Aurelia Butler

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    Kacey Musgraves’s Nashville

    “I always knew that Nashville would be a destination of some sort for me, that I would land there in terms of music,” said the singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves during a Zoom call. A native Texan who is nominated for five Grammys this year, including best country album for “Deeper Well,” her fifth studio album, she began singing at a young age and at 18 competed on season five of the country music television show “Nashville Star.” A year later she moved to Nashville and never looked back. “I do owe so much to the community there for absolutely shaping me and my songs, and for giving me the opportunities that I’ve had,” she said.Her love for the city runs deep. “Nashville is home to an unparalleled songwriting community. Some of the best songwriters in the world are based there,” she said. Indeed, the city pulses with the energy of its musical heritage, and you can soak it all up everywhere you go — from its groovy lounges to its record stores and hole-in-the-wall bars.So where should a visit to Music City begin? “Even if you’re not necessarily a fan of country music, the Country Music Hall of Fame is really interesting,” she said. “Country music is a very historic genre, and this museum really honors the roots of that.”One of her favorite haunts in the East Nashville area is Grimey’s, a record store set inside an old church, complete with vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows. Right next door is Anaconda Vintage, a used clothing store where she “can always find a little treasure or two.” Across town near Vanderbilt University is Brown’s Diner, the oldest burger joint in the city and “notoriously John Prine’s favorite spot to get a hamburger.”Ms. Musgraves is currently on tour across North America in support of “Deeper Well,” which was reviewed in The Times as “a study in quiet thoughtfulness rooted in gratitude.” Her last stop, on Dec. 7, is back home in Nashville at Bridgestone Arena.Here are her favorite places to visit in the city.1. Sperry’sRoast of prime rib beef with creamy horseradish sauce, asparagus and a twice baked potato is one of the classic dishes at Sperry’s.William DeShazer for The New York TimesWith its classic decor, Sperry’s is the kind of restaurant that seems frozen in time.William DeShazer for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Man Behind the Legendary Donkey Kong Country Soundtracks

    David Wise turbocharged the Super Nintendo for scores inspired by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Prokofiev, Duran Duran and more.The initial hype about Donkey Kong Country, which was released for the Super Nintendo 30 years ago this week, was centered on its impressive 3-D-ish graphics. But the game’s legacy proved to be its soundtrack.As players led a brawny ape and a cartwheeling monkey through jungles, ancient ruins and snowscapes, they were treated to a musical smorgasbord of atmospheric tunes. The self-taught British composer David Wise, with valuable contributions from Robin Beanland and Eveline Fischer, had managed to coax a richer variety of sounds than had ever emanated from a game console.“Dave really knew the S.N.E.S. inside out, so he could push it as hard as he could to make it do things that people hadn’t heard before,” the video game composer Grant Kirkhope said. At the core of Wise’s music, though, is “melody, melody, melody.”Wise joined the studio Rare in 1985 and composed for its games, including several entries in the Donkey Kong franchise, until 2009. He has continued to work in the industry, with his latest score accompanying Nikoderiko: The Magical World.A legion of gamers cherishes the music for Donkey Kong Country and its sequel, which are a bit like the “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper” of video game music. In a recent interview, Wise unpacked the process and inspirations, musical and otherwise, behind his music for the first two Donkey Kong Country games.‘DK Island Swing’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Two Bee Gees Drummers Die Within Days

    Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the original drummer, and Dennis Bryon, who played during the band’s disco heyday, died within four days of each other.Two drummers for the Bee Gees — one during the long-running Anglo-Australian pop group’s early days of hit-making ballads, the other during its white-hot disco superstardom — died four days apart, according to posts from a tribute band and former bandmates.Dennis Bryon, 76, the Bee Gees’ drummer starting in 1973, died on Nov. 14, according to Blue Weaver, who played in the band Amen Corner with Mr. Bryon. He announced his death on Facebook on Thursday, but gave no cause of death for Mr. Bryon.Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the band’s first professional drummer, died on Nov. 18 at the age of 78, according to Evan Webster and Sue Camilleri, who work on The Best of The Bee Gees Show, a tribute band. Mr. Petersen died from a fall, they said.Mr. Petersen, who joined the Bee Gees in 1967, played on the band’s first four albums. He started playing in the The Best of The Bee Gees Show five years ago, Mr. Webster said.Mr. Petersen played on a string of hit ballads from 1967 to 1970, including “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “I Started a Joke” and “Words.” He was also a child actor, known for his role in the 1956 film “Smiley,” which was the origin of his nickname, among a few other movies in the late ’50s.In a 2022 interview with The Strange Brew Podcast, Mr. Peterson said that the band would always create songs together in the studio.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott Wrap Up a Partnership With Thanks

