Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Ahead of World Tour, Blackpink’s Members Venture Out On Their Own

      by

      On new solo releases, Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rosé each face a choice: double-down or retreat from their roles in the smash K-pop girl group.As K-pop supergroups go, Blackpink was — remains? — a supernova. In the late 2010s, it released a series of EPs and singles that emphasized maximalism and pandemonium. Its songs were huge, and pugnacious, and rowdy — a bit of a rejoinder to some of the delicate girl groups that preceded it, and a bit of a taunt about just how much mayhem a pop hit could contain.Blackpink was also utterly modern — though functionally split between its true singers, Rosé and Jisoo, and its rappers, Lisa and Jennie, there was a surprising amount of vocal versatility across all the group members. Their flexibility kept the group’s music nimble and unpredictable — ideas arrived at warp speed, and departed almost as quickly.After a few years, though, Blackpink’s chaos began to rattle and rankle a bit — its hugeness in sound, and also in global success, threatened to topple the empire.And so there was a hiatus, albeit a brief one, that’s now ending with the release of solo projects by all four members, in advance of a reunion tour that begins in July. (Reunions aren’t what they used to be — the group last toured in 2023.)In theory, the albums should be an opportunity to underscore what each of the four does best, and an opportunity to expand on the roles they played in the group — and sometimes the new releases do. But more often, holding the albums side by side tells a story about record label ambitions and the more legible parts of K-pop’s genre cross-pollination more so than the artistic ambitions of each member.Lisa and Jennie, most responsible for Blackpink’s signature attitude, are reckoning with similar pressures on their new albums, both of which nod to the sound that made the group erupt while attempting to chisel out a path forward.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

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Larry Appelbaum, Who Found Jazz Treasure in the Archives, Dies at 67

      by

      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

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Party Like It’s 2009: The Playlist

      by

      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

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      New York Philharmonic Announces Its 2025-26 Season

      by

      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

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Sony Gives N.Y.U. $7.5 Million for an Audio Institute

      by

      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

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Inside the Detail-Obsessed, Essential World of Music Editing

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Lonnie Holley Never Plays a Song Twice. (Even His Own.)

      by

      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