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      For Some, Blackpink’s Jennie Is the Only Reason to Watch ”The Idol”

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      Fans of the K-pop group are tuning in to the new HBO series to marvel at the global pop star in her acting debut.Before airing on HBO, the drama “The Idol” dominated headlines and social media for its controversies: At the Cannes Film Festival, where the first two episodes premiered, the series was widely panned for its graphic sexual content; it was rewritten and reshot after Sam Levinson, the creator of the series “Euphoria,” replaced Amy Seimetz as its director; and in March, Rolling Stone published an article detailing a troubled production.But after its first episode was released on Sunday, a pop songstress took center stage. Not the main character Jocelyn, the show’s aspiring idol played by Lily-Rose Depp, but Dyanne, one of Jocelyn’s backup dancers portrayed by Jennie Kim, better known as Jennie of the K-pop girl group Blackpink.Blackpink — which consists of Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rosé — has become one of the most globally recognized K-pop acts in recent years. Though Jennie isn’t the only member of the group to try her hand at acting, she may have its most high-profile role.On the internet, clips abound praising Jennie in her acting debut. In one widely circulated scene, Dyanne, eyes half-lidded, lips parted and hair perfectly tousled, shows Jocelyn how to do the choreography for her new single.The K-pop idol — clad in a loose, slightly ripped midriff, a black sports bra and high-waisted booty shorts — struts, poses, grinds, pops, locks and drops. Later, Jocelyn can be seen watching and wiping her tears over her failure to embody Dyanne’s indomitable stage presence.That star quality wasn’t lost on fans of the singer and viewers of the show either.“Jennie’s acting was very good for what her character was,” said Greta Dobson, a 27-year-old student in Brooklyn who considers herself a “blink,” what Blackpink fans affectionately call themselves. “It seems like it almost felt natural for her since she always has to do this for dance rehearsals. It must have been so meta for her.”“Jennie’s acting was very good for what her character was,” said Greta Dobson, a student in Brooklyn who considers herself a “blink,” what Blackpink fans affectionately call themselves.Eddy Chen/HBOSearch “The Idol” on TikTok or Twitter, and the number of posts critiquing the show is likely to match those commending Jennie’s performance.Within hours after the series premiere was released, a TikTok account (@d4jenn) posted seven “fancam” videos of nearly all the scenes where Jennie was featured in the show’s pilot. (Each clip has garnered thousands of views.)Anisa, 18, of Seattle, who runs the account and declined to give her last name, was one of many viewers who tuned into “The Idol” to watch her favorite K-pop star. She said had it not been for Jennie, she never would have watched the show.“I would completely stop watching it,” she said. “And end my subscription with HBO Max.”Though fans like Anisa were proud of Jennie’s acting debut, many hope the show’s first season, which consists of six episodes, will provide her with more screen time. “The show producers could’ve done a little more, even if she was a side character,” Ko Im, 37, a managing producer in Seattle, said in a message on Twitter. “They barely gave her lines she could really own.”She added, “We need to see that main character energy she already has.”Ms. Dobson, however, already speculates that Jennie may play a bigger role in the series.“Are they going to utilize Jennie’s dancing and singing background in the show? Is she going to take Jocelyn’s role?” she said. “I guess we’ll just have to watch to find out.” More

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      Birds Sing, but Are They Making Music? What Scientists Say.

