist at all in this movie. That’s the fantasy. And I’m here for it. But also: Wham! didn’t have any thorns.Here were two white boys from England of solid Greek Cypriot (George) and Egyptian (Andrew) stock, born during Motown’s ascent in the early 1960s and, in adolescence, bonded to each other as disco was handing the party baton to new wave and rap. They synthesized it all (plus a little Barry Manilow and Freddie Mercury, and some Billy Joel) into a genre whose only other alchemists, really, were Hall and Oates. In every one of the duo’s roughly two dozen songs — including “Everything She Wants,” “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “I’m Your Man,” jams all — there’s influence but, in the movie’s conjuring, no anxiety. Race doesn’t quite exist here.The film doesn’t bother with journalism or criticism or music history. Just a lot of pictures and archival interviews, performance footage, outtakes and music videos. It’s essentially adapted, by the director Chris Smith and some very busy editors, from scrapbooks that Ridgeley’s mother kept, celebrating everything from the duo’s first attempt to storm the airwaves in 1981 to its acrimony-free breakup in 1986. That’s where things end, a year before the release of Michael’s megahit album “Faith,” and decades before his death in 2016 at 53. There’s no mention made, either, of Ridgeley’s misapprehended, out-of-print solo album from 1990, “Son of Albert.”There aren’t even any talking heads. The disembodied voices of Michael and Ridgeley guide the whole thing — rumination and memory as narration. (Most of Michael’s comes from a BBC Radio interview.) They explain how they met as schoolkids in the mid-1970s and took over a mini-block of 1980s culture. You get to hear Ridgeley still warmly call Michael by his nickname, Yog, for he was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, and see both their looks pinball from leather bar to Richard Simmons.Nothing here’s overthought or pumped up. To invoke the words of a different beacon of catchiness, “Wham!” is a teenage dream. You could drink it from a coconut. You’re permitted to embrace Michael’s dexterous approach to Black music and Ridgeley’s affable interpretation of Michael’s blueprint as the way — a way — things could be. Easy, frictionless. You hear Michael rhyme on “Wham! Rap” just about as bodaciously as Grandmaster Flash or with some of Kurtis Blow’s humor, and no cold sweats follow. The homework had clearly been done. So, instead you say: He just … had It.I mean, the early 1980s were awash in young white Brits making hits, at least partially, out of slicked-up Motown: ABC, Bananarama, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Soft Cell. I’d say that sound came most naturally to Michael; it seemed most elastic to him. He really could make the most of a “do do do” or a “yeah yeah.” He had a knack for tattoo melodies and chord progressions so juicy that you want to bite into every section of almost every song.Michael learned early on how to shade his singing. He could get it to coo and wail and susurrate; Ridgeley, played a feisty, insinuating, shirt-unbuttoning guitar, an element I can now hear (and thanks to this film, appreciate). They made three albums in as many years, then stopped when the costs of fame became too much for Ridgeley but were barely meeting Michael’s expectations for himself. Wham!, for Michael, was the ground floor. To hear both men tell it, he was the stronger songwriter, and he really knew how to produce a record.My favorite story in the documentary involves a trip to Memphis that Michael took to record “Careless Whisper” with the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section under the supervision of the producer Jerry Wexler, another legend. Michael didn’t like what they did with the song. The movie lets you hear some of it, and the trademark warmth is what seems to be missing. There’s something almost metronomic about it. (If there were a moment for somebody to come in and do some explaining, this would be it. What exactly displeased George and eventually Andrew?) But I love this story because it stars these different generations of white soul musicians with divergent tastes in Black music. Maybe Wexler and the boys didn’t hear “Careless Whisper” the way Michael did. But he had the confidence (and the nerve) to take it home and redo it until it became the screen of silk and smoke we know today.“I’m never gonna dance again, the way I danced with you”? What a work of melodrama! Where’d it come from? Who did Michael do wrong? “Wham!” alludes to personal struggles — Michael with his sexuality; Ridgeley with partying. Michael recounts coming out to Ridgeley early on but to almost no one else. Success becomes his identity. In the film, that identity’s lowest moment happens at the end of 1984, when “Last Christmas,” on its way to being Wham!’s fourth U.K. chart-topper in the calendar year, is kept from the spot by “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the all-star charity-for-Africa record, which Wham! is on. Michael is bummed that he keeps himself stuck at No. 2.Michael chose to let ambition define him. But there is a kind of desperation in the average Wham! song, a crisis about either being trapped in lovelessness or excluded from love — a crisis audible, even to my young ears, as a wail from the closet. (The bouncy, blow-dried music videos were always a different story: What closet?) Meanwhile, the movie about the men who made these songs is all bright side. A little desp rarely sounded so good. A pair of more candid, if more conventional, documentaries exist about the darkness and light of Michael’s life. This one? It’s a prequel, one that personifies the Wham! Experience: over before you know it.Wham!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Her Symphony Reclaims an Ancestral Story, and Classical Music

