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      A Ravel Work Premieres at the New York Phil After Nearly 125 Years

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      A prelude and dance by the French master recently surfaced in a Paris library. Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic will give the world premiere.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel has premiered dozens of pieces in his career.But the score that he was giddily studying on a recent afternoon at Lincoln Center was different: a nearly 125-year-old piece by the French composer Maurice Ravel that had only recently surfaced in a Paris library.“Imagine more than 100 years later discovering a small, beautiful jewel,” Dudamel, the incoming music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, said in an interview at David Geffen Hall. “It’s precious.”On Thursday, Dudamel and the Philharmonic will give the world premiere of the five-minute piece as part of a program celebrating the 150th birthday of Ravel, one of the leading composers of the 20th century, whose works include “Boléro,” “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “La Valse.”The newly found piece, “Sémiramis: Prélude et Danse,” was written sometime between 1900 and 1902, when Ravel was in his late 20s and sparring with administrators at the Paris Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition.The work, from an unfinished cantata about the Babylonian queen Semiramis, reveals a young musician still honing his voice and looking to others, like the Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov, for inspiration. “Sémiramis” lacks some of the lush textures and rich harmonies for which Ravel would become known — he was a master of blending French impressionism, Spanish melodies, baroque, jazz and other music — though there are hints of his unconventional style.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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      Larry Appelbaum, Who Found Jazz Treasure in the Archives, Dies at 67

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      He helped turn the Library of Congress into a leading center for research on the history of jazz, and made some surprising discoveries of his own.Larry Appelbaum, a music archivist who over a long career at the Library of Congress helped make it a leading center for research into the history of jazz, discovering a number of important recordings along the way, died on Feb. 21 in Washington. He was 67.His death, in a hospital, was from complications of pneumonia, his brother Howard said.Mr. Appelbaum specialized in one of the Library of Congress’s most complex tasks: the preservation of recorded speech and music, often involving its transfer from one format to another. As part of that effort, he acquired and processed collections of old recordings, a job that offered no end of drudge work, but also the opportunity for serendipitous finds.His biggest discovery came in 2005, when the library received a large collection of jazz recordings — fragile acetate tapes made by Voice of America at Carnegie Hall in 1957.“There was literally a truck filled with tapes that came to us,” he recalled in an interview for the D.C. Jazz Festival.As he flipped through them, he found one labeled, in pencil, “Thelonious Monk Quartet,” with a few track listings. Interesting, he thought, but not necessarily momentous.“It was only when I put the tape on the machine and started to listen to it that I thought, ‘That’s John Coltrane,’” he said.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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      Party Like It’s 2009: The Playlist

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      Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” inspired a look back at a time when indie-rock and Auto-Tuned pop mingled, and the lines between the underground and mainstream blurredGrizzly Bear performing at SXSW in 2009.Josh Haner/The New York TimesDear listeners,I spent the weekend reviewing Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” and thinking a lot about 2009, a recent moment the album explicitly references. When I was trying to put my finger on exactly what 2009 sounded like, there was only one thing to do: make a playlist.I graduated from college in the fabled year of “Bad Romance” and “Paparazzi” — and of the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Got a Feeling” and Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” — so I attach a lot of emotions and memories to that musical moment. My favorite 2009 albums at the time were a trifecta of stellar and ambitious indie releases that would come to define their era, too: Animal Collective’s “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” Grizzly Bear’s “Veckatimest” and Dirty Projectors’ “Bitte Orca.” The line between underground and mainstream music was becoming provocatively blurred, in a way that seems a little quaint today. The writer Andrew Unterberger recently devoted an entire episode of his Billboard podcast to an event that somehow made headlines in 2009: Beyoncé and Jay-Z attending a Grizzly Bear concert in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Naturally, her cool younger sister, Solange, took them.)You’ll hear Grizzly Bear on this brief tour through 2009, along with higher-profile artists like Miley Cyrus, Jason Derulo and Mariah Carey. This is hardly meant to be a definitive look at the year’s releases, but a quick refresher on what it sounded like to, as I put it in my “Mayhem” review, party like it’s 2009.All up in the blogs,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Phoenix: “Lisztomania”Let’s kick things off with this irresistibly upbeat opening track from the French pop band Phoenix’s 2009 LP, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.” This song prompted one of the more wholesome memes of 2009, when a YouTube creator used it to soundtrack a montage of Brat Pack movie dance scenes. That video became such a sensation that it inspired countless copycat clips — including one featuring a future member of Congress.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York Philharmonic Announces Its 2025-26 Season