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      When a bird sings, you may think you’re hearing music. But are the melodies it’s making really music? Or is what we’re hearing merely a string of lilting calls that appeals to the human ear?Birdsong has inspired musicians from Bob Marley to Mozart and perhaps as far back as the first hunter-gatherers who banged out a beat. And a growing body of research is showing that the affinity human musicians feel toward birdsong has a strong scientific basis. Scientists are understanding more about avian species’ ability to learn, interpret and produce songs much like our own.Just like humans, birds learn songs from each other and practice to perfect them. And just as human speech is distinct from human music, bird calls, which serve as warnings and other forms of direct communication, differ from birdsong.While researchers are still debating the functions of birdsong, studies show that it is structurally similar to our own tunes. So, are birds making music? That depends on what you mean.“I’m not sure we can or want to define music,” said Ofer Tchernichovski, a zoologist and psychologist at the City University of New York who studies birdsong.Where you draw the line between music and mere noise is arbitrary, said Emily Doolittle, a zoomusicologist and composer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The difference between a human baby’s babbling versus a toddler’s humming might seem more distinct than that of a hatchling’s cry for food and a maturing bird’s practicing of a melody, she added.Wherever we draw the line, birdsong and human song share striking similarities.How birds build songsExisting research points to one main conclusion: Birdsong is structured like human music. Songbirds change their tempo (speed), pitch (how high or low they sing) and timbre (tone) to sing tunes that resemble our own melodies.The Tempo of BirdsongA northern mockingbird stretches its tempo. Recording by David Rothenberg.The Pitch of BirdsongA northern mockingbird adjusting its pitch from one phrase to the next. Recording by David Rothenberg.The Timbre of BirdsongA northern mockingbird shifting its tonal quality across phrases. Recording by David Rothenberg.Other features, like cadence and tension, are also used in both birdsong and human music, said Tina Roeske, a behavioral neurobiologist who specializes in birdsong. Just as the familiar tune “In the Hall of the Mountain King” gradually builds speed “accelerando,” as the compositional notation is known, some birdsong does too, like that of the nightingale.While earlier studies focused on syntax, or how notes were ordered, newer research is integrating rhythm, too, by analyzing how notes are timed. In human music, rhythm is often thought of as a constant beat, like the one that opens “We Will Rock You” by Queen. But in birdsong, rhythm refers to patterns of notes, regardless of whether they are repeated.To humans, birdsong may appear to have “a random structure,” Dr. Roeske said. Because of the speed at which birds sing — up to four times as fast as most human music — that rhythm is “hard for us to grasp and appreciate,” she added.Dr. Roeske and her co-author Dr. Tchernichovski researched birds’ musical structure and found that birdsong rhythms fell into three general categories. The first is isochronous, in which intervals between notes are equidistant.Isochronous RhythmA thrush nightingale sings with equidistant intervals between notes. Recording by Tina Roeske.Alternating, in which a note is longer than the previous one.Alternating RhythmA thrush nightingale alternates its notes. Recording by Tina Roeske.And ornament, an exaggerated form of the alternating pattern.Ornament RhythmA thrush nightingale exaggerates its alternating rhythm. Recording by Tina Roeske.Human music contains these rhythmic patterns, too.In their 2020 study, Dr. Roeske and Dr. Tchernikovski compared recordings of thrush nightingales across Europe with examples from musical genres all over the world, including Western classical piano, Persian drumming and Tunisian stambeli. They found that birdsong and global music forms had the same types of timing components, integer ratios, which form the foundation of most melodies.In music, these ratios are the amount of time between notes. A 1-to-1 ratio means notes are evenly spaced, like in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” but a 1-to-2 ratio means the time from one note to the next is uneven, like in “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” Dr. Roeske explained.When they charted integer ratios from birdsong and human music, the plots all produced a similar shape resembling a long-stemmed flower. This indicates that some birds build songs using patterns similar to those found in human music.Other researchers are gaining insights by focusing on birdsong rhythm.“We found that rhythm and syntax have a relationship that nobody has really thought about before,” said Jeffrey Xing, a graduate student in psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and an author of a September 2022 paper analyzing the song structure of the Australian pied butcherbird.Pied butcherbirds “seem to prefer some song rhythms over others,” such as isochronous rhythm, Mr. Xing said. In some ways, these rhythmic patterns follow rules like forms of poetry that have strict meter. A good example is a sonnet.“It’s a very rigid rhythmic structure that you have to follow, and somehow the syntax of the words you use has to conform to that,” he said.Human brains and bird brainsHollis Taylor has dedicated her life’s work as a violinist and ornithologist to the pied butcherbird, a species she deems a fellow musician.Ms. Taylor, who analyzed the bird’s rhythmic structures with Mr. Xing, records the birds’ songs in Australian deserts and savannas in the middle of the night. Then, she transcribes their notes into musical notation.“The musician in me recognizes the musician in them,” Ms. Taylor said.Pied Butcherbird DuetsThree examples of pied butcherbirds singing duets. Recording by Hollis Taylor.She has observed what appear to be warm-up sessions, rehearsals and singing contests. Other than humans, there’s only a “small club” of species with an observed capacity to learn songs and vocal patterns, Ms. Taylor said, including songbirds, parrots, hummingbirds, bats, elephants and some marine mammals.Ms. Taylor has performed her birdsong-like compositions with orchestras around the world. She draws inspiration from the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who also transcribed birdsong into musical notation.Musicians’ fascination with birdsong has deep roots. Mozart, historians recount, kept a European starling in his Vienna apartment for three years. In a letter to his father, Mozart remarked at the “lovely” and precise way in which the starling learned and repeated one of his concertos.Fiona CarswellWhile there is no concrete evidence that Mozart’s starling influenced his compositions, the idea that birds affect the work of composers endures.The French composer François-Bernard Mâche, a founder of zoomusicology, speculates that birds may have influenced Igor Stravinsky’s compositions during summertime stays in what is now Ukraine. According to Dr. Doolittle’s research, the song patterns of Eurasian blackbirds found in that region resemble Stravinsky’s compositional style.Neuroscience research points to the idea that this affinity between birds and humans is not so unusual. In terms of musical ability, we are more like birds than we are like our primate cousins or other mammals, said Johan Bolhuis, a zoologist who specializes in the cognitive neurobiology of birds and humans.Our brains and songbirds’ brains have a similar way of learning musicality. But the brains of monkeys and non-songbirds, like gulls, are organized in a different way, Dr. Bolhuis said. It could be a sign of shared creative abilities: Like humans, some songbird species seem to improvise based on the song patterns they have learned.For example, both humans and birds can produce smash hits that evoke feelings in their listeners, the psychologist Dr. Tchernichovski explained.“When you hear music, what do you feel? Well, it depends on the music,” he said.For instance, listening to a funeral march might make you sad even if you’re vacationing on the beach, and a romantic song might fill you with love even if you’re working on your taxes. Birdsong can affect the behavior of other birds by luring in a mate or scaring off an unwanted foe, similar to how we might turn up the volume when we hear our favorite song or skip to the next track if the vibe is off.“This is the magic in music,” Dr. Tchernichovski said. “Bird songs seem to have some of this magic, too.”But there’s no evidence that their songs have meaning, Dr. Bolhuis said.“In the mind of the great composers, they actually meant something” with music, he said. “It’s not so much the case in birdsong.”Also, birds have a limited repertoire, whereas with only a limited number of items, the human mind “can be infinitely creative,” Dr. Bolhuis said.Researchers agree, however, that birdsong can communicate identity. “They can recognize individuals just the way you and I can recognize each other by our voices,” said Mike Webster, director of the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.When birds from a certain area hear a familiar bird singing, he explained, it’s no big deal. But if the same bird moves to a new area, the birds there “go bananas” in a territorial uproar. In this sense, singing is like a way for birds to identify themselves — but there may be more to it than that.Why do birds sing?While scientists have studied birdsong for decades, they know little about why and how birds select specific tunes and what counts as deliberate communication versus meaningless song.Through brain-imaging studies, neuroscientists have found that the human brain responds to music most strongly along a particular neural circuit that is activated when a person listens to a song perceived as pleasant. Studies have shown that birdsong elicits the same response in female birds, possibly as an evolutionary mechanism for mate attraction. But scientists still wonder whether birds sing for entertainment in addition to mating.“What’s going on in the bird’s head when it’s singing? Is it happy?” Dr. Webster said. Humans often sing when they are emotional — happy and heartbroken alike — but scientists do not know if birds have such an emotional range.Dr. Webster, who studies bird behavior and communication, added another unknown: If birdsong’s main purpose in some species is for males to attract females, then why do some females also sing? “Female song actually arose very early in songbird evolution,” he said. “In species where females don’t sing, it’s because they’ve lost the ability to sing rather than it being gained.” This indicates that it may have once been evolutionarily beneficial for females to sing — and scientists can’t say why.There are other mysteries. Ornithologists have observed “bird chatter” in parrots, when two birds appear to be whispering to each other. There are also nonvocal sounds, Dr. Webster said: Some birds snap their wings, some drum on trees and others rub their feathers together as if playing the violin. The purpose of these sounds — whether communicative, musical or both — sits on the next frontier of ornithology research.“We’ve just scratched the surface,” Dr. Webster said. “Birds are constantly making sound, and I think most of the time we don’t really know why, and we don’t really know what they’re saying to each other.” More