    Tamar-kali, a former punk rocker, wove episodes of Gullah Geechee history into “Sea Island Symphony,” premiering at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.When the composer Tamar-kali goes fishing in the South Carolina low country, she thinks about her ancestors — the Gullah Geechee — singing spirituals like “Wade in the Water.” And she pictures Harriet Tubman arriving with Union gunboats in the summer of 1863 when those ancestors actually had to wade in the water to their freedom.The Gullah Geechee, who called Tubman Black Moses, helped create a rich book of spirituals that fused biblical imagery with their own plight. “You think about a people who have been engaging in this faith as a form of coping with their lot in life,” Tamar-kali said, “which is the absolute removal of their agency, their humanity, as chattel slaves.”Tamar-kali, who lives in Brooklyn, is always thinking about history, and it infuses her music. The largest expression yet is her “Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo,” a new work for orchestra and vocalists that is to have its world premiere on Wednesday in Manhattan as part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City.The programmatic symphony paints the Gullah Geechee story from the Civil War through the rise of Robert Smalls, a Carolina man who was born enslaved and became a United States congressman in 1875.“I’m a full-concept girl,” said Tamar-kali, who began working on the piece in 2019. “I started it and then I realized: Oh, this is not something small. Because it’s like I really go with the guidance from the muses.”The symphony’s world premiere, performed by American Composers Orchestra, is the culmination of a series she curated called “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle” that has included panel discussions about the complex and often neglected history of America’s Black composers and classical music. Tamar-kali said it was important to her that the piece be contextualized and that the series happen around Independence Day to emphasize that “the end of colonial British rule only symbolized independence for a very small population.”The four-movement “Sea Island Symphony” is the most ambitious addition yet to a composing and performing career that has included punk rock, film scores and opera. Tamar-kali’s eclectic output is the product of wildly varied input — her family’s juke joint in the Sea Islands, blues and jazz, and the Ashkenazi cantorial melodies and classical music she absorbed growing up in New York City.Tamar-kali, center, at Joe’s Pub in 2008.Scott Ellison SmithTamar-kali C. Brown — that’s her full name — describes herself as “a kid that classical music lost.” She received a formal music education at an all-girls Catholic school in Brooklyn in the 1980s, studying theory and singing in a classical choir. But her experience there — she called it “a post-colonial missionary mind-set institutional space” — gave her “no desire to continue that journey that basically felt, to me, like a war,” she said. “So I figured out early on that I would deal with music on my own terms.”She arrived on the New York musical scene screaming — shredding an electric guitar and belting out lyrics of resistance by way of punk rock, becoming a fixture at Joe’s Pub. Shanta Thake, the new chief artistic officer at Lincoln Center, was an early fan. “If you were just to describe her visually, walking around, she is so fierce,” Thake said. “There’s this warrior fierceness to who she is onstage, and just such a command of the audience, of the songs themselves.”Another fan from the Joe’s Pub days was the composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, now a professor at Arizona State University. Roumain was living in Harlem in the early 2000s, and he invited Tamar-kali to his apartment, where they recorded a raw electric version of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.”“She was this seminal New York artist who was bold and brash, avant-garde,” Roumain said, “incredibly powerful and incredibly inventive. She was a destination, and her career was, even at that time, landmark.”Tamar-kali transcended punk to found the Psychochamber Ensemble, an all-female string and choral group that also covered Kate Bush. She was dipping back into classical music, and she realized, if only after the fact, that she was trying to recreate the fellowship she had experienced in school choir — but now in a safe space while maintaining her agency. “I didn’t even realize I was trying to heal myself,” she said.Before long, Tamar-kali’s string writing and story sense attracted film directors. She made her scoring debut with Dee Rees’s “Mudbound” in 2017. She recently scored a PBS documentary about the Gullah Geechee, “After Sherman,” and is working on John Ridley’s biopic of Shirley Chisholm starring Regina King.The film work is acoustic and often chamber sized, with a handmade quality, created in her studio in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. She often incorporates her own singing voice. Her music is always, in a way, vocal, Roumain said: It “is always boundless, is always wanting to speak. In some ways, it can’t be contained.”Tamar-kali described herself as “a kid that classical music lost.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesShe composes most of her music with her voice, which she then translates into software and synth mock-ups before it’s interpreted by other musicians.It was Roumain who nominated Tamar-kali in 2019 for an Arizona State commission that became the seed for “Sea Island Symphony,” a work she describes, stylistically, as Americana, a synthesis of all of her influences. “It just … it sounds like me,” she said.The finished symphony opens with a movement depicting the Port Royal Experiment of 1861, in which the Gullah were left to manage themselves in the low country’s undesirable marshlands, with text sung by a tenor representing a newly freed person.The second movement travels forward to the Combahee River Raid of 1863, when Tubman led a Union military operation to rescue more than 700 enslaved people, and reclaims the true origins of the song “Kum ba yah.” “It’s not about making amends or being all happy and sweet,” Tamar-kali said. “It’s a cry for intercession by the higher power: ‘Come by here, my lord.’”The segment culminates in a ring shout, a call-and-response circle that enslaved Africans developed to preserve their heritage while strategically not offending their white captors. The singers will be accompanied by a “shout stick,” historically often a mop or broomstick, since drums were outlawed at the time.The third movement is a scenic piece inspired by General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, an 1865 military order that granted the area’s newly freed people ownership of the Gullah Geechee