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      Karol G, Shakira and Natalia Lafourcade Win Big at Latin Grammys

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      Karol G, Shakira and Natalia Lafourcade took the top prizes at the awards’ first ceremony outside the United States.Spain tried to share the cultural clout of its former colonies at the 24th annual Latin Grammy Awards, which were broadcast worldwide on Thursday night from the Fibes convention center in Seville. It was the first Latin Grammy ceremony to take place outside the United States.Even with the trans-Atlantic move, the top awards went to women from Latin America. Karol G, from Colombia, won album of the year for “Mañana Será Bonito.” Shakira, from Colombia, shared song of the year, a songwriting award, for her collaboration with the Argentine producer Bizarrap, “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53.” They performed it on the show, with Shakira dancing sinuously and defiantly.Karol G became the first woman to win a Latin Grammy for música urbana album; “How cool is it for a woman to win this?” she exulted. And “TQG,” her duet with Shakira from that album, was named best urban/fusion performance.Record of the year, an award for a single, was by Natalia Lafourcade from Mexico: “De Todas las Flores,” the title track of a richly retro album that was named best singer-songwriter album. “This is the most personal album I made at a time when I felt completely broken,” she said while accepting an award at the preshow. “I didn’t even know where to start, and music once again taught me its power, its medicinal power.”Joaquina, an introspective 19-year-old songwriter from Venezuela, won as best new artist. “They told me I wouldn’t make it if I recorded my own songs, but here I am,” she said in a tearful speech. “Music is always worth the pain.”For the Latin Recording Academy, which gives the awards, Latin music isn’t defined by geography or history. It’s simply a matter of what language the lyrics are in: Spanish, Portuguese or Indigenous languages of the Americas. This year’s award for person of the year, a lifetime achievement award, went to Laura Pausini, an Italian singer who has spent much of her three-decade career performing in Spanish.The Latin Grammys’ venture to Spain was supported by a $24 million grant, for this year’s Latin Grammys and other musical events in Andalusia, from the European Union and the government of the region of Andalusia, the cradle of flamenco.The awards took place on the annual International Day of Flamenco, commemorating UNESCO’s 2010 recognition of flamenco as an “intangible cultural heritage.” While Caribbean reggaeton and regional Mexican music are the styles that have spearheaded Latin music’s new worldwide popularity, the awards show played up the influence of Spain and flamenco.The preshow awards webcast began with the clang of a martillo — an anvil, harking back to a flamenco tradition of using rhythms from Roma blacksmiths — and a medley from the nominees in the flamenco category including Niña Pastori, the winner. She called flamenco “music of purity” and congratulated her fellow nominees, urging them to “keep fighting for this flamenco, which is the most beautiful music there is.”The main awards ceremony began with the Spanish songwriter Rosalía, whose “Motomami” was named album of the year in 2022. She sang “Se Nos Rompió el Amor” (“We Destroyed Our Love)” — a dramatic hit by Rocío Jurado, a Spanish singer who died in 2006 — in a stark crescendo surrounded by flamenco guitarists and hand-clappers. The raspy-voiced Spanish songwriter Alejandro Sanz performed amid 30 flamenco dancers. With orchestral backing, the popera tenor Andrea Bocelli sang a vibrato-charged “Granada,” the Mexican songwriter Agustín Lara’s tribute to the Spanish city.Where Latin American songwriters had collaborated with Spaniards, those songs were featured. Pablo Alborán, from Spain — who has had 24 Latin Grammy nominations without a win — was joined by the Argentine songwriter Maria Becerra for their duet, “Amigos,” before she went on to sing a fierce solo version of her bitter, wrathful post-breakup song “Ojalá” (“I Hope”). The Spanish songwriter Manuel Carrasco sang with the Colombian songwriter Camilo before they were also joined by the Brazilian singer Iza and by Camilo’s longtime collaborator Edgar Barrera, who was named producer of the year and songwriter of the year. Barrera also shared the songwriting award for regional Mexican song, the hit “Un x100to” (“One Percent”) by Bad Bunny and Grupo Frontera.The show offered a little recognition for the regional Mexican music that has been a growing international force in recent years. “Ella Baila Sola” (“She Dances Alone”) — a speedy, horn-pumped waltz about winning over a beautiful woman — became a blockbuster international single this year, and it got its first onstage performance in Seville from its studio and video collaborators, Peso Pluma and Eslabon Armado.The Mexican songwriter Christian Nodal, who won awards for both norteño album and ranchero/mariachi album, shared a vehement lovers’-quarrel duet, “La Siguiente” (“The Next One”), with Kany García from Puerto Rico. The Mexican songwriter Carín Leon got two performing slots, on his own and with the Colombian singer Maluma.Cross-genre, cross-border collaborations increasingly define pop both within and beyond the United States, and no music awards show can quite keep up. But the Latin Grammys’ excursion to Spain came across as a field trip, not an advance. More

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      Tammy Faye Bakker Is Broadway Bound. As a Musical.

