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      Drake Returns to No. 1 as Dolly Parton Opens Big With ‘Rockstar’

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      The country star’s rock-themed new LP debuts at No. 3, becoming her highest-charting album on Billboard’s all-genre Top 200.Drake’s latest album, “For All the Dogs,” returns to No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart this week thanks to an expanded edition, while Dolly Parton notches her highest chart position ever.Six weeks ago, “For All the Dogs” opened at the top with big streaming numbers, and it has held in the Top 5 since. Last week, Drake released a new version of it — the “Scary Hours Edition” — with six new songs, which has sent the album back to No. 1 with the equivalent of 145,000 sales in the United States, including 190 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate.That was enough to keep Taylor Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” at No. 2, while Parton, 77, starts in third place with “Rockstar,” the rock-themed double album she made after her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year (an honor she initially declined). It features songs like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Stairway to Heaven” and “Let It Be,” with guests including Joan Jett, Elton John, Rob Halford of Judas Priest, plus Paul and Ringo.Incredibly, “Rockstar” becomes Parton’s highest-charting album, and only the third in her storied career to reach the Top 10 of the all-genre Billboard 200 chart. “Trio,” her 1987 collaboration with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, and “Blue Smoke,” from 2014, both went to No. 6. Among Parton’s solo albums, and LPs with her onetime singing partner Porter Wagoner, she has had numerous titles in the Top 10 of Billboard’s country chart, including eight No. 1s.Also this week, the K-pop septet Enhypen opens at No. 4 with “Orange Blood,” and Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” holds at No. 5. Last week’s top seller, “Rock-Star” by Stray Kids, another K-pop group, falls to No. 7 in its second week out. More

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      An Oratorio About Shanghai’s Jews Opens in China at a Difficult Time

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      “Émigré,” about Jews who fled Nazi Germany, debuts amid U.S.-China tensions and cultural rifts over the Israel-Hamas war. It comes to New York in February.“Émigré,” a new oratorio about Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai in the late 1930s, begins with a song by two brothers, Josef and Otto, as their steamship approaches a Chinese harbor.“Shanghai, beacon of light on a silent shore,” they sing. “Shanghai, answer these desperate cries.”The emigration of thousands of Central European and Eastern European Jews to China in the late 1930s and early 1940s — and their survival of the Holocaust — is one of World War II’s most dramatic but little-known chapters.In “Émigré,” a 90-minute oratorio that premiered this month in Shanghai and will come to the New York Philharmonic in February 2024, the stories of these refugees and their attempts to build new lives in war-torn China are front and center.Musicians of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra warming up before a dress rehearsal of “Émigré.” The oratorio will be performed by the New York Philharmonic in February.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesThe piece, composed by Aaron Zigman, with lyrics by Mark Campbell and Brock Walsh, has been in the works for several years, a commission of the Philharmonic, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Long Yu. But it is opening at a delicate time, with tensions high between China and the United States and with the Israel-Hamas war spurring heated debates in the cultural sphere.The war in the Middle East is a sensitive subject in China, which has sought to pitch itself as a neutral broker in the conflict, though state-controlled media has emphasized the harm suffered by civilians in Gaza while giving scant coverage to Hamas’s initial attack. Israel has expressed “deep disappointment” at China’s muted response to the Hamas attack. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, on Tuesday called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and for “the restoration of the legitimate national rights of Palestine.”In recent weeks, promotional materials in China for “Émigré” have rarely mentioned its plot, and listed its Chinese title, “Shanghai! Shanghai!” The major state-owned Chinese news outlets did not cover the premiere this month, although an English-language television channel for foreign audiences did.The creators of “Émigré,” which takes place during the Second Sino-Japanese War, said they hoped the piece would help underscore a shared sense of humanity in a time of renewed strife. “I don’t think music and politics really belong in the same sentence,” Zigman said. “I just want people to be human and kind, and there are certain parts of this piece that help that vision.”Brock Walsh, who wrote the lyrics to “Emigré,” with Mark Campbell.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesThe composer Aaron Zigman said, “Our project is really about bridging cultures and humanity and love, hope, loss and tragedy.”Qilai Shen for The New York TimesIn 2019, Yu, worried that the stories of Jewish refugees in his hometown were being forgotten, came up with the idea for the piece. He approached the New York Philharmonic, which has had a partnership with the Shanghai Symphony since 2014, about commissioning the work together.Yu said he never expected the oratorio to premiere in wartime but hoped that its message would still resonate.“We always make the same mistakes in our lives, and we have to learn from history,” he said. “We can be inspired by the kindness and support that Shanghai showed in this moment.”To shape the music and the plot, Yu turned to Zigman, a classically trained film and television composer who has returned to classical music in recent years, including with “Tango Manos” (2019), a piano concerto he wrote for the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Yu has long known Zigman, who has composed more than 60 Hollywood scores, including “The Notebook,” and he and Thibaudet suggested the idea for a tango concerto.For “Émigré,” Zigman said he was eager to create a “multicultural love story” that drew attention to the violent struggles unfolding in Asia and Europe at the time. Those include the 1937 massacre in Nanjing, an eastern Chinese city, in which tens of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed by occupying Japanese forces; and Kristallnacht, the wave of antisemitic violence carried out by Nazis in 1938.