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      Music’s Most Neglected Day of the Week

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      Seven songs for Tuesdays from Stevie Wonder, iLoveMakonnen and more.Stevie Wonder, a bard of TuesdayChris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,The day after Memorial Day — or any day that directly follows a beginning-of-the-week holiday — is one of those Tuesdays that feels like a Monday. A certain temporal fog lingers and will continue to confuse you all week: “Wait, what day is it again?” Well, today it is Tuesday. And I am here to offer you a sonic cure for that fog, something to ground you in the present: a playlist of Tuesday songs.Friday, Saturday and Sunday are all perennial muses of popular music; even the dreaded Monday (Monday) has its memorable anthems. Tuesday, though, tends to get short shrift — or at least it did until 2014, when the rapper iLoveMakonnen released a ubiquitous ode to clubbing on the most banal day of the week. But Makonnen’s “Tuesday” certainly wasn’t the first song to pay tribute to (or shake a fist at) the second day of the traditional workweek. Decades earlier, Stevie Wonder and Lynyrd Skynyrd both used it as a backdrop for heartache, and it also inspired the moniker of a fictitious Rolling Stones heroine, in a song later covered beautifully by the recently departed folk singer Melanie.All those songs are featured on today’s playlist, along with tracks from Blood Orange, the Pogues and, of course, the ’80s new-wave act ’Til Tuesday. If you find yourself wondering what day it is, just hum one of these tunes and all will be well. As long as they don’t stick in your head until tomorrow …Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Stevie Wonder: “Tuesday Heartbreak”It’s bad enough to be heartbroken — but being heartbroken on a Tuesday? Stevie Wonder understands the double indignity of that situation on this jazzy number from his great 1972 album “Talking Book”: “Tuesday heartbreak seems to be unfair, ’cause you say that you found another man.”▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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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      Taylor Swift Prevails Over Billie Eilish for a Fifth Week at No. 1

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      In a tight battle that had fans hustling to support their favorite star, “The Tortured Poets Department” outsold “Hit Me Hard and Soft.”Taylor Swift holds the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s latest album chart for a fifth consecutive week, after an intense contest with Billie Eilish in which both stars released a blizzard of “versions” of their LPs to lure fans.Eilish fought for “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” her third album, with release-week arena listening events in New York and Los Angeles. In an era of supersized track lists as a strategy to maximize streaming yield, the LP had just 10 songs. But fans were given a long menu of options to buy it, including nine colored vinyl editions. There were also four CDs, among them a “splatter” variant for which Eilish herself decorated the covers with splashed paint (“each one is unique,” her website said).But Swift may have fought harder, or at least hurled more product at the marketplace. Since “The Tortured Poets Department” was released last month, it has come out in more than 20 iterations, according to Billboard, with enough track list variations, media pigments, bonus tracks and collectible goodies like autographs and magnets to keep fans coming back.Over the last week, both artists’ camps launched new items like cannonballs. On the day Eilish released “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” Swift put out three limited digital editions of “Tortured Poets” featuring “first-draft phone memo” bonus tracks; then came a remix of her hit “Fortnight”; then, on Thursday, with just hours left in the tracking week, three additional digital versions of the album arrived with live tracks from her recent Eras Tour performances in Paris.Eilish, for her part, released three “deluxe” digital albums, adding versions of her LP’s songs featuring isolated vocals or in sped-up or slowed-down form. The day after Swift’s “Fortnight” remix, Eilish put out a remix of “L’Amour de Ma Vie.”Fans acted as foot soldiers in this war, clicking for streams or buying up as many album variations as they could. Many also complained on social media, accusing Swift of ruthlessly raining on another star’s parade, or taking Eilish to task for comments in a recent interview in which she criticized “some of the biggest artists in the world” for excessive vinyl production.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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      Florentina Holzinger Brings Roller-Skating Nuns to the Opera House

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      The choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s shows feature circus performers and abundant nudity. Now, she’s bringing her experimental approach to opera.In a rehearsal last week at the Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin, northeastern Germany, Fleshpiece, a shirtless performer with tattoos and purple hair, strode to the front of the main stage and delivered an impassioned monologue.“This opera house, this is our church,” Fleshpiece intoned. “We continue to nail you to the present, just as Jesus was nailed to the cross.”Supervising the scene was the experimental choreographer Florentina Holzinger, wearing a black baseball cap and a T-shirt printed with a picture of two nuns engaged in B.D.S.M. play.Her previous works, including “Ophelia’s Got Talent” at the Volksbühne in Berlin and “A Divine Comedy” for the Rührtriennale festival, were boundary-pushing, peripatetic shows in which nudity, profanity, onstage helicopters, onstage ejaculation and performers hanging from their teeth have shocked and awed audiences. “Ophelia’s Got Talent” jointly won Germany’s Faust prize for best dance production last year, cementing Holzinger’s status as one of Europe’s rising theater stars.In the German-speaking world, that kind of profile brings invitations to direct opera — and Holzinger’s work, which matches music with powerful, stage-filling spectacle, certainly has operatic qualities. Yet a gilded opera theater still seems an unlikely home for Holzinger, 38, whose anarchic works are collaged from new and old text and music, often with sharply contrasting styles.Holzinger is known for her boundary-pushing experimental shows.Gordon Welters 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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      Jaap van Zweden’s Brief, Fraught Time Atop the New York Philharmonic

