Aurelia Butler

There is something transcendent about the architect’s spaces: something unseeable that you experience when you enter. They are as fluid as music.The great trumpeter Wynton Marsalis once told a group of graduating college students, “Music is the art of the invisible. It gives shape and focus to our innermost inclinations and can clearly evidence our internal lives with shocking immediacy.”Marsalis’s creative home, of course, is Jazz at Lincoln Center, a collection of performance spaces tucked into the fifth floor of the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle in New York City. The complex’s crown jewel is the Appel Room, designed by Rafael Viñoly, who died on March 2. The space is intimate and sweeping, thanks largely to Rafael’s love of glass and the way it frames the adopted city to which he was endlessly devoted.Through the course of our intersecting lives, I spent countless rich and meaningful hours with Rafael. But to really understand him, I’d have to meet him twice: first as an architect and, many years later, as a musician.He opened his studio in New York City in 1983. I started mine the following year. Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, he and the architect Frederic Schwartz invited me to join the Think design team they assembled to create a new concept for the World Trade Center site. I was living in TriBeCa at the time, and Rafael’s studio, where we met to brainstorm, was a street-front space on Vandam Street in SoHo. We’d walk downtown in horror, engaged it now seems in an endless conversation about the future of cities, in particular New York.Rafael Viñoly in 2002 presenting plans by the Think team for the World Trade Center site, showing open latticework towers, and favoring civic use over office space.Librado Romero/The New York TimesThe plan for the site, a pair of twin towers that spiraled upward, a filigreed weave of steel and air, would transform the center for trade to one of civics and culture. There were many of us involved in the Think team, but the design, which won the competition but was rejected by then-Gov. George Pataki, was largely a combination of Fred’s relentless belief in the significance of urban life and Rafael’s love and belief in the power of beauty and culture.Rafael’s studio at the time seemed, like him, larger than life. The spaces were filled with amazing models, many of them large-scale studies. We would discuss the plans for the World Trade Center site, and how to create built environments that fostered a sense of civic purpose. My strongest memories of that process are feeling his hand leaning on my shoulder as he quizzically looked at what I was drawing and sat down, lowered his glasses and offered — sometimes graciously, sometimes not so much — an invariably whip-smart critique or suggestion.He was an obsessive architect, pencil in hand, always sketching and drawing, across countries and continents. But he was also a classically trained pianist. And what I would come to understand is that it wasn’t possible to truly know Rafael without appreciating the centrality of music and performance in his life.I knew that tucked away in the offices was a piano — actually two Steinway D concert pianos from Hamburg, I would later learn. (More recently, according to his son, Román, he kept one belonging to András Schiff, the British pianist.) The pianos were both well used, because Raphael would rely on music — often Bach — to relieve the pressure.His friend Bernard Goldberg, the art dealer and former hotelier, as passionate as he was about classical music, tells of the time Rafael was redesigning the Roger Williams Hotel, including a space for free chamber music performances. In the middle of one conversation, the architect suddenly popped out of his chair, walked over to a Steinway and started to play a Bach toccata. He finished playing, returned to Bernard, and said, “Now let’s get on with this stuff,” and continued the design conversation.I was just beginning to return to the piano myself, for the first time since childhood, with an extraordinary piano teacher, Seymour Bernstein. I had resumed my training in 2016 with a level of attention that I had thought impossible. It was then that I finally met Rafael as a musician.The Appel Room, part of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York, was designed by Rafael Viñoly and exhibits his love of glass.Brad Feinknopf It was at an event at Jazz at Lincoln Center. We were discussing the space — the adaptability of the rooms, allowing for intimate recitals and larger performances — and I mentioned that I was beginning to study piano again. From that moment on, our conversations were about music: how it filled his childhood, the pleasure of practice, the nature of the art form, and how it differed, he insisted, from design and architecture. He famously said that music and architecture were opposites, that music is completely about abstraction. “In a way,” he said, echoing Marsalis, “it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is.” Architecture, he would often insist, “is a fight against gravity. The musician’s job is to create beauty.”Several months later I showed up at a “playing class” Seymour had organized at his home on 79th Street. Seymour, who is now 95 and is still at the top of his game as an inspiring teacher, had asked a group of his long-term students to each play a new piece they had been working on, followed by a conversation. As I walked in, I was shocked to see Rafael off to the side. I asked him what he was playing and he said he had come to hear me. I was incredibly moved and equally terrified.Rafael