“Our project is really about bridging cultures and humanity and love, hope, loss and tragedy,” Zigman said.Rehearsing in Shanghai. Yu, the orchestra’s music director, worried that the stories of Jewish refugees in his hometown were being forgotten.Qilai Shen for The New York Times“Émigré” tells the story of Otto, a rabbinical student, and Josef, a doctor, who leave Berlin for the port city of Trieste, Italy, and board a boat headed for Shanghai.The brothers are anguished about leaving their parents and homeland but try to settle into life in China. Josef is interested in traditional Chinese medicine and visits an herbal medicine shop, where he meets Lina, the daughter of the owner, who is grappling with the death of her mother in Nanjing. They fall in love, but their cross-cultural union draws scorn from their families.Shanghai’s role as a haven for Jews was a historical fluke. Britain, France and the United States insisted that Beijing let them set up settlements there in the 1840s. By the 1930s, the settlements had grown into a sprawling city. But the Chinese government controlled who was issued visas to enter mainland China, including for arrival at Shanghai’s docks.When Japan seized east-central China in 1937, including the area around Shanghai, the Nationalist Chinese government could no longer inspect visas at the city’s riverfront docks. But the Japanese military did not start controlling visa access to the area until shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.The result? Nobody was controlling who entered China at Shanghai. It became an open port for those four years: Foreign travelers were welcomed and could stay in the Western settlements.Mark Campbell, who wrote the libretto with Brock Walsh.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesCampbell, who has written librettos for more than 40 operas, said he hoped that the stories of refugees in “Émigré” could be a modern-day lesson.“It’s very important for the audience to go away and remember there was a time in this world when one country embraced the refugees of another country,” he said.In Shanghai, the stories of Jewish residents are preserved at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. The core block of China’s legally designated Jewish ghetto, where the Japanese required Jews in Shanghai to live during the last three years of the war, has been preserved. Its Central European-style townhouses and house-size synagogue still stand.But much of the surrounding area has been bulldozed amid rapid growth in recent decades, causing concern among preservationists. Two gargantuan office buildings, each 50 stories tall, cast huge shadows toward the little synagogue at midday.At least 14,000 Jews lived in the ghetto during the war, and possibly several thousand more. Another 1,000 to 10,000 secretly lived elsewhere in the city. (Almost all of Shanghai’s Jews left after the war, many resettling in the United States.)A building in what was the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. The core block has been preserved amid encroaching urban growth.Jackson Lowen for The New York TimesShanghai was a deeply troubled place in the years that “Émigré” takes place: packed with Chinese refugees as well as Jewish ones, frequently short on food and potable water, and racked by epidemics of disease. Opium was smoked openly and prostitutes gathered on street corners.Among the ghetto’s residents was Michael Blumenthal, who fled from Nazi Germany in 1939 at 13 and who much later became treasury secretary under President Jimmy Carter. Blumenthal said in an interview with The New York Times in 2017 that when he was a teenager, a Japanese police station was just down the block from the synagogue. He and others had to apply at the station for permission to leave the ghetto during the war, and by the final year, it was almost impossible to obtain permission.Trucks patrolled Shanghai, not just in the ghetto, to collect those who succumbed to illness. “I used to see them driving around the city, picking up dead bodies,” Blumenthal said. “The city was vastly overcrowded, it was dangerous, there was constant fighting among factions, and shootings.”“Émigré” received wide attention in China when it was announced in the summer. With a Chinese and American cast, the work was hailed as a sign of the power of cultural exchange between China and the United States in a time of increasing tensions. Yu joined Zigman, Campbell, Walsh and Gary Ginstling, the president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, for a news conference at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum celebrating the commission.When the joint Shanghai-New York project was announced, “Émigré” was hailed as a sign of the power of cultural exchange between China and the United States in a time of increasing tensions. Qilai Shen for The New York Times“Émigré” will have its American premiere in February with the same cast, and Ginstling said in a recent interview that he did not expect the Israel-Hamas war would lead to alterations in the work, which Deutsche Grammophon recorded in Shanghai for release next year.“Things change quickly in the world,” he said. “We are committed to our role as cultural ambassadors.”The Philharmonic’s version, directed by Mary Birnbaum, will be semi-staged and incorporate some visual elements, including images of devastation from World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War.Several New York Philharmonic musicians took part in the premiere in Shanghai, and a group of Chinese musicians will play at the premiere in New York.At a recent rehearsal for “Émigré” at Jaguar Shanghai Symphony Hall, choir members sang Jewish, Christian and Buddhist prayers, which open the work. “Grant peace in high places,” they sang in Hebrew.“Sacred presence blossoming,” they sang in Chinese.The cast includes the tenor Arnold Livingston Geis as Josef; the tenor Matthew White as Otto; the soprano Zhang Meigui as Lina; the mezzo-soprano Zhu Huiling as her sister, Li; and the bass-baritone Shenyang as their father, Wei Song.Between rehearsals, Zhang said that she was trying to stay focused on the music, and that she hoped “Émigré” could provide some relief from the war.“We’re going through a very difficult time in this world,” she said, “but I think music has to be separate from this.”Zhang added that she had found some comfort in a song at the end of the first act called “In a Perfect World.” In that piece, Josef sings:If I ruled the world,Mine to redesign,I’d stop every gunshot, every war.Now, forevermore.Li You More

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      Antonia Bennett Used to Sing With Tony. Now She’s Carrying on Solo.