corridor. The final movement traces the story of Robert Smalls, who used his navigational skills to sail to freedom; he joined the Union army and later become a congressman. Though Smalls’s name is all over his hometown, Beaufort, it’s another piece of history that Tamar-kali discovered only as an adult.Tamar-kali said she hoped eventually to take the symphony down to the low country and to Washington, D.C. She insisted on this premiere being part of free summer programming, which means it’s one night only, with a small budget and very limited rehearsal.Having grown up attending free concerts in Brooklyn and Central Park, she knows that “the most multicultural, multigenerational audiences, of the most diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, exist at free public programming,” she said, adding it was “the gateway to diversity in the halls. But it’s overlooked, and it’s underfunded.”Classical music lost her once. She wants it to find more people like her. More

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    How Julie Byrne’s Astral Folk Music Took Flight

    After the loss of her closest collaborator, the singer-songwriter paused but didn’t retreat. “The Greater Wings,” the follow-up to her 2017 breakthrough, is due Friday.“I’m not trying to be eccentric, I promise!” Julie Byrne joked as she carefully arranged colorful tiles and bits of clay on the dining room table of her minimally furnished Queens apartment. The singer-songwriter, cozily stylish in a milk chocolate-colored tank top, cargo pants and snug knit slippers, located a pair of jagged white tiles that bore a phrase scribbled in black Sharpie: “Letting go.”“There was a third one that said ‘future,’ but I gave it to a friend,” Byrne said, explaining that those messages help tell the story of her first record in six years, an incandescent collection of ambient folk titled “The Greater Wings,” due Friday.Byrne, 32, hadn’t necessarily planned the long gap after her 2017 breakthrough, “Not Even Happiness,” an elegant and emotionally astute album that brought her critical acclaim. But that album’s closing track, “I Live Now as a Singer,” became something of a manifestation. She toured for two years and relocated to Los Angeles from New York in late 2018, and found herself living as a working musician for the first time. It was an uneasy transition.“It was a period of tremendous absorption in my own doubt,” Byrne said. “It took me a long time to learn to work well on my own time.”Byrne grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., where she passed time climbing grain mills and exploring the city’s abandoned Central Terminal. She picked up the guitar at 17 and taught herself on an instrument that belonged to her father, a fingerstylist who stopped playing after a diagnosis of primary progressive multiple sclerosis. “My guitar work,” she noted, “is a family inheritance.”After high school, Byrne spent the next few years floating across the United States. “My mom traveled quite a bit when she was that age, and I fell in love with her stories about that time,” Byrne said. “I had hardly been anywhere and was hungry to experience more. There was a lot of romance in that dream.” She developed her songwriting voice along the way, releasing several cassettes of haunting folk songs, which were later compiled into her 2014 debut, “Rooms With Walls and Windows.”Three years later, “Not Even Happiness” brought her music to a wider audience, propelled by Byrne’s dedication to nonstop touring. The success, however, generated some stress around her process. “While there is mysticism in creativity, there would be times where I was lost in a mind-set of only wanting the process to be mystical,” she explained, letting loose a bright chuckle before turning pensive again. “When I was younger, I approached writing as something that occurred spontaneously, rather than through perseverance and the raw, honest effort of showing up day in and day out.”“The deep wild romance of friendship is very much at the heart of the record,” Byrne said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesIn the winter of 2020, Byrne had recently moved to Chicago from California to be closer to Eric Littmann, her longtime creative collaborator. After meeting in 2014 at South by Southwest, where Littmann engineered a performance that featured Byrne playing in a dried-up creek bed, the pair were immediately aligned, creatively, and for about a year, romantically. Littmann became Byrne’s go-to musical partner while also making his own bedroom pop under the moniker Steve Sobs and leading Phantom Posse, a New York-based collective featuring artists like iLoveMakonnen, Vagabon and Emily Yacina, whose solo music he also produced.After a first attempt at recording “Not Even Happiness” in Brooklyn, where they struggled to capture a tranquillity amid the chaos, Littmann and Byrne relocated to her childhood home in Buffalo for four months. Both were eager to recapture that immersive creative energy for “The Greater Wings.” While Littmann worked as a cancer researcher by day, in the evenings and on weekends he and Byrne would tinker away at song drafts that became tracks like “Summer Glass,” a shimmering, synth-driven standout on the new album that ends with the line, “I want to be whole enough to risk again.”By early 2021, Byrne and Littmann were working steadily on songwriting, traveling the country to record harp and string arrangements. But in June of that year, Littmann died suddenly at 31. Byrne declined to speak to the circumstances of his death, which remains a profoundly destabilizing loss.“He was a truly brilliant person, he had so much faith in me and what we had set out to do together — that never wavered,” Byrne said. “It wasn’t even his vision or technical skill or artistry that made the collaboration so rich and singular, it was his love and care.” Work on “The Greater Wings” paused for seven months as Byrne moved back to New York to be closer to her support system; her current apartment is just down the street from the one she and Littmann shared around the time they made “Not Even Happiness.”Byrne toured for two years and relocated to Los Angeles from New York in late 2018, and found herself living as a working musician for the first time. OK McCausland for The New York TimesAt the time of Littmann’s death, most of the album had been mapped out and at least four songs were near completion. When it came time to reopen the record, Byrne sought outside support. Ghostly, the experimental and electronic record label that later signed Byrne, connected her with Alex Somers, a producer known for his work with Sigur Rós and Julianna Barwick.