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      What Opera Singers Gained, and Lost, Performing While Pregnant

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      “It’s adjustable, yes?” Standing in a dressing room in the opera house in Montpellier, France, in May, the soprano Maya Kherani tugged at the waistband of her tiered skirt. A draper kneeling behind her shook out the hem while the costume designer looked on with satisfaction.“We’re lucky,” she said, cupping her hands around the smooth orb of her belly. “It works for the character.”Kherani considered herself fortunate not because she had landed the role of Autonoe, a lead in “Orfeo,” by the Baroque composer Antonio Sartorio. Instead, Kherani, who gave birth on Sunday, was relieved to discover that her costumes in this modern-dress production came with elasticated waists and flat shoes that would make it bearable to sing and act while 32 weeks pregnant.Better yet: The stage director Benjamin Lazar decided to incorporate her pregnancy into the staging, making it the driving force behind her character’s quest to win back her errant lover.“It works dramaturgically really well for my character,” Kherani said in a FaceTime interview from Montpellier. “In my gestures and in the staging, I am referencing the pregnancy. Everyone’s really supportive, which is not always the case.”In most musical professions, pregnant women — not their employers — determine how long they continue to work. When opera singers want to perform pregnant, however, they rely on the good will and skill of a creative team: drapers who add strategic ruching to costumes; stage directors who might change a risky piece of stage business or adapt their concept to include the pregnancy.All too often, though, pregnant singers lose work. And yet opera is a rare business in which pregnancy and childbirth can directly and positively affect the core product — the voice. The science behind the phenomenon is still poorly understood, but it is such a noticeable and common occurrence that it has become something of a truism in opera: After childbirth, the voice seems enriched with warmth, creaminess and depth of color.Kherani found her voice improved after becoming pregnant. “You learn to use a wider base of breath support including the back muscles,” she said, “which I think every singer is trying to access, but I have been forced to.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesChanging bodies, of course, go along with the changing voices. A growing number of women in the industry are speaking out about what they feel are cancellations motivated by their appearance rather than sound. Officially, opera houses say they are concerned about safety. Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of Washington National Opera, said, “As a general rule we are interested in the safety and well-being of all artists working for us.” The Metropolitan Opera said in a statement that “if a pregnant singer wishes to perform, we make sure it is safe for them to do so.”But not all cancellations reflect the wishes of the pregnant singer. The mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke said in a video interview she was removed from a production weeks before opening when the company learned she was pregnant, and that she lost a role at another opera house after her management told the company she would be in her second trimester during the performances. A fellow singer later told her the production would have required Cooke to go down a slide, but Cooke said safety was not mentioned in the cancellation, nor was she consulted.“The industry still views you as their property,” Cooke said. “Your choices are their choices.”Like other singers who were eager to speak about pregnancy and motherhood in opera, Cooke asked me not to name the companies that canceled her contracts. In part, this was because of fear of retribution. But also, as the soprano Kathryn Lewek told me before her last performance in the Met’s recent run of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” the goal was not to shame or remove certain administrators or directors. “We want to help bring about change,” she said.More than five years after the #MeToo movement sparked an overdue investigation of sexual harassment and misconduct in classical music, the field is buzzing with voices calling for more equity around pregnancy and parenthood. The soprano Julia Bullock, who gave birth to her first child last year, has taken to Instagram to post about performing as a lactating mother. The mezzo J’Nai Bridges publicly shared her decision to freeze her eggs at a time in her career when she is a sought-after Carmen — a notably physical role. Social media is especially vital for singers because so many are freelancers, lacking the organized lobbying power of unions and working much of the year on the road.After a singer gives birth, Kherani said, “All the support and alignment creates a stronger foundation for the breath, and that can result in a richer tone.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesOn Facebook, the Momology private discussion groups for mothers in the performing arts are bursting at the seams. The classically trained Broadway singer Andrea Jones-Sojola, who created the first group in 2010, caps membership at 500 for each group to create a cohesive support network. This year, she opened a fifth. Jones said pregnancy-related cancellations are an important thread. “A lot of women were afraid to make it known publicly,” she said. “They were afraid to fight for themselves.”Singers also turn to each other for advice on how to navigate technical challenges during pregnancy. Many report doing their best work in their second and sometimes third trimesters, after symptoms like nausea and fatigue have abated and other physiological changes enhance their vocal power. Much of that power comes from the muscles and tissue singers learn to activate for what is known as appoggio, the internal support