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      A show about the televangelist, with songs by Elton John and Jake Shears, had a run in London last year and plans to open in New York next season.A new musical about Tammy Faye Bakker, the singing televangelist whose colorful life and collapsed ministry have repeatedly been dramatized for stage and screen, is pledging to open on Broadway next season.The show, called “Tammy Faye,” features music by Elton John and lyrics by Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters. The musical had a run last year at the Almeida Theater in London, where the critic Matt Wolf called it “spectacularly entertaining.”The musical is being directed by Rupert Goold, the artistic director of the Almeida and a two-time Tony nominee for the plays “Ink” and “King Charles III.” The book is by James Graham, a prolific English playwright whose previous Broadway outings include “Ink” and the musical “Finding Neverland.”John and Shears, although best known for their careers in pop music, have both worked extensively in theater. John has written songs for many shows, including “The Lion King”; won a Tony Award for “Aida”; and is now also reworking a musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada” that was poorly received during an initial production in Chicago. Shears has not only written theater songs, but also performed in “Kinky Boots” on Broadway, and is currently starring in “Cabaret” in London.“Tammy Faye” explores the life and work of Bakker (she used the surname Messner in her final years), who had an enormously successful, and lucrative, television ministry in the 1970s and 1980s, that fell apart when her husband and partner in ministry, Jim Bakker, was indicted and then imprisoned for fraud.She was known for her big hair, her big personality and her big heart — her compassion for people with AIDS made her a popular figure among gay people often shunned by evangelicals. The musical explores her life in the context of the rise of a politically potent religious right in the United States.Bakker’s arc has proved irresistible to storytellers. Jessica Chastain won an Academy Award playing her in the 2021 film “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” and there have been several other stage projects.“Tammy Faye” is being produced by Rocket Stage, which is a theater production company established by John and his husband, David Furnish; Greene Light Stage, which is a production company established by Sally Greene, who has a business partnership with John; and James L. Nederlander, who is the president and chief executive of the Nederlander Organization.The producers said Friday that the musical would open at one of the nine Nederlander Broadway houses in the 2024-25 theater season; they did not specify which theater, and did not announce any casting.Andrew Rannells, who played Jim Bakker in London, and who is now starring in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” on Broadway, recently told Andy Cohen he was expecting the show to arrive on Broadway soon, but did not say whether he was continuing with the project. More

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      John Morris, Who Brought Rock Legends to the Stage, Dies at 84

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      As a coordinator of the Woodstock festival and the hallowed New York venue Fillmore East, he helped showcase the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.John Morris, who brought an element of spectacle to the rock explosion of the 1960s as a coordinator and M.C. for the era-defining Woodstock festival, and who also helped run the storied rock venues Fillmore East in New York City and the Rainbow theater in London, died on Friday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 84.The cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease following treatment for lung cancer, his longtime partner, Luzann Fernandez, said.A New York native, Mr. Morris got his start as a lighting designer — first for theater productions in his home city and on London’s West End, and later for rock concerts — before he began producing concerts himself. He gained prominence in 1967 when he organized a free concert by Jefferson Airplane in Toronto that drew some 50,000 people, and he went on to mount tours by that band, as well as by the Grateful Dead and others.In 1968, Mr. Morris cemented his place in rock lore when he helped Bill Graham, the powerful and feared West Coast rock impresario, open an East Coast answer to his hallowed Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Fillmore East became a magnet for top acts like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Brothers, who recorded a searing live album there, and was often called “the church of rock ‘n’ roll.”Still, no Fillmore East concert could come close to matching the impact of Woodstock, where legions of rock