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      Meet Joni Mitchell’s Joni Jam Crew

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      A cast of musicians, led by Brandi Carlile, joined the 79-year-old singer and songwriter onstage at the Gorge in Washington on Saturday.Allison Russell: clarinetist, singer and lyricist. Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesDear listeners,Consider this a postcard from Wenatchee, a small city nestled in the hills of central Washington. Out here, the blue highway signs that usually serve as mile markers instead display the types of apple trees you’re driving by: Fuji, Gala, Honeycrisp. I made an eager pilgrimage to this corner of the world over the weekend (along with a bunch of other Joni Mitchell fans) to see Mitchell headline the Gorge Amphitheater at her first ticketed concert in more than 20 years.To call the show miraculous does not feel like hyperbole. In the review I wrote sleep-deprived in the middle of the night, I likened it to seeing a bird in the wild that you thought had gone extinct. Days later, I can’t think of any other way to describe it.After Mitchell’s near fatal brain aneurysm in 2015, I doubted we’d ever hear her sing again at all, let alone hit some of those rich, resonant notes in songs like “Amelia,” “The Circle Game” and “Carey” on Saturday night. Those videos of her surprise appearance at last year’s Newport Folk Festival were certainly something. But the so-called Joni Jam at the Gorge was proof that she’s spent the last year — on the brink of turning 80, no less — working hard to strengthen her voice. It was inspiring to behold.Like the Newport set, the Joni Jam was communal by nature, spearheaded by Mitchell’s friend Brandi Carlile and designed to have the feel of the musical gatherings Mitchell frequently hosts in her living room. That made the show feel relatively egoless: Though there were some headline-worthy names present, there were no dramatic, please-welcome-to-the-stage entrances or bowed departures. Everyone was onstage the whole time, either jamming, singing or listening intently.The different performers onstage spoke to the diversity of Mitchell’s influence: Annie Lennox, Allison Russell, Wendy and Lisa from Prince’s Revolution. Since I still can’t get the concert off my mind, I thought I’d celebrate that spirit of musical community by offering a kind of who’s who of the Joni Jam. Some names you’ll probably recognize, others you might not — all the more reason to give them a listen. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find some fresh apples before leaving town.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Annie Lennox: “No More ‘I Love You’s’”Earlier this year, when Mitchell received the Library of Congress’s prestigious Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, the great Annie Lennox gave a performance of “Both Sides Now” that brought something entirely new out of that song. Seriously, just watch it. The dramatic finger-pointing! On Saturday night, Lennox honored Mitchell with a synthy, atmospheric cover of “Ladies of the Canyon,” similar to the version she recorded for a 2007 Mitchell tribute album. Lennox has long been a great, fluid interpreter of other people’s material: For the longest time, I didn’t even know that “No More ‘I Love You’s,’” the leadoff track from her 1995 album “Medusa,” was a cover. But it is, and Lennox lifted a wonderful 1986 song by the Lover Speaks out of semi-obscurity with this passionate rendition. As ever, she has taste. (Listen on YouTube)2. Allison Russell: “The Returner”Onstage, when she accompanied her for a rendition of “Young at Heart,” Mitchell called the Americana artist Allison Russell “the most beautiful clarinet player ever.” But she’s a heck of a singer and lyricist, too, as this uplifting title track from her upcoming second album “The Returner” attests. (Listen on YouTube)3. Sarah McLachlan: “Sweet Surrender”Just a very underrated single from Sarah McLachlan’s multiplatinum “Surfacing.” Put some respect on Sarah McLachlan’s name! (Listen on YouTube)4. Blake Mills: “Skeleton Is Walking”Mitchell’s Gorge performance of “Amelia,” from her singular 1976 album “Hejira,” was a highlight for me — not only for the lushness of her vocals, but because of the musician and producer Blake Mills’s faithful accompaniment, on Mitchell’s own guitar. There’s a precise kind of spaciousness to the guitar phrasings on “Hejira,” and Mills did an excellent job recreating them. You can hear more of his nimble guitar work on the ambling, psychedelic solo he noodles over the back half of “Skeleton Is Walking,” from his forthcoming solo album, “Jelly Road.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Lucius: “Go Home”Although they dress onstage like fraternal twins, Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig are not even sisters. Judging by their tight, soulful harmonies, though, you’d almost swear they were. The duo are prolific backing vocalists, and in their Joni Jam appearances they’ve nailed that almost Andrews Sisters-esque harmony that Mitchell often employed on her folkier albums. They let loose with something a little rawer here on a standout track from the 2014 Lucius album “Wildewoman.” (Listen on YouTube)6. Brandi Carlile: “The Story”“Joni hasn’t always felt the appreciation that exists amongst humanity for her,” Carlile said in a CBS News interview right after the Newport performance. “But I wanted her to feel that.” Carlile’s friendship and support have been crucial to Mitchell’s return — onstage, she clearly knows how to make Mitchell feel relaxed and at home (sometimes literally: the Gorge set evoked Mitchell’s living room). Let’s raise a glass (or bottle) of pinot grigio to Carlile, or just let her classic 2007 hit “The Story” rip. (Listen on YouTube)7. Prince and the Revolution: “Purple Rain”Speaking of stories, Wendy Melvoin told a great one at the Joni Jam: Apparently Mitchell came to a Prince concert on the “Purple Rain” tour, and Prince wanted to invite her onstage to sing the title track. But she told Prince she didn’t know the words! (Imagine.) It’s easy, he told her: it’s just “Purple rain, purple rain, purple rain.” I may never hear this song again without picturing this exchange. (Listen on YouTube)No regrets, coyote,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“A Who’s Who of the Joni Jam” track listTrack 1: Annie Lennox, “No More ‘I Love You’s’”Track 2: Allison Russell, “The Returner”Track 3: Sarah McLachlan, “Sweet Surrender”Track 4: Blake Mills, “Skeleton Is Walking”Track 5: Lucius, “Go Home”Track 6: Brandi Carlile, “The Story”Track 7: Prince and the Revolution, “Purple Rain”Bonus TracksAfter I wrote about my earliest favorite songs in Friday’s newsletter, a bunch of you wrote in to share your own stories. I appreciated every single one of them, but I admit that this one may have been my favorite:“Our son, who is a couple years younger than you, used to like to sing the chorus of ‘Loser’ by Beck at the top of his lungs in public places like grocery stores when he was 3. We got a lot of strange, disapproving looks.” More