they lean on to control the breath flow. For some women, the presence of the unborn baby is like a corset they can push against.Dr. Paul Kwak, an ENT specialist who works with opera singers, said voices are affected by the hypervascular state the body enters in pregnancy as it creates more blood vessels and increases blood flow through tissue. Because the tissue and muscle in the vocal folds can become engorged with that extra blood, he said, “it can change the ways the vocal folds themselves oscillate.” At the same time, changes to the abdominal cavity create pressure on the bottom of the diaphragm. “Some women like it,” Dr. Kwak said, “they feel they have a support there, a shelf to push against.”Lewek, who sang the role of Queen of the Night in “The Magic Flute” through two pregnancies, described the experience as one of adjusting “to the fact that a human is taking up square footage in this very delicate part of my anatomy where I work.” By the second trimester, she said she felt as if she were performing “on steroids.” “Everything was so easy,” she said, “high notes just came shooting out of me.”Many singers said the improvement of the voice after childbirth may be the result of integrating tools used during pregnancy into their vocal technique. “You learn to use a wider base of breath support including the back muscles,” Kherani said, “which I think every singer is trying to access, but I have been forced to.” The changes in her body’s center of gravity also made her hyperaware of her posture, another important factor in singing. After a singer gives birth, she said, “All the support and alignment creates a stronger foundation for the breath, and that can result in a richer tone.”Dr. Kwak said richness was a difficult factor to study scientifically. A singer’s vocal tone, or timbre, is shaped by the tissue in her mouth, tongue, pharynx and face, he said, adding that it was possible this tissue became more supple after pregnancy. But studying its changes during and after pregnancy isn’t easy. “That’s why it’s such a mystery,” he said.Many female singers report doing their best work in their second and sometimes third trimesters, after symptoms like nausea and fatigue have abated and other physiological changes enhance their vocal power.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesRecovering from childbirth can be traumatic for many singers, who have to reacquaint themselves with a body that has changed most radically in the very area that is the powerhouse of their art. The soprano Erin Morley said she lost 30 pounds in the first week after each of her three deliveries. “I found it much easier to sing during my second and third trimesters than I did during the fourth trimester,” she said, echoing many mothers I asked about their recovery following childbirth.Six weeks after delivering her first child by cesarean, Lewek performed the Queen of the Night at the Met. (Morley sang the role of Pamina, the Queen’s daughter, having just given birth to her third, and the two singers spent their breaks breastfeeding in the same dressing room.) The week before rehearsals started, with her “entire support system slashed in half” by surgery, Lewek was still able to sing only up to a high G, a full octave below what Mozart’s music required.With the help of a physical therapist, she devised a workaround. “I found a diaphragmatic rather than muscular way of supporting staccati in Queen of the Night,” she said, “that, overall, I would never want to sustain my entire singing career. But it got me through that gig and it opened up a new set of skills.” Her tone, too, opened up, after the births of each of her children, when she said she noticed “a blossoming of the tone quality of my voice that now has lent itself to bigger repertoire.”She wondered: “Was it the pregnancies that really changed my voice, or was it the recovery?”Lewek said she was fortunate that she was able to perform her star role in the “Magic Flute” up until being eight and a half months pregnant with her first child. But during that same pregnancy, she was abruptly removed from a different role, shortly after she had shown up to rehearsals with a visible baby bump. Citing safety concerns involving the set, the company urged her to withdraw, she said, even though she felt comfortable with what the production required of her. When the company added financial incentives and promises of a future role, she relented.“It wasn’t my decision,” Lewek said, “but my agent said I should grab the offer and run.”Morley said she lost a major role because of concerns she wouldn’t fit through a trap door in the set. And during a later pregnancy she lost a role because it required singing an aria standing on a chair in what would have been her second trimester. “I was really considering making a statement,” she said, “but these were companies I wanted to work with again, and I was very worried that there would be repercussions.” Besides, her contract was paid, which she knew was not always the case in such situations. “It felt kind of like dirty money,” she said. “Like they were paying me so I would not talk.”One singer who went public was Julie Fuchs, after she was booted from a production of “The Magic Flute” two years ago at Hamburg State Opera, where she would have sung the role of Pamina four months into her first pregnancy. When Fuchs announced on social media that she was out of the production, her feed lit up with outrage. Many commentators suggested misogyny was to blame for the company’s decision, although the director, Jette Steckel, was a woman. After arbitration, Fuchs settled with the company under terms that do not allow her to speak about the case.The company said the production’s flight scenes made it unsafe for a pregnant Pamina. “The legal situation for the protection of the expectant mother is clear,” its director of artistic management, Tillmann Wiegand, said in a statement at the time, “and we will never take a health risk, even if only a risky scenic action could take place on the stage.”Kherani at home with her daughter Eila and husband Zaafir.