disciples turned a mass migration to a dairy farm in upstate Bethel, N.Y., into a pilgrimage that marked the apotheosis of the hippie era.The crowd on the first day of the festival. It was Mr. Morris who announced, as unanticipated masses converged on the festival, that Woodstock was “a free concert from now on.”Clayton Call/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Morris served as the production coordinator for the three-day event, formally known as the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, which featured more than 30 acts. Organizers originally sold tickets for $18 (the equivalent of about $150 today), anticipating a crowd of about 50,000.Before the festival began, Mr. Morris helped the festival’s creators lure cutting-edge talent, using every means at their disposal given budgetary restraints. “We famously got the Who for $11,000 because that was all we had left in the budget,” he said in a 2019 interview with the music site Pollstar, “and we plied Pete Townshend with wine to get him to agree.” (Other sources give the amount as $12,500.)The festival, of course, became a signature event of the 1960s, a rain-soaked counterculture convention at which an estimated 400,000 people or more got high, listened to wailing guitars and lived communally in muddy fields, as memorialized in the Academy Award-winning documentary “Woodstock” (1970), directed by Michael Wadleigh.Mr. Morris, who usually worked behind the scenes, found his own taste of fame after Michael Lang, one of the festival’s organizers, without warning deputized him and Chip Monck, the lighting director, to serve as masters of ceremonies.It was Mr. Morris’s voice that echoed over the hillsides, in his famous announcement, as unanticipated masses converged on the festival, that Woodstock was “a free concert from now on,” to which he added: “That doesn’t mean that anything goes. What that means is that we’re going to put the music up here for free.”But, as he later clarified, it was Mr. Monck, not he, who made the equally famous announcement warning festival goers to avoid the unreliable batch of LSD known as the “brown acid.” “I did not do drugs,” he said, “because I was usually in charge and I didn’t feel I could. So me saying the brown acid is not particularly good would be very out of character, because I would not have the vaguest idea.”However transcendent Woodstock proved to be for the hordes of revelers, Mr. Morris had to deal with continual crises. “You can see me in that film announcing and coming as close to a nervous breakdown as humanly possible,” he said in a 2017 interview with The Malibu Times. “On Sunday, we had what was later on called a tornado that shot through the festival, poured rain, wind — the stage started sort of sliding, feeling dangerous.”However chaotic things got, Mr. Morris later expressed pride in pulling off the seemingly impossible.“We dealt with what became one of the largest cities in New York State at that point,” he said, and “managed to put on one of the best music concerts of all time.”Mr. Morris, center, shared his Woodstock memories at a 2019 panel discussion in Los Angeles with Bill Belmont, left, the festival’s artist coordinator, and Joel Rosenman, one of the festival’s producers.Alison Buck/WireImage, via Getty ImagesJohn Hanna Morris Jr. was born on May 16, 1939, in Manhattan, the elder of two sons. His father was a deputy New York City police commissioner and later an advertising executive. His mother, Louise (Edwards) Morris, had run national youth programs under the New Deal during the Great Depression.The family eventually settled in Pleasantville, a village in Westchester County. After graduating from high school in Somers, N.Y., Mr. Morris spent two years studying theater production at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh.Following his tenure at Fillmore East, Mr. Morris spearheaded the reopening of London’s Rainbow theater in Finsbury Park as a rock temple in its own right, starting with a fiery opening show by the Who in November 1971.In addition to Ms. Fernandez, Mr. Morris is survived by his brother, Mark.Mr. Morris continued producing concerts by major acts, including David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Stevie Ray Vaughan through the 1980s. He later produced antiques shows and was a dealer of Native American art and artifacts.For all his later accomplishments, he never stopped expressing pride in helping to make Woodstock, a festival created by the young and for the young (its principal organizers were in their 20s) an unlikely success.“I was the adult in the room, charged with keeping the thing running,” he told Pollstar. “I was older than most everybody else, all of 30 at that point.” More

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      Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes: A Diary of an Influential Life

