Aurelia Butler

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    TikTok Made Addison Rae Famous. Pop Made Her Cool.

    A couple of years ago, when Addison Rae went to pitch herself for a deal with Columbia Records, pop stardom was not a guarantee. She was best known as one of TikTok’s breakout stars, someone who had used the app to catapult from anonymity to ubiquity, but as a dancer and personality — not a musician. And some early demo recordings she didn’t love had recently leaked online, and she wanted to distance herself from them.So instead of presenting a set of sonic ideas, she came into the meeting with a mood board in a binder.First there were the descriptors: words like “intentional,” “intense,” “loud,” “dance,” “glitter.” Then there were the colors: aquamarine, hot pink, purple, yellow. And then the screen grabs of superstar live-show touchstones: Britney Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards, Madonna’s Girlie Show tour, and so on.It worked — she landed the deal. But what came next was a conundrum, Rae said in an interview last month on Popcast, The New York Times’s music podcast: “I was like, I know what I want people to feel when they hear my music, but what does that sound like? And what am I going to say?”Those questions set Rae on a year-plus mission of refining her public image, one that was forged in the relentless algorithmic fires of TikTok and that has lately seen her remade as a savvy pop ingénue. This week, she’ll release “Addison,” her debut album and one of the year’s signature pop releases. (Its original title was, in fact, “Mood Boards.”) It’s a breathy, sweaty, urgent album — more a throwback to the sonics of three decades ago than a conversation with contemporary pop.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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    Tribeca Festival: Lin-Manuel Miranda Has Advice for Aspiring Filmmakers

    An artist development program at the Tribeca Festival aims to support underrepresented groups in filmmaking.The Tribeca Festival is undoubtedly a star-studded event with famous figures, including actors, directors, musicians and artists gracing red carpets and showcasing their works.But supporting aspiring and emerging filmmakers through its artist development programs is also very much part of the festival’s DNA, according to its chief executive, Jane Rosenthal, who founded the event with Robert De Niro and Craig Hatkoff.“So much of the festival is about discovery, and the development programs are part of that,” she said. “We are always looking for new voices and stories and new ways of telling stories, and there are not enough programs supporting aspiring artists.”Since 2015, the artist development programs have included eight initiatives that give producers, directors, writers and other creative people in the moviemaking industry full funding for their projects.Rosenthal said that they have awarded close to $2 million annually, supported more than 1,000 filmmakers and seen celebrities such as Kerry Washington, Queen Latifah and John Leguizamo get involved as mentors and judges. “Everybody needs an advocate, and celebrities, no matter where they are in their careers, help lift these filmmakers up through their support,” Rosenthal said.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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    David Cope, Godfather of A.I. Music, Is Dead at 83

    His EMI algorithm, an early form of artificial intelligence that he developed in the 1980s, prompted searching questions about the limits of human creativity.David Cope, a composer and pioneer in the field of algorithmic composition, who in the 1980s developed a computer program for writing music in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and other Classical masters, died on May 4 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 83.The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Stephen Cope said.Before the proliferation of A.I. music generators, before the emergence of Spotify and the advent of the iPod, before Brian Eno had even coined the term “generative music,” Mr. Cope had already figured out how to program a computer to write classical music.It was 1981 and, struggling with writer’s block after being commissioned to compose an opera, he was desperate for a compositional partner. He found one in a floppy disk.The process was straightforward but tedious. Mr. Cope started by quantifying musical passages from his own work, rendering them as numbers in a database that could be analyzed by a pattern-identifying algorithm he created. The algorithm would then reassemble the “signatures” — Mr. Cope’s name for the patterns it found — into new combinations, and he would convert those combinations into a score.It wasn’t the first time someone had used a computer to create music. In 1957, Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson had employed a five-ton supercomputer at the University of Illinois to compose “Illiac Suite,” widely considered to be the first computer-generated score. But Mr. Cope’s program took things a step further: By scanning and reproducing unique signatures, his algorithm could essentially replicate style.After years of troubleshooting and fine-tuning, the program, known as Experiments in Musical Intelligence, was able to produce a full opera in a matter of hours. EMI, or Emmy, as Mr. Cope affectionately called it, was officially born. It was one of the earliest computer algorithms used to generate classical music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A New Opera Shines Light on Ukrainian Families Separated by War