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      Jenny Lewis Keeps Finding the Magic

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      Jenny Lewis didn’t mean to wind up with the marimba.But for the last year, a vintage percussion instrument has occupied pride of place in the singer-songwriter’s forest green home studio. She inherited it from her godfather, Jerry Cohen, a music editor for TV and movies and an amateur musician, who died suddenly last spring. He was a surrogate dad to her, the kind who surreptitiously bought Hanukkah presents when money was tight in her household, and introduced her to jazz records when she was 10. She was the only person in the room with him when he passed away.“He was my mentor and my best friend and the most Jewish of all people in my life,” she said. “Jerry would want me to get lessons on the marimba.”Lewis, the 47-year-old indie artist whose country-rock troubadour style and evocative lyricism has earned her comparisons to songwriting greats from Nashville’s Music Row to Laurel Canyon, has suffered a lot of loss lately. Her mother’s death, in 2017, was the backdrop for her last album, “On the Line,” in 2019. Now, after losing Cohen and another mentor, the album designer and her “rock ’n’ roll dad” Gary Burden, there is “Joy’All,” an album out June 9 that grapples with aging, life cycles and romantic (im)possibility and yet somehow feels vivacious.Lewis inherited the marimba from her godfather, Jerry Cohen, a music editor for TV and movies and amateur musician, who died suddenly last spring.Ariel Fisher for The New York Times“My 40s are kicking my ass,” she sings on the third track over peppy acoustic guitars, “and handing them to me in a margarita glass.” The song is called “Puppy and a Truck,” her latest — and perhaps most lasting — prescription for happiness; she scored them both. “Having survived this moment, I felt like it was important to project something joyful,” she said.The dog, Bobby Rhubarb, a shiny black cockapoo, greeted me with a waist-high leap when I visited Lewis recently at her home at the end of a wildflower-lined canyon road in the San Fernando Valley. The house is called Mint Chip — there’s an ice cream cone etched in stained glass by the garage — and Lewis acquired it after promising to maintain the whimsical touches that the Disney animator who built it in the 1950s installed. It attracts the fantastical too: during the pandemic, Lewis said, she discovered a baby squirrel had been sneaking in and hiding acorns under her pillow.There is more than a little magic to her life. It’s in the way Lewis amplifies the space around her (she decked out that truck, a Chevy Colorado, with ersatz Gucci seat covers) and even the way she made it out of a career as a child actor to succeed in another artistic universe.“She’s a unicorn,” said Soleil Moon Frye, her fellow child star (“Punky Brewster”) and a friend for decades. Even as a preteen, Lewis had musical skills, said Moon Frye, who documented their Hollywood crew’s adolescence in home movies, released as the 2021 documentary “Kid 90.” “We would memorize these hip-hop songs — she was always so good at rapping.”Though she’s pegged as a country-tinged folk rock songwriter, Lewis’s keystone is still hip-hop, reggae, soul and funk — “finding the story in rap-style verses and picking up an acoustic guitar, and kind of marrying the two worlds,” she said. A printout of the Wikipedia entry for “3 Feet High and Rising,” the landmark album by De La Soul, rested on the music stand in her studio; she was paging through it to understand all the samples they had used.Though she’s pegged as a country-tinged folk rock songwriter, her references for “Joy’All” included Tracy Chapman, Portishead and Frank Ocean.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesHer references for “Joy’All” included Tracy Chapman, whose conversational delivery she admires, Portishead and Frank Ocean. About half of the tracks for the LP were created over two years in Los Angeles. The rest she made in Nashville, where she has also had a home since 2017. It’s her fifth studio album as a solo artist — she started out in popular indie bands, Rilo Kiley and the Postal Service — and her first release on Blue Note Records, the storied jazz label. (After her own tour, she’ll be joining the Postal Service on the road this fall.)Dave Cobb, the Nashville producer (Brandi Carlile, John Prine, Chris Stapleton) who worked on the album, was awe-struck by her ease and perennial good moods. “If you don’t like Jenny Lewis, you don’t like people,” he said. Their sessions, tracking instruments like pedal steel and Mellotron, along with birdsong from Lewis’s Nashville backyard, flowed easily. “To say she led is absolute, because we all played to her,” he said, adding: “Everything she writes about is true. She literally showed up every day with the puppy and her truck.”She has the openness of someone who has spent a lifetime cheerfully talking about herself, and the staggeringly eccentric stories of a showbiz veteran. Sitting on the midnight blue couch in her minimalist living room, Lewis, in a sweatshirt, sunset-hued corduroys and a single gold hoop earring inscribed with her last name, touched on being Jewish; the spiritual guru Ram Dass; the female Elvis impersonator who was her childhood babysitter; the time her mother convinced Lucille Ball to have a sitcom wrap party in their ramshackle house (“Lucy walks in, and she goes, ‘What a dump!’”); and the swap meet in Atlanta where she buys knockoff Gucci socks by the armful. “I would never buy a real Gucci sock — that’s so silly,” she said.Telling stories about Cohen, she cried. When she was a child, he took her to his job on the Universal Studios lot and let her draw and animate her own movies using giant old film machines. Being with him when he died “was probably like the most important moment of my whole life,” she said.Lewis’s parents, itinerant lounge musicians, split when she was a toddler. Her acting career in the ’80s changed the family’s fortunes, for a time, but her mother’s drug addiction and instability outpaced her sitcom earnings. She was estranged from her parents for decades, then reconciled with each late in their lives. Her father’s bass harmonica sits on a stand on her mantel.“On my dad’s deathbed, he basically was like, ‘learn musical theory,’” she said. “So there has been this pressure, from my people, to do better and learn more.”Jess Wolfe, one half of the duo Lucius, befriended Lewis and sings backup on “Joy’All.” “I really understand the need for trying to lift yourself up through your art and hoping that it can do the same for other people — she did that, in her cool, effortless Jenny Lewis kind of way,” Wolfe said.“She’s always had to figure it out and take care of herself,” she added. “She is incredibly resourceful and incredibly clever about how to do something, effectively, efficiently and affordably. Truly, I’m always blown away by her in that sense — I will always feel creative when I’m around her.”“Everything she writes about is true. She literally showed up every day with the puppy and her truck,” the producer Dave Cobb said.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesAt age 40, after Lewis separated from her longtime partner, the musician Johnathan Rice, she moved to New York for the first time, realizing a teenage ambition. She lived in her pal Annie Clark’s (St. Vincent) apartment for two years, starting the side project NAF there with some friends. Then came Nashville, where she learned how to two-step at a honky-tonk across from the Ryman Auditorium.In a rehearsal at a space covered in red velvet in Nashville last week, which she shared over a video call, Lewis directed her all-female backing band (she seeks out women for the stage and, for this outing, even has a female tour manager — a relative rarity in the industry, and a first for her). “You guys just pedal on that, and let me do my thing,” she said, as they prepared to sing “Acid Tongue,” the title track off her 2008 solo debut. “Let’s get those ‘oohs,’” she instructed. The harmonies rolled in. “Well done,” she told them. “It’s just feeling confident.”Back in L.A., Lewis had confided that aging as an unfiltered, undoctored music star isn’t easy. “I see myself and I don’t always love it,” she said. “But I’m trying to embrace being a woman in her 40s, and all that has to offer.”She is contentedly single now, though trying out a dating app, and itching to write about it — even, she admitted, enjoying that more.“My life is outrageous,” she said, although her songwriting is not straight autobiography. “But if I’m being honest, I’m in every single line.” More