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      Begun to improve his own technique, piano exercises that Glass wrote over decades are the subject this month of a new book, a concert and dances.Philip Glass wanted to become a better pianist.He didn’t study the instrument in earnest until he was 15. And by the time he was 30 and founding an ensemble — to perform his pathbreaking music of repetitive structures — he needed to be good enough to keep up with his colleagues.So Glass turned to Charles-Louis Hanon’s classic “The Virtuoso Pianist in Sixty Exercises.” Eventually, he took a crack at writing some études himself. “They were totally about my own limitations, in pursuit of technique,” he told the public radio personality Ira Glass, his cousin, in an interview for a new collection, “Studies in Time: Essays on the Music of Philip Glass.”“I was not trying to compose like Scriabin or Rachmaninoff, who were demonstrating the techniques they already had,” Glass added, characteristically underselling himself. Those études, from the early 1990s, may be aspirational in technique, but they are assured in craft: portals into Glass’s world of whirling arpeggios, shocking rhythmic and harmonic turns, and meditative discipline.Once the conductor and pianist Dennis Russell Davies, the reigning interpreter of Glass’s symphonic music, heard about the études, he commissioned a set of six for his 50th birthday in 1994. Those turned into 10, each focused on a specific technical challenge. And then 10 turned into 20, completed in 2012 for another birthday: Glass’s 75th.Now a generation of artists has come of age with Glass’s études. Choreographers have used them for brief, charged dances. And pianists have interpreted them with a wide range of approaches, like the straightforward, crisp treatment by Maki Namekawa, Davies’s wife, who gave the first performance of the whole set a decade ago; or the soft-spoken, sensitive account that Vikingur Olafsson released in 2017.This month, audiences and artists alike have new ways to take in Glass’s études. At David Geffen Hall on Nov. 19, a group of 10 pianists will gather to perform the entire études for a densely kaleidoscopic program that will run about two and a half hours. Then, starting Nov. 28, the Joyce Theater will present “Dancing With Glass: The Piano Etudes,” a program of works from five choreographers, including Lucinda Childs and Justin Peck. And a handsome, informative new folio collection of the études — edited by the composer-performer Timo Andres and Cory Davis from Glass’s publisher, Dunvagen Music — has just been packaged with “Studies in Time” and published by Pomegranate Arts, producers long associated with Glass.A new folio edition of Glass’s études, based on his manuscripts, has been released by Pomegranate Arts.Stephen DoyleStephen DoyleIt’s an unexpected landing for a project that started as personal exercises. But today, the études are spoken of in the same breath as those by Chopin and Debussy. And their influence extends beyond the world of keyboard playing. “Studies in Time,” edited by Linda Brumbach and Alisa E. Regas of Pomegranate Arts, includes surprising contributions from, among others, the filmmaker Martin Scorsese, the artist Maira Kalman and the chef Alice Waters.“What strikes me — aside from their extraordinary range of mood and feeling — is how they represent a life of practice,” Waters wrote. And practice not just for Glass. The first 10 études, more focused and less difficult than the comparatively rhapsodic and occasionally cosmic later set, can be played by the average amateur. And unlike the technical pieces in Hanon’s exercise book, they are rewarding from a purely musical perspective.The artist and musician Laurie Anderson wrote in “Studies in Time” that the études can sound to her like voices: “There’s the stumbling and the trembling of voices. There’s chatting, joking, brisk analysis, rambling, explaining, crooning, grumbling, shouting; there’s the confident attorney rolling out the arguments; there are rules and regulations being spelled out, prayers, announcements, shouts of joy.”That quality of Glass’s music — patterns and repetitive phrases infused with so much character — is in part what has made it a perennial draw for choreographers. (Movement of all kinds, really: Last year, Anderson D.J.’ed a party for his 85th birthday at the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink, and wrote that she can now “say with confidence that Philip Glass didn’t write anything you can’t skate to.”) It has become so common for dances to be set to his music, Peck said in an interview, that he had long found himself resisting it.