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      On a balmy spring morning, after a breakfast of coffee and plain yogurt at a luxury Manhattan hotel, Jaap van Zweden grabbed his bag of conducting batons and scores by Mozart and Gubaidulina and set out for Lincoln Center through the wilds of Central Park.“I love the air, I love the trees,” he said. “Everybody can do whatever they want here. This is freedom, absolute freedom.”Van Zweden, 63, will leave the New York Philharmonic this summer after six seasons as its music director, the shortest tenure of any maestro since Pierre Boulez, the eminent French composer and conductor who led the Philharmonic in the 1970s. Van Zweden helped the orchestra emerge from the turbulence of the pandemic; shepherded it through a trying, nomadic season when its home, David Geffen Hall, was undergoing a $550 million renovation; and led the orchestra when it reopened the sparkling, reimagined hall ahead of schedule, to the delight of musicians and audiences.But throughout his tenure, van Zweden, an intense, exacting maestro from Amsterdam, faced persistent questions about whether he had the star power, creative drive and strong connection to New York needed to lead the Philharmonic.During the pandemic, he spent more than a year at home in the Netherlands, which fractured his nascent relationship with the ensemble. And in 2021, he announced that he would step down from his post, far earlier than many people expected.Van Zweden said he felt no other Philharmonic music director had faced such profound challenges.“We had to start all over again,” he said. “I feel like we are still in the process of getting to know each other.”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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      Excavating Jerry Garcia’s Crucial Bluegrass Roots

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      In 1964, the guitarist took a road trip, hoping to become Bill Monroe’s banjo player. The journey, and his longtime love of the genre, shaped the Grateful Dead.Just off the lobby of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum is the “picking room” — a cozy, glass-enclosed corner where visitors are encouraged to grab any of the guitars, banjos and fiddles hanging on the wood-paneled walls and play. Located on the Ohio River 35 miles northwest of Rosine, the small farming community that produced the bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, the museum’s readily available instruments and neighborly spirit are no surprise.What is unexpected? The 1961 Chevy Corvair sticking out of a wall upstairs in the museum’s main hall and the newly unveiled exhibit it anchors: an in-depth look at the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s long and often intense love affair with bluegrass music.Best known as the standard-bearer for San Francisco’s psychedelic sound and the house band for Ken Kesey’s storied Acid Tests, Grateful Dead concerts were not a big draw in the beating red heart of bluegrass country. Of the more than 3,500 shows Garcia played with the Dead and his own bands, only seven were in Kentucky. But the subsequent emergence of the “jamgrass” scene — a bluegrass cousin to the bands who take a cue from the Dead in emphasizing extended improvisations — is one of the ways that time and a widening appreciation have proved the Dead to be one of the most American of bands. It’s also given Garcia a new kind of cultural heft and near-mythological status, 28 years after his death.The new exhibit “Jerry Garcia — A Bluegrass Journey” will run for two years at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum.Chris StegnerMusicians and listeners alike have long singled out “Old & in the Way,” a 1975 LP from one of Garcia’s side projects, as the gateway recording that introduced them to bluegrass. But much of “Jerry Garcia — A Bluegrass Journey,” the imaginative and carefully curated show that recently began a two-year run at the museum, is built around an intriguing and less well-known event in Garcia’s career: Before forming the Grateful Dead, he aspired to a career as a bluegrass musician and undertook a 1964 cross-country musical pilgrimage, largely in the hope of landing a job as Monroe’s banjo player.“I’ve been with the museum for 13 years and an exhibit on Jerry Garcia has always been on the back burner,” said its curator, Carly Smith. Those discussions were pushed to the forefront when the museum moved in 2018 to a new 64,000-square-foot home that enhanced its ability to present detailed exhibits and includes superb indoor and outdoor performance spaces. Though the pandemic necessitated a two-year delay, the show is an ambitious bid to highlight a little-known connection and build bridges between genres and audiences. Mounted with the cooperation of Garcia’s family, it includes a dozen of his instruments, numerous clippings, artifacts and mementos and a well-researched narrative of Garcia’s formative years on the Bay Area’s folk scene.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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      Memo to Orchestras: Do More Opera