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      Turning 100, the New Jersey Symphony Sticks to Home

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      The orchestra could have rented Carnegie Hall for the celebration, but “our supporters are here, our audiences are here,” its chief executive said.When the New Jersey Symphony was planning this season’s centennial celebrations, which come to a close this weekend, a question kept coming up: Would the orchestra be going to Carnegie Hall?After all, appearing at Carnegie — even if that means renting the hall — is a mark of excellence and validation, an exclamation point on a tour or a special occasion. Like a 100th birthday.While the New Jersey Symphony has given many Carnegie performances over the years, most recently in 2012, it decided this was not the right time to return.“Sure, we can go to Carnegie,” Gabriel van Aalst, the orchestra’s chief executive, recently recalled thinking. “We could have hired it out; we could have done it. But I strongly felt that this major tentpole celebration should be us in our state. Our supporters are here, our audiences are here.”These were striking words from an institution long characterized by what — and where — it is not. The elephant in the concert hall is that New Jersey is squeezed, geographically, between two of the world’s greatest ensembles, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra.Smaller than either of those giants, the New Jersey Symphony has lately punched above its weight in programming ambition — and, as the music world continues to rebuild from the pandemic, has prided itself on thinking locally rather than trying to compete with its famous neighbors. In Xian Zhang, its music director since 2016, the ensemble has an energetic, collaboration-minded leader well liked by the players.“I felt this orchestra was, for me, very easy to conduct,” said Zhang, who has been music director since 2016. “They read me easily.”Douglas Segars for The New York Times“Since I’ve gotten here, I’ve hired 10 positions,” Zhang said. “We only have 66 musicians total, so that’s a high number. And after the pandemic, when everybody came back, there’s been even more of a sense of unity and wanting to be together. It feels closer now, psychologically.”What was initially called the Montclair Art Association Orchestra made its debut on Nov. 27, 1922, boasting female members at a time when that was unusual. The inaugural program included Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, which Joshua Bell will reprise in this weekend’s season finale.In its early years, the orchestra benefited from its closeness to New York, since many of its players were also part of the Philharmonic — and even now, the proximity can be valuable for attracting talent. (The star pianist Daniil Trifonov might not be such a perennial presence if he didn’t live just across the Hudson River in Battery Park City.)Under the decade-long directorship of the young conductor Samuel Antek, who died suddenly in 1958, community outreach — lowering ticket prices, appearing on the radio, hiring local choruses, creating children’s concerts — was a priority. Ten years later came the glamorous tenure of Henry Lewis, the first Black music director of a major orchestra, who presided over the kind of booming institutional growth that spread throughout the American orchestral world in the 1960s and ’70s.Henry Lewis, the first Black music director of a major orchestra, presided over a golden era of institutional growth. Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe ensemble has been known for charismatic podium leaders. Hugh Wolff’s programming was creative, and his performances polished. Under Zdenek Macal, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark opened in 1997, providing a home base for the orchestra, and Neeme Järvi, in charge from 2003 to 2009, led enthusiastically received concerts.When Zhang, born in China in 1973, made her first guest appearance, in 2010, her English was still a work in progress, recalled Eric Wyrick, the orchestra’s concertmaster.“She was very businesslike” at those initial rehearsals, he said. “Very straight up and down with her delivery. But then, at the performances, she just exploded. For a tiny person, she was just huge.”“I felt this orchestra was, for me, very easy to conduct,” Zhang said. “They read me easily.”With swooping yet clear gestures, she has guided the ensemble into repertory it hadn’t touched in a long time — like, earlier this year, Mahler’s Third Symphony — as well as major commissions from composers like Steve Mackey, many of them based in New Jersey.At a recent rehearsal for a concert that featured Randall Goosby as the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, she worked with the musicians on a new piece by Chen Yi, emphasizing buoyancy and the length of the musical line: “Everything needs to be lighter and have a lot of space.” (With the composer in the house, it was a rare moment in the music world — a rehearsal being guided entirely by women of Asian descent: Zhang, Chen and the ensemble’s assistant conductor, Tong Chen.)“They’re faster than a lot of orchestras to grasp different things,” Zhang said after the rehearsal — a necessity, since the group is constantly traveling among its five main performance spaces across the state.“Because we’re not a behemoth, we can be more responsive to community needs,” van Aalst said. “Traditionally orchestras either say, ‘Come to us, we’re wonderful,’ or they go out into communities and say, ‘Hey, listen to us.’ We were very intentional that we were going to go to communities and ask, ‘What do you need from us?’”Zdenek Macal with the orchestra at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, which became its home base.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThis approach has meant bigger and richer Lunar New Year celebrations than at most American orchestras, and an intriguing performance of Indian music in May that aimed to engage with the state’s substantial South Asian community. The players’ contract has a strong chamber component, encouraging participation in educational activities.“We’re not going to compete with the New York Phil,” van Aalst said. “We’re not going to compete with Philadelphia. That’s not the point. We have been very intentional about framing the orchestra as ‘your New Jersey Symphony.’ We’re here for your community.”Zhang’s current contract extends through the 2027-28 season, at which point hers will be, at 12 years, the longest music directorship in the orchestra’s history. “She could have done this for eight years and gone and done other things,” van Aalst said. “But I think she loves being here; there’s a symbiosis.”There are also things to look forward to: new repertory, including more Mahler and a robust slate of commissions, as well as hopes to create a new building that the orchestra would own — unlike the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which is its own entity — devoted to offices, rehearsals and education. In the even longer term, there are dreams for a summer venue for the region, along the lines of the Hollywood Bowl.While Zhang said she would love to lead the orchestra on tour, including internationally, there doesn’t seem to be much worry about proving the ensemble’s bona fides — particularly nearby.“I would rather commission two new pieces from New Jersey composers than spend the money to go to Carnegie Hall,” van Aalst said. “That’s actually driving the art form forward; that’s actually celebrating the orchestra.” More

