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      Heinali Is Reconstructing Kyiv, One Synth Wave at a Time

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      “Kyiv Eternal,” by the composer and sound artist Heinali (real name Oleh Shpudeiko), submerges listeners in the sounds of the prewar Ukrainian capital.It’s disorienting: Again and again these past few weeks, I’ve been walking through New York and thinking I’m somewhere else. I’ll be strolling through Central Park, but the sounds I hear come from a park nine time zones away. In line at my local Whole Foods I’ll hear the cash registers of an Eastern European grocery store. Last week I was riding the subway to Harlem and the announcer called out the wrong line. “Next stop, Maidan Nezalezhnosti …”In my headphones, I’ve had an album on loop: “Kyiv Eternal,” a ravishing audioscape of the Ukrainian capital by the composer and electronic musician Heinali. Amid ambient washes of sound, Heinali, whose real name is Oleh Shpudeiko, integrates field recordings from across Kyiv: the horns of minibuses that ferry workers in from the suburbs, or the crowds in Landscape Alley, the open-air sculpture park overlooking the Dnipro River. Staticky street sounds from Shuliavka, a neighborhood that endured artillery strikes in the war’s first hours, commingle with quavering loops of electronic vibrations.The sounds are something of a time capsule. Shpudeiko captured them before Russia invaded; some of the recordings are more than a decade old. Intertwining those archival noises with electronic keyboards and instrumental lines, he has fabricated a citywide portrait of beautiful irresolution. “Kyiv Eternal” is no war diary. It’s an inward-looking musical conjuration of a city that’s partially vanished — to refugee outflows, to military curfews — and a city that is still, defiantly, standing.“I bought my first pocket Zoom sound recorder in 2011, I think, and the moment I bought it I started recording basically everything around me,” Shpudeiko told me when we caught up on a video call. With Alexey Shmurak, another sound artist, he attempted an “acoustic ecology of Kyiv”: collecting tones and noises that typified the capital’s audible life. They captured the unique phrasings of drivers of the capital’s private minibuses — which once constituted a hefty fraction of Kyiv transport, but began to fade in the era of Uber — hawking their destinations.“They would develop, with time, a very specific phrasing,” Shpudeiko said. “A melodic contour would suddenly appear. Like birds trying to capture the attention of a mate.” He incorporated those calls into the track “Rare Birds,” where soft electronic tremolos shimmer over drivers’ megaphones, as they announce their routes to Odesa or Vinnytsia.You hear more literal chirping on “Botanichnyi Sad” (“Botanical Garden”), whose stuttering synths intermingle with field recordings of birdsong from the A.V. Fomin Botanical Garden, which has stood in the center of the capital for nearly two centuries. Or there’s the exquisite track “Silpo,” named for a Ukrainian grocery store chain, whose jingling beat derives from the cash registers: a corporate carillon of high, sharp chimes, each ringing out over the composer’s muffled, crackling percussion line.“Kyiv Eternal” was released on Feb. 24, the one-year anniversary of the invasion. It inhabits a different sonic space from Heinali’s medieval-inspired synthesizer compositions, which he’s performed this year in a Paris mansion, a Vienna nightclub and a Ukrainian bomb shelter. (Ukrainian men require government permission to go abroad; Shpudeiko had approval for a residency in Cologne, Germany, where he recorded the new album.) Each track of “Kyiv Eternal” is largely stationary, without strong melodic variations. Some recall the ambient 1990s synth baths of Aphex Twin, others the recent synth-and-found-object compositions of Ryuichi Sakamoto. The effect is foggy, wistful, plangent, unresolved.Yet to a Kyivan listener, every track is studded with “ear-marks,” as Shpudeiko calls the aural signposts that orient you through the city as landmarks do for your eyes. The album is an ode to the capital, but not a mash note. “Kyiv isn’t the perfect city,” he said. “It’s full of ugliness and beauty as well. It’s a very interesting city, but it’s hard to love. But after leaving Ukraine, I felt it was a part of my identity, and I owe a lot to this city.”Since the war began, Heinali has performed in a Paris mansion, a Vienna nightclub and a Ukrainian bomb shelter. Oleksii KarpovychShpudeiko is a city boy, born in Kyiv in 1985. As a teenager he witnessed the 2004 Orange Revolution, which drew nonviolent protesters to the streets to