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      A Solar Eclipse Soundtrack

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      Songs from TV on the Radio, Brian Eno, Julianna Barwick and others than could well accompany the celestial event on Monday.TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe.Chad Batka for The New York TimesDear listeners,As you have probably heard, on Monday most people in the United States will be able to witness a solar eclipse that will plunge an ordinary afternoon into otherworldly darkness. Such events require planning. Where are you going to watch the eclipse? Who are you going to watch it with? And, most crucially for Amplifier purposes, what will you listen to during it?Today’s playlist aims to get you in the mood for this rare cosmic event. It features atmospheric ambient music from Brian Eno and Julianna Barwick as well as ethereal jazz from Alice Coltrane and Amaro Freitas. I also included a few songs that refer to moons and darkness, from Cat Stevens and Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy, though I stopped just short of adding Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” because I have at least some restraint.As far as solar eclipses go, this one is relatively long: Along the totality line, the moon will block out the sun for about four minutes and 28 seconds. A few songs on this playlist run for approximately that duration, so if you press play on, say, Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” as soon as the eclipse begins, it can soundtrack the entire experience. If you want to take in the moment in reverent silence, though, I fully support that; this playlist will be here when the eclipse is over, if you want to extend the astronomical vibe. And if you want to spend your eclipse listening to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”? Well, that’s your decision, not mine.I do love the feeling of human interconnectedness that occurs during an eclipse, though. There’s something powerful about knowing that millions of people in all sorts of locations will be stopping what they’re doing and perhaps reflecting on the fact that, for all our differences, we’re all living under the same sky. Who knows? Maybe some of us will even be listening to the same music.I’m being followed by a moonshadow,LindsayListen along while you read.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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      The Era of Klaus Mäkelä, Conducting Phenom, Begins in Chicago

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      On Thursday, the richly talented 28-year-old maestro led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director.On Thursday evening, when Klaus Mäkelä came onstage to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director, he seemed at pains not to bask in the roar that greeted his entrance.He smiled, bowed and quickly turned to give the downbeat. The orchestra had already released a video of the moment on Tuesday when the players were told he got the job. Many maestros would take the opportunity to wax a little eloquent before getting down to business; Mäkelä spoke for less than 20 seconds before raising his baton to start the rehearsal.Mäkelä, just 28, clearly wants to avoid seeming like a vain, spotlight-craving young man. He is already the topic of much discussion for being what some consider far too early in his career for such an august position — the Chicago Symphony has been among America’s finest for well over a century — especially when he has already taken on daunting responsibilities with European orchestras.His rise has been one of the most meteoric in modern music history. After completing his education in his native Finland, Mäkelä began his international career in earnest a mere six years ago; the pandemic was for him a period of unnatural acceleration.He is not, however, the first 20-something conductor to burst onto the classical scene. Gustavo Dudamel was Mäkelä’s age when he became the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Leonard Bernstein was 25 when his surprise New York Philharmonic debut, broadcast nationwide, made headlines.And Willem Mengelberg was just 24 when he took on the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the eminent ensemble at which Mäkelä is currently artistic partner. He will become chief conductor there in 2027, the same year he will officially become music director in Chicago. (And the same year that his current podium contracts, in Paris and Oslo, will lapse.)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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      Chappell Roan’s Eye-Roll Kiss-Off, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Prince, Young Miko, the Black Keys and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Chappell Roan, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’The rising pop star Chappell Roan sends an ex-lover off with an eye roll on the wrenching “Good Luck, Babe!,” a synth-driven tune that allows the dynamic vocalist to do her best Kate Bush. The subject of the song is noncommittal and perhaps in denial of her sexuality: Roan imagines her former flame kissing “a hundred boys in bars” and eventually becoming a man’s dissatisfied wife in the aftermath of their affair. But ultimately, Roan chooses herself, singing with all her heart, “I just wanna love someone who calls me baby.” LINDSAY ZOLADZPrince, ‘United States of Division’“Everybody stop fighting/everybody make love,” Prince urged in “United States of Division,” a song previously released only as a British single B-side in 2004, alongside Prince’s album “Musicology.” It’s six minutes of deep-bottomed polytonal funk — topped with synthesizer jabs and horn lines, goaded by a hard-rock guitar riff — that veers between disenchanted verses and a conditionally optimistic chorus. Prince was hoping for the best but seeing stubborn obstacles, pondering tribalism, inequality and faith all at once and wondering, “Why must I sing ‘God Bless America’ and not the rest of the world?” JON PARELESCharli XCX, ‘B2b’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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      Review: A Conductor’s Philharmonic Debut Is a Homecoming