    After 40 years of musical collaborations, this cellist and pianist have recorded their final album together, “Merci.”Of all the cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s many, many collaborations, the one with the pianist Kathryn Stott has been among his most enduring.Ma and Stott have been giving recitals and making records for 40 years. But time passes on, and as Stott, 65, prepares to retire from public performances at the end of this year, they have marked the passing of their partnership with a tour and a last album, “Merci” — a beautiful and poignant adieu through music by Gabriel Fauré, Camille Saint-Saëns, Pauline Viardot, and Lili and Nadia Boulanger.Friends before they started playing together, Ma and Stott met in 1978 in rather unusual circumstances. Ma and his wife, Jill, were staying in London, where they sublet an apartment in Hampstead. “One especially hot day I was practicing — with almost no clothes on — when two people unexpectedly walked into the flat,” Ma, 69, has said. “It turned out that our landlord had failed to mention that he had a flatmate or to tell her that he had sublet his room! The flatmate was Kathy Stott. And that’s how a beautiful friendship began.”Yo-Yo Ma, right, and Kathryn Stott, left, wait backstage before their Nov. 9 concert in Paris. They have been performing together since the 1980s.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesSpeaking from Berlin recently, Ma and Stott discussed their new recording, the notion of lineage in music and their time together. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Kathy, this album seems to have several different layers to it.KATHRYN STOTT It really does. One of my all-time favorite composers is Fauré. It’s 100 years since he died. I don’t like celebrating people’s deaths, but you know, what can you do? So that was one little idea. And then Yo-Yo and I both have connections to Nadia Boulanger, so we were thinking also about our heritage, our teachers and all the links of the composers on the album. Every single composer on there is linked through a story, or being a teacher, or being introduced to another. And then our kind of “merci” to each other for these remarkable 40 years that we’ve had, being musical explorers and otherwise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Quincy Jones Receives Posthumous Oscar, and Daughter Gives His Speech

    At the Governors Awards, Rashida Jones spoke on behalf of her father, who died earlier this month at the age of 91.Before his death two weeks ago, the musician and producer Quincy Jones wrote a speech he intended to deliver at the Governors Awards, where he would receive an honorary Oscar at the ceremony created by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.On Sunday night in Hollywood, his actress daughter Rashida Jones delivered that speech on his behalf before a rapt audience.“As a teenager growing up in Seattle, I would sit for hours in the theater and dream about composing for films,” she said while channeling her father, who was a Black trailblazer in Hollywood: “When I was a young film composer, you didn’t even see faces of color working in the studio commissaries.”Nominated seven times, Jones was given a different honorary Oscar — the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award — in 1995, back when these awards were still part of the televised Oscar broadcast. To shorten that show, the honorary awards were spun off into their own event in 2009.“He has so many friends in this room,” said Rashida Jones, center, of her father, Quincy Jones.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThough the Governors Awards are not televised, they still attract an A-list crowd that rivals any major ceremony. An early stop on the awards-season circuit, the event offers plenty of unfettered face time with Oscar voters during its cocktail hour and post-dinner break and serves as the season’s starriest schmoozefest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Park Avenue Armory Will Host Yoko Ono’s ‘Wish Tree’ and Jamie xx

    The Armory’s upcoming season also includes the world premiere of “DOOM,” a new work from the Golden Lion winner Anne Imhof.The Park Avenue Armory announced its 2025 season on Monday, which includes the North American tour debut for the musician and producer Jamie xx’s new album “In Waves” and the largest ever North American installation of the artist Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree,” a grove of almost 100 trees that will arrive at the Armory for visitors to attach wishes to.“This season, some of the most cutting-edge artists of our time will be invited to the Armory to illuminate complex histories, contemporary society and visions of the future,” Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of Park Avenue Armory, said in a news release.The season opens on Jan. 9 with “In Waves.” The show is a return for Jamie xx, one-third of the British electro-pop band the xx, after that group took over the Armory for 25 performances in 2014. “In Waves,” Jamie xx’s first solo album in nine years, was released this September, and will feature in the four-night residency along with some of his early solo music and songs from “In Colour” (2015).A “Wish Tree” installation in Germany. The ongoing work by Yoko Ono invites people to tie personal wishes to trees; 92 of them will be installed at the Armory.Klaus Ohlenschlaeger/Alamy“Wish Tree,” Ono’s ongoing participatory work where visitors are invited to tie personal wishes to a tree, will have 92 trees in honor of Ono’s 92nd birthday on Feb. 18. It will start on Feb. 14 and run for four days. A two-day symposium with panels and performances will celebrate Ono’s work during the installation.The Armory’s season will also include the world premiere of “DOOM,” a new durational performance piece from the cross-disciplinary artist Anne Imhof, who won the Golden Lion, the top prize, at the 2017 Venice Biennale for her installation “Faust.” The performance, which opens on March 3 and is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, will take over the Wade Thompson Drill Hall with performers, sound and scenery to explore the balance between apathy, activism and resistance.In addition to those productions, the Armory’s upcoming season includes:The North American premiere of “Constellation,” an exhibition of more than 450 prints of the photographer Diane Arbus’s work, some of which are still unpublished.“The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” a musical theater adaptation from the composer Philip Venables and the writer-director Ted Huffman of a cult favorite gay liberation fantasy novel, self-published by the activist Larry Mitchell.The North American premiere of “Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow,” a hybrid work from the choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell that uses the form of a dancing runway show on a catwalk to juxtapose everyday gestures and extravagant poses with historical references, pop culture and political rhetoric. More