“But,” he added, “I’ve always loved the music.” As a teenager, he saw Jerome Robbins’s “Glass Pieces” at New York City Ballet. It felt “like I’d experienced vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice creams,” he said, “and then someone discovered you can make ice cream with pistachios.” He ended up choreographing to Glass for “In Creases” at City Ballet in 2012, and created a new solo, set to the Sixth Etude, for the program coming to the Joyce.Lucinda Childs, the postmodern dance-maker who has had a relationship with Glass and movement going back to “Einstein on the Beach” in the mid-1970s, said his music has always felt like a “sounding board.” They later collaborated on “Dance” (1979), which she described as controversial at its premiere, with its repetitions prompting exasperated audience members to walk out. (That work was recently revived by Lyon Opera Ballet at New York City Center; when she and Glass saw how it was received there, she said, it was “kind of a joke for us because it’s become a classic.”)Then and now, Childs said, she has felt “a tremendous freedom” within his carefully structured scores. For example, the Joyce’s program features a duet of hers set to the 18th Etude. “My first reaction is just to listen,” she said — to the Rachmaninoff-esque shading, the mellowness and alluring romanticism. “There’s passion in this music. I like the idea of that.” From there, she took her work into the studio, eventually bringing in dancers, for a process that she described as fundamentally intuitive.Peck similarly described his étude, the Sixth, in poetic rather than structural terms. “There’s this layer of anxiousness in it,” he said. “It made me feel something emotional, almost like being in a waiting room and not knowing what test results you’re going to get. And the amount of time the étude takes, it feels like an eternity.”Not everyone has such strong emotional reactions to the études. Some have found them downright unmusical. “There’s always been a cadre of people, specifically in the more entrenched classical music world, for whom Philip’s music does nothing,” said Andres, the composer and editor of the new folio set, who is performing in the Geffen Hall concert. “What Philip would say is, there’s plenty of other music in the world.”If there is any agreement on the études, it may be about their specific difficulties. Like works by Mozart, they sound easier than they are, and punish anything short of precision in players. They demand metronome-specific steadiness and crystalline articulation, without sacrificing expression or shape, sculpted over several bars or several slow lines of score.They teach pianists, Davies said, to “be relaxed when dealing with a technical problem, while also building up endurance.” Otherwise, playing the music becomes physically painful. He recalled the story of a musician running out of the orchestra pit during the premiere of Glass’s opera “Satyagraha” because his arm was hurting so much; the études, he added, also “expose weaknesses in anyone’s technique” that can lead to discomfort.Maki Namekawa was the first pianist to perform Glass’s études on a single program. She will play in performances of the pieces this month.Richard Termine for The New York TimesNamekawa, who is performing at both Geffen Hall and the Joyce, warms up for them by playing Bach. Before she brings the Fifth Etude onstage, she will try out a Bach invention in her dressing room, with an ear focused on “the really tiny changes” because in both cases, “the beauty is in tiny changes.”Glass has performed from only the first set of 10 études; he didn’t care as much about whether he could play the second half, which, Davies said, goes beyond “thinking about what’s possible.” By the 20th, Glass achieves a tone poem more like “a benediction,” Davies added. (But these are still exercises. Andres called the 20th “a really good technical étude for legato playing.”)Through all of them, Glass repeats not only short phrases but entire sections, like Schubert, with whom he shares a Jan. 31 birthday. Both composers, Namekawa said, are “always right, very correct” in their use of repetition. And unlike Baroque composers, they don’t use recursive gestures to welcome ornamentation: When something repeats, it returns in identical form.Yet it feels different, Andres said. “When I get to the end of No. 6, for example, when that melody comes back, it has a completely different meaning than it did at the beginning of the piece,” he added. “There’s a settling, a resignation.”In Andres and Davis’s new folio edition of the études, assembled from Glass’s manuscripts, it’s easier to track changes in the music, particularly in the rhythm. Glass wrote with a shorthand that flags shifts more clearly than the comparatively spelled-out version published in 2014. “It’s like reading a sentence,” Andres said. “You’re not reading one word at a time, or one letter at a time. When you’re reading music, the more you can break it down into chunks and the more it makes sense grammatically, the smoother and more pleasurable the reading experience.”With more than one edition now available to players, Glass’s études are starting to look more like classics. They also double as a kind of musical autobiography. “He composed the whole thing in 20 years,” Namekawa said. “It’s a diary. You can see his thoughts and his compositional technique.”In that sense, the études are also something of a guide to Glass. “The thing all the great étude sets have in common is that they’re not just technical études,” Andres said. “They’re études, in a way, for understanding the composer’s language. If you were to learn Philip’s études, you would have a very good overview of his music over his career. You could say the same of Chopin and Debussy and Ligeti études. They’re compendiums: The whole is greater than the parts.” More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): What Is Going on With the Grammy Nominations?