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesInnovations in set design and technology can make opera stages a risky work environment. Wagnerians are especially likely to find themselves airborne. Morley said she came to an agreement with the Met to bow out of a planned Ring Cycle during her first pregnancy because as one of the Rhinemaidens she would have had to fly in a harness. But when Zambello learned of the pregnancy of a Valkyrie in a Washington National Opera production, she adapted her concept. While the other Valkyries made their entrance by parachute, she had this singer run onstage trailing hers. “I said, ‘OK, you are the nonflying Valkyrie,’” Zambello said. “They were all wearing flight jumpsuits and I said, ‘we’ll just make yours baggier.’”The mezzo Isabel Leonard was in her first trimester when she sang Cherubino in “Marriage of Figaro” at the Met, a trouser role — a male character sung by a woman. A dancer from childhood, she said she wasn’t showing at the time and told no one.Leonard said reconciling the rights of pregnant singers and theatrical standards required a more honest and open conversation. “We are storytellers,” she said. “How far into realism are we going? There has to be a bigger discussion within companies, production by production.”Those channels of communication may open up as more singers enter the administrative suites of opera houses. Bullock, a founding member of American Modern Opera Company, said her organization was looking into formalizing financial support for artists who needed to travel with young children. For a recent tour in Europe, her contract included a per diem, accommodations and travel fare for her infant and designated caregivers.“I can’t really expect that from every arts institution where I work,” Bullock said. “But if you want my presence fully, so that I can really do the job that you’ve hired me to do, this is a part of it.”The soprano Christine Goerke joined Detroit Opera as associate artistic director in 2021. She credits motherhood with propelling her into the dramatic lead roles in Wagner and Strauss she is now known for. “It allowed me to reach into these bigger roles in a way that suddenly felt like that’s where I belonged,” she said of the changes to her voice postpartum.A vocal champion of parents’ rights in opera, she said she recognized the complexity of the situation. “Now that I am on both sides of the desk, I can see the different sides of this. It is difficult to have a pregnant Octavian,” she said, referring to a trouser role in Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier.” However, she continued, “before a snap decision is made, I would like to see conversations between the artist who is pregnant and the director and bring in other people. It may be that you can come up with a different solution.”Many singers said opera houses were beginning to be more attuned to the needs of singers who are traveling with children. They might provide information on local nanny services and playgrounds or retain the services of a pediatrician along with the ENT who is on call in every theater. Lewek said together with other mothers she was preparing a list of best practices to improve equity for pregnant artists and parents in opera houses. She would like to see unilateral cancellations become a thing of the past.“This is not Hollywood. There is another priority why we’re hired to do the job,” she said. “It’s the voice.” More

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      Marcos Witt, the Pop Star Bringing Latino Evangelicals to the Pews

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      The sanctuary of Northside church in Charlotte, N.C., is built for joyous adoration. Enormous speakers hang from its domed ceiling, along with an elaborate system of colored lights. Its semicircular stage has wide, carpeted steps that lead down on all sides to rows and rows of wine red pews, which hold about 2,700 people. The evening I visited last February, they filled to capacity with Latino families who had come to see the evangelical superstar Marcos Witt.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      How Shahzad Ismaily Became Musicians’ Favorite Musician

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      Shahzad Ismaily cannot regulate his body temperature. He was born without sweat glands, or at least, not very many.When he was a month old, his parents rushed him to the hospital because he was beyond feverish and struggling to breathe. They learned their only child had ectodermal dysplasias, a rare genetic disorder that produces abnormalities at the body’s surface, including fingernails and teeth. Five decades later, Ismaily has become one of music’s most in-demand collaborators, flitting like a mischievous butterfly through genres as diverse as honeyed folk, rambunctious free jazz and spectral meditations sung in Urdu. He does not think these facts are unrelated.“Since I move with the temperatures of the outside world so readily, is it possible that I have an extra sensitivity to the tone of the world around me?” Ismaily, 51, recently wondered by phone from a tour stop in the Netherlands, as he briefly warmed himself in his hotel room’s bedside bathtub, during one of several extended interviews. “The hardest part of playing music with people is a kind of nonverbal, total empathetic awareness of how another person feels, how a room feels. I’m moving with the world around me. I’m not a sealed object.”Though he’s never released a solo album, Ismaily has played on or produced nearly 400 records since moving to New York in February 2000, including work by Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Yoko Ono. His Brooklyn studio, Figure 8, remains an affordable and inclusive hub for experimental musicians, even as Ismaily becomes a marquee session player.This year alone, his subtle keyboards lit the darkened corners of Feist’s “Multitudes”; his elastic bass provided the combustible matter inside “Connection,” a rock record from Ceramic Dog, his trio with the iconoclastic guitarist Marc Ribot; and his prismatic keyboards and askance rhythms shaped “Love in Exile,” the acclaimed debut from his improvisational group with the singer Arooj Aftab and the pianist Vijay Iyer. But summarizing exactly what Ismaily does — let alone, how he’s so good at it — can feel a little like bottling wind.