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      Our critics choose highlights from a lineup that includes Joshua Bell, Nathalie Joachim, Barbara Hannigan and more.Gustavo Dudamel does not officially take over as the New York Philharmonic’s music and artistic director until fall 2026. But he will be a fixture on the podium in the orchestra’s coming season, leading six weeks of concerts and several world premieres, the ensemble announced on Tuesday.Matías Tarnopolsky, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said that the new season, which includes a celebration of the 250th birthday of the United States as well as a centennial tribute to the eminent French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, “gives us a glimpse into a supremely exciting, joyful and embracing future with Gustavo Dudamel.”Dudamel will lead the world or local premieres of an oratorio by David Lang based on Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”; an orchestral reimagining of Frederic Rzewski’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”; and a choral work by Ellen Reid, which the Philharmonic commissioned with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where Dudamel is the music and artistic director through the end of next season.At the opening night concert, in September, Dudamel will be on the podium with Yunchan Lim as the soloist in Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3. The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason will serve as the Philharmonic’s artist in residence; Barbara Hannigan will make her conducting debut with the ensemble; and stars like the violinist Joshua Bell, the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the violinist Nicola Benedetti will return.Here are 10 highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZBoulez Centennial, Oct. 3-11The Philharmonic will celebrate the centennial of the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, a former music director of the orchestra’s, with two programs. First, Pierre-Laurent Aimard will present some of the composer’s early Notations for piano, and Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct Boulez’s later orchestral adaptations of those pieces, alongside works by Debussy. The following week, dancers choreographed by Benjamin Millepied will accompany Salonen and the orchestra in Boulez’s “Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna.” SETH COLTER WALLSWe 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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      Sony Gives N.Y.U. $7.5 Million for an Audio Institute

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      A multifaceted new program at the university’s Steinhardt School will train students (on Sony equipment) for jobs in music and audio “that don’t exist yet.”Students at New York University who study the music industry and do research at the frontiers of audio have a new benefactor: Sony.A $7.5 million donation from the Japanese electronics and media giant, made through its personal entertainment business unit, will help establish the Sony Audio Institute, a multifaceted partnership at N.Y.U.’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. It is set to open this spring.N.Y.U. and Sony, which jointly announced their agreement on Tuesday, say that the institute is not a physical space. Rather, it’s an interdisciplinary approach to studying and researching the latest advances in consumer and pro-level audio tech — replete with Sony tools to facilitate. As part of the partnership, a studio space will be revamped with professional equipment from Sony and the institute will offer an array of internships, scholarships and programming, even letting students collaborate with Sony’s engineers and researchers.The institute will not, however, grant degrees. It will be part of Steinhardt’s degree programs in music business and music technology.“To have access to the researchers who are inventing the future of audio, as well as the businesspeople who are managing the introduction of those products, creates a great opportunity and a competitive advantage for our students,” Larry S. Miller, the director of Steinhardt’s music industry program, said in an interview.Miller, a former music executive, will step down from his leadership of the school’s music industry program in the fall to become director of the Sony Audio Institute, which has been established for an initial 10-year run. (It is unrelated to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, a degree program under N.Y.U.’s Tisch School for the Arts.)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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      Inside the Detail-Obsessed, Essential World of Music Editing

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      When composers publish their scores or prepare them for performance, they need an editor — a role that rarely enjoys the classical music limelight.Editors of contemporary classical music are used to describing what they do through metaphors and comparisons.“I suppose you could say I was like a midwife bringing musical children into the world,” said Sally Cox, a former editor at the publisher Boosey & Hawkes.“What happens when Lady Gaga drops a record, and there are, like, 12 writers credited on it, where one guy simply massaged a synthesizer?” asked the freelance editor Ash Mistry. “Isn’t this like the same thing?”Not quite, but that’s a useful starting point. Just as we can understand Lady Gaga’s music as hers while acknowledging the many musical hands involved in its conception, so too can contemporary composition — at least the kind produced through major publishers — be understood as simultaneously the work of a sole composer and a product of group labor.Among those laborers — performers most visibly, but also commissioners, programmers and publishers — there are music editors, people who prepare manuscripts for performance. It’s a role away from the spotlight and rarely explored. “People don’t realize or don’t think about how the music gets onto their stand,” Cox said.This is true even for composers. “When someone says, ‘What does an editor do?,’ we tend to say, ‘We save the composer from themselves,’” said Elaine Gould, a former editor at Faber Music. “That can sound very arrogant, but quite often a lot of them have no idea how much we do.”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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      Lonnie Holley Never Plays a Song Twice. (Even His Own.)