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      The crooner’s daughter is ramping up her music career once again, and plotting a new album. On Friday, she’ll perform two sets at Dizzy’s Club in New York.Antonia Bennett’s childhood had some unique charms. There were the parties, where the likes of Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé would gather around the piano and sing. There were the times Bennett’s father, Tony, took her to work, beginning when she was about 5, and gave her an early taste of the spotlight.“My dad would just bring me up onstage, and we would sing together,” Bennett recalled in a recent interview. “I guess it started with ‘The Hokey Pokey’ and ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,’ and then I graduated to ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz,’ and we just kept going from there, you know?”Bennett, 49, is the younger of the crooner’s two daughters by the second of his three wives, the actress Sandra Grant Bennett. Over the years, she too has sung professionally, releasing a 2014 album, “Embrace Me,” and an earlier EP that mixed traditional pop standards with a cover of Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield.” For the first time since her father’s death in July at 96, she is preparing to take the New York stage — and start her career anew.“It was such a privilege to be able to get to know my dad in my adult life, and to spend so much time traveling and performing with him,” said Bennett, who regularly opened for her father and was his featured duet partner at major venues and festivals until his retirement from the stage. “And I learned so much from him.”On Thursday, she will play two shows at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club. Earlier this month she released a new single, “Right on Time,” a breezy slice of jazz-tinged pop she co-wrote with her frequent collaborator Cliff Goldmacher, a Nashville veteran who has teamed with artists including Keb’ Mo’ and Kesha. “I don’t really have a timeline, because I look at my dad and I think, he just kept reinventing himself and going on and on,” Bennett said of her own career.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThe tune is one of several originals that will be included on a forthcoming album she has produced with the noted jazz pianist and arranger Christian Jacob, with vocals produced by Mark Renk. There are also covers, of course, of standards such as “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Exactly Like You,” set to elegant, playful jazz arrangements that flaunt her influences, which extend to pop bards like Randy Newman.“I pull from everything,” Bennett said in a video interview from her Los Angeles home, showing off a lush mane of red hair and a girlish smile that matches her lissome, tangy singing voice, which The Times critic Stephen Holden once described as having “echoes of Billie Holiday and Rickie Lee Jones (with a hint of Betty Boop).” Bennett studied at Berklee College of Music and also plays piano, although “not in public,” she noted. She said the treatments on the new album are jazz “because that’s where I come from.”At Dizzy’s, Bennett will appear with the pianist Todd Hunter’s trio, featuring the bassist Ian Martin and the drummer Chris Wabich. “She knows what she’s looking for, but she’s also very open to collaboration,” Hunter said in an interview. “And she’s got a lot of great stories — though I don’t know if there are any I could actually repeat.”Jason Olaine, vice president of programming at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which will celebrate Tony Bennett in a concert gala next April, has known Antonia for years, and praised her “fresh, direct” vocal approach. “It feels very honest, without a lot of ornamentation,” he said. “I’ve seen her on the East Coast with other groups, and it will be nice to have her in a small group setting, with people she’s intimately familiar with.”While her album doesn’t have a firm release date, Bennett has more live concerts planned for February in Chicago. “I don’t really have a timeline, because I look at my dad and I think, he just kept reinventing himself and going on and on,” she said.Bennett also credits her light touch musically in part to her father’s influence: “He would always give me this great advice, which is to sing the way you speak.” She added, “I think the most important thing I absorbed from my dad was how much he loved what he did — how much he got from the audience, and how much he gave in return.”After her father learned he had Alzheimer’s disease, his work became therapeutic, she said. “I think just being in that routine of singing and performing was important for him. Sometimes he would repeat a song, but nobody ever cared — he always sang like it like he was singing it for the first time. It was beautiful to watch him do something he really loved. Even after he stopped singing in concert halls, he would get together with his piano player and go through songs.”Bennett is already carrying on a family tradition, inviting her own daughter, Maya, 7, onstage during performances. “I’ll let her sing the parts she knows, and if I think she doesn’t know a part I’ll just sneak the words in,” she said.For Bennett, something more than maternal pride is at work in such moments. “I feel very confident now,” she said. “I feel like this is my time; I’ve been honing my craft for many years, and I feel whatever I put out now will be a good reflection of who I am — like a page in a book that I can keep building on. I’d really like to be able to do this forever and ever.” More

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      JACK Quartet Commits to Finding the Music