    The Metropolitan Opera, hoping to revive support for Kyiv, released an excerpt from “The Mothers of Kherson,” about abducted Ukrainian children and their relatives.The Metropolitan Opera typically takes pains to keep developing works under wraps to give artists the space to make changes and take risks.But “The Mothers of Kherson,” an opera recently commissioned by the Met about abducted Ukrainian children and their relatives, is different. The company released an excerpt from the opera on Monday — more than a year before its premiere — hoping it might help revive support for Ukraine in its battle against Russia.“This is one way of fighting back,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “We don’t want the world to forget what’s going on. This is an artistic way of reminding them.”“The Mothers of Kherson,” by the Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiiets, with a libretto by the American playwright George Brant, tells the story of two mothers in the southern city of Kherson who embark on an arduous, 3,000-mile journey to rescue their daughters, who are being held by Russians at a camp in Crimea.The characters in the opera are fictional, but the story is based on the accounts of Ukrainian mothers who traveled into Russian-occupied territory, and back again, to recover their children. (In March, the State Department said it would pause funding for the tracking of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, under a program run by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab.)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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    ‘Mia’ to Continue Her Testimony as Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Trial Nears Midpoint

    The former assistant will be questioned by Mr. Combs’s lawyers, who say her account of sex abuse and violence is at odds with the warmth she showed him on social media.The federal trial of Sean Combs is entering its fourth week, the midpoint of what is expected to be an eight-week trial, with prosecutors still filling out the particulars of a case that charges the music mogul with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.Jurors have heard from 21 witnesses in support of the government’s case that Mr. Combs was a violent and abusive man who controlled, intimidated and sexually violated women, and that he directed employees to commit arson, bribery, forced labor, obstruction of justice and other crimes on his behalf as part of a “criminal enterprise.”Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual arrangements were nonconsensual, arguing that the women who are part of the government’s case willingly consented to sex with Mr. Combs. If convicted of all charges, Mr. Combs, 55, could face life in prison.The witnesses in the case so far have included Casandra Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, who said she had been coerced intro drug-fueled sex marathons, and a former assistant, testifying under the pseudonym “Mia,” who said that her boss sexually assaulted her and subjected her to sleep deprivation and violence.Another witness, Deonte Nash, a stylist, described witnessing Mr. Combs’s violent attacks on Ms. Ventura, and said she told him that Mr. Combs had threatened to release explicit videos of her with other men in “freak-offs,” the sexual encounters that are at the heart of the government’s case. Ms. Ventura had called those videos “blackmail materials.”At a news conference at the White House on Friday, President Trump said that, if asked, he was open to reviewing a possible pardon for Mr. Combs — whom he crossed paths with decades ago on the celebrity scene in New York — if he was convicted.“I would certainly look at the facts,” Mr. Trump said.Mia, who testified on Thursday and Friday last week, will return to the stand on Monday for what should be the conclusion of her testimony. Under cross-examination on Friday, Brian Steel, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, showed Mia dozens of social media posts in which she repeatedly expressed affection and admiration for the music mogul. Mr. Steel asked how she could write such things if he had also abused her in the way she said.“I was young and manipulated and just eager to survive,” Mia said.The next witnesses suggest the government will further examine the circumstances of freak-offs. One witness, Eddy Garcia, was a supervisor at an InterContinential Hotel in Los Angeles, where a security camera recorded Mr. Combs attacking Ms. Ventura in 2016. Another expected witness, Frank Piazza, is a forensic video expert who examined that hotel footage. Other expected witnesses include Sylvia Okun, a hotel custodian, and a man named Enrique Santos. More