protest a rigged election. Ten years later he took part in the Maidan Revolution, the massive democratic uprising that ousted a Kremlin-backed president. Maidan didn’t just recast Ukraine’s political trajectory; it brought a cultural revolution too, especially in the capital.Before Maidan, Shpudeiko recalled, Kyiv had few promoters specializing in electronic, experimental music. “After 2014,” he said, “it was like an explosion.”Clubs sprang up in Podil, a low-lying bohemian neighborhood by the Dnipro River. There were digital radio stations like 20 Feet Radio, and electronic music labels rivaled only by Berlin’s. Kyiv became one of Europe’s prime party capitals — but the same venues that hosted club nights like Cxema also presented contemporary classical concerts, dance performances and art installations. “The audiences that would usually visit a rave would go to contemporary poetry readings,” Shpudeiko remembered.That post-Maidan class of DJs and sound artists — composers of art music and of club music, none too worried about the distinction — would become the first generation from post-independence Ukraine to win broad European esteem. But even as the city developed its reputation for cutting-edge nightlife, Shpudeiko started looking back: to medieval and early Renaissance music, whose strict, almost mathematical cadences reverberated with his own modular synthesizers.He fell particularly hard for Léonin and Pérotin, two of the first named composers, who in Paris in the late 12th and early 13th centuries pushed Western sacred music into polyphony. On his magnificent 2020 album “Madrigals,” Shpudeiko used custom synthesizer software to generate rich, independent yet intertwining melodies in the style of the Notre Dame school. Over that electronic polyphony, accompanists on period instruments, including the theorbo (a long-necked lute), improvised sometimes plangent, sometimes dissonant improvisations.He was at work on a second album of “generative polyphony” when the war came to Kyiv. (That album remains on hold, though a new composition, “Aves rubrae,” premiered on the website of the Museum of Modern Art last month.)“The thing is, I didn’t believe there would be a full-scale invasion,” he said. “All of my friends didn’t believe it either. But my girlfriend, she actually believed there would be war. I remember, on that night, we drank wine and we watched the last season of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm.’ Four hours later we were woken up by explosions in Kyiv. And even at first, I thought that maybe it was some kind of mistake.”The couple’s first act was to evacuate their mothers. They were on the road for 50 hours straight, with Shpudeiko’s synthesizer between his legs. They tried and failed to cross the Polish border, unable to make it through the miles-long lines. Eventually they made it to the Hungarian border, where his relatives crossed safely. Shpudeiko took refuge in Lviv, in the relative safety of western Ukraine, where he and other displaced musicians played live-streamed concerts to raise money for the army and humanitarian aid.Last April — as Ukrainian forces retook the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, and discovered unspeakable atrocities exacted on civilians — Shpudeiko was in a bomb shelter, his synthesizer hooked up to Ethernet cables the length of a football field, playing his unfinished medieval album. Out of the basement, the beeps and honks of the synth danced around one another, just as the voices did in Paris some 900 years ago. The walls of the shelter, like those of the Gothic cathedral before it, reverberated with polyphonic music from a world beyond pain: not sacred, not quite, but certainly exalted.“What we did back then, it wasn’t just activism,” he says of those bomb-shelter concerts. “It was also about therapy. It was a way of preserving our artistic identity. When the full-scale invasion started, I think no one knew who they were anymore. I think everyone needed to perform some work to either reconstruct or preserve or change their identity.”Now the Ukrainian capital has another soundscape: the wailing bursts of the air raid siren that wakes you at night, the whir of the low-altitude cruise missile, the chain saw buzz of the slow-flying drone. The war haunts “Kyiv Eternal” nevertheless. The album opens with sounds of the Kyiv tramway, and, amid reverberant synths, we hear a loudspeaker calls out the stops: Zoolohichna Street, Lukianivska Square …. It’s line 14, and a gander at a Ukrainian transport app (for the trams still run on time in Kyiv) confirms that this streetcar is headed north, to Podil, where it will terminate at a grand square.On the album’s