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      Its stylistic range, precision and passion have made the group one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles.“Can your hiccups be even bigger?” the composer Natacha Diels asked the JACK Quartet on a recent morning.“I was thinking there were differences in how you were leaning back on the flamingos,” she added, and, addressing the cellist, said: “Jay, your owls are a little unconvincing. Maybe a little more jowl in your owl?”Somehow, this bizarre code would translate into meticulously uproarious art. Diels and the JACK had come together in an airy room at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan to rehearse her “Beautiful Trouble,” a five-part piece premiering in February that brings together surreal short films and just-as-absurdist live performance.Diels calls for the four musicians to hiccup, as well as make clicks, dings, odd little movements, head rolls and maniacal grins, among much else. Flamingos and owls are drawn in the score as notation for a full-body unfurling motion and shudder. At that morning rehearsal, the JACK’s usual instruments — violins, viola and cello — were still in their cases at the edge of the room.A few days before, I had spent time with the venerable Emerson String Quartet as it prepared to give its final concerts, with music of Beethoven and Schubert. Compared to that, this JACK rehearsal didn’t feel like a different group or a different piece; it felt like a different world.“The performance practice can be kind of far away from the Classical-Romantic continuum,” Jay Campbell, the quartet’s cellist, said with winking understatement in an interview alongside his colleagues a week later. “And we gravitate to that.”“That” can mean a lot of different things. The group — Campbell, the violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, and the violist John Pickford Richards, all in their mid-30s to mid-40s — can do, with equal aplomb, austerely earthy arrangements of Renaissance and medieval pieces, the eclectic folk jam of Gabriella Smith’s “Carrot Revolution” and Diels’s fanciful choreography.John Zorn’s ferociously fast thickets of notes and Catherine Lamb’s glacially shifting microtonal drones are both JACK specialties; on Friday, the group will perform Lamb’s 90-minute magnum opus “divisio spiralis” at Yale.With that sprawling stylistic range and its technical mastery, its enthusiastic curiosity about eminent and student composers alike, its precision and passion, the JACK has, since its founding in 2005, become one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles.“There’s almost nothing they can’t do,” said the composer Amy Williams, who is at work on a new JACK commission. “So in a way, it’s like writing for electronics, with no human limitations. That can be exciting, and also terrifying.”The soprano Barbara Hannigan, who has toured with the group, said: “It’s a very disciplined yet manic virtuosity. And somehow they’re also very calm at the center of all that virtuosity. They are super, super centered. I’ve worked with quartets with a specialty in modern repertoire, but there’s nobody like JACK.”The group formed in the heady atmosphere for new music at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., in the early 2000s. The players in the original lineup — Richards, Otto, the violinist Ari Streisfeld and the cellist Kevin McFarland — were united by decisive encounters with the work of the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, a master of sonic extremes. Lachenmann traveled to Toronto to coach three of the JACK members in his first quartet, “Gran Torso,” and the group flew to a festival in Mexico with other Eastman musicians to continue working with him.“I am their father, or something — their grandfather,” Lachenmann, who turns 88 this month, said with a laugh recently. “They were totally precise, and very musical. And there is for me one word that is very important: They are serene. When I met them, immediately it was clear, the honesty and the concentration. I don’t find better groups for my music than them.”Otto recalled, of their early work on Lachenmann’s third quartet, “Grido”: “We could sense that it was just the tip of the iceberg. Just the depth of this music — I’d never encountered something like that before, the thought that we could just continue practicing this piece for a really long time.”JACK performing at the Tribeca New Music Festival 2010 with its original lineup: from left, Ari Streisfeld, Otto, Kevin McFarland and Richards.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesThey chose to call the group “JACK,” an acronym of their first names — at first a jokey nod to Lachenmann, whose “Grido” is named after the members of the Arditti Quartet. But the players also liked its slightly ironic all-American quality and its modesty.In the first years, the group played only sporadic concerts, and they weren’t usually glamorous. The JACK often performed at the Tank, then on Church Street in Lower Manhattan, where cockroaches would sometimes scamper over the musicians’ feet while they played.Lachenmann put in a good word with WDR, the influential radio network in Cologne, Germany, which invited the JACK to play and record all four of Iannis Xenakis’s quartets, a feat not yet attempted. Released in 2009 as part of Mode Records’s complete Xenakis project, it made the group’s reputation.“We got paid to record it, which is crazy,” Richards said. “And that album introduced JACK to a lot of people.”It established the quartet as youthful masters of daunting modernism, as did a live recording of a 2011 performance of works by Xenakis (“Tetras,” an intense calling card), Ligeti, Cage and Matthias Pintscher at Wigmore Hall in London. But the flood of repertory and touring soon grew trying.“It’s hard to do more than 70 or 80 concerts a year with all new pieces,” Richards said. McFarland wanted to move to Colorado, where his partner lived, and Streisfeld wanted to stop traveling so much and take a steadier teaching position.They left the group in 2016, and while Otto and Richards were committed to keeping JACK going, it was, Richards recalled, “surprisingly hard to discover people who wanted to throw their whole lives into it.” But Campbell and Wulliman, both well regarded in the cozy contemporary-music community, fit the bill.