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The nominations for the 2024 Grammy Awards, which include multiple nods for the true pop stars Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, but also for the R&B sensualist SZA, as well as the loose-knit indie rock supergroup boygenius and the former talk-show bandleader and exuberant border-crosser Jon Batiste.“The Curse,” the new show on Showtime from Nathan Fielder that continues his philosophical and moral experimentation with the tropes of reality television.New songs from Dua Lipa and Jack HarlowSnack of the weekConnect 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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      36 Hours in Acadiana, Louisiana: Things to Do and See

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      10:30 a.m.
      Time travel to a historic village
      When the British forcibly removed the Acadians from parts of Canada in the mid-18th century, an event known as Le Grand Dérangement, the French-speaking Acadians started making their way down the Mississippi River, creating settlements in South Louisiana. Vermilionville was the name given to Lafayette when it was established in the 1820s as one of those settlements. Today, Vermilionville, a 23-acre, open-air living history museum along the banks of the Vermilion River, tells the story of that migration and how the Acadians’ mingling with Creole, Spanish and Native American traditions created the unique culture of today’s Acadiana. Visitors can embark on a guided boat tour of the grounds, be entertained by costumed actors and historical reenactments, or join Cajun dance lessons and jams. The on-site restaurant, La Cuisine de Maman, also hosts an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch. Adult admission, $10; handicap-accessible. More

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      Jennifer Walshe’s Irreverent, Hectic and Deeply Serious Productions

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      The Irish composer blends everyday items with Dada-like theatricals. But there’s a serious purpose to her explorations.A few weeks ago, Jennifer Walshe was backstage at a concert hall in Essen, Germany, searching for the exit when she paused near the green room. A double bass bow was laid out, ready for the evening’s performance; attached to it, wobbling in the air, were several black-and-white balloons. Walshe grinned and pulled out her phone to snap a picture.This esoteric musical apparatus had been prepared for a new piece, composed by Walshe, that would be premiering in a few hours’ time. Called “Some Notes on Martian Sonic Aesthetics, 2034-51,” it invites a chamber ensemble to impersonate a musically trained crew who have set up a colony on Mars and are beaming performances back to Earth.While researching the piece, Walshe, 49, said that she had asked NASA how sound waves travel in carbon-dioxide rich atmospheres (“you don’t hear high-end frequencies”). She had also requested that packets of freeze-dried food be placed on the percussionists’ tables, so that the audience could hear the sound of astronauts chowing down, along with cans of compressed air to imitate the hiss of airlocks opening and closing.And the helium-filled balloons? Here to make the double bassist’s bow feel 60 percent lighter, as though he were playing in Martian gravity. “I’m a hardcore science fiction fan,” Walshe said as she strode onto the street. “I want things to be as accurate as possible.”Walshe during a performance of “Some Notes on Martian Sonic Aesthetics 2034-51” at a festival in Essen, Germany. She reached out to NASA when researching the piece.Tobias RasokatOtherworldly though the Mars piece may be, by the standards of Walshe’s oeuvre, it isn’t that outlandish. In 2003, she produced a 35-minute opera, “XXX Live Nude Girls,” whose protagonists were Barbie dolls manipulated by puppeteers, their voices supplied by female vocalists. In 2017 came “My Dog & I,” a piece for cello, dancer, film, electronics — and the cellist’s pet, who curled up onstage.A few years later, Walshe began work on a knowing tribute to her homeland called “Ireland: A Dataset,” in part created