cover is a statue in that square, of Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, a Cossack military commander now adopted as the patron saint of the Ukrainian army. In peacetime, pedestrians would look up to see Konashevych on horseback, saber raised to the sky. On the cover of “Kyiv Eternal” he appears as he does today: sandbagged up his neck, a black tarp shrouding his head.The general is, for Shpudeiko, an unexpected cover model. “I’m not a nationalist, and all my music was always personal or abstract; it didn’t have any obvious national identity,” he told me. “I wanted to have something that would capture this feeling of wanting to embrace the living city. And these monuments: They are embraced by these sandbags, protecting them from harm.”Heinali (Oleh Shpudeiko)“Kyiv Eternal”(Injazero) More

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      Review: A Contemporary Music Group’s Next Era Begins

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      George E. Lewis’s tenure with the International Contemporary Ensemble began with a tribute to the multitalented artist Douglas R. Ewart.Some artists earn the “multi-hyphenate” label by doing two or three things. But Douglas R. Ewart works on a whole other level.That much was clear when this composer, visual artist, poet, multi-instrumentalist and instrument-maker put on a true multimedia event at the Chelsea Factory on Friday night. He gave a thrilling tour of his varied creativity in the company of a violist, cellist, bassoonist and two percussionists from the International Contemporary Ensemble — whose new leader, George E. Lewis, organized the concert, making his curatorial debut with the group.In the lobby were three of Ewart’s sculptures (including one dedicated to the jazz musician Eric Dolphy), and inside the hall hung five of his paintings (including one titled “Rasta in Sun Ra”). Underneath those canvases, the concert featured some shimmering, percussive work from Ewart, 76, himself — on a tall wooden staff outfitted with a sequence of Bundt cake pans, which he called “The George Floyd Bunt Staff.” (More on the chiaroscuro effect of that Bundt/bunt ambiguity later.)From left, the International Contemporary Ensemble players Wendy Richman, Aliya Ultan and Rebekah Heller.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAlso on offer was Ewart’s piping, ecstatic approach to the sopranino saxophone, informed by bebop and the avant-garde alike. And there was plenty of meditative yet tuneful chamber music writing for the full ensemble, which the composer sometimes underlined with performances on a series of flutes.Elsewhere, Ewart gave somber, spoken-word testaments to Floyd’s memory, in addition to more slyly humorous commentaries on contemporary discussions of race. One such aperçu involved his interrogation of the phrase “unapologetically Black,” with him saying, “I am not unapologetically anything, because when I say that I have already apologized.”Other compositions offered space for Ewart to celebrate the practice of “sound sifting” — which he defined as a dedicated process of studying music’s mysteries — alongside playing from the ensemble members that emphatically endorsed his poetry’s quality of exultation.Clockwise, from top left: Ewart’s “Eye of Horus” (2017-18); “Sonic Stroller” (2006); his elaborately decorated performance outfit, which has bells stuffed in its pockets; and “Eric Dolphy Sonic Dread” (2017).It sounds like there’s a lot going on here. But while undeniably jam-packed and charged with grave themes, the evening progressed with a sense of unhurried equanimity. That was in large part thanks to the figure cut by Ewart; when he paced the stage to grab a new instrument, you could hear bells — tucked away in the pockets of his colorful, homemade concert suit — jangling peaceably.The International Contemporary Ensemble had commissioned the evening’s first through-composed piece, “Songs and Stories of Hopes, Dreams and Visions,” and throughout, the players were on Ewart’s same wavelength: intense yet generous. At the outset of the concert’s first half — a 40-minute set that included three works played without a break — the percussionists Nathan Davis (on vibraphone) and Clara Warnaar (on marimba) collaborated on dreamy, interlocking mallet-instrument patterns that recalled past Ewart projects that have involved choirs of similar instruments.Rebekah Heller, the ensemble’s bassoonist, responded to the upward-swooping graphic notation of “Red Hills” with a peppery excitement that rivaled earlier interpretations of it. (This piece was previously documented during a 1981 concert in Detroit, which has recently been reissued digitally on Bandcamp.)