“I had been playing in professional new-music ensembles in Chicago,” Wulliman recalled. “But to sit down with these guys to read through ‘Tetras’ — whoa, I have never, ever, ever experienced anything like that. Being able to just get through something that easily. The ease of the music moving forward.”The JACK is not one of those businesslike quartets that travels separately and meets up just for soundchecks and performances. “I still like spending time with them,” Wulliman said. They go on hikes and search out new restaurants together on tour — and, when road trips are involved, always sit in the same configuration in the car, with Richards at the wheel.The four have mock fights about things like whether they should play Ralph Shapey’s astringent music. (“I’m dying to do Shapey,” Otto said; “I’d rather die,” said Wulliman.) But when they’re rehearsing, they speak in genial fragments, completing one another’s sentences and doing much more playing than debating.Going through an arrangement of a piece by the 16th-century composer Nicola Vicentino, Otto, who was doing a harsh, very contemporary-sounding bow stroke, asked, “Does it feel over the top with the sweeping stuff?”JACK rehearsing in San Francisco recently. Otto said: “We’ve always gotten along, but there’s been an evolution in how we communicate — with our playing as well as our words.”Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesWulliman thought a second, and answered, “I’m not ready to pass judgment yet.” And they moved on.In the interview, Otto said: “We’ve always gotten along, but there’s been an evolution in how we communicate — with our playing as well as our words. Sometimes, early on, we would get overly conceptual or just talkative at rehearsals, and it wasn’t really that productive.”Since those beginning years, using the Kronos Quartet as a model, JACK has been organized as a nonprofit — Lachenmann co-signed the articles of incorporation — to allow it to raise money, commission pieces and start initiatives on its own, rather than waiting for partner institutions.“It feels like institutions are just a little behind,” Campbell said. “I want to be more in front of it.”In 2018, the group became the quartet in residence at Mannes, a milestone for its artistic and financial stability. Its budget in 2010 was $120,000; it’s now $700,000, separate from the members’ Mannes salaries — and large enough for JACK to have hired a full-time executive director, Julia Bumke, in 2020.As its 20th anniversary approaches, the group is focusing on expanding its fund-raising to include more individual givers amid the grants and foundation support, as well as fortifying its already robust commissioning activities, including the JACK Studio program, which offers funding for new scores as well as a range of mentorship and performance opportunities.When the quartet believes in a composer, it truly commits. “As we worked together,” Catherine Lamb said, “something clicked: ‘I can really write what I want to write for these people. I don’t have to hold back. I can explore what I want to explore.’ So I let myself go.”The result was “divisio spiralis,” an epic, 13-part experiment in delicate yet rending, mesmerizing harmonic changes that demands hyper-exact intonation to make its impact.“The last time I heard them play it live,” Lamb said, “I was overwhelmed by how much it had grown since the premiere in 2019. They had more clarity in reaching the sound colors together, finding the right kinds of balances. It’s more and more seamless, more and more musical.”That commitment to finding the music — the sheer beauty — in what could be merely exercises in complexity, to treating every composer like a distinct style that can be ever more fully inhabited, is what sets JACK apart.The group said it was a little intimidated by the difficulty of Amy Williams’s music. But Williams, whose new JACK piece relies heavily on hocketing, the medieval technique of alternating rhythms so lines interlock like a zipper, said that was unlikely.“They have absorbed so much music — working with students, premiering pieces, large-scale composer projects,” she said. “It’s quite extraordinary how much they’re processing. Challenging them is no longer on the table.” More

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      Catherine Christer Hennix, Spiritual Drone Musician, Dies at 75

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      She fused her mathematical knowledge with minimalist sounds and global spiritual traditions, most notably in her 1976 composition “The Electric Harpsichord.”Catherine Christer Hennix, a Swedish experimental musician and artist who fused minimalist drones, mathematical logic and global spiritual traditions into an approach she called “infinitary composition,” died on Sunday at her home in Istanbul, Turkey. She was 75.The cause was complications of an unspecified illness, according to Lawrence Kumpf, the founder and artistic director of Blank Forms, an organization that has promoted Ms. Hennix’s work. She had previously been treated for cancer.At 20, Ms. Hennix was already a promising mathematician, jazz drummer and electronic composer when she visited New York in 1968 to explore the downtown Manhattan arts scene. She soon met the pioneering minimalist composer La Monte Young and immersed herself in his world of drone music and “just intonation,” an alternative to the standard tuning system of Western music.In 1970, an encounter with the Indian classical singer and guru Pandit Pran Nath, whom Mr. Young had helped introduce to the West, further defined Ms. Hennix’s career and sound. Along with other prominent experimental musicians, including Terry Riley and Jon Hassell, she became a disciple of Mr. Nath, a so-called guruji. She was particularly drawn to the complex, shimmering sound of the raga’s underlying tambura drone, which seemed to stretch on endlessly in time.