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      Taylor Swift Halts Morgan Wallen’s Run at No. 1

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      After 12 straight weeks at the top, the country star’s “One Thing at a Time” yields to Swift’s “Midnights,” which was reissued in expanded editions.For 12 weeks, nothing could stop Morgan Wallen’s domination of the Billboard chart with his latest album, “One Thing at a Time.” Not Metallica. Not Ed Sheeran. Not the Jonas Brothers or solo projects from two members of BTS.Then came deluxe reissues of “Midnights,” Taylor Swift’s seven-month-old LP.With two expanded editions featuring bonus tracks, “Midnights” returns to No. 1, notching its sixth time at the top. One of the new versions, called “The Late Night Edition,” was primarily sold as a CD at Swift’s current stadium tour, though for 24 hours it was also available as a download from the singer’s website. Counting all variations, “Midnights” logged the equivalent of 282,000 sales in the United States last week, including 196,000 copies sold as complete packages and 108 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate.“Midnights” has been a steady hit since it came out last October. In its 32 weeks on the chart, it has never left the Top 10, and in all but three of those weeks it was in the Top 5. In the United States, “Midnights” has had the equivalent of nearly five million sales and been streamed 3.2 billion times.Lately, as Swift’s Eras Tour has become a cultural juggernaut, her wider catalog has also dotted the upper ranks of the album chart. Last week, Swift had nine titles in the Top 40. (“Lover,” from 2019, is No. 6 this week.) Swift also announced recently that a rerecorded version of her 2010 album “Speak Now” — featuring the hits “Mine,” “Back to December” and “Mean” — will come out in July.The return of “Midnights” bumps Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” to No. 2. Its 12-week consecutive run at the top was historic, falling just one week short of tying a record set by Stevie Wonder in 1977 among albums that open at No. 1 and hold there. Wallen’s last release, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” is No. 5 this week, its 122nd appearance in the Top 10.Also this week, “Almost Healed,” the new album by the Chicago rapper Lil Durk — featuring guest appearances by Alicia Keys, 21 Savage and Wallen — starts at No. 3 with the equivalent of 125,000 sales, including 168 million streams and 2,000 copies sold as a complete package. SZA’s “SOS” is No. 4. More

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      Kaija Saariaho’s Luminous Music Was a Personal Invitation