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      Review: Kaija Saariaho’s ‘Adriana Mater,’ After Her Death

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      The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the director Peter Sellars, two Saariaho collaborators, brought “Adriana Mater” to the San Francisco Symphony.The composer Kaija Saariaho, who died earlier this month at 70, spent much of her career expecting not to write an opera. She saw it as a dusty art form, she once said, and couldn’t picture translating her sound world of slow, subtle harmonic changes into melodies and arias.A pair of directors changed her mind. In the early 1990s she saw Patrice Chéreau’s staging of “Wozzeck” in Paris and Peter Sellars’s production of “Saint François d’Assise” at the Salzburg Festival — experiences that, she later said, “opened my mind to what can be done by telling a story with music.”Saariaho’s first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” an ethereal allegory of medieval love, premiered at Salzburg in 2000 and quickly became her most famous work. Even so, she didn’t plan to compose another.But some nudges, and a commission from the Paris Opera, led to “Adriana Mater” in 2006. Less than a week after Saariaho’s death, that sophomore outing was revived at the San Francisco Symphony — by the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sellars, two of her longtime collaborators, who first brought the work to life.The long-planned event was a ready-made memorial for news so fresh it had to be acknowledged with a program insert. On that succinct sheet of paper, Salonen touchingly remarked, “This is the first time I’ll conduct the music without my friend.” And Sellars described the performance as “the best way we know to remember her, call her back and let her go again.”“Adriana Mater” is starkly different from “L’Amour”: contemporary in its subject matter and more explicitly dramatic. But then, all of Saariaho’s operas are distinct, even if they add up to stars in the same constellation.The composer who was reluctant to write for theater would go on to create the richly nuanced monodrama “Émilie,” premiered by the soprano Karita Mattila in 2010; the Noh-inspired “Only the Sound Remains,” staged in 2016; and “Innocence,” first unveiled at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021, a work powerfully wise in its ideas and execution, a smoothly cohesive collage of styles that now seems like something of a career capstone, if not her masterpiece.History will decide what music of Saariaho’s will survive. It’s hard, however, to imagine the operas fading from the repertoire. They represent the art form at its best: elevated expression that, through storytelling, constantly revisits themes that are timeless and universal. For all their complexity, they are about how we love, how we hurt, how we die. Beyond any surface-level drama, like a school shooting in “Innocence” or war in “Adriana Mater,” these works are utterly relevant — not only in how they pertain to our moment, but also in how they capture the root of that word, as the author Garth Greenwell has observed of the French “relever,” to raise back up.The San Francisco Symphony’s production was staged by Peter Sellars and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, both of whom were involved with the opera’s premiere in 2006.Brittany Hosea-SmallThat much was clear during the San Francisco Symphony’s performances of “Adriana Mater,” which concluded on Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall and were recorded for later release. Amin Maalouf, the librettist for all of Saariaho’s operas until “Innocence,” has said that the work recalls conflict in the Balkans at the end of the 20th century. But its themes resonate independent of that reference point. It is fundamentally about the uncertainty of motherhood, and about compassion in the face of brutality — about seeking, as one character says, salvation over vengeance.“Adriana Mater” is an opera of difficult questions and emotions but straightforward plot. Adriana (the mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, a mighty presence in a small frame) rebuffs Tsargo, a drunk young man, with a mixture of disgust and pity. But later, Tsargo — sung by the baritone Christopher Purves with Alberich-like bite — returns during wartime to rape her, empowered by circumstance and an assault rifle. Adriana becomes pregnant, and despite warnings from her sister, Refka (the alluringly lyrical soprano Axelle Fanyo), chooses to have the baby. “It isn’t his child,” Adriana says. “It’s mine.”But she does worry: Will the child be more like Tsargo or like her? Cain or Abel? Act II, set 17 years later, puts that uncertainty to the test when her son, Yonas (an agile, heldentenor-like Nicholas Phan) learns his father’s identity and sets out to kill him. But when he sees Tsargo, blind and broken, he cannot bring himself to do it. Yonas feels ashamed for not carrying out the murder, but his mother is relieved. He is truly her son.Saariaho’s music is rarely representational. Adriana’s offstage rape is punctuated with violent chords, and drilling percussion evokes the assault of war, but otherwise the writing favors atmosphere and abstraction. In a way that prefigures the grand tapestry of “Innocence,” she attaches specific sounds to each character: turbulent harmony for Adriana, long melodic lines for Refka, darkly shadowed low strings for Tsargo, frantic lightness for Yonas. Too often in contemporary music, conductors seem merely to be keeping time; but all this was handled deftly by Salonen, who looked as animated and assured as if he were conducting Beethoven.Sellars’s concert-hall staging was minimal, as was his original production at the Paris Opera. Here, the action unfolded on platforms of various heights that kept the singers, looking contemporary, if not specifically of any one place, in Camille Assaf’s costumes, almost always isolated. At the start, Adriana and Tsargo’s little stages, under James F. Ingalls’s lighting, were colored yellow and blue, as if to suggest that the story took place in Ukraine.But any comparison to the current war didn’t linger. The colors changed constantly, mercurial and expressive, as the action unfolded. Neither Sellars nor the opera, after all, needed an updated story to make it more recognizable. That’s already in the score, in the way Saariaho’s delicately consoling music stares down the worst of the world and says: The only way forward is grace.‘Adriana Mater’Performed on Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. More