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      In late January, Lonnie Holley was scheduled to perform at a concert in Tulsa celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” as part of a lineup that included Elvis Costello and Lucinda Williams. Holley, 75, a venerated visual artist whose work has been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has been singing and playing keyboards for much of his life, but only started releasing his music publicly in 2012. Initially, he didn’t want to go.“He was terrified,” Matt Arnett, Holley’s manager, said. “He’d never sung a cover song. Lonnie’s never even played a Lonnie Holley song twice.”Holley’s approach to music is both extreme and extremely simple. His performances, whether live or recorded, are all improvised in the moment. He’s made a half-dozen hypnotic, soulful, genre-bending albums, including a new one, “Tonky,” which will be released on March 21, but the material has only ever been played the one time it was recorded. Arnett eventually convinced Holley to play the Dylan tribute, and Holley tweaked his approach slightly, using Dylan’s songs as a jumping-off point for his own idiosyncratic performance.Holley has been singing and playing keyboards for much of his life, but only started releasing his music publicly in 2012. Kendall Bessent for The New York Times“I get lost in thought when I’m onstage,” Holley said during an interview in Atlanta on an early February afternoon. “My thing is I got so much going on in my brain.”Holley is tall, with a regal bearing and a gentle voice. His long gray hair was pulled back in braids, a collection of beaded necklaces hung around his neck and his round-framed glasses were perched on his forehead in the manner of an absent-minded professor. He was sitting on a couch at the Grocery on Home, a tiny former community grocery store in the city’s Grant Park neighborhood. Arnett initially bought the Grocery as a place to live, then repurposed it in 2010 into an intimate music venue.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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      South Korean R&B Singer Wheesung Is Found Dead at 43

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      The artist was known for popularizing the musical genre in the country, but convictions for drug abuse damaged his image.The South Korean singer-songwriter Wheesung, who popularized R&B music in the country but had documented struggles with drug abuse, was found dead in his home in Seoul on Monday evening, police said. He was 43.Fire department officials found the singer, whose birth name was Choi Whee-sung, in a state of cardiac arrest in his apartment around 6:30 p.m. on Monday. An officer at Seoul Gwangjin Police Station said there was no evidence of a break-in or foul play, and that the authorities were investigating the possibility of a drug overdose.The death is the latest in a string of tragedies to strike the country’s booming entertainment industry. Several South Korean celebrities have died including Kim Sae-ron, a young actress who was found dead at her home a few weeks ago. Police ruled Ms. Kim’s death a suicide.Mr. Choi, who also went by Realslow, began his career in 2002 with the album “Like a Movie” and quickly gained critical and popular acclaim, winning several South Korean music awards in the same year. `He released around a dozen albums and also starred in musicals, playing iconic roles including Zorro and Elvis Presley. Mr. Choi also helped write music for some of South Korea’s most successful K-pop bands, including Twice and Super Junior.His career suffered a setback in 2021, after he was found guilty of purchasing and using propofol, a powerful sedative that is a controlled substance in South Korea, on several occasions. He received a suspended sentence of one year in prison, avoiding jail time on the condition that he didn’t reoffend. He was also fined 60.5 million won (around $41,000), ordered to perform community service, and undergo drug treatment.With the drug charge, Mr. Choi came under scrutiny from the media and faced harsh public criticism, with some people posting hateful comments online. In South Korea, the social standing of celebrities usually hinges on having a blemish-free reputation and blameless character.Singers in South Korea posted tributes in honor of Wheesung on their social media accounts. “His music was a big part of my 20s,” the rapper Paloalto wrote on Instagram along with a picture of Mr. Choi’s first album cover. “Thank you for being there with me.”Wheesung had been scheduled to perform on March 15 with the singer KCM in Daegu, a city in the country’s south.Tajoy Entertainment, the company that managed Wheesung, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.In South Korea, call 109 for the health ministry’s suicide prevention hotline, or visit the Korean-language site 129.go.kr/109. More