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    Tales of 19th-Century A.I.: Don’t Fall in Love With a Singing Robot

    Love me, love me, pretend that you love me.One of today’s most popular artificial intelligence apps is Replika, a chatbot service whose users — many millions of them — converse with virtual companions through their phones or on VR headsets. Visually, the avatars are rudimentary. But each Replika offers personal attention and words of encouragement, and gets better at it with each update. There are dozens of A.I. services like this now: imitation humans who promise, via text or voice, to console, to understand, to adore.Many users (men and boys, mostly) are developing long-term bonds with these simulated lovers (“women,” mostly). Some fall into ruin. A young man in Britain tried to assassinate the former queen after plotting with a Replika avatar; and last month a mother filed a lawsuit against Character.AI, another of these apps, after her son killed himself with the encouragement of his virtual “girlfriend.”It all sounds new. It all sounds alarming. Yet these online lonely-hearts are brushing against anxieties at the core of modern art and philosophy — anxieties, as Sigmund Freud wrote more than a century ago, that things not alive may yet have spirits, and that our animistic ancestors were onto something.One of the most famous musical automatons of Enlightenment Europe: a female organist, designed by the Swiss inventor Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz in 1774.Grisel/RDB/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIntricate gearwork drives the automaton’s fingers, which play the organ’s keys. Her eyes move back and forth, and her chest rises and falls as if breathing.Grisel/RDB/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesThis fall I’ve been thinking about lovers and robots, erotics and mechanics — ever since seeing two performances, both at Lincoln Center, that resonated with all our contemporary worries about art, sex and technology. One was Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” (1881) at the Metropolitan Opera, which puts an android musician at center stage: the automaton Olympia, whose song and dance captivate and then devastate her human paramour. The other, next door at New York City Ballet, was “Coppélia” (1870), a merry comedy featuring not only dancing machines but also, more troublingly, humans pretending to dance like machines.Is our projection of life onto technology a sign of derangement? Or is it more like wish fulfillment? In both “Hoffmann” and “Coppélia,” grown men fall hard for female contraptions, only to discover the gears and grease that power their music and movement. Singing and dancing, in particular, seem to awaken these men’s archaic passions and juvenile needs, and shatter their rational skepticism about gadgets.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Paramount Takes Promotional Stunt to New Level for ‘Gladiator II’

    The studio plans to air the same 60-second trailer on 4,000 TV, radio and digital channels on Monday.For a snapshot of what movie marketers think it now takes to get the public’s attention — even for a sequel to a popular movie — consider the astounding stunt that Paramount Pictures has planned for “Gladiator II.”On Monday at 9 p.m. Eastern, Paramount will debut a final 60-second trailer for the film on more than 4,000 television networks, digital platforms, local stations, Spanish-language outlets and radio stations simultaneously.Based on average audience totals for a Monday evening, the trailer could reach roughly 300 million potential customers, according to Marc Weinstock, Paramount’s president of worldwide marketing and distribution. “We aimed to create a big moment to match the scope and grandeur of Ridley Scott’s epic film,” Mr. Weinstock said.The promotional tactic is known as a roadblock, and marketers have used them for decades. But the number of channels is typically much smaller. In what was described by Variety magazine in 2009 as the largest roadblock ever, Sony Pictures Entertainment simultaneously aired ads for the disaster movie “2012” on 450 television networks.Mr. Weinstock would not say how much Paramount is spending on Monday’s stunt. According to a “Gladiator II” producer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with the studio, the airtime was relatively inexpensive to purchase — about $2 million in total, with a spot during “Monday Night Football” as the most expensive. Wavemaker, a media agency, helped Paramount coordinate the effort.Marketing a movie used to require little more than buying ads on NBC on a Thursday night when millions tuned in to watch shows like “ER” and “Friends.” With the intense fracturing of the media landscape, however, studios have been forced to conjure up ever more provocative ways to grab attention. A single premiere? How quaint. Paramount staged “Gladiator II” red carpets in Australia, Japan, Ireland, France, Denmark and Britain in recent weeks. On Monday, a premiere in Los Angeles will involve the construction of a faux coliseum on Hollywood Boulevard.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More