      Beneath Detroit / Ewart . Barefield . Tabal Trio by Geodesic DisquesEwart, center, performed spoken-word portions of the show alongside musicians including Ultan, left, on cello, and Heller, on bassoon.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat members of the International Contemporary Ensemble could stack up so well against the recorded legacy of an artist like Ewart was no small thing. Credit also to Lewis, the ensemble’s new artistic director. This pathbreaking trombonist, composer and scholar literally wrote the book on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the organization that provided schooling to Ewart in the 1960s, after he immigrated from Jamaica. (Ewart later served as chairman of that influential organization.)During the intermission on Friday, Lewis interviewed Ewart, a longtime collaborator, onstage. They amiably referred to moments in their history together, which includes a memorable 1979 duo recording on the Black Saint imprint.Given that relationship, Lewis was an ideal figure to extract more from Ewart about the ambiguities only hinted at in the performance’s staging and program notes. Such as: Why was the percussion instrument that Ewart employed during “Homage to George Floyd” billed as “The George Floyd Bunt Staff,” when it was clearly built from a series of Bundt pans? Channeling the serious-and-witty ingenuity of his music, Ewart responded with a sports analogy. He noted that Floyd’s death had catalyzed protests that had helped the national conversation to advance, like the sacrifice bunt in baseball.Nathan Davis, left, and Clara Warnaar on percussion. The performers played against a backdrop of visual artworks by Ewart.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSuch poetic abstraction risks sounding flip out of context, but the qualities of Ewart’s compositional practice made the gesture seem more like an authentic celebration of multiplicity and invention. The variety of tones he elicited from this instrument helped make the ambit of the tribute clear. When rapidly twirling it, and dragging the edges of a particular pan against a drumstick, he created a haunting, skittering effect — a restless signal of warning. When striking it directly, he could produce profoundly resonant gong-like sounds.This elegant shift from the grave to the exultant was heard again during the finale of the concert’s second half, which reached a climax with a fully notated piece for the ensemble players, “Truth is Power,” in which Ewart improvised on sopranino saxophone.It was a raucous, exciting conclusion to the show. And it was just a taste of what Lewis’s directorship of the International Contemporary Ensemble could bring. How many other artists like Ewart might benefit from having their larger works receive this kind of attention? The possibilities are extensive, and tantalizing.Douglas R. Ewart and the International Contemporary EnsemblePerformed on Friday at Chelsea Factory, Manhattan. More

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      The New York Philharmonic Announces Its 2023-24 Season

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      Jaap van Zweden’s final season as the New York Philharmonic’s music director will feature belated debuts and premieres, and a grand farewell.In his final season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Jaap van Zweden will lead a host of premieres, performances of Mozart’s Requiem and Mahler’s Second Symphony, and a residency in China, the orchestra announced on Tuesday.Gary Ginstling, the Philharmonic’s incoming president and chief executive, said that the season would showcase van Zweden’s devotion to new music and traditional works.“This is an opportunity,” Ginstling said in an interview, “to really celebrate all the elements that Jaap brought to the New York Philharmonic.”Van Zweden will make his first appearance on Sept. 27, with a gala featuring the cellist Yo-Yo Ma as the soloist in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto.The season will feature premieres by several composers, including Olga Neuwirth, Mary Kouyoumdjian and Melinda Wagner, as part of Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission new pieces from 19 women. And in summer 2024, the orchestra will return to China for the first time since 2019, for a residency in partnership with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.New Yorkers hoping to hear a taste of the Philharmonic’s future will have to wait: There will be no appearances next season by Gustavo Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who was announced as van Zweden’s successor in February. Ginstling said scheduling conflicts were to blame.Here are nine highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZMirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Oct. 11-14For those keeping track of all the ways in which the Philharmonic has followed the lead of its West Coast counterpart, the Los Angeles Philharmonic — in its leadership, in its hall’s look, in its choice of music director — here’s another one: Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the lively Lithuanian conductor who is being talked of as a possible successor to Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, will be making her debut. Daniil Trifonov, a welcome fixture at David Geffen Hall, will join for a program of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto, as well as selections from Sibelius’s “Lemminkäinen Suite” and Raminta Šerkšnytė’s “De Profundis,” from 1998. JOSHUA BARONEMirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a possible successor to Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, will make her New York Philharmonic debut in October.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLigeti’s Centennial, Oct. 19-21The Philharmonic is celebrating the centennial of Gyorgi Ligeti’s birth with multiple concerts. (Look out for pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing Études on Nov. 7.) This program, one of the most eclectic on the Philharmonic’s calendar, brings two pieces of Ligeti’s into dialogue with Brahms’s Serenade No. 1 and a piano concerto by the living modernist Elena Firsova. The Ligeti works are from relatively early in his career. (And one, “Mifiso la sodo,” is a U.S. premiere!) Evaluating their place alongside the Brahms and the Firsova, with Yefim Bronfman as the soloist, should make for a bracing ride with David Robertson at the podium. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Israel in Egypt,’ Oct. 25-26A recent performance of “Solomon” at Carnegie Hall was a reminder of the sumptuous power of Handel’s English oratorios, his genre of concert-format, loosely plotted, often biblically inspired works that made choruses the stars. The Philharmonic rarely programs these pieces — with the obvious exception of the perennial “Messiah,” conducted this year in mid-December by Fabio Biondi — so “Israel in Egypt” will be a treat. On the podium, Jeannette Sorrell makes her subscription debut with the orchestra, leading the choir of Apollo’s Fire, her Cleveland-based ensemble. ZACHARY WOOLFESound On, Oct. 27Past concerts in this chamber-focused series have delved deeply into contemporary music — and have also been relegated to smaller spaces inside Lincoln Center. But on this date, when the Ensemble Signal conductor Brad Lubman joins Philharmonic players and a wide range of guest soloists, the music will be presented in Geffen Hall proper. That bodes well for Unsuk Chin’s transporting aesthetic, which is represented here by her Double Concerto for Piano and Percussion. And there’s similar potential for a new (as yet untitled) collaborative work by Kinan Azmeh and Layale Chaker. Both are leading player-composers who also happen to improvise, and they’ll both be onstage here. SETH COLTER WALLSDessner’s Concerto for Two Pianos, Nov. 30-Dec. 2Bryce Dessner, one-fifth of the rock band the National, wrote his Concerto for Two Pianos for the tight, persuasive duo Katia and Marielle Labèque, who bring it to Geffen for its New York premiere. Dessner’s taste for lush transparency, evident in his orchestrations for Taylor Swift’s album “Folklore,” shows in the way he cushions the piece’s unabashedly pretty piano parts without overwhelming them. OUSSAMA ZAHR‘Vertigo,’ Jan. 23-26Playing film scores live alongside screenings has become a booming business for orchestras struggling with attendance, but the fare is usually blockbusters: the “Harry Potter” series, “Jurassic Park,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Not when the Philharmonic performs Bernard Herrmann’s lush, ominous music for Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” as audiences watch that strange, hypnotizing study in erotic obsession. (Next season also brings “West Side Story” (Sept. 12-17) — Spielberg’s 2021 version, which featured the Philharmonic on its soundtrack — and “Black Panther” (Dec. 20-23). ZACHARY WOOLFEJames Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which will be screened with a live soundtrack.Universal Studios Home EntertainmentKarina Canellakis, April 4-6I’m not entirely joking when I say this, but now that the Philharmonic has lined up its next music director, it can start thinking about who Gustavo Dudamel’s eventual successor might be. Karina Canellakis, who coincidentally occupies Jaap van Zweden’s former post as the chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, might well