“You get your first intuitive acquaintance with infinity through the raga, and then mathematics amplifies this concept of infinity by teaching you to formally manipulate it on paper with symbols,” Ms. Hennix told the writer Marcus Boon in 2001.Alongside music making, she wrote poetry, logical equations and Japanese Noh dramas. Her efforts culminated in a 10-day festival called Brouwer’s Lattice, which she curated in 1976 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and which included presentations of her art installations as well as performances by other minimalist musicians.The festival also featured “The Electric Harpsichord,” a full-scale synthesis of Ms. Hennix’s seemingly divergent interests. Utilizing a Yamaha keyboard calibrated to just intonation, she improvised on a raga scale and fed the results through a tape delay, all atop a constant drone. The result was a strange, trembling and powerfully uncanny soundscape. Though the extant recording of “The Electric Harpsichord,” from its first and only performance, is 25 minutes long, Ms. Hennix envisioned the music to have no end.Minimalist music went mainstream in 1976 — with groundbreaking compositions like Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach” and Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” — but Ms. Hennix remained resolutely underground, committed to the ethos of the infinite drone and to a kind of artistry that could not be contained in a traditional concert setting. (The Deontic Miracle, her gagaku-inspired trio, which debuted at the Stockholm exhibition, had rehearsed for four years and never played a second concert.)Ms. Hennix then collaborated with the equally uncompromising artist Henry Flynt on a series of projects they described as “hallucinogenic/ecstatic sound experiences.” In 1979, they presented tapes of their music at the Manhattan performance space The Kitchen, including the recording of “The Electric Harpsichord.” Mr. Flynt heralded it as “unclassifiable and out of this world.” A skeptical New York Times critic, Ken Emerson, wrote that Ms. Hennix’s music “concluded an otherwise fascinating evening on a shrill, buzzing note that rang unpleasantly in this reviewer’s ears.”For decades afterward, Ms. Hennix toiled mostly in obscurity.“My contention has always been that the future of music and art, sound and light, needs aesthetics to coalesce with ethics,” she told Mr. Boon in 2020 in an interview for The Brooklyn Rail. “This has certainly been a hard sell during my 50 years as an active composer, which is why public exposure to my work has been very limited, not to say nonexistent, over long periods of time.”In the 21st century, however, Ms. Hennix’s work has undergone something of a revival. The partial recording of “The Electric Harpsichord” was finally released in 2010, and since 2016 Blank Forms has presented her concerts, released archival and new recordings, and published two volumes of her theoretical writings.She was born on Jan. 25, 1948, in Stockholm, to Gunnar Noak Hennix, a doctor, and Margit Sundin-Hennix, a jazz composer. Inspired by her older brother, she took up the drums at age 5. The flourishing Swedish jazz scene brought many American luminaries to Stockholm, and as a teenager she was transformed by hearing the saxophonist John Coltrane live.Ms. Hennix studied linguistics at Stockholm University and later pursued graduate studies in mathematical logic, drawn to the theories of Fourier and Brouwer. At Stockholm’s electronic music studio, she created synthesized compositions in the style of Karlheinz Stockhausen, but ultimately concluded that the hyper-complexity of European modernism was a dead end.Instead, it was Mr. Young’s drones that seemed to offer a path forward. The first time she heard his music, she recalled in 2010, “it took me about 60 seconds to decide that this was the sound.”Through the 1980s and ’90s, Ms. Hennix undertook other projects, including drumming in a band with Mr. Flynt called the Dharma Warriors; teaching logic and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and at the State University of New York at New Paltz; and working with the Soviet-era dissident mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin.She moved back to Sweden and then to Amsterdam, where she collaborated with the photographer Lena Tuzzolino, her partner for about a decade. She eventually moved to Berlin, though she never found an artistic scene that fully supported her quixotic worldview.Ms. Hennix had been introduced to Sufism during her formative discipleship with Mr. Nath. In recent years, she converted to Islam, studying classical Arabic and the Turkish style of maqam music. In 2019, she moved to Istanbul, in part to regularly hear the call to prayer.Ms. Hennix, who had gone by Christer, began identifying as a woman in the late 1980s, and became known as Catherine or C.C. No immediate family members survive her.“Her refusal to be consumed by the practical conditions that most of us are consumed by really opened up this profound inner experience and inner exploration for her that in many ways didn’t need an audience,” said Mr. Kumpf, the Blank Forms artistic director. “It’s a spiritual practice: It’s between her and no one else.” More

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      André 3000’s Experiments With Flutes and Fame

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis month, André 3000 — half of Outkast, and one of the most innovative rappers of all time — made a tentative return to music with the release of his first solo album, “New Blue Sun.” It is … not a hip-hop album. Instead, André, who has regularly been spotted out and about playing one of several flutes, has released an LP of contemplative experimental music, in which he is a supporting character, not the star.What does it mean when one of the most famous musicians of his generation decides to take such a radical creative turn? In what ways is this unconventional musical choice as revealing as the ones for which he’s long been known?On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about André’s reluctant relationship to stardom, the musical scene providing the setting for his public return, and the ways in which one can be in the spotlight but still very much in hiding.Guests:Zach Baron, GQ senior special projects editorSadie Sartini Garner, a critic for Pitchfork and othersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Why You Love (or Love to Hate) Christmas Music