“If you listen to my last record, you could not know he’s on it, because he’s not the most present musician,” Sam Amidon, the soft-voiced singer who has worked with Ismaily for nearly 20 years, said by phone. “But every moment he was in the room, he brought out the most beautiful stuff in other people through his energy. He’s just sneakily there.”For Ismaily, the invitation to play may be the most important part. “Since 30, I have been asked to walk into a room and be myself musically — an incredibly intense, intensely fortunate situation,” he said. “My preferred way to work is to walk into a room and feel, intuitively, what we should do today.”The self-confidence to play the part of himself did not come easily for Ismaily. Soon after that early emergency room visit, surgeons split his prematurely fused skull, adding space for it to expand as he aged. The scar cuts horizontally across his head, a reminder of his tenuous health as a child. Intense allergies and asthma often caused him to wake up in panics about catching his next breath. For several months, he was blind.When Ismaily was 4, his mother became a psychiatrist for the state of Pennsylvania, and the family shuttled among the campuses of mental hospitals where they stayed for years at a time. Ismaily quickly learned not just to live with people whose worldview he could not comprehend, but to communicate with them, to try and glimpse their reality. He befriended the bipolar, the depressed, the manic.“Since I move with the temperatures of the outside world so readily, is it possible that I have an extra sensitivity to the tone of the world around me?” Ismaily said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesFriends his own age, however, were much harder for the lanky Pakistani boy with, as he put it, “a very thin amount of hair, no teeth or one tooth or dentures, and a compressed head” in small-town Pennsylvania. Kids would tease him about why he dressed for Halloween all year. His mother worked long hours on hospital grounds, and his father battled cancer when Ismaily was 3, leaving him emotionally withdrawn. Left alone, Ismaily slipped into science fiction, particularly the postapocalyptic escape of Terry Brooks’ “Shannara” series. These books taught him to drift into other realms beyond his physical surroundings.“When something opens up in front of you that you love, you dive headfirst into it,” he said.Music soon revealed the world he has spent his lifetime since exploring. His home was very quiet, with no instruments or even a stereo. Still, when Ismaily was 2, he began to crave the act of making sound. He specifically wanted rhythm, banging spoons against hot radiator coils until his parents relented and bought a tiny Muppets drum kit. A high school marching band was the source of his only childhood friends, offering respite from judgment.He shipped off for a lifesaving stint at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts, which he called “a school of misfits, of 300 oddballs.” He headed to Arizona to join friends in bands and, ultimately, study biochemistry; too busy playing music to attend class, he stopped one credit short of his masters. Playing in bands there, he realized he could get just enough shows to pay his meager bills. Making the same scenario work in New York, however, presented new challenges, and Ismaily filled every ostensible day off with an extra recording session or one-off concert. The over-commitment kept him afloat; it also cost him romantic partnerships and rankled bandmates. But after almost two decades together in Ceramic Dog, which is Ismaily’s longest-running relationship, Ribot understands the need.“It’s not a coincidence, the challenges Shahzad had growing up and the way he plays rock. It’s about being forced into confrontation with mortality,” Ribot said in a phone interview. “He’s the most natural-born anarchist I ever met, because he has the natural desire to exceed whatever limit he’s standing next to.”“It’s crazy to be 51 and still have so much unresolved trauma. That’s keeping me from making a record,” Ismaily said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesIsmaily is an expert at lending others that superpower, or reminding them that they have it. Beth Orton recalled the frustrating process of making her 2022 album, “Weather Alive,” and how label woes and abandoned sessions prompted her to believe she no longer belonged in the music business. But then she began sending demos to Ismaily, who replied to her uncertain hymns with tizzies of pre-dawn gut reactions. “I was so down, and I think he knew how tender I felt,” Orton said in an interview. “There was a sense of being met during a very cold winter.”Ismaily is still, however, trying to muster such temerity within his own work. He has often played shows in the nude, including memorable gigs on a very hot boat on the East River or covering the Counting Crows at a Brooklyn benefit cloaked only by an acoustic guitar. These stories stem in part from the body temperature troubles that will last him a lifetime and in part, he admitted, from confronting the shame of the body that long caused him grief.“I feel ecstasy when those performances are over,” Ismaily said. “It’s the ecstasy of feeling good in your own skin, just showing someone who you really are and surviving it.”He worried, though, that he still lacks the conviction — or “artistic depth,” as he called it — to put something permanently on record that takes his own name. For a decade, he has run a record label that shares a name with his studio. The imprint specializes in first albums by veteran collaborators and role players, the musicians who make albums by the more famous better. Ismaily knows that description encapsulates so much of his work. He hopes someday to be brave enough to own that mantle for himself, to make his own record in his own studio for his own label.“It’s crazy to be 51 and still have so much unresolved trauma. That’s keeping me from making a record,” Ismaily said, still energetic after nearly five hours of conversation about that very trauma. “It still feels like a non-mountaineer casually driving past the bottom of Mount Everest, but I would be so excited about that outcome.” More