and I would continue to work on various design projects, most recently the NEMA residential building in Chicago, where he did the structure and I did the interiors. But our communication was different. Music had become our shared language, as we talked — sketching on the same pad — about the rhythm and structure of the outdoor spaces that we both found so important.Carrasco International Airport in Montevideo, Uruguay, by the architect, features a monumental curved roof inspired by the rolling dunes along the coastline. Daniela Mac Adden I appreciate the distinction that Rafael is trying to make between architecture and music. But I’m not convinced that he fully believed it. In the same interview where he spoke about architecture and gravity and music and beauty, he paused to acknowledge exceptions — projects where the two were totally commingled. He cited the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. The architect Louis Kahn, who worked on the design with Jonas Salk, produced a campus where each building is unique but somehow united, notes connected almost invisibly. Rafael described stepping onto the plaza between the two long structures, saying, “You feel like you are touched by something that makes you feel good.”Rafael’s work — his design for the World Trade Center site; the Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center; his terminal at Carrasco Airport in Montevideo, Uruguay; the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and so many others — managed to merge tangible, real-world permanence with Marsalis’s “art of the invisible.” There’s something transcendent about them, something unseeable that you experience when you enter them. When you encounter them, “you are touched by something that makes you feel good.” In other words, his buildings don’t just exist; they perform. More

Claire Gibault has spent a lifetime fighting sexism and forging a path in a male-dominated profession. Her next targets: pay gaps and age discrimination.This article is part of our Women and Leadership special report that profiles women leading the way on climate, politics, business and more.The baton-waving bully conductor played by Cate Blanchett in “Tár” has earned a series of Oscar nominations and captivated audiences worldwide. That may be, in part, because of her novelty: Until recently, conducting was almost exclusively a male profession.The French conductor Claire Gibault has spent a lifetime battling that gender barrier. In 2019, she co-founded La Maestra, a biennial international competition for female conductors in Paris that draws more than 200 contestants from some 50 countries.“Giving confidence and visibility to the talented women who are emerging as orchestral conductors is a cause La Maestra will continue to champion with commitment and passion,” said a news release inviting contestants for the next competition, in March 2024. The competition, founded with the Philharmonie de Paris, awards prizes of 5,000 to 20,000 euros ($5,300 to $21,400) to finalists who are provided numerous musical opportunities, too. Ms. Gibault also founded the Paris Mozart Orchestra in 2011, one of France’s few female-led orchestras.Born in 1945 and raised in Le Mans in northwestern France, where her father taught music theory at the conservatory, Ms. Gibault was studying violin when she discovered conducting and persuaded the conservatory to teach it.She went on to make classical music history by becoming the first woman to conduct a performance at La Scala in Milan (where she was an assistant to her mentor, the late conductor Claudio Abbado, who was then La Scala’s music director). She also was the first woman to conduct the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.Ms. Gibault, 77, has been busy and much in the news lately, especially with the Academy Awards on March 12. She discussed her career, her views on “Tár” and sexism in classical music in a phone interview from Paris. The conversation was translated from French, edited and condensed.Why did you decide to set up the La Maestra competition?In 2018, I was the only female jury member of a conducting competition in Mexico. There were such sexist attitudes on the part of certain jurors that I was shocked. One man on the jury even said that women were biologically incapable of being conductors, because their arms were naturally turned outward to hold babies. Whenever a female contestant came up in the competition, this man would cover his face with his jacket, close his eyes and plug his ears. One female finalist who was very musical and very talented received as many votes as a young man to whom the jury gave the first prize. I found that very unfair.The competition in Mexico was a trigger for me. I was furious. When I got back to Paris, I met with a patron, Dominique Senequier, [founder and] president of the private investment company Ardian. I told her that a lot of female talents were invisible, and that it would be interesting to do something for them. She encouraged me to set up a prestigious competition for female conductors and said she would finance it.The International Conductors Competition La Maestra, at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2022. The three finalists, with bouquets from left, are Beatriz Fernández Aucejo (3rd Prize, ARTE Prize), Joanna Natalia Ślusarczyk (2nd Prize, French Concert Halls and Orchestras Prize, ECHO Prize) and Anna Sułkowska-Migoń (1st Prize, Generation Opera Prize).Maria Mosconi/Hans LucasWhat impact has the competition had?The impact has been extraordinary. Female conductors are now viewed as a very modern phenomenon. Yet we have