“Julie and I had been friends for years and Eric was a big part of my community,” Somers recalled over the phone. A friend at the label gave him a message: “Julie doesn’t want to retreat.”After several informal hangouts at Somers’s Los Angeles home, Byrne and her collaborators regrouped in January 2022 at a cozy studio in New York’s Catskill Mountains. “It was a really charged experience,” Somers said. “Every single day, at least one person was in tears.”But as Byrne sings on the serene “Portrait of a Clear Day,” “Love affirms the pain of life.” So while loss loomed over the album’s completion, Byrne emphasized that “a majority of it came from life, our life together, not from death and grief.” She added, “The deep wild romance of friendship is very much at the heart of the record.”It’s a sentiment clearly articulated on the title track, which Byrne completed after Littmann’s death. Atop a meditative guitar melody and celestial ambience, Byrne sketches scenes from her shared past with Littmann while committing to continued artistic evolution: “I hope never to arrive here with nothing new to show you, as so many others have.”“There’s a sense of responsibility in that line, to embody the statement with my actions, not only with my words,” Byrne said. “Perhaps the act of finishing the song itself is one of many beginnings in that effort.” More

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    Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire’ Takes a Note From Taylor Swift

    The pop singer’s new single dismantles a former paramour who was entranced by fame, borrowing a tactic from Swift’s career-shifting “Dear John.”On “Drivers License,” one of the great singles of the 2020s, Olivia Rodrigo has been played for a fool by an ex, but the song — pulsing, parched, destitute — remains centered in her pathos. She may have been abandoned, but the person who did the damage is still an object of, if not exactly affection, then obsession: “I still hear your voice in the traffic/We’re laughing/Over all the noise.” At the song’s conclusion, she is alone, and lonely.That was the Rodrigo from two and a half years ago, when she was reintroducing herself to the world as a human after a stretch as a Disney actress automaton. The Olivia Rodrigo who appears on “Vampire,” the first single from her forthcoming second album, has now lived through some things. Her sweetness has curdled.“Vampire” is nervy and anxious, a tripartite study in defiance that begins with Elton John-esque piano balladry à la “Drivers License” — a head fake in the direction of naïveté.But Rodrigo knows better now, or at least knows more: Rapid stardom has both bolstered and cloistered her. “I loved you truly,” she sings, deadpan, then almost cackles the next line, “You gotta laugh at the stupidity.” The song continues in this vein, through a boisterous up-tempo midsection and a rowdy, theatrical conclusion. Her subject matter — romantic disappointment, being left in the lurch — is the same, but the stakes are much greater now.“I used to think I was smart/But you made me look so naïve,” she sings. It is the sort of insider-outsider awareness that can only come from being both the object and the subject at once — powerful enough to author your own story, vulnerable enough to fall prey to someone else’s wiles.It is, in short, Rodrigo’s “Dear John.”Over a decade after its release, “Dear John” remains one of the most powerful songs in Taylor Swift’s catalog, and also among the most idiosyncratic. Purportedly about a dismal romantic engagement with John Mayer, it is produced in the style of Mayer, dressed liberally with blues guitar noodling.Lyrically, it’s not only astute, it’s vicious. Swift begins with a similar unjaundiced shrug — “Well, maybe it’s me/And my blind optimism to blame” — then goes on to surgically, savagely disassemble her foe: “You are an expert at sorry and keeping lines blurry/Never impressed by me acing your tests.”“Dear John” appeared on “Speak Now,” Swift’s third album, released when she was 20. It wasn’t a single, but it was one of a pair of songs on the album — the other was “Mean,” about a fierce critic of her artistry — in which Swift began creatively and publicly reckoning with the public version of herself. Her earlier songwriting felt winningly insular, almost provocatively emotionally intimate. But “Dear John” announced Swift as a bolder and riskier performer and songwriter, one unafraid of using stardom as her ink, and who understood that the celebrity most people knew provided as much fodder as her inner life.Rodrigo is 20 now, and “Guts,” due in September, will be her second album. And while “Drivers License” and its fallout became tabloid fodder, the public narrative wasn’t encoded into the song itself.“Vampire” changes that. Rodrigo’s target here is someone attempting to be glamorous, or perhaps glamour itself: “Look at you, cool guy, you got it/I see the parties and the diamonds sometimes when I close my eyes/Six months of torture you sold as some forbidden paradise.”Perhaps the song is about the Los Angeles nightlife fixture Zack Bia, one of Rodrigo’s rumored partners — if so, the structural shift from the first to second part might be pointed — that’s when the music becomes coffeehouse EDM, possibly a veiled allusion to Bia’s emergent career as a producer and D.J., and an echo of the Mayer-ian blues-pop Swift channeled on “Dear John.”The relationship itself, Rodrigo learns, is a transaction, too. “The way you sold me for parts/As you sunk your teeth into me,” she yowls, before anointing her ex with the coldest moniker imaginable: “fame [expletive].” That insult usually begins with “star” rather than “fame,” but Rodrigo knows that the condition of fame is far more toxic than any one person, and that someone who craves it is perhaps uninterested in personhood at all.On “Drivers License,” Rodrigo still saw the other woman as an enemy, or source of tension, but now on “Vampire,” she understands what the lines of allegiance truly are, marking an emergent feminist