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      Sono Fest! Freely Dips Into Jazz and Classical Music

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      In its opening days, Ethan Iverson’s Sono Fest! in Brooklyn was already showing promise.Update: Ethan Iverson announced on Monday that the rest of Sono Fest! would not proceed as scheduled because the owner of the Soapbox Gallery, responsible for running the theater, had tested positive for Covid-19.This past week, I did something with a classical music concert that I have often enjoyed at jazz clubs: I hung back to hear the same program again when it returned for a second set.It was opening night of the inaugural Sono Fest!, founded and programmed by the jazz pianist and composer Ethan Iverson, and running through June 23 at Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn. (The space, in addition to hosting audiences in its 60-seat space, is also offering ticketed livestreams of the events.) Iverson was wrapping up a concert with the violinist Miranda Cuckson when he casually noted that anyone who wanted to hear the same pieces again could remain for the next gig.Their performance — of works for violin and piano by Peter Lieberson, Louise Talma and George Walker — had been among the best chamber music shows I’d heard all season. (Another delight: Iverson’s jaunty and lyrical Piano Sonata, which he’d performed alone.) Rapport between players sometimes develops as a night progresses, so why not stick around?That decision paid dividends quickly — particularly during Talma’s Sonata (1962), a choice rarity that pairs mid-20th-century harmonic modernism with forceful rhythmic drive. In the first set, Cuckson had devoted a range of expressive talents to the violin writing: carefully shading some drier moments of muted playing, and later deploying her silvery sound to underline the singing qualities embedded in an otherwise complex idiom.Cuckson and Iverson had been enviably coordinated during the furious passages in the earlier set — if sometimes a touch stiffly so. Later, though, they achieved a give and take that was something else: At select junctures, she powered slightly ahead of his beat, allowing an almost-rushed climactic phrase in the violin to decay dramatically over his rhythmically precise piano.Afterward, Iverson told the audience that they were experiencing “the deep set.” Those of us who had sat through knew just how right he was.“The truth of the matter is, I love it all,” Iverson said. “And I think we all should love it all. I’m really trying to dig deep.”Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesPermission to linger and experience multiple sets is just one aspect of Iverson’s merging of jazz and classical traditions at his new festival. Last Wednesday, as skies darkened in New York because of Canadian wildfires, he played mostly jazz standards — including, pointedly, Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” — with Chris Potter, the storied tenor saxophone player. (I caught that performance the next day on video.)On Thursday, you can catch multiple sets by Aaron Diehl, a first-call jazz pianist who also plays the music of Gershwin with symphony orchestras (and the music of Philip Glass on recordings). Other nights trend more toward more traditional chamber fare. But rarely too traditional: On Tuesday, the vocalist Judith Berkson — who sings adaptations of Schumann as well as her own electroacoustic pieces — will bring her visionary practice to the Soapbox.In an interview between sets last week, Iverson said of his festival’s organizing principles: “The truth of the matter is, I love it all. And I think we all should love it all. I’m really trying to dig deep.”After mentioning that the composers represented on his program with Cuckson were all American, Iverson noted, “There’s syncopation in the Walker and the Talma,” adding that in the latter case, the extent of the rhythmic exuberance makes him think of Harlem Stride piano legend James P. Johnson.Johnson, as it happens, gets a tip of the hat in Iverson’s Piano Sonata, which he premiered last year at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he teaches.That piece is structured like a sonata in the model of Haydn and other classical forebears, but first-movement explosion of rhythm in the bass receives the indication “a la James P. Johnson” in the score. And it’s not the sonata’s only jazz-world nod: After a snatch of Mozartean melody in the second movement, Iverson revels in descending licks redolent of the soul jazz tradition, marked “a la Bobby Timmons.”This is no less referential than another charming classical piece of Iverson’s, “Concerto to Scale,” which he premiered with the American Composers Orchestra in 2018. But to its credit, the sonata is less jokey — and thus more secure — when dealing with its layered source materials. To my ear, that makes it a new advance in his engagement with fully notated writing.Playing the sonata last week, both times, Iverson dived right into his own crunchy, chromatic figures with a ferocity that was absent in video from the New England Conservatory premiere, in which he was “a little bit nervous,” he said.But at Soapbox, “I was certainly warmed up,” he said, having played the Talma piece before his sonata. Always, though, he has been confident in the work, which he has tinkered with and recorded for his next release on the Blue Note label, scheduled for 2024.In terms of the sonata’s spirit, he said: “I do think when people who don’t swim in the world every day hand in formal composition, they often are too serious. I’d actually rather be rambunctious.”“I feel James P. with me,” he added. “I feel Erroll Garner with me. And I feel Ralph Shapey.”The language Iverson uses when discussing his upcoming compositional premieres — including more sonatas, as well as orchestral arrangements of Ellington — enjoys a reprise whenever he discusses the balance of the Sono Fest! programming. In both cases, he is looking for new paths. And for Iverson, all routes move within what he calls “this very American phenomenon.”Before hopping back onstage for his second set last week, he observed: “It’s not happening in Germany or England. There’s still something I like so much about all of this: these are American composers I’m playing. Scott Joplin is part of it. And Henry Mancini is part of it. There’s a whole thing, there, that’s our language. If you really love it all, there’s incredible room still, to find a way.” More