to be careful and very vigilant: make sure that it’s not just the young and attractive conductors who are being recruited. There is a flagrant degree of age discrimination in the world of classical music. For that to change, we need more women in management positions.What was your own experience as a young female conductor in a profession with almost no women?Audiences took it very well. The problem was the condescension of colleagues — of certain male conductors and of the male managers and directors of orchestras and cultural institutions. For them it was fine to hire women as long as they were assistant conductors, especially if they were very good assistants. I worked on pieces that the men didn’t want to work on, such as new compositions. I knew that this was a battle I had to wage with a smile, never complaining, never whining. That’s the way it worked.Why did you set up the Paris Mozart Orchestra?In my career, I experienced aggressive behavior on the part of musicians who made my job very hard, orchestras that didn’t want to play at my tempo. It was sometimes very difficult. I wanted to be able to choose the program. And I didn’t want to wait to be chosen.What did you think of the movie “Tár”?I found it disturbing, yet fascinating. What I like about the movie is that it’s a fable about power: how power can transform human beings, be they men or women. It’s like a Greek tragedy.Ms. Gibault co-founded La Maestra, a biennial international competition for female conductors in Paris that draws more than 200 contestants from some 50 countries.Maria Mosconi/Hans LucasDid you feel that it was about you?I don’t think we should be egocentric about it. It’s not because I’m a woman conductor that I felt directly concerned. It’s true that when you’re fighting for the cause of female conductors, it’s disturbing to see a woman who accumulates so many reasons to be hated: who takes advantage of her power, who takes drugs, who flirts with the young women in the orchestra. Of course, if a man behaved in that way, it would be a lot less shocking because we’re used to it.That kind of male behavior in classical music is now being called out. I think it’s high time for that behavior to stop. Not only is there abuse of power and sexual misconduct, but male conductors are also overpaid. That’s unacceptable given the economic crisis that the world of culture is going through.You mean the pay gap between male and female orchestra conductors?Yes, but also the pay gap with the musicians in the orchestra. And this incredible disdain that some male conductors have for the musicians that they’re conducting. We need to revolutionize this world from the inside. We need a different set of values.What do you need to revolutionize?The economics of culture. And the fact that careers are being built on notoriety, so the focus is on boosting people’s fame. There are people who are very famous and who are extraordinary artists, and others who are a little less so. I know extraordinary artists who are not famous at all.So there’s a cult of personality?Yes — for purely economic reasons. More

The last surviving original member of the classic Southern rock group, he played the soaring slide guitar solo on “Free Bird” and co-wrote “Sweet Home Alabama.”Gary Rossington, an original member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the quintessential Southern rock band, whose guitar helped define its sound and who was a key figure in the group’s eventual rebirth after a plane crash in 1977 killed three of its members, died on Sunday. He was 71.The band posted news of his death on its Facebook page but did not say where he died. No cause was given, although Mr. Rossington had had heart problems for years. He was the last surviving member of the original band.Growing up in the Jacksonville, Fla., area, Mr. Rossington got the rock-star bug when a friend, Bob Burns, was given a drum kit in the summer of 1964. The two teenagers decided they would become rock drummers.“The practical limitations of forming a band with only two drummers soon became apparent,” Mr. Rossington’s biography on the band’s website notes, “and Gary gravitated toward playing the guitar.”That same summer, according to a portrait of the band written for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted the group in 2006, another teenager, Ronnie Van Zant, was playing in a baseball game when he hit a foul ball that struck a spectator, Mr. Burns. Mr. Van Zant, too, had rock-star aspirations, and the three began playing together, adding other members and trying out group names — the Wildcats and Sons of Satan were among those considered.Eventually they settled on Lynyrd Skynyrd, a bastardization of Leonard Skinner, a gym teacher who had hassled them in high school because of their long hair.The band, playing countless bar dates around Florida and eventually beyond, evolved into a seven-piece with three guitars — Mr. Rossington, Allen Collins and Ed King (later replaced by Steve Gaines) — backing Mr. Van Zant’s vocals. The guitarists would alternate as lead, sometimes in the same song. Mr. Rossington was adept as a lead and also had a knack for adjusting his style to support the other guitarists when one of them was front and center.