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      The Cleveland Orchestra’s staging of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” was a reminder that ensembles can help fill the gap as opera grows harder to find.It was that rarest of sights when I walked into the Cleveland Orchestra’s hall on Sunday afternoon: a dark curtain drawn across the stage.Rare, that is, in a concert hall. Orchestras don’t tend to have dramatic unveilings before they start to play. And while Cleveland has done near-annual opera presentations over the past two decades, the ensemble has almost always been onstage alongside the singers, as the stagings have worked around (and sometimes incorporated) the presence of dozens of players.But for Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” which ended a sold-out four-performance run at Severance Music Center on Sunday, the orchestra was lowered into an honest-to-goodness pit, and the curtain was closed at the start, just as it would have been in an opera house.It was a reminder that opera — expensive to put on and not to everyone’s taste, though with a passionate fan base — has been ever harder to find in American cities. And a reminder that orchestras can — and should! — summon the resources to fill even a bit of that gap.As the Cleveland Orchestra’s president and chief executive, André Gremillet, said in an interview, “This city doesn’t otherwise have world-class opera.” Cleveland Opera, a company that did present world-class offerings for several decades, faded away about 15 years ago, and a couple of companies left in its wake offer just a smattering of smaller-scale performances.And yet there is a hunger for the art form, and an opportunity for orchestras around the country to expand their audiences. “There are people who are not here every week,” Gremillet said, “who will come to the opera — and more than once.”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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      Carin León Is Bringing Música Mexicana and Country Ever Closer

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      “There are no limits for music,” the Mexican singer-songwriter said.“There’s just good music and bad music.”In January 2023, the música Mexicana star Carin León was preparing for a concert at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena when he decided he needed to do something special for an encore.León grew up in Hermosillo, the capital city of Sonora, Mexico, about 250 miles from Tucson, Ariz. Music was always playing around his home, often from border radio stations that piped in a wide variety of American hits, and his father was known to listen to David Allen Coe’s “Tennessee Whiskey” on cassette over and over.“Me and my brother would sing the song as kids, but we would make up different lyrics because we didn’t know English back then,” León said. The country giant Chris Stapleton turned his R&B-slow-dance cover of “Tennessee Whiskey” into a career breakthrough, and León, a Stapleton superfan, worked up his own powerfully soulful version for the largely Latino audience in Nashville.“The next day, the performance went viral,” León said. “People were saying, he can sing country music, he can sing in English. So that gave me a little spark.”León, 34, was already a Latin Grammy-winning artist with billions of streams on Spotify before he covered “Tennessee Whiskey” — and before he released bilingual collaborations with the country star Kane Brown and the soul singer Leon Bridges; wrote with the Nashville veterans Jon Pardi, Cody Johnson and Natalie Hemby; earned a standing ovation at the Grand Ole Opry with a set entirely in Spanish; became the first Latin artist to perform at both the Coachella and Stagecoach festivals; and opened for the Rolling Stones in early May.“My comfort zone is being outside of my comfort zone,” León said from his shopping-bag-strewn suite at a swank Beverly Hills hotel in California, his girlfriend and team at his side. “There are no limits for music. There’s just good music and bad 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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      She Landed One of Music’s Great Gigs, but First Came Boot Camp

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      Classical musicians have limited options to play professionally, so some turn to the U.S. military.Those who emerge successfully from the audition process must then endure boot camp.For several months, musicians train as soldiers without any access to their instruments.Managing to secure a full-time job with a premier military band can be transformational.The Great ReadShe Landed One of Music’s Great Gigs, but First Came Boot CampThe 4,300-seat performance space about an hour north of Carnegie Hall was eerily empty, except for nine judges in uniform sitting behind a thick black curtain.Ada Brooks, her mouth dry from nerves, lifted the bell of her euphonium, a smaller relative of the tuba, and prepared to play the notes that could determine her future.“Breathe,” she thought. “The beginnings are the most treacherous part.”Ms. Brooks had told herself this before. Her fervent pursuit to professionally play the euphonium, which is not used in traditional symphony orchestras, had come with many stressful auditions. This one was her 10th for the institution that calls itself the nation’s largest employer of musicians: the United States military.Time and time again she had practiced and prepared and tried to remember to breathe. She was turned down repeatedly or offered jobs in regional bands. Now came an opportunity for a premium position, a rarely open seat in the prestigious West Point Band.Some aspects of the audition — like playing for a jury hidden behind a curtain, to guard against potential bias — would be familiar to most orchestra musicians. Others were unique to the military. Two of the other four candidates said they had to lose weight to qualify, and the finalists were tested for coordination in marching drills.Scores of regional military bands represent the armed forces at ceremonies, parades and holiday celebrations. About a dozen premier bands, including the U.S. Military Academy’s ensemble in West Point, N.Y., perform at inaugurations and foreign dignitary visits.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