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      Stray Kids Reach No. 1 (Again) With CD Sales, Not Streams

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      An array of collectible CD packages sent the K-pop octet to the top of the Billboard 200, while new releases by Jelly Roll, Enhypen and Foo Fighters open in the Top 10.For 12 straight weeks recently, the country star Morgan Wallen dominated the Billboard album chart, but others are now breaking through. Last week, Taylor Swift returned to the top with deluxe versions of her latest album, “Midnights,” and this week the K-pop group Stray Kids scores its third No. 1 album in 15 months with “Five-Star.”A barrage of collectible CD releases — 18 in all — sent the eight-member Stray Kids to No. 1. “Five-Star,” with 12 tracks sung mostly in Korean, opens with the equivalent of 249,500 sales in the United States, 231,000 of those on CD, according to the tracking service Luminate.The album was also credited with nearly 20 million streams. To put that number in perspective, on last week’s singles chart Wallen had 33 million clicks for his No. 1 song “Last Night” — just one of the 36 tracks on his album, “One Thing at a Time,” which holds at No. 2 this week. (Swift’s “Midnights” falls four spots to No. 5.)The success of Wallen, Swift and Stray Kids is also notable in that all three share the same record label: Republic Records, a division of the giant Universal Music Group. Counting releases by those artists and another in February by the K-pop group Tomorrow X Together, Republic has now held the No. 1 spot for 15 of the 23 weeks of the year so far.A clutch of new releases are in the Top 10. In third place is “Whitsitt Chapel” by Jelly Roll, the face-tattooed rapper-turned-country singer who has become the toast of Nashville. Enhypen, another K-pop act, lands at No. 4 with “Dark Blood.”The soundtrack to “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” by the star hip-hop producer Metro Boomin — with guest appearances by Offset, ASAP Rocky, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Wayne, 21 Savage and many others — opens at No. 7. And Foo Fighters’ “But Here We Are,” the band’s first since the death of its drummer Taylor Hawkins last year, starts at No. 8. More

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      Opera About Refugee Children to Premiere at Spoleto Festival