by feeding gobbets of “Riverdance,” Enya, James Joyce and Irish sean nos folk song into an artificial-intelligence-generated composition engine. In the piece, which Walshe described as “a slightly bizarre radio play,” the results play out alongside video mash-ups and an instrumentalist and vocalists performing skits, one of which pokes fun at Irish American tourists visiting the country in search of their roots.It would be wrong to think of these pieces as jokes, but not entirely wrong: a vein of anarchic humor does run through much of what Walshe does, as well as a taste for hectic, Dada-like theatricals. She often appears as a vocalist in her own pieces, makes accompanying films and writes scripts and essays, in addition to her day job as a professor of composition at the University of Oxford.“It’s hard to keep up with her,” said Kate Molleson, a critic and broadcaster. “Her mind is so restless and inquisitive. I can’t think of a composer more interested in the way the contemporary world functions.”Walshe performing at a festival in Brooklyn in 2017. She often appears as a vocalist in her own pieces.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesWalshe said she sees what she does as a way of paying attention: “I want to be present, and curious and engaged,” she said over dinner one night. “The work is how I do that.”Born in Dublin to a working-class, artistically inclined family (her father worked for IBM, her mother was a writer), Walshe began as a trumpeter — initially in local youth orchestras, before studying the instrument at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow.At college, she said, she felt like the odd one out: She would practice and attend concerts, and work on her own compositions, but she was also fascinated by visual art, literature, film and a million other things. These obsessions were “regarded as my weird hobby,” she said with a laugh.She felt more at home when she did graduate work at Northwestern in Chicago, discovering not just avant-garde composer-performers like La Monte Young and Laurie Anderson, but also the city’s rambunctious comedy and free jazz scenes. Despite never having taken vocal training, she began to sing and improvise, and the boundaries of her creativity exploded.It is Walshe’s creed that practically everything can be material: text messages, memes, irritating conversations overheard on the train, old TV shows and movies unearthed from YouTube, online message boards, Samuel Beckett and the band One Direction have all appeared in her work.The other week, she said, she had been asked to record her dentist as he performed a procedure: “The second you say, ‘Let’s pay attention to this and see what’s going on,’ maybe that’s something interesting.” Walshe at the Darmstadt Summer Course in Germany. She will soon travel to Huddersfield, England, where she will be the resident composer at the town’s contemporary music festival.Kristof LempBut it would be wrong to interpret her work, extraordinary as it often is, as irreverent for the sake of it, Molleson said. “There’s a real compassion and tenderness there. And she’s fascinated by big issues. Take A.I., which she was exploring a decade ago: She was way ahead of most of us.” For all of its high jinks, in performance “Some Notes on Martian Sonic Aesthetics” was a disconcertingly moving meditation on the loneliness of space exploration.Later this month, Walshe will travel to the northern English town of Huddersfield, where she will be the resident composer at its annual contemporary music festival. “Ireland: A Dataset,” premiered online during the coronavirus pandemic, will have its first in-person performance on Nov. 24. And a gallery will host an exhibition of Walshe’s work, titled “13 Ways of Looking at A.I.: Art and Music,” which will develop the composer’s recent thinking on a subject that has preoccupied and fascinated her for the last decade, and which increasingly seems to infiltrate her output.The festival will open on Friday with another recent work, “Personhood,” created with the accordionist Andreas Borregaard. It explores what selfhood looks like in an era of unremitting technological surveillance — with many of our movements tracked, and much of our data scraped and mined.Andreas Borregaard playing the accordion in the Netherlands during a performance of “Personhood” this month. The work explores what selfhood looks like in an era of unremitting technological surveillance.Paul JanssenAccording to Walshe, Borregaard and the ensemble are instructed to perform choreography as if being controlled by a “mind cult.” The conductor will be equipped with the kind of clicker used by dog trainers, and there will be references to characters resembling Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.A rumination on how it feels to cling to individuality when tech corporations seem intent on trying to turn people into biological fodder for algorithms, “Personhood” is both funny and deeply serious, like so much of Walshe’s work.“Perhaps it sounds earnest, but the way I think of my role as an artist is to try and look at the world around me, and process that,” Walshe said. “It’s how I understand what’s going on.”Huddersfield Contemporary Music FestivalThrough Nov. 26; hcmf.co.uk More