be on its shortlist when the time comes. This native New Yorker’s belated Philharmonic debut offers a taste of her thoughtful programming: Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, Strauss’s “Tod und Verklärung,” Scriabin’s “Le Poème de l’Extase” and Ravel’s Piano Concerto, with the soloist Alice Sara Ott. DAVID ALLENOlga Neuwirth, April 18-20Olga Neuwirth’s contribution to Project 19 in 2020 went — well, the way of many things early in the pandemic. Nearly four years after its scheduled premiere, it is finally coming to Geffen Hall, having been first unveiled instead with the Berlin Philharmonic, which streamed the unruly and delightful work for countertenor, children’s choir and orchestra on its Digital Concert Hall platform. Andrew Watts takes up the solo vocal part, making his New York Philharmonic debut alongside the conductor Thomas Sondergard, on a program that also includes Lili Boulanger’s “D’un Matin de Printemps” and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. JOSHUA BARONEMahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony, June 6-8Those with a taste for dry humor might ask themselves what exactly it is that Jaap van Zweden plans to resurrect with these final Geffen Hall concerts as the Philharmonic’s music director, but Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 at least offers him a grand farewell. He will be joined by the New York Philharmonic Chorus, the soprano Hanna-Elisabeth Müller and the mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova. ALLEN More

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      Following a Folk Tale Through the Himalayas

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      In a high hamlet, a two-hour trek up a verdant slope beneath ice-clad Himalayan peaks, an argument erupted over a folk tale. Two brothers, Pralad Singh Dariyal, 60, and Hira Singh Dariyal, 77, heatedly debated which nearby village in the Johar Valley was once the home of the story’s heroine. Eventually agreeing on a few possible locations, Hira said that the story, which is sung as a ballad and which he remembered from childhood, was virtually unknown today among the area’s young people. “They’re the YouTube generation,” he explained with a shrug.“No one even knows how to sing it anymore,” Pralad added.The voice of Pralad’s wife, Sundari Devi, rang out from the kitchen into the courtyard, where I sat with the brothers and a couple of other people in front of clothing drying on a line and pieces of a butchered sheep drying on a neighbor’s stone-shingled roof. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she shouted. “Some people do remember how to sing it. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s not important.”In the Kumaon region of the Indian state of Uttarakhand, where sky-scraping summits soar over a maze of sublime hills in a corner of the country that abuts Nepal and Tibet, the story known as “Rajula Malushahi” has been passed down orally for hundreds of years. A sprawling epic of adventure and true love that unfurls across a broad swath of the landscape, it’s long been recognized as Kumaon’s pre-eminent folk tale. Short versions were sung by parents to their children, while renditions lasting up to 10 hours were performed by hurkiyas, or traditional bards, who chanted and drummed alongside a handful of backup vocalists for local audiences, often as a way to pass cold winter nights, before televisions — and now smartphones — became ubiquitous.When I first learned about “Rajula Malushahi” on a previous visit to Kumaon, I was immediately intrigued. After reading as much of the literature about it as I could find, I decided on a recent trip to use it as a guide to traveling through the area, letting it take me places I might not otherwise think to go.While creating an itinerary, I realized that there was no definitive route to follow, since there is no definitive narrative. Before it was first written down in the 1930s, numerous versions were sung. Though they tend to share the same overarching plotline, there are many variations among them, including where certain episodes are said to have occurred. It seemed fitting that planning a trip around a centuries-old folk tale was more an act of creative interpretation than a strict adherence to a single text.A traditional Kumaoni house, built of stone.Morning mists rise from fields in the Gomati Basin.I headed first for the Johar Valley, which is where the story (according to most versions) begins. There, a girl named Rajula, who was so beautiful that the sun paled before her, was born into the Shauka tribe — one of the subgroups of shepherds generally known as Bhotias. Her father, Sunapati Shauk, was the richest trader in the