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      “Ruinous Gods,” an exploration of the trauma of mass displacement, will be staged in Charleston, S.C., next year.A chamber opera about refugee children and the trauma of mass displacement will premiere next year at Spoleto Festival USA, the organization in Charleston, S.C., announced on Saturday.That work, “Ruinous Gods,” tells the story of a mother and her 12-year-old daughter, who are forced to flee their home. The opera evokes the crises over refugee families and migrant children that have played out in recent years in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere.The violinist and composer Layale Chaker, who was born in France and raised in Lebanon, is writing the music, to a libretto by Lisa Schlesinger, a playwright, activist and educator from New York.“‘Ruinous Gods’ speaks to the maddening political morass that drags down the world’s most vulnerable,” said Mena Mark Hanna, Spoleto’s general director. “Reverberations of this piece shook me to my core, especially as a father.”The festival, known for bringing artists together across disciplines and commissioning and staging innovative works, has sought in recent years to more directly address contemporary social problems.Last year, Spoleto gave the premiere of “Omar,” an opera by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels based on the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim man from West Africa who was enslaved and transported to Charleston in 1807. The work went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for music.“Ruinous Gods” focuses on a condition known as resignation syndrome, in which children living in a state of limbo fall into comalike states. It is loosely based on the Greek story of Persephone and Demeter.Schlesinger said she began thinking about the story as a rush of migrants, many from Syria, entered Europe in 2015. She was moved by reports about resignation syndrome affecting refugee children in Sweden in 2017.“I could feel these children inside my body, like the way that they felt like they needed to fall asleep in order to be in the world,” she said. “That was really the genesis for this piece.”Chaker said that her desire for the work was to prompt fresh conversations about how governments and societies treat migrant families.“I hope that this provides us with the means to interrogate our legacy, the state of the world as we are leaving to our children,” she said. “How can we do better and how can we ensure we leave the world kinder and more just to them, for them to be able to carry on?” More

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      What Happens When A.I. Enters the Concert Hall