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      The Finnish composer, who died at 70, is remembered by one of her longtime collaborators.The history of classical music is a history of creators of distinct originality. Its evolution has always happened through the work of visionary individuals and their ability to expand our understanding of the world through their works. These artists widen our horizons, invent, search, open doors and create paths for others. It takes extraordinary force, and courage, to follow an inner voice that no one else knows or understands yet.One of these visionaries was the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died on Friday at 70. Her legacy is monumentally important, luminous and larger than we can fully comprehend at this time.When I first got to know her as a person in the early 2000s, I had already admired her from a distance. She was a well-known figure in Finland, from the group Korvat Auki! (Ears Open!) in her youth and her collaborations with Avanti!, a summer festival, and in my mind, she and her music were one and the same.I conducted “Cinq Reflets” at the Helsinki Festival in 2002, and over the years that followed, I got to know both her and her musical universe more profoundly; and I came to understand how deeply personal her music really is. It is not something external, which is given or delivered to us. Rather, as I see it, it is something that allows us to enter into her intimate inner world. We are, generously, given an opportunity to look within her.It’s mind-blowing to see how a deeply personal creative voice can be so powerful that, even if the language expands in time and is more and more refined over the years and decades of their creative work, its originality shines through from the very beginning, so bright that it is immediately recognizable. Unlike anything else, it becomes a new element in the greater musical universe.Kaija’s music is like this: both new and timeless, both personal and universal, from the moment it is first heard. Whether her works are electronic or acoustic, staged or in concert, we are always transported to another time and place.The creative process for a composer is fundamentally solitary, but a characteristic element of Kaija’s working process was collaboration. She knew how the interaction between a creator and an interpreter means much more than simple questions of technique, volume or tempos — how it also means having the willingness to be on the same wavelength to be able to transmit the right atmosphere with the greatest care and respect. To write a role for a certain singer, a concerto for a soloist genuinely interested in her view of the instrument, an orchestra piece or an opera, knowing who would be conducting would, I believe, liberate her creative energy to full freedom.Her music is spellbindingly beautiful and reflects colorful imagination, but in a way it’s also a form of sonic research, through science and artisanship — and, always, poetry and reflection. Kaija has changed music because she has changed our perception and our way to listen. This music is living. It vibrates and breathes, and it has to get its own space and freedom, and it feels like it speaks to us from another world. Electronics and acoustic instruments, solo or full orchestra, the human voice, words, dreams — it’s fascinating and impressive how, in spite of different tools and changing proportions, the final result is always unique, but at the same time it also perfectly coheres with other pieces. It is a language in which specific sounds blend together and become an amazing paradox of crystal-clear precision and luminous haze.The most refined nuances are our sensory vocabulary, and in Kaija’s works nuance is everything: Understanding the essential meaning in each expression is key. For a composer, having her message passed on to the audience in the right way, with the right sensitivity, is absolutely essential.Kaija’s closest longtime collaborators — such as Jean-Baptiste Barrière, her husband; the cellist Anssi Karttunen; the flutist Camilla Hoitenga; and the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen — recognized her talent and trusted her instinct, understanding her unique voice from the beginning. There were us others of a younger generation who joined Kaija’s musical family later, and she would never fail to express how grateful she was for our work. We in turn will forever feel a deep gratitude for the trust, for all the ways she supported us through her warmth and care, and for all the friendships that have grown out of our shared love for her art.She was a mother, exceptionally devoted to her children and family. In time, her children Aleksi and Aliisa also became working partners, and Kaija repeatedly spoke about how much she learned from them and their observations. But this nurturing and caring weren’t limited to them alone. Having been allowed to be a part of her artistic family has been the greatest privilege imaginable; her generosity in supporting the young generation of composers and musicians is also an indicator of her thinking, which was aimed to keep building things bigger than ourselves. She was warm and funny too, and a very wise and compassionate friend — a truly, remarkably beautiful person, both outside and in.The courage with which Kaija built her life’s work is enormous, considering the condescending or humiliating attitudes she had to endure as a woman early in her career — be it in the press, by institutions or in private encounters. She never wanted to draw much attention to this, but there were hurtful experiences she only shared after years of close friendship. Her nobility and strength to rise above all that, however — in keeping on, then showing the way to others — was incredible, strong and exemplary. She knew that even in that respect, her work carried huge importance, but she chose to let the music speak for itself.She is and remains a role model, not only for her place in music history, but also for her ethics and her courage to speak up about topics that she considered important. She chose complex subjects for her operas, such as those of “Adriana Mater” and “Innocence,” and the theater would include everything: the unbearable truths, but also the soothing dream world — which for her was the most central element of “Innocence,” not the tragic events themselves. Through this genuine fearlessness and honesty, she restored many people’s belief in opera as art form.It is impossible to imagine the world — the music world or my own life — without Kaija. But her presence is with us in her art. What helps now, in the grief, is the inner light present in her works, which we will now keep carrying forward, always moving toward the light. More

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      Ian Bostridge on Music’s Fuzzy Boundaries of Identity