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      Karina Canellakis, a born-and-raised New Yorker, led her hometown orchestra alongside another debut, of the pianist Alice Sara Ott.Recently, there has been more speculation than usual about the future of American orchestras. This week, the 28-year-old conductor Klaus Mäkelä became the youngest music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and there are openings at a number of the highest-profile ensembles in the country — especially after Esa-Pekka Salonen announced his departure from the San Francisco Symphony in March.One conductor under close watch is Karina Canellakis, who made her New York Philharmonic debut on Thursday. A born-and-raised New Yorker, she is the chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra — a job once held by the Philharmonic’s departing music director, Jaap van Zweden — and principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.With the Philharmonic, Canellakis made an exciting and memorable debut, in a program that leaned heavily toward meditative, dreamy reflection. She began with an incisive reading of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, keeping her conducting elegantly restrained, even economized — gestures that befitted this sharply angled, brief set.Where the Webern was spare, the next piece, Strauss’s mystic “Death and Transfiguration,” was sumptuous, with Canellakis and the orchestra rendering phrases in richly hued colors and gentle curves. She harnessed the ensemble’s full power, riding over the heaving waves of sound with a muscular confidence.After a multiyear delay because of the pandemic, the German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott finally made her Philharmonic debut as well, playing Ravel’s jazz-fueled Piano Concerto in G, which fit her like a custom suit. She had enormous fun with the two sparkling and vivacious outer movements and brought deep tenderness to the inner slow movement, which she rendered as intimately as if she had been playing in a small nightclub.This concerto, completed in 1931, is something like a French sibling of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which Ravel asked to hear the American composer play when he visited New York in 1928. (The admiration was mutual; at one point, Gershwin sought to study with Ravel.)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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      As Heartbeat Opera Reaches a Milestone, So Does Its Musical Leader

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      Dan Schlosberg, who for 10 years has adapted opera classics for the company, has written its first world premiere.For the last decade, Heartbeat Opera has treated the classics like rough drafts: The scores of “Carmen” and “Madama Butterfly,” “Fidelio” and “Der Freischütz” have been starting points for something fresh, urgent and immediate.In New York, a city with fewer and fewer spaces for opera, Heartbeat sits harmoniously between the Prototype Festival, which stages new music theater at a chamber scale, and the grand tradition of the Metropolitan Opera. Heartbeat draws from the canon but reimagines it with an avant-garde spirit and an eye toward the issues of our time: gun violence, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement.Performed on intimate stages, the resulting productions smartly elicit strong reactions, whatever those may be. I haven’t liked all of Heartbeat’s shows, but I’ve never walked away with a shrug, and I’ve never regretted going.Now, in its 10th year, the company is adding something truly new to the mix: a world premiere, “The Extinctionist,” which opened on Wednesday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center as part of Heartbeat’s 2024 repertory season, alongside Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.”It’s fitting that “The Extinctionist,” an opera with good bones but a flawed presentation, is composed by Dan Schlosberg. He has been the musical soul of Heartbeat since its founding, adapting works by Puccini, Donizetti and more with a vision as creative as each production’s director.Schlosberg rehearsing with the company. He leads “The Extinctionist” from the piano.George Etheredge 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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      John Sinclair, 82, Dies; Counterculture Activist Who Led a ‘Guitar Army’

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      His imprisonment for a minor marijuana offense became a cause célèbre. He was released after John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang about him at a protest rally.John Sinclair, a counterculture activist whose nearly 10-year prison sentence for sharing joints with an undercover police officer was cut short after John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang about his plight at a protest rally, died on Tuesday in Detroit. He was 82.His publicist, Matt Lee, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure.As the leader of the White Panther Party in the late 1960s, Mr. Sinclair spoke of assembling a “guitar army” to wage “total assault” on racists, capitalism and the criminalization of marijuana. “We are a whole new people with a whole new vision of the world,” he wrote in his book “Guitar Army” (1972), “a vision which is diametrically opposed to the blind greed and control which have driven our immediate predecessors in Euro-Amerika to try to gobble up the whole planet and turn it into one big supermarket.”He also managed the incendiary Detroit rock band the MC5. Their lyrics — “I’m sick and tired of paying these dues/And I’m finally getting hip to the American ruse” — were a kind of ballad for the cause.Mr. Sinclair, right, with members of the MC5, the rock group he managed, and friends in 1967.Leni Sinclair/Michael Ochs, Archive, via Getty ImagesMr. Sinclair’s command of this “raggedy horde of holy barbarians,” as he described them in his book, was upended in 1969 when Judge Robert J. Colombo of Detroit Recorder’s Court sentenced him to nine and a half to 10 years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover police officer.During the hearing, Mr. Sinclair argued that he had been framed.“Everyone who is taking part in this is guilty of violating the United States Constitution and violating my rights and everyone else that’s concerned,” he said. He added, “There is nothing just about this, there is nothing just about these courts, nothing just about these vultures over here.”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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      How a Violin Maker’s Dreams Came True in Cremona, Italy

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      Art of Craft is a series about craftspeople whose work rises to the level of art.When Ayoung An was 8, her parents bought her a violin. She slept with the instrument on the pillow next to her every night.Two years later, a shop selling musical instruments opened in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, her hometown, and An became a fixture there, pelting the owner with questions. “I think I bothered him a lot,” An, now 32, said.As a teenager, she decided she would become a violin maker. Eventually, a journey with twists and turns took her to Cremona in northern Italy — a famed hub for violin makers, including masters like Antonio Stradivari, since the 16th century. There, An, a rising star in the violin-making world with international awards under her belt, runs her own workshop.Ayoung An, a rising star in the violin-making world, at her studio in Cremona, Italy, home to famed masters like Antonio Stradivari. Set on a quiet cobblestone street, An’s studio is bathed in natural light and filled with books and piles of wood chunks that must air dry for five to 10 years before becoming instruments or risk warping. She shares the two-room studio with her husband, Wangsoo Han, who’s also a violin maker.On a recent Monday, An was hunched over a thick 20-inch piece of wood held in place by two metal clamps. Pressing her body down for leverage, she scraped the wood with a gouge, removing layers, her hands steady and firm. She was forming a curving neck called a “scroll,” one of the later steps of making a violin or cello. On this day, the violin maker was immersed on a commission for a cello, which shares a similar crafting process.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