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      Artificial intelligence is not new to classical music. But its recent, rapid developments have composers worried, and intrigued.When the composer and vocalist Jen Wang took the stage at the Monk Space in Los Angeles to perform Alvin Lucier’s “The Duke of York” (1971) earlier this year, she sang with a digital rendition of her voice, synthesized by artificial intelligence.It was the first time she had done that. “I thought it was going to be really disorienting,” Wang said in an interview, “but it felt like I was collaborating with this instrument that was me and was not me.”Isaac Io Schankler, a composer and music professor at Cal Poly Pomona, conceived the performance and joined Wang onstage to monitor and manipulate Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder, or R.A.V.E., the neural audio synthesis algorithm that modeled Wang’s voice.R.A.V.E. is an example of machine learning, a specific category of artificial intelligence technology that musicians have experimented with since the 1990s — but that now is defined by rapid development, the arrival of publicly available, A.I.-powered music tools and the dominating influence of high-profile initiatives by large tech companies.Dr. Schankler ultimately used R.A.V.E in that performance of “The Duke Of York,” though, because its ability to augment an individual performer’s sound, they said, “seemed thematically resonant with the piece.” For it to work, the duo needed to train it on a personalized corpus of recordings. “I sang and spoke for three hours straight,” Wang recalled. “I sang every song I could think of.”Antoine Caillon developed R.A.V.E. in 2021, during his graduate studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by the composer Pierre Boulez in Paris. “R.A.V.E.’s goal is to reconstruct its input,” he said. “The model compresses the audio signal it receives and tries to extract the sound’s salient features in order to resynthesize it properly.”Wang felt comfortable performing with the software because, no matter the sounds it produced in the moment, she could hear herself in R.A.V.E.’s synthesized voice. “The gestures were surprising, and the textures were surprising,” she said, “but the timbre was incredibly familiar.” And, because R.A.V.E. is compatible with common electronic music software, Dr. Schankler was able to adjust the program in real time, they said, to “create this halo of other versions of Jen’s voice around her.”Tina Tallon, a composer and professor of A.I. and the arts at the University of Florida, said that musicians have used various A.I.-related technologies since the mid-20th century.“There are rule-based systems, which is what artificial intelligence used to be in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s,” she said, “and then there is machine learning, which became more popular and more practical in the ’90s, and involves ingesting large amounts of data to infer how a system functions.”Today, developments in A.I. that were once contained to specialized applications impinge on virtually every corner of life, and already impact the way people make music. Dr. Caillon, in addition to developing R.A.V.E., has contributed to the Google-led projects SingSong, which generates accompaniments for recorded vocal melodies, and MusicLM, another text-to-music generator. Innovations in other areas are driving new music technologies, too: WavTool, a recently released, A.I.-powered music production platform, fully integrates OpenAI’s GPT-4 to enable users to create music via text prompts.For Dr. Tallon, the difference in scale between individual composers’ customized use of A.I. and these new, broad-reaching technologies represents a cause for concern.“We are looking at different types of datasets that are compiled for different reasons,” she said. “Tools like MusicLM are trained on datasets that are compiled by pulling from thousands of hours of labeled audio from YouTube and other places on the internet.”“When I design a tool for my own personal use,” Dr. Tallon continued, “I’m looking at data related to my sonic priorities. But public-facing technologies use datasets that focus on, for instance, aesthetic ideals that align more closely with Western classical systems of organizing pitches and rhythms.”Concerns over bias in music-related A.I. tools do not stop at aesthetics. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, a music professor at Brown University, also worries about how these technologies can reproduce social hierarchies.“There is a very specific racial discourse that I’m very concerned about,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that hip-hop artistry is forming the testing ground for understanding how A.I. affects artists and their artistry given the centuries-long story of co-optation and theft of Black expressive forms by those in power.”The popularity of recent A.I.-generated songs that mimicked artists like Drake, the Weeknd, Travis Scott and others have animated Dr. Lumumba-Kasongo’s fears. “What I’m most concerned about with A.I. Drake and A.I. Travis Scott is that their music is highly listenable,” she said, “and calls into question any need for an artist once they’ve articulated a distinct ‘voice.’”For Dr. Schankler, there are key differences between using R.A.V.E. to synthesize new versions of a collaborator’s voice and using A.I. to anonymously imitate a living musician. “I don’t find it super interesting to copy someone’s voice exactly, because that person already exists,” they said. “I’m more interested in the new sonic possibilities of this technology. And what I like about R.A.V.E. is that I can work with a small dataset that is created by one person who gives their permission and participates in the process.”The composer Robert Laidlow also uses A.I. in his work to contemplate the technology’s fraught implications. “Silicon,” which premiered last October with the BBC Philharmonic under Vimbayi Kaziboni, employs multiple tools to explore themes drawn from the technology’s transformative and disruptive potential.Laidlow described “Silicon” as “about technology as much as it uses technology,” adding: “The overriding aesthetic of each movement of this piece are the questions, ‘What does it mean for an orchestra to use this technology?’ and ‘What would be the point of an orchestra if we had a technology that can emulate it in every way?’”The work’s entirely acoustic first movement features a mixture of Laidlow’s original music and ideas he adapted from the output, he said, of a “symbolic, generative A.I. that was trained on notated material from composers all throughout history.” The second movement features an A.I.-powered digital instrument, performed by the orchestra’s pianist, that, “sometimes mimics the orchestra and sometimes makes uncanny, weird sounds.”In the last movement, the orchestra is accompanied with sounds generated by a neural synthesis program called PRiSM-SampleRNN, which is akin to R.A.V.E. and was trained on a large archive of BBC Philharmonic radio broadcasts. Laidlow describes the resulting audio as, “featuring synthesized orchestral music, voices of phantom presenters and the sounds the artificial intelligence has learned from audiences.”The size of “Silicon” contrasts with the intimacy of Dr. Schankler and Wang’s performance of “The Duke of York.” But both instances illustrate A.I.’s potential to expand musical practices and human expression. And, importantly, by employing small, curated datasets tailored to individual collaborators, these projects attempt to obviate ethical concerns many have identified in larger-scale technologies.George E. Lewis, a music professor at Columbia University, has designed and performed alongside interactive A.I. music programs for four decades, focusing primarily on the technology’s capacity to participate in live performance. “I keep talking about real-time dialogue,” he said. “Music is so communal, it’s so personal, it’s so dialogic, it’s communitarian.”He is hopeful that people will continue to explore interactivity and spontaneity. “It seems the current generation of A.I. music programs have been designed for a culturally specific way of thinking about music,” Lewis said. “Imagine if the culture favored improvisation.”As a composer, Lewis is continuing to explore this topic, including his recent work “Forager,” for chamber ensemble and A.I., which was created during a 2022 residency at PRiSM. The piece marks the latest update to “Voyager,” a piece that he developed in 1985 and described as a, “virtual improvising pianist.” “Forager” enhances the software’s responsiveness to its human co-performers with new programming that enables what he called, “a more holistic recognition” of musical materials.The differences among Dr. Schankler’s use of R.A.V.E., Robert Laidlow’s orchestral work “Silicon” and Lewis’s interactive “Forager” underscore the nuances with which composers and experimental musicians are approaching A.I. This culture celebrates technology as means to customize musical ideas and computer-generated sounds to suit specific performers and a given moment. Still, these artistic aims stand at odds with the foreboding prompted by others like Dr. Tallon and Dr. Lumumba-Kasongo.Individual musicians can do their part to counter those worries by using A.I. ethically and generatively. But even so, as Laidlow observed, being truly individual — which is to say independent — is difficult.“There is a fundamental problem of resources in this field,” Laidlow said. “It is almost impossible to create something computationally powerful without the assistance of a huge, technologically advanced institute or corporation.” More

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      David Byrne’s ‘Here Lies Love’ Reaches Deal With Broadway Musicians