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      The beloved tenor’s latest book and album emerged from a time when the pandemic forced him to question what exactly he does when he sings.Spring this year has been a particular joy for touring singers like me. The cloud of Covid seems to have evaporated: Restrictions have been lifted, audiences have (nervously) returned and the prospect of being stranded in foreign parts with a positive test is gone, not to mention the diminishing threat of serious or voice-impacting illness. Things will never be the same — they never are — but some semblance of normalcy has returned.When the endless travels of classical music were interrupted, though, and when I was forced into a kind of silence, I had time and the inclination to question what I was doing, to ask what exactly I’m up to when I stand up and sing a song. This interacted with two projects that were conceived before the pandemic but were largely undertaken during it: “Song and Self,” lectures and a resulting book, and a recording of “The Folly of Desire,” a song cycle written by and performed with the pianist-composer Brad Mehldau.This spring saw the consummation of both, with the book out from the University of Chicago Press in April, and the album out on June 2 on the Pentatone label. In my writing, I looked at some iconic works — by Monteverdi, Schumann, Britten and Ravel — exploring them in the light of concerns about gender identity, colonialism and death. Mehldau’s work, resolutely art and not remotely a work of analysis, treats the multiform and problematic nature of sexual desire, sometimes with a shocking directness and sometimes with a glowing compassion, but always with a visceral beauty.WHEN I BECAME a professional musician, in the mid-1990s, I forged my reputation as a singer of songs — particularly of lieder, German art song, that very niche but hugely significant branch of classical music reinvented by Franz Schubert in the 1820s and brought to global prominence by the legendary baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau after World War II.Ian Bostridge, right, performing “The Folly of Desire,” with Brad Mehldau at the piano in 2019 at Zankel Hall in Manhattan.Stephanie BergerThe big discovery I came to, as I made my first tentative steps into the world of music theater, was that the distinction I had unconsciously made between “song” and “opera” was misconceived and inhibiting. The boundary between the two was, rather, fluid and permeable.Having seen Fischer-Dieskau perform toward the end of his career in the 1980s, I had already half-learned this lesson. To watch him perform even as purely lyrical a song as Schubert’s “Meeresstille,” a setting of Goethe’s poem about a ship becalmed at sea, was to see a master actor at work. Some of the great stage directors I have worked with in opera — Baz Luhrmann, David Alden, Deborah Warner — have encouraged me to bring the special intensity of the song recital, the “expressive intimacy” identified by my baritone colleague Christian Gerhaher in a recent book, to opera.Conversely, song recitals involve the presentation of a persona just as much as any other piece of music theater. And the boundaries between acting as impersonation (think Daniel Day-Lewis’s film performances) and as intensification of the reinvented self (now think of Cary Grant’s work with Hitchcock) are constantly shifting.Hybrid forms, neither opera nor conventional recital, are particularly interesting in this regard. Three pieces of music theater that I have been lucky enough to bring to Lincoln Center in New York — Seamus Heaney’s translation of Janacek’s “Diary of One Who Vanished,” directed by Warner, and Netia Jones’s stagings of Schubert’s “Winterreise,” in a version by Hans Zender, and of Britten’s “Curlew River” — were exactly that: staged song cycles in the first two cases, and reimagined ritual in third. They encouraged me even more to explore an issue that I found slippery and abstract at first, but that gradually took on a clearer form.Identity is something that all performers have to confront. Each time we stand onstage to deliver a text — literary or musical, or some combination of the two — we have a decision to make about its character, and about our stance toward it. How do we go about embodying it? Do we take on the identity of the material we have absorbed, or does it reconfigure itself as it is molded to our own identity? What is our duty to the text? To the audience? To ourselves?My book “Song and Self” explores and worries at issues of identity that come to the fore in some of the works I love — issues of gender, for example. Is the real protagonist of Robert Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und -Leben” not the woman we see on the surface, but rather the composer, whose anxieties and passions inflect the cycle at every point? What difference does it make if the cycle is sung, as it was in the 19th century, by a man? Should I sing it today?Then again, how important is the gender of the Madwoman, which I have sung, in “Curlew River”? Britten uses the ritual resources of Japanese Noh theater to create a sort of distancing. Cross-gender casting is a part of this, but one which in blurring our perceptions of gender only amplifies the impact of the austerely told story: The Madwoman is all of us.Troubling political issues can also intersect with the sung persona as I discovered in my research into Ravel’s “Chansons Madécasses.” The second section of this powerful cycle, for voice and instrumental trio, is a setting of an 18th-century protest against longstanding French attempts to colonize Madagascar, voiced by a Malagasy. “Méfiez-vous des blancs” (“Beware of the whites”) he cries — but that cry was written by Évariste Parny, an opponent of slavery yet a slave owner.Ravel wrote the song in the midst of French colonial wars in North Africa, only a few decades after the bloody French conquest of Madagascar in 1896. Some early audiences saw the piece as political provocation. There’s something troubling about these twin acts of ventriloquism, Parny’s poem and Ravel’s music. In addressing the song we have to ask questions about the poet’s bad faith as a slaveholding abolitionist, about the composer’s motives and about our own. Who should sing this song? Who owns it?“Song and Self” is very much an exploratory work. It takes the notion of the essay at its word — as an attempt, an experiment. If I draw any conclusion, it’s that the way to approach classical music, in an era in which its relevance or ideological stance is constantly being questioned, is to explore where it comes from more closely, not to throw it away. Questioning is built into the classical music tradition; and interpreting this complex music that we have inherited means negotiating between the preoccupations of the past and the present so that we can discover more about ourselves.MEHLDAU’S “THE FOLLY OF DESIRE” demands similar questioning. I had first met Brad five or six years ago; he was playing jazz improvisations and I was singing “Winterreise,” we hit it off, and he offered to write song cycle for the two of us. What emerged, about 18 months later, was a group of songs that set the past and the present against each other in a way that also opened up new ways of thinking — in this case, concerning what William Blake called “the lineaments of gratified desire.”“Folly” both fits into and challenges the tradition of Romantic lieder that Mehldau and I love so much. It sets a series of poems in a dizzying sequence of musical styles that reflect the shifting perspectives on desire opened up by each poem he sets: the delicate darkness of William Blake’s “The Sick Rose”; the classical horror of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”; the sly lubricious perversity of a sonnet by Bertolt Brecht so obscene that his estate will not allow it to be translated; the rollicking jocks of E. E. Cummings’s “The Boys,” set in the style of Supertramp “with Wurlitzer.” The cycle ends with an epilogue based on one of the great poetic expressions of the ambiguities and compromises of sexual relationships, W.H. Auden’s “Lullaby”: “Lay your sleeping head, my love / Human on my faithless arm.”We performed the songs in recital with Schumann’s “Dichterliebe.” The pairing reinvigorated the weirdness and perversity of a piece from the 19th century so familiar as to be in danger of losing its edge. Mehldau’s cycle can also be shocking, but, as in the Schumann, to dramatic effect; juxtapositions of violence and serenity intensify our engagement with the mysterious movements of text and music. When a tiny motif from the first Blake setting reoccurs in the last — “What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? / Or Wisdom for a dance in the street?” — we are moved, even if we hardly know why.In the end we decided to complete our recording with the jazz encores we had performed over the years, rather than with the Schumann. But hearing these standards — “These Foolish Things,” “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Night and Day” — set against Mehldau’s cycle also opens them up to questioning.“The Folly of Desire” explores different identities through text and music, some rebarbative and some consolatory, and in doing so shines a light on our experience of desire — its capacity for mindless destruction, its sublime creativity, its sheer idiocy. Folly indeed. As Mehldau writes in a composer’s note, it was written in a period when desire and its dangers were very much at the fore of public discourse, as #MeToo forced everyone to come to terms with the troubled issue of consent.But the piece is, as Mehldau says, “untouched by prosaic discourse.” Like other great works of the classical tradition, it allows us to inhabit other personas, other worlds. And it offers no answers, doing what art does in that spirit of negative capability, which Keats so perfectly encapsulated: to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” More