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      Like the holiday season itself, the nostalgia that Christmas music evokes can be emotionally charged.It’s been a little over one year since the Backstreet Boys released their Christmas album, “A Very Backstreet Christmas,” and Francine Biondo has had it on repeat ever since.To be fair, Ms. Biondo, 39, a child care provider in Ontario, Canada, is a fan of Nick Carter and maybe even a bigger fan of Christmas music. The Christmas season was in full swing for her by mid-November, with plans to decorate a tree. Although she typically begins listening to holiday music after Halloween, she is known to sprinkle in a little Christmas cheer during the summer.“It just puts me in a happy, feel-good mood,” she said by phone of songs like Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” adding that they invoked happy memories of her childhood.For Ms. Biondo, the songs do more than get her into the holiday spirit, they also boost her productivity. “To be honest, I need music to just get me through the day,” she said. “I need music when I’m cleaning the house and just doing the daily things, it kind of helps motivate me. Christmas music, especially around that time of year, it just’s more fun.”She might be on to something.Daniel Levitin, an author and musician in Los Angeles and a professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, said research has shown that most people in Western countries use music to self-soothe. “They know that there are certain kinds of music that will put them in a good mood,” he said. “Christmas music is a reliable one for a lot of people.”The healing effects of music have long been studied. Mr. Levitin participated in a 2013 study that concluded that music boosts the body’s immune system and reduces stress.Mr. Levitin said that listening to a song that has not been heard in a long time can transport a person back in time. “That’s the power of music to evoke a memory,” he said. “With those memories come emotions and possibly nostalgia, or anger, or frustration, depending on your childhood.”For the people who find joy in Christmas music, the brain may increase serotonin levels and may release prolactin a soothing and tranquilizing hormone that is released between mothers and infants during nursing, Mr. Levitin said.Conversely, if negative memories and feelings are associated with Christmas, the same songs could cause the brain to release cortisol, the stress hormone that increases the heart rate, and trigger the amygdala, the brain’s fear center. “There are a lot of people who, when Christmas time comes around, they just want to run home and put their head under the covers and wait it all out,” Mr. Levitin said.Christmas music, like all forms of music, is powerful. But this genre is perhaps more potent than other forms of music because the holiday season itself is emotionally charged. It represents the ideals that most humans strive for like equality, tolerance, love and tranquillity. “For some of us, that’s an inspiring message,” Mr. Levitin said. “For others of us, it just draws in stark relief how far we are from achieving that.”Yuletide music sung to celebrate the winter solstice has been around for thousands of years, some even predating Christianity, according to Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, an English professor at Indiana University East. These songs were sung in communal, secular settings and as early as the third century, Christianity adapted Yuletide festivals for celebrations of Jesus’ birth. Then, stories of Jesus were woven into carols, which were still sung in communal settings, even across class divides.“During the dark months of winter, it brought people together for celebration and generosity,” Professor Clapp-Itnyre said, adding that she thinks this still happens today in various forms, like the Salvation Army holding donation drives and carols being sung in nursing homes.By the 20th century, secular Christmas songs like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “White Christmas” began reflecting the grief people were facing and brought solace, particularly to World War II soldiers who could not be home for Christmas. “These songs are becoming popular during the war because people are seeking something traditional, something that they used to know of family and peace and those good traditions, even as their whole world is being blown to smithereens,” Professor Clapp-Itnyre said.The positive feelings associated with Christmas music are something Vanessa Parvin, the owner of Manhattan Holiday Carolers, a holiday entertainment company, knows well. Ms. Parvin, 45, has been singing Christmas music professionally since 1999.Part of the joy, she said, is “adding to other people’s holiday magic experience and nostalgia,” which can mean honoring song requests that remind guests of their childhoods or relatives who have died.While she has a memorized repertoire of about 90 Christmas songs, there is one that invokes memories of her own family. “‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ was my grandmother’s favorite, so that doesn’t make me think of caroling,” she said. “It makes me think of my grandmother and my mother.” More

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      For Monetochka, a Moral Stand Started a Creative Climb

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      Before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Monetochka was on her way to becoming a superstar in Russia.She had released two hit albums of lyrical pop, secured ad deals with brands including Nike and Spotify, and was set to appear and sing a new song in the opening scene of Netflix’s first original Russian drama, a lush adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.”But President Vladimir V. Putin’s military action derailed everything.Netflix shelved the series. The big ad deals, which once comprised more than half of Monetochka’s income, disappeared. And, after making a raft of antiwar statements and fleeing Russia, she was branded a foreign agent in January.Yet the 25-year-old singer-songwriter — who now lives in Lithuania and is scheduled to perform at the Melrose Ballroom in New York on Sunday as part of a U.S. and European tour — said exile had removed the burden of worrying about what she says, and was worth the cost.“You can scream, yell, rant, write any songs or poems you want — and this, of course, means a lot to me,” said Monetochka, or “Little Coin,” whose real name is Liza Gyrdymova. “For me, this is such an important feeling, as an artist and a lyricist: freedom of expression.”Monetochka said she is still pursuing the same dreams, goals and plans in exile, but it is harder than before. Marvin Zilm for The New York TimesShe is just one of the many Russian music stars rebuilding their careers outside their homeland after taking a moral stand against the invasion of Ukraine. Now forced to operate at a distance from most of their fan bases and, in many cases, labeled traitors by their government, they are adopting touring schedules that hew to the new geography of the Russian diaspora as they try to keep their careers moving forward.Michael Idov, a Latvian-American writer and director who has worked with top Russian singers and has directed a music video for Monetochka (pronounced moh-NYET-och-ka), said that those musicians faced several dilemmas abroad, even though in most cases Russians can still stream their music on YouTube and Yandex Music, a Russian streaming platform.