streak. Here, she finds kinship with her ex’s other partners, and lambastes herself for thinking she ever was the exception: “Every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news/You called them crazy, God, I hate the way I called ’em crazy too.”There’s an echo here of Swift’s realization on “Dear John” that she, too, is closer kin to the other aggrieved women than to her ex: “You’ll add my name to your long list of traitors who don’t understand/And I look back in regret how I ignored when they said/‘Run as fast as you can.’”After sweeping past it for most of her career, Swift has just begun revisiting this moment — last month, she played “Dear John” live for the first time in over 11 years, at one of the Minneapolis stops of her Eras Tour. That’s likely because Swift’s rerecording of “Speak Now,” part of her ongoing early album reclamation project, is being released this week.But she also used the moment to both reflect on her maturation, and to urge her devoted, sometimes ferocious fans not to live in, or dwell on, her past.“I’m 33 years old. I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19 except the songs I wrote and the memories we made together,” she said from the stage. “So what I’m trying to tell you is, I’m not putting this album out so you should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written a song about 14 billion years ago.”When Swift began reporting on her own fame on “Dear John,” it had the secondary effect of activating phalanxes of fans who went to war on her behalf, too. But over the course of the past decade, something interesting happened: The battle became theirs more than hers. They hold on to her wrongs with pitbull-like grip, ensuring, in a way, that Swift can’t fully grow up.So if “Dear John” is a creative guidepost for “Vampire,” this cautionary note offers a suggestion of what might come from it: a call to arms, a hardening of your outer shell, a conflagration that burns long after you light the match and walk away. More

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    Echoes of William Byrd in Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly and Others

    Four popular composers explain how this Englishman’s ideas ricochet through their own works today.The works of William Byrd hold significant historical interest, but they are also remarkably influential on music that is being written today.Here are edited excerpts from conversations with four composers who have written pieces directly inspired by Byrd, or who grew up singing in the choral tradition of which he is such an important part.The composer Roxanna Panufnik, who has written music that responds directly to Byrd’s.Benjamin Ealovega PhotographyRoxanna PanufnikPanufnik, whose body of choral music includes a “Coronation Sanctus,” written for the crowning of Charles III, composed a “Kyrie After Byrd” in 2014 and is working on another response.I’m really in awe of Byrd. First, how brave he was being a Catholic in such dangerous times, during the Tudors and Queen Elizabeth’s reign. That’s no joke, and thank God he was a musician, because I think that’s probably what saved him. But I love his harmony. Byrd, Tallis and Bach — I think their harmonic changes are more emotional, and sometimes more radical than a lot of 19th-century composers. He was really a man ahead of his time.Susie Digby formed this professional choir, ORA Singers, and she wanted to do a project where people took their inspiration from Byrd. She particularly wanted for me to do something from his five-part Mass. As soon as I heard the Kyrie, immediately — there’s a certain harmonic U-turn in the middle of the road, in the middle of the stave, and I just thought, “Oh, my goodness, that’s what I want to do.” So I started it like Byrd, but then took it a step even further, or two, or three.The composer James MacMillan, who began singing Byrd’s music as a student.Liam Henderson for The New York TimesJames MacMillanMacMillan — like Byrd, a committed Catholic — recently wrote “Ye Sacred Muses” for the King’s Singers and Fretwork, the viol consort. The piece employs a text that Byrd used to commemorate Thomas Tallis.I first got to know his music, and first sang his music, as a teenager at school in Scotland. Our high school choir was singing bits of his four-part Mass. As a fledgling composer, who was very interested in early counterpoint and getting to grips with how you should handle complexity, it was a wonderful lesson in how to make line against line work in a piece of music. His music is known among the singing community, the choral community, but maybe beyond that he’s not as well known as he should be. Classical music audiences tend to forget about the pre-Baroque, and it’s a pity because William Byrd is one of music history’s great figures.Another wonderful motet by Byrd is “Justorum animae,” which is basically a commemoration or a celebration of martyrs. It’s quite clear whom he means. He was seeing people being put to death because of their faith. I think Byrd and Tallis knew people who were arrested, and I think there were some composers for one reason or another during this time arrested. They must have thought that that could have been in the cards. The only comparable situation today is in dictatorships, behind what was the Iron Curtain — Shostakovich living with fear, with his bag packed, ready to go.Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices” carries traces of Byrd’s style.Bryan Thomas for The New York TimesCaroline ShawShaw, a singer, violinist and composer, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for “Partita for 8 Voices.”I grew up singing in an Episcopal church choir, and I don’t think we really sang much Byrd then. But when I was at Yale, I started singing at Christ Church New Haven, which is a High Anglican church. We would often do the Byrd for Four, Byrd for Five [two of the Masses] at the services in the morning, or the motets. The thing that really is the biggest influence on my writing, and approach to music, is the Compline service, which we would do on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. There are two particular ones that I remember: “Ne irascaris,” which is so beautiful, the one that starts with the men in the bottom and then the higher voices come in later; and “Justorum animae.”There’s a physical experience to singing Byrd or Tallis, or a lot of that era of music. It’s the feeling of early polyphony and homophony, where they’re just enjoying the sound of voices together, and the beginnings of harmonies moving, and getting to make sound in these beautiful spaces, where the resonance of certain chords is spiritual. The first part of “Partita” that I wrote, which was “Passacaglia” — I wanted to hear the sound of a bunch of voices just kind of chatting gutturally, going into vocal fry and then suddenly exploding into a chord that feels like that, feels like one of those Byrd or Tallis, perfectly voiced chords, just the resonance of it.Nico Muhly, who said, “There’s always a Byrd for something.”Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesNico MuhlyMuhly grew up singing in an Episcopal church, and continues to write works in the Anglican tradition. Several of his pieces reflect the importance of Byrd, most explicitly “Two Motets,” an orchestration of “Bow thine Ear” and “Miserere mei, Deus.”For me, the highest form of personal and artistic satisfaction is: Some random introit of mine is happening at Magdalen College, Oxford, and they’re also doing the Byrd “Sing Joyfully.” That, to me, is the pinnacle. You’re in this kind of linked-up way with music whose power comes in completely different ways than the Romantic tradition. Of course, with Byrd, most of it is designed for people to look upward and inward, because it’s sacred music. So for me the project is, how do you bring that into concert music, or how do you write music that is honest and engaged with that tradition, without a fuss?It’s part of my daily listening, it’s part of my year, in the context of going to church. There’s always a Byrd for something. I do simultaneously love thinking about his political positioning, and I love thinking about the relationship of Catholicism to what he’s doing. But I also feel like what he gets at is a more delicious form of engagement with the ear, which is to say: If you don’t know that — if you don’t know everything that was going on with his faith, and how that was practiced, and where that was practiced — the ear, I think, still can articulate that there’s a deeper well of meaning. 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    Vietnam Bans ‘Barbie’ Movie Over South China Sea Map

    Greta Gerwig’s upcoming film has been banned in the country for its use of a map depicting territory that both China and Vietnam claim as their own.There will be no “Barbie” world in Vietnam this summer.The Southeast Asian nation has banned the release of “Barbie,” the upcoming film directed by Greta Gerwig, because of a scene that includes the so-called nine-dash line, a U-shaped dotted line on a map showing territory in the South China Sea that both China and Vietnam claim as their own.The nine-dash line is used in Chinese maps to mark its claim over as much as 90 percent of the South China Sea.While an international tribunal at The Hague ruled in 2016 that China had no legal basis for its claims, Beijing has yet to concede to the ruling and has instead sought to dominate the waters, carrying out aggressive incursions and developing military installations.Vietnam, with its long-held acrimonious ties to China, said on Monday that the new film would not be released in the country because of its use of the line, according to Vi Kien Thanh, the head of the Vietnam Cinema Department. The decision was made by the National Film Appraisal and Classification Board, which is responsible for licensing and censoring foreign movies in Vietnam.Responding to state media on Monday, Mr. Thanh confirmed that “Barbie” was banned because of “the illegal image of the ‘cow’s tongue line’ in the film,” using the common Vietnamese phrase for the nine-dash line.Vietnam Plus, a state newspaper, wrote that the decision to include the line “distorts the truth, violates the law in general and violates sovereignty of Vietnamese territory in particular.”China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei all have territorial claims in the South China Sea, which include islands and other strategic maritime features.“Barbie,” which stars Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and a host of other celebrities, was scheduled to be released in Vietnam on July 21. Some moviegoers in the country welcomed the government’s ban. Hoang Xuan Bach, a 23-year-old university student, said the producers should have known better than to include the map.“I hope this movie will flop,” he said.This is not the first time Vietnam has banned films for including scenes with the nine-dash line. “Uncharted,” a 2022 action film by Sony featuring the actor Tom Holland, and DreamWorks’ 2019 animation “Abominable,” were both dropped from the nation’s box offices for the same reason.Vo Kieu Bao Uyen More

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    Paul Justman, Who Shed Light on Motown’s Unsung Heroes, Dies at 74

    After establishing himself as a leading music video director in the 1980s, he found acclaim with his 2002 documentary about session musicians.During the filming of a climactic scene in his critically acclaimed documentary, “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” a celebration of the unheralded session musicians behind countless 1960s hits, Paul Justman could have found himself foiled by Detroit’s harsh winter.Arriving at the city’s MacArthur Bridge one morning to interview the guitarist Eddie Willis about Motown’s fateful move to Los Angeles in 1972, Mr. Justman and his crew found the bridge blanketed with fresh snow, seemingly impenetrable. But the director was undeterred.“To Paul, this was an opportunity,” his brother, the musician Seth Justman, said by phone. “The glistening snow helped accentuate the feeling of loss.”Throughout his career, Mr. Justman blended a photographer’s eye with a musician’s feel for the pulse of pop as a prominent director of music documentaries and videos.He died on March 7 at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 74. His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by his brother.While Mr. Justman enjoyed a long and varied career, he is best known for “Standing in the Shadows of Motown.” That film, released in 2002, brought to light the lasting contributions made to pop music by the session musicians, known as the Funk Brothers, who fueled countless era-defining Motown hits despite working in obscurity.