“Back in the day, we had three guitars and a keyboard, so that’s all strings,” he told the website Premier Guitar in 2017. “It’s hard to get all those strings together, and the hardest part is not playing. Growing up, we learned where not to play. Even though you could play, you leave the space and room.”The band’s breakthrough came in 1973, when the musician and producer Al Kooper caught a show in Atlanta, liked what he heard and signed the group to his Sounds of the South label. Mr. Kooper produced the band’s first album, “Lynyrd Skynyrd (pronounced ‘lĕh-’nérd ‘skin-’nérd),” which was released in 1973 and included “Gimme Three Steps,” “Simple Man” and what became one of rock’s most famous songs, “Free Bird,” with Mr. Rossington’s evocative slide guitar solos.By the fall of 1977, the group had released four more albums, had hits with “Sweet Home Alabama” (which Mr. Rossington wrote with Mr. Van Zant and Mr. King) and other songs, and was one of the best-known bands of the day. Then, on Oct. 20, the band’s chartered plane ran out of fuel and crashed in a thicket in Mississippi, killing Mr. Van Zant; Mr. Gaines; Cassie Gaines, Mr. Gaines’s sister and a backup vocalist; the band’s road manager; the pilot; and the co-pilot. The 20 other passengers were injured, including Mr. Rossington, who sustained numerous broken bones.The crash was the end of Lynyrd Skynyrd, for a time. After a few years to recover physically and psychologically, Mr. Rossington and Mr. Collins formed the Rossington Collins Band, which strove to distinguish itself from Lynyrd Skynyrd, in part by hiring a female vocalist, Dale Krantz, whom Mr. Rossington would later marry.But the new band did play “Free Bird” at its shows.“We do it now as an instrumental,” Mr. Rossington told The Orlando Sentinel in 1980. “We don’t do the vocal on it because that was Ronnie’s. It still gets heavy when we play it. I can hear him singing.”In 1987, the 10th anniversary of the crash, Mr. Rossington helped bring about a tribute tour, reuniting surviving members, with Mr. Van Zant’s younger brother, Johnny, taking over as vocalist.Mr. Rossington, right, duets with Rickey Medlocke in the reconstituted Lynyrd Skynyrd in Fort Hood, Tex., in 2004.Steve Traynor/The Killeen Daily Herald, via Associated Press“We were just going to do a one-show thing,” he told The Los Angeles Times that year, “but it turned into a tribute tour because, 10 years later, the music’s still being played on the radio, and it’s still requested, and it’s still selling real good.”The reconstituted group stuck, and it has been touring as Lynyrd Skynyrd, with various lineups, ever since, as well as releasing albums. Later this year the band is scheduled to tour with ZZ Top. Mr. Rossington, though, had cut back his participation to only occasional appearances, for health reasons.Mr. Rossington was born on Dec. 4, 1951, in Jacksonville. His father died when he was a boy, and his mother was an important force in his life, so much so, he said, that he named his first serious guitar, a Les Paul, “Berniece” after her.In a 1993 interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Rossington recalled some early validation for the fledgling group: winning a battle of the bands in Jacksonville in 1968.“There were 10 bands playing soul music,” he said. “We came in and did Yardbirds and Stones. We were a little over the audience’s heads. Except that the judges went, ‘These cats are cool.’”Mr. Rossington, right, with Lynyrd Skynyrd in 2019. He cut back his participation in the band in recent years because of health problems.Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Rossington and other band members were known for a wild lifestyle. In 1976 Mr. Rossington smashed his car, with alcohol and drugs contributing to the accident. The crash inspired the band’s song “That Smell,” a track on its 1977 album, “Street Survivors.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Rossington’s survivors include two daughters.When Mr. Rossington and the others in the tribute group of 1987 gave their first concert, in Nashville, they played “Free Bird” as an instrumental, as Mr. Rossington had in his earlier group. The audience filled in for the absent Ronnie Van Zant.“You could hear 16,000 people singing,” Mr. Rossington said, “and it sounded like a million.” More

The tech-forward composer Tod Machover has made a chamber opera of Richard Powers’s novel “The Overstory,” featuring Joyce DiDonato.Musical themes abound in the work of the novelist Richard Powers, often intertwined with science and social issues. The parallel decoding of Bach and DNA (“The Gold Bug Variations”), the saga of an interracial family of classical performers unfolding against the events of the Civil Rights era (“The Time of Our Singing”): A signature of Powers’s novels is the virtuosity with which he weaves these strands into narratives that seem both surprising and inevitable.With his 12th novel, “The Overstory,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019, Powers draws on the findings of dendrology (the study of trees) and contemporary environmental anxieties to hint at a music that is always present but largely unrecognized — that of nature itself, as represented by the lives of trees.Powers said in an interview that his “preoccupation with the more-than-human world, the living world beyond the human” had pushed his work in a new direction for “The Overstory,” which he called “the most operatic of my novels.” It is told on a large scale, with an extended cast of characters, wide geographical scope and a long time frame.The composer Tod Machover sensed this operatic potential as soon as he read it and was especially drawn to its relevance. “The subjects Powers brings together here are so important,” Machover said in a phone interview from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, where he directs the Opera of the Future group. “I’ve always wanted to write a theatrical work with many strands that come together in an unusual way.”Machover’s first pass at the material, “Overstory Overture,” a brief chamber opera featuring Joyce DiDonato, premieres on Tuesday at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. The work, which was conceived both as a prelude to a full-scale opera and as a stand-alone piece, was commissioned by the string orchestra Sejong Soloists — their largest contemporary commission to date — and will be performed under the young conductor Earl Lee.Machover’s score.