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      After the musicians’ union raised objections to the show’s plans to use recorded music instead of a live band, the show agreed to use 12 musicians.“Here Lies Love,” the new David Byrne musical scheduled to start previews on Broadway next week, has bowed to objections by a labor union and agreed that 12 musicians will be part of the production.The producers of the musical, which is a dance-club-like show about Imelda Marcos, and the union, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, announced the agreement late Friday afternoon.“On behalf of our entire cast, company and creative team, we have reached an agreement with Musicians Union Local 802, per the collective bargaining agreement,” the producers of the musical said in a statement. “We look forward to welcoming audiences to experience the revolutionary musical experience that is ‘Here Lies Love’ at the Broadway Theater beginning on Saturday, June 17.”The union issued a similarly terse, but slightly more detailed, statement, saying, “After negotiation, we have reached an agreement that will bring live music to ‘Here Lies Love’ with the inclusion of 12 musicians to the show. Broadway is a very special place with the best musicians and performances in the world, and we are glad this agreement honors that tradition.”Eric Koch, a communications consultant for the union, said three of the company’s actors would be counted among the 12 musicians.Asked about that, the producers responded: “‘Here Lies Love’ has always had three actor-musicians and a musical director in every production. The show’s integrity and the musical concept remains the same.”“Here Lies Love” is being led by a group of producers, including Patrick Catullo, Hal Luftig, Kevin Connor, Jose Antonio Vargas, Diana DiMenna and Clint Ramos. The show is one of the larger productions opening on Broadway this summer, with a big budget — it is being capitalized for up to $22 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission — and plans to redo the Broadway Theater so that the production can be staged in an immersive fashion, with much of the audience on a dance floor surrounded by the action.“Here Lies Love,” about Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, was written by Byrne and Fatboy Slim. It has been around for more than 15 years, and has been praised by critics and popular with audiences. It was presented as a song cycle at Carnegie Hall in 2007, and there were productions in 2012 at Mass MoCA, an art museum in the Berkshires; in 2013 at the Public Theater in New York; in 2014 at London’s National Theater and back at the Public for a second engagement; and in 2017 at the Seattle Repertory Theater.The production has in the past used recorded music, which the show said was meant to create a karaoke-like atmosphere, but as the Broadway opening neared, the labor union objected, saying its contract with the Broadway League requires the use of live musicians. The union had threatened to protest this weekend’s Tony Awards and the show’s upcoming previews; on Friday, the two sides settled the dispute. More

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      First Favorite Songs Are Like Sonic Baby Pictures