“This salute to the literally unsung and underrecognized studio heroes of Motown is so good because it is one of those rare documentaries that combine information with smashing entertainment,” Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times wrote in a review. “And it is one of the few nonfiction films that will have you walking out humming the score, if you’re not running to the nearest store to buy Motown CDs.”Among Mr. Justman’s other documentaries were “The Doors: Live in Europe 1968” (1990) and “Deep Purple: Heavy Metal Pioneers” (1991). He also made features, including the 1983 battle-of-the-bands tale “Rock ’n’ Roll Hotel,” which he directed with Richard Baskin, and “Gimme an ‘F,’” a romp about cheerleaders, released the next year.Still, none of his films could match the ubiquity of the music videos he made in the 1980s, capturing the era’s Day-Glo look and Pop Art sensibility as MTV reshaped the pop landscape.Mr. Justman brought a quirky sense of deadpan to videos like the Cars’ “Since You’re Gone,” Diana Ross’s “Muscles” and Rick Springfield’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” as well as the MTV staple “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band — for which his brother happened to play keyboards.Some of the studio musicians behind the Motown sound got back together for “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” among them, from left, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina. Joe Hunter and Bob Babbitt.Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock PhotoPaul Evans Justman was born on Aug. 27, 1948, in Washington, the second of three children of Simon Justman, a government systems analyst, and Helen (Rebhan) Justman, a school drama teacher.Growing up in Washington, in Newton, Mass., and in Margate City, N.J., Mr. Justman was drawn to music (he played drums and guitar in rock bands as a teenager) and dance (at 9, he choreographed his own routines for courses at the Boston Conservatory). He also fell in love with photography.After graduating from Earlham College in Indiana in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, he moved to New York City and took a job with a team making short films about American culture for Swedish television.He soon started working as an assistant to Robert Frank, the lauded documentary photographer and filmmaker. He eventually served as an editor on Mr. Frank’s notorious warts-and-all documentary about the Rolling Stones’ raucous 1972 North American tour, which became famous, in part for its obscene name, although it was never officially released.Mr. Justman, who moved to Los Angeles in 1980, was also a fixture behind the scenes with the J. Geils Band as it was climbing from the clubs of Boston toward fame. In the mid-1970s, he made a short documentary, “Postcards,” about the high-energy blues-rock band’s frenzied life on the road. That film, which featured appearances by the rock critic Lester Bangs, was broadcast on PBS.In addition to his brother, Mr. Justman is survived by his wife, Saundra Jordan, and his sister, Peggy Suttle Kligerman.Not all Mr. Justman’s work with the J. Geils Band was behind the camera. He often collaborated on songs with his brother, and he contributed lyrics for all the songs on the band’s final studio album, “You’re Gettin’ Even While I’m Gettin’ Odd” (1984), recorded after the kinetic frontman, Peter Wolf, left the band. (Seth Justman handled most of the lead vocals.)But, his brother said, it was Mr. Justman’s ever-present videos that helped break the band into the pop stratosphere. His “Freeze Frame” video, featuring band members dressed in white and splattering one another in paint as if they were human Jackson Pollock canvases, received heavy airplay on MTV. The song hit No. 4 on the Billboard singles chart in 1982.But it could not match “Centerfold,” from the previous year, in ubiquity. The video for that song, featuring models marching around a high school classroom in teddies and, famously, a snare drum filled with milk, become a token of Generation X pop culture, and the song became the band’s first and only No. 1 hit.“MTV was really starting to cook,” Seth Justman said of “Centerfold,” “and that cinematic and energetic approach, along with splashes of humor, resonated and lit the fuse. The song, and the video, shot like a rocket.” More

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    Peter Brötzmann, 82, Dies; His Thunderous Saxophone Shook Jazz Traditions

    One of Europe’s most influential free-jazz musicians, he played with “a kind of scream” to exorcise his demons, and those of German history.Peter Brötzmann, an avant-garde saxophonist whose ferocious playing and uncompromising independence made him one of Europe’s most influential free-jazz musicians, died on June 22 at his home in Wuppertal, Germany. He was 82.His death was confirmed by Michael Ehlers, the director of Eremite Records, who served as Mr. Brötzmann’s longtime North American tour manager and business partner.No cause was given, but Mr. Brötzmann had suffered from respiratory issues for the last decade. A self-taught musician — best known for his tenor saxophone work, he also played various clarinets and the tarogato, a Hungarian woodwind instrument — he said that his practice of pushing too much air through his horn might have caused his health problems, which he likened to the lung damage suffered by glassblowers.“I wanted to sound like four tenor saxophonists,” he told the British music magazine The Wire in 2012. “That’s what I’m still chasing.”The force of Mr. Brötzmann’s abrasive squall felt tectonic. “I can’t think of anyone that played with more power than Peter,” the British saxophonist Evan Parker, who appeared on several of Mr. Brötzmann’s early records, said in a phone interview. “I don’t think it can be done, to get more out of a saxophone than that. Sometimes his nose would bleed because he was blowing so hard. He gave everything.”Mr. Brötzmann in performance at the Vision Festival in New York in 2011. He said he “wanted to sound like four tenor saxophonists.”Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesMr. Brötzmann described his style as a means of exorcising demons — particularly those of Germany’s crimes against humanity in World War II.