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesMachover — a composer, inventor, educator and researcher into the interface between music and technology — has developed novel approaches to electronics and is a trailblazer in the applications of artificial intelligence to music. “Overstory Overture” blends electronic and instrumental sonorities with DiDonato’s voice and acting to portray the book’s protagonist, the dendrologist Patricia Westerford. Four closely woven scenes distill not only her trajectory but also the novel’s larger themes of communication, environmental devastation and what Machover described as “the necessity of getting outside yourself and of recognizing connections we take for granted.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.This isn’t the first operatic adaptation of Powers’s fiction. When the Belgian composer Kris Defoort’s reworking of “The Time of Our Singing” had its premiere in Brussels in 2021, it made for “a lovely closing of the circle,” Powers said, taking his music-centered narrative and “putting it back into musical form.”But the challenges posed by “The Overstory” are different. Powers said several composers had expressed a desire to adapt it to the opera stage but he chose Machover because of a longstanding admiration for his music and a thematic affinity. He noted that works like Machover’s “Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera” (2010) examine issues of technology and its human ramifications that are very close to concerns in his earlier novels.“It was interesting to me that both Tod and I, who had explored human-machine interdependence, have now shifted attention to the interdependence between humans and other living things,” Powers said. A fan of DiDonato, he added that he was “completely delighted” when he learned that she would create the role of Patricia Westerford — “the heart and soul of the whole book who ties all the rest of it together.”DiDonato.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesMachover.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesRather than become involved in creating the libretto, Powers said he preferred it to be done by “people who know how to target the viscera and the minds of people inside a concert hall in real time.” Machover turned to the British writer, actor and director Simon Robson, with whom he had collaborated on his opera “Schoenberg in Hollywood” (2018).For this first part of the project, Robson compressed Powers’s delineation of Patricia throughout the sprawling novel into a sequence of scenes that evoke mythic archetypes as she comes to understand the hidden language of the forest. The soul and moral compass of the novel, she suffers with the trees the assault of “petrochemical props, chainsaw and machete” before finding peace in a new connection — which Machover sees as “what a different kind of synergy between a human being and the trees might feel like.”Powers’s novel resonated strongly with DiDonato, she said, because of her multiyear, global touring project, “EDEN,” that addresses climate change and our place in nature. She also has a longstanding connection to Machover: Her first leading role came in his 1999 opera “Resurrection,” based on a novella by Tolstoy. “That was the first time I was able to make my mark as a complete artist,” she said in an interview.Finding a vocal language for Patricia was collaborative, “totally a Tod Machover experience,” she said. “We looked for what kind of sounds we could create from me and in conjunction with the electronics and the acoustic instruments as well.”The process was playful. “But it had a deep level as well,” she added, “because both of us are passionate about this topic. Patricia is discovering these sounds that the human ear hasn’t heard before.”The orchestra — string players, a marimba and a bass drum — rehearsing. The ensemble becomes a metaphor for the forest.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesThe orchestral ensemble — 19 string players augmented by a five-octave marimba and a low bass drum — becomes a metaphor for the forest. The electronics play a multifaceted role: sonic fragments recombine to mimic chemical signaling, the process used by the trees to communicate and interact, even to warn of the harsh human threat. Patricia’s decoding of this plant language is based on the work of the scientific pioneer Suzanne Simard, who also was an inspiration for James Cameron’s “Avatar.”Yet for all the technological intervention, it’s melody, the most natural of musical elements, that is accorded critical importance here. “I tried to make the melodic line very present — one big development from beginning to end,” Machover said. Plans for a larger-scale “Overstory” opera are still being put in place, but “Overstory Overture” maps out a musical language that he expects to incorporate.“There is a music in words,” Powers said. “When I write, I try to use that music to support the semantic underpinnings of the story.” When a composer like Tod Machover adapts this to a musical form, “he is also exploring that equivalent from the other side — to take the meaning of the words and put them back into a soundscape that will embody that meaning.” More