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      Ahead of APEC Summit, Musicians from Philadelphia Orchestra Tour China

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      President Biden and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, face a host of thorny geopolitical issues as they meet Wednesday in San Francisco: trade, Taiwan and the war between Israel and Hamas.But they have found some common ground in the cultural sphere. Both leaders have in recent days praised the visit by a delegation of Philadelphia Orchestra musicians to China.The musicians arrived there last week to mark the 50th anniversary of the orchestra’s celebrated 1973 visit to Beijing, when it became the first American ensemble to perform in Communist-led China as the two countries worked to re-establish official ties.Now, with the relationship between the United States and China at its lowest point in four decades, their leaders have highlighted the role of music in easing tensions.Mr. Biden said in a recent letter to the orchestra that its visit this month could help “forge even closer cultural ties, forever symbolizing the power of connection and collaboration.”Mr. Xi, in a letter released on Friday, said the Philadelphia Orchestra had long played a role in strengthening the connection between the two countries, describing its 1973 visit as an “ice-breaking trip.”“Music has the power to transcend borders,” he wrote, “and culture can build bridges between hearts.”Daniel R. Russel, a former senior American diplomat now at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said that cultural exchange could build connections between China and the United States and help “refute political caricatures” that citizens of each country may hold.But there are limits, he said, given the heated rhetoric and the increasingly intense rivalry between Beijing and Washington over national security and economic issues.“It’s a very slender thread to use to knit together such a huge gash in the relationship,” he said.Cellist John Koen of the Philadelphia Orchestra, right, going over the score with his counterpart from the China National Symphony Orchestra on Friday, for a concert at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing.Todd RosenbergOn Friday, a dozen musicians from the Philadelphia Orchestra joined their counterparts from the China National Symphony Orchestra for a concert at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing. The program included Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Leonard Bernstein’s overture from “Candide,” and Chinese folk songs.“It was an incredibly impactful moment,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. “It had the effect of focusing the attention on the arts and culture and on the beauty and the power of music to effect change.”The visit by the Philadelphia musicians, who are also traveling to Shanghai, Suzhou and Tianjin, has received wide attention in China. Many news outlets have in recent days published nostalgia-filled stories about the 1973 visit, during which the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Eugene Ormandy, performed inside a packed hall in Beijing, a year after President Richard M. Nixon’s historic visit.At the time, China was in the final years of the Cultural Revolution, during which most traditional music, including Western classical music, was banned. Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, made sure that the concert — which featured a favorite work, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (known as the “Pastoral”) — was broadcast across the country.The orchestra has been all over Chinese state media in recent days. An article about Mr. Xi’s letter to the orchestra appeared on Saturday’s front page of People’s Daily, the main newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, just under the announcement that Mr. Xi would meet Mr. Biden in San Francisco. China Central Television, the state broadcaster, aired interviews showing Philadelphia Orchestra staff members and musicians praising Mr. Xi’s letter.The focus on the orchestra’s visit reflects the Chinese government’s recent efforts to shore up its global image by emphasizing more personal ties, said David Bandurski, co-director of the China Media Project, an independent research program based in the United States.“Emphasizing people-to-people exchanges is a way to stress the positives from the standpoint of China’s leadership,” he said. “They harken back also to an earlier time when Ping-Pong was sufficient to get both sides back to the table.” More