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    Hear the Sound of a New Generation of South Korean Musicians

    Unsuk Chin, the curator of the Seoul Festival in Los Angeles, shares music by some of her favorite young composers and performers.“Compare Korea to China or Russia,” the composer Unsuk Chin said in a recent interview. “If you think how small the country is, it’s amazing how many talented musicians are coming out.”South Korean artists are prominent on classical music’s most prestigious stages. The young pianists Seong-Jin Cho and Yunchan Lim sell out Carnegie Hall. The conductor Myung-whun Chung was recently named the next music director of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Chin’s new opera, “The Dark Side of the Moon,” premiered in Hamburg in May.Now, to explore South Korea’s creative output, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is presenting the Seoul Festival from Tuesday through June 10.It is the latest in a series of themed Philharmonic events, including dives into Iceland and Mexico. Around 2018, the orchestra and its artistic leader at the time, Chad Smith, asked Chin to help plan a South Korean iteration, but the plans were derailed by the pandemic. About half of the original programming has made it intact onto this year’s concerts.“I really wanted to present the youngest generation of composers, conductors and musicians,” said Chin, 63.That generation has emerged from what she called “a very long cultural tradition.” The country’s embrace of Western musical culture began around the turn of the 20th century, and a Western-style compositional tradition took hold with figures like Isang Yun (1917-95), who wrote avant-garde music for Western instruments — but with a style that attempted to translate old-school Korean techniques.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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    For Pride, Stream These Queer Horror Movies

    Standouts include a lesbian-coded vampire thriller and a Mexican folk-horror drama.In horror movies, to be queer is to be different, “which cinema has continually rewritten as a form of danger,” Peter Marra writes in his new book, “Queer Slashers.”Dangerous, queer, different: Sounds like my kind of horror movie. Here are some of my favorites.‘Dracula’s Daughter’ (1936)Rent or buy it on major platforms.“She Gives You That WEIRD FEELING!”: That’s how one poster advertised Lambert Hillyer’s lesbian-coded vampire thriller, a follow-up to “Dracula,” a hit for Universal Pictures in 1931. Hillyer’s movie centers on Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), a Dracula progeny who kidnaps a young woman in Transylvania. Holden’s performance is predatory but feminine, menacing but soft-eyed — a powerful example of how lesbian subtext in early Hollywood paved the way for future Sapphic vampires.‘The Seventh Victim’ (1943)Rent or buy it on major platforms.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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    Guy Klucevsek, Multi-Genre Accordion Virtuoso, Is Dead at 78

    He elevated his instrument’s often-maligned reputation with deft musicianship, and by writing and commissioning a wide range of music.Guy Klucevsek, a masterly accordion player who developed an eclectic body of work for his beloved, if sometimes mocked, instrument that expanded its repertoire well beyond polkas and other traditional fare, died on May 22 at his home on Staten Island. He was 78.His wife and only immediate survivor, Jan (Gibson) Klucevsek, said the cause was pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer.Praise for Mr. Klucevsek (pronounced kloo-SEV-ek) typically noted that he had elevated the profile of the accordion beyond the realms of beer halls and “The Lawrence Welk Show.”Writing in The Village Voice in 2015 about a series of performances by Mr. Klucevsek in the East Village, Richard Gehr noted that, “having mastered the instrument in virtually all of its classical, modern, jazz and international manifestations,” Mr. Klucevsek “has extended it into another dimension altogether.”Mr. Klucevsek performed with the dancer Claire Porter at the Kitchen in Manhattan in 2000.Hiroyuki Ito/Getty ImagesHe recorded more than 20 albums, composed dozens of pieces and commissioned others, in multiple genres. He accompanied the performance artist Laurie Anderson on her 1994 album, “Bright Red,” and collaborated with the dancer Maureen Fleming on “B. Madonna,” a 2013 multimedia piece based on the myth of Persephone.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