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      Bobby Osborne, Mandolinist Who Flouted Bluegrass Convention, Dies at 91

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      The band he led with his brother broke new ground with an unusually broad repertoire, unorthodox instrumentation and untraditional vocal harmonies.Bobby Osborne, the singer and mandolin player who with his younger brother, Sonny, led one of the most groundbreaking bands in the history of bluegrass, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Gallatin, Tenn., a suburb of Nashville. He was 91.His death was confirmed by Dan Rogers, the vice president and executive producer of the Grand Ole Opry.Formed in 1953, the Osborne Brothers band habitually flouted bluegrass convention during its first two decades. They were the first bluegrass group of national renown to incorporate drums, electric bass, pedal steel guitar and even, on records, string sections. They were also the first to record with twin banjos, as well as the first to amplify their instruments with electric pickups.Employing a wider repertoire than the Appalachian wellspring from which most of their peers drew, the Osbornes also worked with a more expansive musical palette, embracing country, pop and rock material associated with the likes of Ernest Tubb, Randy Newman and the Everly Brothers.“We caught lots of flack from the die-hard bluegrass fans,” Mr. Osborne said of the group’s sometimes fraught relationship with bluegrass purists in a 2011 interview with the online publication Mandolin Café.Perhaps nothing the Osbornes did rankled the bluegrass orthodoxy more than the three-part vocal harmonies they patented on their 1958 recording of the lovelorn ballad “Once More.”At the time, bluegrass arrangements typically featured one voice singing the melody, with a tenor and a baritone supplying harmonies above and below it. By contrast, the Osbornes positioned Bobby’s voice, singing the melody, above the two other voices. The result was the bright, euphonious blend that became the group’s trademark.Mr. Osborne told NPR in 2017 that the group discovered this sound while rehearsing “Once More” as they drove home from a show one night. “We knew then,” he said, “that we caught onto something that we had never heard before.”“So we got the guitar out of the trunk and found out what key we was in,” he continued. “We sang that song all the way home so we would not forget that type of harmony.”The trio that perfected this new approach consisted of Mr. Osborne, his bold high-pitched lead the focal point; his brother, Sonny, on baritone; and the singer and guitarist Red Allen on another part beneath them both, adding a third layer of harmony.A formative member during the group’s early years, Mr. Allen had previously appeared on the Osbornes’ popular 1956 recording of “Ruby, Are You Mad?,” an unbridled two-banjo romp written by the old-time country singer Cousin Emmy, a.k.a. Cynthia May Carver.To the surprise of some people, the Osbornes were vindicated over the next decade and a half for steadfastly breaking with tradition. Among other accomplishments, they were named vocal group of the year by the Country Music Association in 1971. They were also one of the few bluegrass bands to consistently place records on the country singles chart.Along the way they built a bridge between first-generation bluegrass royalty like Bill Monroe and the duo of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and intrepid latter-day inheritors like New Grass Revival and Alison Krauss.Mr. Osborne performing at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in 2019.Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Country Music Hall Of Fame And MuseumMaybe the best known of the Osbornes’ 18 charting singles was “Rocky Top,” an unabashed celebration of mountain culture that reached the country Top 40 in 1967. Written by the husband-and-wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who also wrote hits like “Tennessee Hound Dog” for the Osbornes — and even bigger hits for the Everly Brothers — “Rocky Top” was adopted as one of Tennessee’s official state songs and as the fight song of the University of Tennessee football team, the Volunteers.Robert Van Osborne Jr. was born on Dec. 7, 1931, in Thousandsticks, an unincorporated Appalachian enclave near Hyden, Ky., where he and his brother grew up. Their parents, Robert and Daisy (Dixon) Osborne, were schoolteachers; Robert Sr. supplemented their teaching income by moonlighting in his parents’ general store.Young Bobby took up the electric guitar as a teenager after the family moved to Dayton, Ohio, where he also began playing in local country bands and working as a cabdriver.The Osborne brothers started their own band after Bobby completed two years of service with the Marines in Korea, where he was wounded in combat and earned the Purple Heart. He and Sonny had previously worked for bluegrass luminaries — Bobby with Jimmy Martin and the Stanley Brothers, his brother with Bill Monroe.In 1956 the Osbornes joined the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, W.Va. Four years later they became one of the first bluegrass bands to perform on a college campus, appearing at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They