“The basic question is: Can you write new hits in this situation, or are you automatically a nostalgia act, even if the nostalgia is for the year 2021?” he said.There was also the question of how to create a sustainable future. “After you have played every new Russian enclave five times, what do you do after that?” Mr. Idov added. The musicians could break into new markets through collaboration with non-Russian artists, Mr. Idov noted, but few had tried that approach, or put out much new music.So far, the millions of Russian speakers outside Russia have been sustaining the performers. Last Saturday, at a Monetochka concert in Zurich, the hall was packed with nearly 700 fans, including middle-aged couples bopping along and screaming young women taking selfies — some of them with their hair done up in the singer’s trademark double buns. Everyone was speaking Russian.Fans at Monetochka’s show in Zurich.Marvin Zilm for The New York TimesOnstage, Monetochka acknowledged that things had changed. “For all these songs and these views and beliefs, folks, they gifted me the rank of foreign agent,” she said. The crowd erupted in cheers, and the singer launched into a song criticizing Russian internet censorship.Her tour, which kicked off in Barcelona last month, has faced logistical challenges. This week, Monetochka had to postpone a concert in London and cancel one in Miami because she didn’t get visas in time. And figuring out the right size and type of venues has involved some guesswork.To widen their appeal, some exiled artists, including Face, a Russian rapper, have considered switching to English. Yet only a couple of Russian acts, such as the girl group t.A.T.u., have ever landed a hit on the American charts.Monetochka, who rocketed to fame in part because of the poetry of her subversive lyrics, said she couldn’t imagine achieving a similar depth of expression in a language other than Russian. She plans to release a new album in the spring, which she said would reflect her rage and alarm about the war, but also the hopeful feelings she had felt since becoming a mother in 2022. She said she felt she needed to leave listeners with something positive, too.Other exiled Russian stars have soured on living abroad. Morgenshtern, a popular Russian rapper who moved to Dubai in 2022 and was also labeled a foreign agent, recently told a Russian interviewer that he misses home and wants to return to Russia, but is too scared for his safety, including the possibility of being sent to the front as retribution. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, later said no one would give Morgenshtern “guarantees that everything will be fine.”While Russian musicians who backed the war and embraced the accompanying nationalist fervor have found themselves rewarded with growing popularity and riches, the acts who left have felt financial impacts, even if they already had large followings outside the country.Sonya Tayurskaya, a member of a rave band called Little Big, who moved to Los Angeles from Russia just days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, said that the group had to go “back to the beginning.”Clockwise from top left: Little Big, Morgenshtern, IC3PEAK and Face, all exiled Russian musicians.Artur Widak/NurPhoto, via Getty Images; Naumova Ekaterina/Shutterstock; Anton Basanayev/Associated Press; Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated PressRebooting their career had been a test of character, said Ilya Prusikin, Little Big’s main songwriter. “What we’ve learned is that money is not important,” he said.Monetochka said she knew her finances would suffer when she left Russia. She is now touring more and playing smaller venues than in Russia. She said she was also considering moving beyond music, to stage theatrical performances that would be subtitled for non-Russian speakers, to try to reach new audiences.But for now, she said, she was still making enough from concerts and streaming to produce new music — and that was what matters.“If you’re still dreaming of some kind of big concert in Moscow, some sort of solo performance at the Olympic stadium, then it’s going to be hard for you,” she said. “You have to make the decision to go down a few notches and start building it up again.”“It doesn’t take much time to get on your feet and understand how you can earn money,” she added. “Everyone I know after this move feels a surge of inspiration. And again, this is the most important thing — not money, but songs.”Russia branded Monetochka as a foreign agent in January, after she made dozens of antiwar statements.Marvin Zilm for The New York TimesWith young, tech-savvy music listeners in Russia always a step ahead of government censorship, she said she never expected to fully lose access to her fans in Russia. Her antiwar stance had also gained new fans in Ukraine, including among her nearly two million TikTok followers.But even before the war, Monetochka had faced political pressure. After she released a video in support of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, Russian state television went after her, she said, and the authorities called music festivals to get her removed from lineups. She said she had come to shrug off Russia’s branding her as a traitor with humor and “accept that people love to hate someone, they really need it — and when the state encourages this, they reach untold heights.”Toward the end of her concert in Zurich, Monetochka tried to impart some of that resilient spirit as she prepared to play her 2020 song, “Will Survive,” an anthem many of her fans have adopted amid the war.“All of this nonsense, all of this nastiness and filth,” she told the audience. “We will survive.” More