region, shuttling goods over the Himalayas between India and Tibet on the backs of sheep and goats, the best animals for navigating the treacherous terrain. Historically, this once-lucrative route thrived for about a thousand years before collapsing in 1962 with the outbreak of a war between India and China and the closure of the border.In the story, Rajula grows into a clever and confident young woman. She meets Malushahi, the young monarch of the Katyuri Kingdom, which ruled Kumaon from around the seventh to the 11th centuries, and they fall in love. They are quickly separated, however, as her hand has already been promised by Sunapati to the son of a Tibetan king, an important trading partner. Rajula, rebelling, escapes from this undesirable arrangement, then travels through Kumaon to find Malushahi again, overcoming numerous obstacles with her courage and quick wits. After many dramatic twists, including deceptions, murder and sorcery, the lovers are finally reunited — either happily or in death, depending on the version.After initially arriving in Delhi at the end of last September, I traveled for a few days — first by rail, and then by road — to the Johar Valley’s main town, Munsiyari. My friend, the writer Shikha Tripathi, who is herself Kumaoni, happened to be there working on a story about climate change. Together, by S.U.V. and on foot, we traveled for most of a morning to the village of Paton, where we talked in the courtyard with the Dariyal brothers, as Shikha translated.Our conversation concluded when a village-wide feast began. A woman who had married a man with family in Paton was making her first visit — 13 years after their wedding. Everyone came out to welcome her, including people who now lived elsewhere and had returned for the celebration. Vats of rice, mutton and dal had been prepared, and we ate on flat rooftops with views of the valley walls slanting sharply into the clouds.When the feast wrapped up, Shikha and I went back to Pralad’s place to get our bags and shift to the house where we’d been offered accommodations for the night. I stepped into the kitchen to bid Sundari goodbye and found three other women sitting on the floor with her. Before I could say “thank you,” two of them began to sing, filling the low-ceilinged space with the resonant tones of the first verses of “Rajula Malushahi.”Nanda Devi Dariyal, in red, and Duri Devi Sailal, in blue, sing Rajula Malushahi in the kitchen of Sundari Devi Dariyal, who sits behind them.They sang for about five minutes, which was more than long enough to transform the dimly lit room into a musical time machine, transporting us beyond the temporal world into the wonder of the moment. It was Sundari’s gift to us — and was her way of conclusively proving the point she had made to her husband.The next day, Shikha and I hiked, drove and hiked (uphill again) to a village where Hira had told us that some of Rajula’s community had scattered after being cursed at the end of her story. Upon reaching Jimia, we learned that a celebration of the Hindu festival Dussehra was about to begin.Led by drummers and men carrying saplings adorned with flags and tufts of yak hair, a joyous procession descended from the homes at the core of the village to a small temple at its edge. Two sheep were sacrificed to the local goddess, Bharari Devi, a form of Durga, a major Hindu deity. The drumming surged with fevered intensity and the jagar — a ceremony in which the goddess enters into the body, or bodies, of one or more of those in attendance — began around a smoldering bonfire.A possessed woman staggered around like a zombie. A man named Gajendra Singh Quiriyal — the village’s grand pradhan, or leader — fell to the ground and convulsed on the fire’s edge, caking himself with ashes and embers. The goddess then settled into Rudra Singh Quiriyal, Gajendra’s brother. Blankly staring at something no one else could see, he flung rice over himself and into the crowd. Villagers shouted questions one atop the other, like a scrum of reporters at a chaotic news conference, seeking help with their problems. Most persistent was a middle-aged man desperate for his wife to have their first child. Bharari Devi promised to grant his wish.Led by Tulsi Devi Nuriram, at center, women sing and dance during Dussehra celebrations in Jimia.Ukha Devi Quiriyal, wearing traditional Shauka clothing, dances during Dussehra celebrations in Jimia.When the jagar was over, the pradhan, who’d brushed himself off, asked me to snap a picture of him with his wife and daughters and insisted that Shikha and I stay with them that night. Rice and meat from the sacrificed sheep was served to all. On a grassy terrace just above the temple, women danced in a circle while singing