subsequently took their music to universities and clubs in the Northeast and performed at the Newport Folk Festival.In 1963 the brothers signed with the Nashville division of Decca Records, then run by the pre-eminent music producer Owen Bradley. In 1964 they became members of the cast of the Grand Ole Opry.The Osbornes recorded extensively for Decca (which later became MCA Records) before they parted with the label in 1974, disillusioned that their initial success at country radio did not extend into the 1970s.A return to a more time-honored approach to bluegrass revitalized their career, which over the next 30 years found them consolidating their place alongside pioneers of the genre like Mr. Monroe and the Stanleys. They were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame in 1994.Sonny Osborne retired from performing in 2005, after suffering a shoulder injury, and died in 2021. Bobby, who had previously undergone quintuple bypass heart surgery, formed a new group, Rocky Top X-Press, with his son, Bobby Jr. (known as Boj), and continued to perform and record.Besides Bobby Jr., Mr. Osborne is survived by his wife, Karen Osborne; two other sons, Wynn and Robby; a daughter, Tina Osborne; a sister, Louise Williams; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. He lived in Portland, Tenn., another suburb of Nashville.Much has been made of the innovations in production, arrangements and repertoire that the Osbornes introduced to bluegrass. Less, however, has been said of how Mr. Osborne, whose syncopated, lyrical playing was inspired by the jazz-derived solos of old-time fiddlers, broke new ground as a mandolinist.Speaking to the website Bluegrass Situation in 2017, he explained: “Since I always liked fiddle tunes and the mandolin is tuned like a fiddle — and I was good with a flat pick from guitar — I got completely wrapped up playing fiddle tunes with the mandolin.”In the process Mr. Osborne earned a reputation as one of the first bluegrass mandolin players to expand the instrument’s vocabulary beyond what Mr. Monroe, the father of Bluegrass, had established early on.Alex Traub More

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      Robert Black, Bass Virtuoso of the Avant-Garde, Is Dead at 67

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      As part of the influential Bang on a Can All-Stars, he helped popularize experimental music through international tours and well-regarded albums.Robert Black, a virtuoso bassist who collaborated with prominent composers including Philip Glass and John Cage and was a founding member of the influential Bang on a Can All-Stars ensemble, died on Thursday at his home in Hartford, Conn. He was 67.His partner, Gary Knoble, said the cause was colon cancer.Mr. Black was already a prominent interpreter of modern music for bass when he was invited, in 1987, to perform at the first Bang on a Can festival, a freewheeling marathon of contemporary music in downtown Manhattan.“He had a beautiful sound,” the composer Michael Gordon, one of the founders of Bang on a Can, said in an interview. “He did everything with the bass: He danced with it, he drummed on it, he scraped it, he coached all kinds of amazing sounds out of it.”At that festival, Mr. Black performed Iannis Xenakis’s “Theraps” — an extraordinarily difficult piece that traverses five octaves through uncanny glissandos — and Tom Johnson’s “Failing,” which asks the performer to play increasingly complex passages on the bass while at the same time reading aloud a humorous text that self-consciously describes the possibility of failure.“When I fail to succeed, I will succeed in communicating the essence of the piece,” Mr. Black stated while playing a tricky line — as per the composer’s instructions — to laughter from the audience, captured in a definitive live recording.In 1992, Mr. Gordon and his fellow Bang on a Can directors David Lang and Julia Wolfe asked Mr. Black to join the newly formed All-Stars sextet, which brought further renown and attention to the festival’s visceral, rock-inflected music. His technique was central to the group’s sound: In Ms. Wolfe’s 1997 piece “Believing,” written for the All-Stars, he improvised frenzied passages that Ms. Wolfe once called “quintessential Robert Black-isms.”As a soloist and a chamber musician, Mr. Black championed contemporary music and commissioned work from dozens of composers. His reserved personality belied the cacophonous sounds he could summon with his instrument, a double bass nicknamed Simone that was made in Paris in 1900.Mr. Black’s theatrical approach to performance extended to dramatic speaking — he commissioned a large-scale work from Philip Glass that includes the recitation of poetry by Lou Reed and Patti Smith — and even dancing, as a member of Yoshiko Chuma’s School of Hard Knocks, an interdisciplinary troupe.Mr. Black in 2021. His reserved personality belied the cacophonous sounds he could summon with his instrument.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesRobert Alan Black was born in Denver on March 16, 1956, to Ned Black, an engineer, and Frances (Canzone) Black. Growing up in the suburbs of Denver, he began playing bass in middle school. He attended the University of North Texas before transferring to the Hartt School in Connecticut, where he studied with Gary Karr. While in college, he started performing music composed by his friends, and he freelanced in the New York area after graduating in 1979.“It felt like nobody really trusted me,” he recalled of this time in a 2015 interview. “I would go to the orchestra rehearsal, playing along, and my colleagues were going, ‘Yeah, but you also do that strange contemporary music, you play John Cage.’ And then I would go to a hard-core new music thing, and they’d go, ‘Yeah, you’re really not one of us because you also play in an orchestra.”But, inspired by his longtime partner, the composer James Sellars, as well as the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, Mr. Black increasingly dedicated himself to contemporary composition, at a time when few classical virtuosos were committed to new works. An early showcase was Mr. Sellars’s “For Love of the Double Bass,” a piece for bass and piano that combines music and theater, in which Mr. Black seduced his instrument, buying it a dress, dancing with it and ultimately taking it to bed.As part of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Mr. Black helped popularize experimental music through international tours and well-regarded albums. He and the guitarist Mark Stewart, the only two original members to remain with the sextet, performed together for more than three decades.“He was deeply kind, often playful, gently yet fiercely devoted to the composer and his colleagues onstage,” Mr. Stewart wrote in an email. “His humility was real because his wisdom came from listening.”Mr. Black also pursued a solo career, building a sizable new repertoire for his instrument and recording the complete bass music of Giacinto Scelsi and Christian Wolff. A dedicated pedagogue, he taught at the Hartt School for 29 years. In 2017, he formed the Robert Black Foundation to support contemporary music. He frequently commissioned work from young and emerging composers, whose music he performed as part of a monthly Friday series during the pandemic, live-streamed from his home.At Mr. Black’s final concert, which was in April amid a grove of trees in Philadelphia, he took part in “Murmur in the Trees,” a piece for 24 basses composed by Eve Beglarian.In an unconventional arrangement, Mr. Black had been partners since 1974 with both Mr. Sellars, who died in 2017, and Mr. Knoble, and he had also been married to Elliott Fredouelle since 2016. (They all lived together.) He is also survived by a sister, Debbie Walker.In 2013 Mr. Black, a gifted improviser, trekked into the culverts of Moab, Utah, with his bass to make a new album — a duet with the desert. The recording captures not just the vast array of strange sounds he drew from Simone, but also the murmurs of birds and insects. It was, he explained, an attempt to “make the environment start to sing.”“I would just fool around on the instrument, getting used to the space and the sound,” he told Colorado Public Radio. “When it came time to record — this sounds like such a cliché, but it really is true — I would just try to empty my mind, start listening, and just let my hands move.” More

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      6 Odes to Ohio

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      The state has inspired memorable songs by Randy Newman, R.E.M., King Princess and more.R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, perhaps suggesting we put our heads together and start a new country up.Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto AgencyDear listeners,For six of the past seven summers, I’ve spent a long weekend visiting college friends in northern Ohio — a part of the country with which I was previously unfamiliar but has now come to feel like a home away from home. A highlight of these trips is always, weather permitting, when we get to tube lazily down the Cuyahoga River. We tend to start the drive with this excursion’s unofficial theme song: “Burn On,” Randy Newman’s wry but warmly sung ode to that time in 1969 that the infamously polluted Cuyahoga caught fire.More than 50 years later, the fact that we can comfortably float in the Cuyahoga speaks to the success of the high-profile cleanup campaigns that have restored the river to its past glory — so much so that in 2019, the conservation association American Rivers named it “River of the Year.” I did not even know that was a thing. Congrats, Cuyahoga!Newman isn’t the only musician to be fascinated by the plight of this particular river. A song called “Cuyahoga” appears on R.E.M.’s great fourth album, “Life’s Rich Pageant”; Michael Stipe uses the word as a metaphor not just for environmental degradation but for the seizing of land — and even language — originally belonging to native people. “This is where they walked, this is where they swam,” Stipe sings, then adds with bitter irony, “Take a picture here, take a souvenir.”Perhaps because of the sing-songy, vowel-heavy composition of its name, the state of Ohio itself has inspired quite a few notable tunes. I collected a few for today’s playlist — from the likes of Harry Nilsson, King Princess and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young — to round out those musical odes to the 2019 River of the Year.Will this be the first in a long series of 50 Amplifier installments, each devoted to songs about a specific state? Well, even Sufjan Stevens couldn’t finish his 50 States Project, so I’d say don’t hold your breath.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Randy Newman: “Burn On”“There’s a red moon rising on the Cuyahoga River,” Newman begins in that inimitable voice, accompanied by his own plinking piano, “rolling into Cleveland from the lake.” Released on his 1972 album “Sail Away,” “Burn On” is featured in the opening montage of the classic 1989 baseball flick “Major League,” because — according to a Wikipedia statement without a citation that I will choose to believe anyway — the director David S. Ward said the song was “the only one he knew of that was about Cleveland, Ohio.” (Had he never heard “Cleveland Rocks”?) (Listen on YouTube)2. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: “Ohio”Recorded just two weeks after the fatal 1970 incident at Kent State University, when the Ohio National Guard killed four students and wounded nine more, the searing “Ohio,” featuring lyrics by Neil Young, was rush-released the following month and effectively tapped into the countercultural consciousness. (Listen on YouTube, because this one isn’t on Spotify for presumably Young-related reasons)3. R.E.M.: “Cuyahoga”On “Life’s Rich Pageant,” “Cuyahoga” is preceded by the jangling single “Fall on Me,” a song about the effects of acid rain. Taken together, these tracks indicate the band’s growing social conscience and its particular focus on environmentalism. (Listen on YouTube)4. King Princess: “Ohio”This rollicking live staple frequently closed out King Princess’s early shows. Some of her fans were so vocally upset that this song did not appear on her debut album that, in a 2019 Instagram story, the artist born Mikaela Straus cheekily wrote, “I recorded a version of Ohio that is almost done so everyone just calm down.” She kept her word: The sultry studio version of the song — addressed to a former flame who’s gone home to the Buckeye state — appeared on the deluxe edition of the album “Cheap Queen.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Damien Jurado: “Ohio”Ohio is also depicted as a mythical elsewhere — a love interest’s faraway home — in this heart-wrenching acoustic ballad by the Seattle singer-songwriter Damien Jurado. It appears on his 1999 album “Rehearsals for Departure” and also on many, many mix CDs I burned in college. (Listen on YouTube)6. Harry Nilsson: “Dayton Ohio 1903”What is it with Randy Newman and Ohio? He wrote this sweetly nostalgic ditty and recorded his own version for “Sail Away,” though in the spirit of mixing thing up, I chose Harry Nilsson’s version from the earlier, 1970 album “Nilsson Sings Newman.” The song recalls a simpler time, when people dropped by for tea and, perhaps, the Cuyahoga ran clear and blissfully inflammable. (Listen on YouTube)Burn on, big river,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Odes to Ohio” track listTrack 1: Randy Newman, “Burn On”Track 2: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “Ohio”Track 3: REM, “Cuyahoga”Track 4: King Princess, “Ohio”Track 5: Damien Jurado, “Ohio”Track 6: Harry Nilsson, “Dayton Ohio 1903”Bonus tracksThis 2009 New York Times report, pegged to the 40th anniversary of the Cuyahoga catching fire, has a lede so vivid it is worth quoting in full: “The first time Gene Roberts fell into the Cuyahoga River, he worried he might die. The year was 1963, and the river was still an open sewer for industrial waste. Walking home, Mr. Roberts smelled so bad that his friends ran to stay upwind of him.”Also, it feels almost sacrilegious to talk about the music of Ohio and not mention Guided by Voices, so cue up “Glad Girls” — or another of the approximately 71 billion rippers the Dayton band has recorded over its career — and crank the volume up. More

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      Kylie Minogue’s ‘Padam Padam’ and the Queer Club-Pop Canon

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe song defining Pride month this year is Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam,” a thumping tease that’s lightly campy and has taken on outsize importance as a gay nightlife anthem and meme-culture staple.For Minogue, 55 — a bona fide superstar abroad but more of a pop curio here — it’s one of a handful of breakthrough moments that have cemented her embrace among gay listeners. But “Padam Padam” is also part of a longer list of diva anthems — from Lady Gaga, Madonna, and many others — that become, in effect, gay canon.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about “Padam Padam” and how songs get inscribed into the gay pop canon, Minogue’s not-quite-stardom in the United States, and how a younger generation of pop aspirants like Rina Sawayama and Charli XCX perform their embrace of their gay fans.Guest:Jason P. Frank, news writer at VultureConnect 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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      Diagnosed With Tourette’s, Lewis Capaldi Takes a Break From Touring

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      After performing at Glastonbury Festival over the weekend, Capaldi, the popular Scottish singer-songwriter, said he would stop touring “for the foreseeable future.”The Scottish musician Lewis Capaldi announced on Tuesday that he would take a break from touring “for the foreseeable future,” including the remainder of his current world tour, in order to adjust to life with Tourette’s syndrome, with which he was diagnosed last year.During a performance Saturday at Glastonbury Festival in England, Capaldi, 26, lost his voice and had to enlist the help of the enormous, enthusiastic crowd to finish his 2018 hit “Someone You Loved.”We love you Lewis Capaldi ❤️Glastonbury crowds are the best. pic.twitter.com/x6ZnIIgRpP— BBC Radio 1 (@BBCR1) June 24, 2023
      In the three weeks leading up to Glastonbury, he had canceled shows, he said, to take a “moment to rest and recover.”In his statement on Tuesday announcing the break from touring, Capaldi wrote, “The fact that this probably won’t come as a surprise doesn’t make it any easier to write.”“I used to be able to enjoy every second of shows like this and I’d hoped 3 weeks away would sort me out,” he wrote. “But the truth is I’m still learning to adjust to the impact of my Tourette’s and on Saturday it became obvious that I need to spend much more time getting my mental and physical health in order, so I can keep doing everything I love for a long time to come.”Tourette’s syndrome is characterized by sudden jerking movements and uncontrollable tics and vocalizations, and Capaldi could be seen twitching onstage during his performance Saturday.His next show was scheduled for Wednesday in Zurich, followed by performances across Asia, Europe and the Middle East.This spring, he released a Netflix documentary, “How I’m Feeling Now,” about his diagnosis and the management of his illness. He also discussed it during an interview with The New York Times last month, before he released his second studio album, “Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent.”“This sounds gross, but it’s become part of like a marketing strategy,” he said. “Every piece of content or thing I see with my name next to it is closely followed by Tourette’s.” More