“Younger people don’t understand, but what has happened to us in Germany is a kind of trauma of our generation,” he told The Wire. “There is a great shame there and a terrible kind of trauma. And that’s why maybe the German way of playing this kind of music sounds always a bit different than the music from the other parts of Europe, at least. It’s always more a kind of scream. More brutal, more aggressive.”Hans Peter Hermann Brötzmann was born on March 6, 1941, in Remscheid, an industrial city in western Germany. The city was almost destroyed by Allied bombardment in 1943, and Mr. Brötzmann’s earliest memory was of running through the streets holding his mother’s hand to escape the firestorm.His father, Johannes, a tax officer, had been conscripted into the Nazi Army. Captured by the Russians on the Eastern Front, he didn’t return until 1948, after escaping from a P.O.W. camp in Siberia. Mr. Brötzmann grew up in Remscheid with his family — his father, his mother, Frida (Schröder) Brötzmann, and his sister Mariane — but moved to Wuppertal for school and remained there the rest of his life.He studied graphic design and visual art in the late 1950s at the School of Applied Arts in Wuppertal, where he created his own fonts: striking, blocky alphabets that he later used on the covers of many of his albums. He had his first gallery show in 1959 and participated in early performances staged by the experimental, interdisciplinary art movement Fluxus. In 1963 he collaborated on the first major exhibition by Nam June Paik, the Korean American artist who would become known for his video work, but who at that point was building musically oriented installations and interactive sculptural objects.Mr. Brötzmann continued making artwork prolifically even as music assumed a place of priority in his life.“From the very start, he didn’t love the art-world milieu,” said John Corbett, co-owner of the Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery in Chicago, who began curating exhibitions of Mr. Brötzmann’s artwork in 2003. “But he continued privately making visual art. He was interested in beauty, but it had to be accompanied by a certain kind of honesty and forthrightness.“He really could not deal with people who were false, with art that was false, and with music that he felt was false, Mr. Corbett added. “He was quite intolerant of all those things.”In 1967, Mr. Brötzmann released his first album as a bandleader on his own label, BRÖ. If its title, “For Adolphe Sax,” read like a provocation aimed at the 19th-century inventor of the saxophone, then his next BRÖ album, “Machine Gun,” released in 1968 and credited to the Peter Brötzmann Octet, announced all-out war on everything that had come before.“Machine Gun” was a nickname the trumpeter Don Cherry had given him, as well as a reference to the carnage of the war in Vietnam. A milestone of collective improvisation, the album boasted three tenor saxophonists who would become titans of European free music: Mr. Parker, Willem Breuker of the Netherlands and Mr. Brötzmann.Mr. Brötzmann’s violently expressive sounds, combined with confrontational album titles like “Nipples” (1969) and “Balls” (1970), “was something to get used to,” Mr. Parker said. “It wasn’t the gentle school of English ‘after you, sir’ kind of improvising.”In 1969, Mr. Brötzmann co-founded a new label, FMP (the initials stood for “free music production”), for which his poster and album designs helped create a distinctive visual aesthetic. His trio with the Dutch drummer Han Bennink and the Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove — both veterans of “Machine Gun” — lasted a dozen years before Mr. Van Hove, struggling to be heard above the din, departed; Mr. Brötzmann and Mr. Bennink continued collaborating as a duo.But Mr. Brötzmann’s reputation was largely confined to Europe until the mid-1980s, when he joined with the guitarist Sonny Sharrock, the bassist Bill Laswell and the drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson to form Last Exit, a group whose amplified cacophony flirted with heavy metal and raised his profile in North America.Beginning in the late 1990s, reissues on Mr. Corbett’s label Unheard Music Series made Mr. Brötzmann’s early music readily available to a new generation of listeners, while collaborations with younger musicians like the Chicago Tentet (which featured the saxophonist and composer Ken Vandermark) established him as a revered figure in that city.Throughout, Mr. Brötzmann toured relentlessly, earning the nickname Soldier of the Road, which was later the title of a 2011 documentary about him.He almost never turned down a booking invitation, regardless of the money involved or the distance to be traveled; he even performed in Beirut in 2005 during the chaotic aftermath of the Cedar Revolution. That concert, like most of his travels, resulted in yet another album.By Mr. Ehlers’s count, Mr. Brötzmann appeared on more than 350 records, including 180 as leader or co-leader.Into his 70s, Mr. Brötzmann was traveling in minivans across North America with Mr. Ehlers, playing at theaters, clubs, do-it-yourself art spaces, community centers and occasionally even squats. He paid his audience back in kind, Mr. Ehlers said, through “the little gesture of playing every concert until he almost collapsed from the effort.”In recent years, he toured in a duo with the pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh and played frequently with the bassist William Parker and the drummer Hamid Drake, whom he considered his favorite rhythm section.“Peter had his own relationship with sound,” William Parker said in a phone interview, “and every time he played, he tried to, as we call it, go to the moon.”Mr. Brötzmann married Krista Bolland in 1962. They eventually separated, but remained close. She died in 2006.Mr. Brötzmann is survived by a son, Caspar, a free-form rock guitarist with whom he recorded “Last Home,” a 1990 album of incendiary duets; a daughter, Wendela Brötzmann; and a grandson. His sister died before him.Mr. Brötzmann’s restless creativity sometimes found unlikely admirers. In a 2001 interview with Oxford American magazine, former President Bill Clinton was asked to name a musician readers would be surprised he listened to.His response: “Brötzmann, the tenor sax player, one of the greatest alive.” More