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      Kaija Saariaho: 11 Essential Works

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      This poetic composer, who died on Friday, wrote indelible, simmering operas, concertos, orchestral explosions, choral meditations and solos.Kaija Saariaho, the poetic and powerful composer who died on Friday at 70, was also subtle and suggestive with words.“Dazzling, different surfaces, tissues, textures,” she wrote of an early work, in language that could describe her style over 40 years. “Weights, gravity. To be blinded. Interpolations. Reflections. Death. The sum of independent worlds. Shading, refracting the color.”Her music shivers and glimmers but never lacks forcefulness; lush and often ominous, veiled in dark mystery, her pieces evolve with the muscular sinuousness of snakes. Her scores can evoke the glint and glare of staring at the sun — its beauty, its harshness, its burning afterimage — but also the slowly dizzying churn of the depths of the sea.Saariaho’s preoccupations were clear almost from the beginning of her career until its far too early end: guiding electronic and acoustic instruments into fresh alchemies of color, light and mass; the creation of seething stillness; the swiftness with which seeming solidity collapses into nothingness. Here are 11 works that offer an introduction to her seductive, if sometimes forbidding, world.‘Verblendungen’ (1984)Trained as a strict serialist, Saariaho was exposed in the early 1980s to the sonic haze of spectralist composers like Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey. This, coupled with her time at Ircam, the French institute of electronic music, pulled her from her early musical path toward an exploration of the relationship between acoustic instruments and electronic sounds, sometimes taped and sometimes produced live. In “Verblendungen” (a complex word that means, among other things, “delusions”), taped sounds and a live ensemble together take a journey of gradual dissolution from crushing density to spare, quivering particles.‘Du Cristal’ (1989)Half of a linked pair of pieces (with “ … à la Fumée”) for large orchestra — her entry into composing for grand symphonic forces — “Du Cristal” also has a crucial part for synthesizer, though Saariaho integrates the electronic and the acoustic into a single, shifting, dangerous mass. Strands of solo instruments emerge from a billowing cloud of sound, poised between meditation and violence.‘Graal Théâtre’ (1994)The rare Saariaho work not to include an electronic component, “Graal Théâtre” (“Grail Theater”) is a haunting violin concerto in an exuberantly virtuosic mode — its calligraphic solo line darting, at the start, amid bells and soft droning that shifts in and out of focus. Near the end, the accompaniment explodes before leaving the violinist alone in the final moments.‘Miranda’s Lament’ (1997)Before her first opera, Saariaho ventured into writing for voice, including setting texts from “The Tempest” — among them Miranda’s plea to her father, Prospero, to calm the storm he has created. The chamber instrumentation is intimate and graceful, and the soprano’s line is both expressively pained and plainly lovely, with a combination that long fascinated this composer: contemporary colors mixed with the deceptively simple formality of medieval and Renaissance song.‘Oltra Mar’ (1999)As sensual as Saariaho’s music gets, the chorus’s sound in this seven-part, 22-minute work hovers like bars of light, the edges smokily blurred. The mood is otherworldly; the subject is journeys, which feel more existential than physical. Electronic sounds rumble in “Memory of Waves”; death, the theme of the penultimate section, is followed by the hypnotic unfolding of “Arrival.”‘L’Amour de Loin’ (2000)For her first opera, Saariaho, working with the writer Amin Maalouf, created a stylized vision of the life of the 12th-century troubadour Jaufré Rudel, who falls in love with a countess he’s never met. Luxuriant contemplation reigns; there is little plot, but passion surges in the restraint, with tastes of medieval harmonies and North African rhythms.‘Sept Papillons’ (2000)For all her skill at handling large ensembles, Saariaho’s solos — including this set of miniatures for cello — have a special focus and freedom, a human rather than mythic scale. And, as with Bach’s cello music, almost ceaseless motion here has the uncanny, unexpected effect of encouraging reflection.‘Aile du Songe’ (2001)

      Few contemporary composers have devoted as much energy as Saariaho did to writing for the flute, which she mined for its keening eloquence, its reverberations of the primitive and its human connection: the ever-audible breath. This concerto wanders, dreamlike, fluttering and — in the second part — dancing, its energy infectious.‘Orion’ (2002)A majestic use of a sprawling orchestra, complete with organ, this piece — inspired by the hunter of Greek mythology and the constellation that shares his name — begins as a moody nocturne before boiling over into pummeling fury. “Winter Sky,” the second part, is as expansive as its title, with the trembling of infinite stars; and “Hunter,” the finale, is a ferocious dash.‘D’om le Vrai Sens’ (2010)Saariaho was inspired by a cycle of medieval tapestries to write a clarinet concerto — one that asks its soloist to move around the performance space — structured enigmatically according to the five senses: the kaleidoscopic colors of “Hearing”; “Sight” woozy and wailing; “Smell” simmering; “Touch” alert and as bright as Saariaho’s music gets; “Taste” unsettled and grumbling. The sixth section, the title of which translates roughly to “According to my desire alone,” is one of the spookiest and most beautiful pieces in her body of work, a quietly disorienting cave full of otherworldly calls and responses.‘Innocence’ (2018)Written before the pandemic, which caused its premiere to be delayed until 2021, “Innocence” is as densely plotted as “L’Amour de Loin” was spare. The stark yet sensitive story of a shooting at an international school, and its echoes years later, the score is Saariaho’s masterpiece, confidently guiding the desperate mood in a mixture of singing, speaking (in seven languages) and eerie Finnish folk chant. All these disparate vocal worlds are linked by the orchestra, which wraps around the singers lightly and sleekly — never explicitly underlining them, never competing. More