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      How a minor 1989 George Harrison single from the “Lethal Weapon 2” soundtrack opened a young listener’s ears.George Harrison, when he first had an impact on The Amplifier’s author.Pete Still/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,What was your first favorite song?I’m not talking about that hip, semi-obscure tune around which you formulated your preteen identity — the one you told everyone at school you loved because it made you seem mysterious and cool. I’m talking about a time before all that, before you were conscious of taste, and all you knew about a song you loved was that it struck a resounding chord somewhere deep inside of you.Here’s what I’m talking about:Shortly after I turned 3, “Lethal Weapon 2” came out on VHS. One night my dad was lucky enough to score this coveted Blockbuster rental, and because it was — gasp! — an R-rated movie, I was not allowed to go in the living room while he was watching it. Of course, for the next two hours there was nowhere in the universe that I wanted to be more desperately than the living room.From my safe, G-rated perch upstairs, I strained to hear any sound I could make out from this tantalizingly forbidden flick. I was getting so cranky about it that my parents made me a compromise: They would let me watch the closing credits of “Lethal Weapon 2” — a black screen filled with a bunch of ascending white words and names I could not yet read. But it didn’t matter, because the song that played while they scrolled was incredible. “Again!” I cried when it was over; they were kind and rewound. There I sat directly in front of the television, enraptured by what turned out to be a very minor 1989 George Harrison single, “Cheer Down.”I didn’t yet know who George Harrison was. I didn’t yet know that it is kind of random that George Harrison wrote the theme song for “Lethal Weapon 2.” I didn’t even know who the Beatles were. I just knew that this evocative, lightly melancholic sequence of chords, that comfortingly gruff voice and those slide guitar notes that streak across the song’s coda like shooting stars made me feel a certain way, and that I wanted to feel that way forever.Before he returned it to the video store — F.B.I. agents, look away! — my dad gamely taped the closing credits for me on a blank VHS. It’s still an inside joke in my family, the story of a 3-year-old future music critic constantly asking her parents to put on “the ‘Lethal Weapon tape,’” just so she could listen to this Harrison song over and over.You can learn a lot about a person from asking about their first favorite songs — it’s the sonic equivalent of looking at someone’s baby pictures. And since I’ve been dropping into your inbox twice a week with this newsletter, I figured it was only fair that you heard a few of mine.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Cat Stevens: “Moonshadow”I am pretty sure someone sang this as a lullaby to me when I was a baby, and to this day the-artist-formerly-known-as-Cat-Stevens’s voice can still make me feel an almost preternatural comfort — a feeling of being swaddled beyond what even the heaviest weighted blanket can offer. My parents got a CD player (state-of-the-art technology) when I was young, and I can still remember being taught how to place “Cat Stevens: Greatest Hits” into the tray very, very carefully and cue up track 8, which was of course my song, “Moonshadow.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Tom Petty: “Free Fallin’”I grew up in New Jersey and did not visit the West Coast until my mid-20s, so throughout my youth the proper nouns in this song sounded exquisitely exotic to me: Mulholland, Ventura Boulevard, this surely indescribably glamorous oasis called “Reseda.” “Free Fallin’” would now probably land on the shortlist of the most overplayed American rock songs of the 20th century, and yet — perhaps the reason I cannot imagine ever getting sick of it — I can still travel back to a time when its lyrics sounded alluringly strange to me, and when I believed there might be actual vampires haunting Ventura Boulevard. (Petty also co-wrote “Cheer Down,” and Jeff Lynne helped produce both of those songs — so clearly the Traveling Wilburys had a hold on my musical taste from an early age.) (Listen on YouTube)3. U2: “Zoo Station”After it came out in late 1991, U2’s angsty, glammy “Achtung Baby” was an absolute staple in my parents’ steel-blue Ford Taurus. Taking it in over and over again from the back seat, this album seemed to contain all of the mysteries of the adult world, set somewhere just beyond my realm of understanding. All I knew was that it sounded cool. And a little scary! On “Achtung Baby,” relatively straightforward rock songs are haunted by weird, ghostly sounds, like the mournful, malfunctioning tape loop at the beginning of “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” the eerie distortion of “Until the End of the World” or any number of ghost noises that lurk throughout the tone-setting opener “Zoo Station.” I later realized that a lot of this strangeness was the result of the Edge’s adventurousness with effects pedals and, even more ineffably, Brian Eno’s arty production. (I also realized much later — for shame — that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” was an iconic second-wave feminist slogan, not a funny lyric that Bono made up.) No matter what U2 does or how many albums it forcefully installs on my iPhone, “Achtung Baby” will always have a special place in my heart for being one of the first records to freak me out — in a good way. (Listen on YouTube)4. Peter Gabriel: “Steam”Peter Gabriel is another artist whose voice and melodic sensibility I’ve been drawn to — disquieted and then subsequently comforted by — for as long as I can remember. The seemingly childlike “Games Without Frontiers” was a song I always loved hearing on the radio, even if its geopolitical message and lyrical content went completely over my head. The one I requested over and over, though, was Gabriel’s punchy, absurdly satirical 1992 single “Steam.” (It boasts what I now regard as the most 1992 music video of all time.) Except I confess that I thought that this song was called … “Steve.” Yes, “Steve.” I imagined on the chorus he was demanding, somewhat menacingly over a telephone, “Give me Steve.” Being a kid is weird. So is this song. (Listen on YouTube)5. Fine Young Cannibals: “She Drives Me Crazy”This song was everywhere as the ’80s became the ’90s — it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for a week in April 1989 — and, to quote a phrase, I just could not help myself. The bright, synthetic textures were such an adrenaline rush to me: the cavernous echo of that hopscotching breakbeat, those jagged lightning-bolt riffs that puncture the production’s perfect sheen, and the acrobatic, androgynous beauty of Roland Gift’s vocals. It sounded like the national anthem of another planet, and I wanted to live there. Even today, I’ll sometimes become obsessed with a song and not realize why I can’t stop listening to it, until I realize: “Duh, it kind of sounds like ‘She Drives Me Crazy.’” I am of course incredibly biased, still being an excitable ’80s baby at heart, but I still think it’s one of the more perfect pop songs ever written. (Listen on YouTube)6. George Harrison: “Cheer Down”Play the “Lethal Weapon” tape! Again! (Listen on YouTube)Give me Steve,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Sonic Baby Pictures” track listTrack 1: Cat Stevens, “Moonshadow”Track 2: Tom Petty, “Free Fallin’”Track 3: U2, “Zoo Station”Track 4: Peter Gabriel, “Steam”Track 5: Fine Young Cannibals, “She Drives Me Crazy”Track 6: George Harrison, “Cheer Down”Bonus tracksA few years back, I wrote about another song that similarly enchanted me as a child, perhaps more than any other: Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” I omitted that track from this playlist because I would prefer that you continue subscribing to this newsletter, but you can read that essay if you’re so inclined.I also love this 2014 column from my old colleague at Pitchfork, the brilliant Jayson Greene, about a song that captivated him at a very early age: Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”Plus, if you’re looking for new music, this week’s Playlist has fresh tracks from PinkPantheress, Rosalía, Romy and more.Don’t forget: your Pride songs!I’m still collecting your stories and song suggestions for Pride. So, tell me: Was there a certain song that first gave you the courage to come out? Or is there a particular track that, to you, embodies the spirit of Pride? Share your answers here so I can consider them for an upcoming edition of The Amplifier. More