songs to welcome back to the village their sisters and daughters who had moved away after marrying men from other places. Some of the dancers wore traditional Shauka dress — including embroidered headscarves, black blouses, and black skirts.When we spoke to the women as they sat together following an hour or so of dancing, the elders among them said that they had all heard the tale of “Rajula Malushahi,” but only one remembered how to sing it. Encouraged by the others, Tulsi Devi Nuriram performed a few verses, surprising me with a completely different melody and rhythm than I’d heard the previous day.Everyone I would meet who knew the story line of “Rajula Malushahi” — the youngest of whom appeared to be in their 60s — spoke of it as though it was based on actual events, while well aware that it is a folk tale. It occupies a liminal space in the collective imagination, somewhere between fiction and fact, fantasy and reality — which was not unlike how I internalized my experience of that day.The following night, which Shikha and I spent at a homestay in the village of Darkot, a center of Shauka weaving, we met with a folk theater performer who was well-versed in much of the scholarship about the tale. After launching into a long, impassioned analysis of which elements of particular versions were most likely to be true, Lakshman Singh Pangtey concluded by saying, “There is no guarantee about anything I’ve said. After all, it’s a 500-year-old story.”Women at Bageshwar’s Bagnath Temple gather to observe Karwa Chauth, praying for long lives for their husbands.The Hindu ritual of arti is performed near the confluence of the Saryu and Gomati Rivers, in Bageshwar. A funeral pyre burns in the background.Shikha stayed in Munsiyari, and I continued on alone. I first went to Bageshwar, where Rajula once stopped to pray. The god Bagnath, a form of Shiva, was so overcome by her beauty that he attempted to extort her affections with threats and promises — a deal she angrily refused. When I visited the same site at the confluence of the Sarayu and Gomati rivers, where a 15th-century Chand-era temple stands, women had gathered to observe Karwa Chauth, praying for long life for their husbands. In the bustling, friendly town, scenes of life and death, commerce and worship, played out on the streets and riverbanks on a scale large enough to fascinate yet small enough to be absorbed without overwhelming.In the hills and villages of the Gomati Valley, women harvested winter fodder for their livestock, men turned fields with plows pulled by oxen, and everyone I met was happy to see a stranger and chitchat in Hindi. I was charmed by the town of Dwarahat, where Katyuri-era carved-stone temple complexes are tucked among brightly colored houses and gardens, near where Rajula was captured, beaten and left for dead in the forest. And I visited the riverside temple of Agniyari Devi in Chaukhutia, where Malushahi first laid eyes on Rajula, and she laughed at him for mistaking her for the goddess herself.Along the way, I happened to meet a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew one of the last great hurkiyas of Kumaon. Before long, Nain Nath Rawal invited me to his home, in Sirola village, to hear him sing. I went with my friend, Shriyani Datta, who was staying near Almora, some two hours away.In the town of Dwarahat, Katyuri-era carved-stone temple complexes are tucked among brightly colored houses and gardens.Plowing a field along a tributary of the Gomati River.Rawal’s two-story stone house was set along a ridge atop cascading terraced fields with eye-popping views of the high peaks. He invited us into a room on the upper floor, with shelves of awards for his contributions to Kumaoni culture, and pictures of gods and goddesses encircled by flower garlands hanging on bright yellow walls. An 81-year-old farmer, he was taught to sing by his mother, who gave him lessons when he was young.When, among many questions translated by Shriyani, I asked why audiences root for Rajula when they wouldn’t approve of a young woman from their own community overtly disobeying her father, breaking a marriage contract and running away to find her beloved, he acknowledged that “today, her family would probably send the police after her.” But, he explained, Rajula and Malushahi were destined to be together, which meant that Rajula was doing the right thing. “If that happened now,” he added, “you couldn’t prove that fate was involved.” The story’s theme, he said, is “turning divine intention into reality through love.”Rawal sang while playing an hourglass-shaped drum, called a hurka, for over 20 minutes, accompanied by Baji Nath Rawal, who tapped on a stainless steel plate, while two vocalists, Mohan Nath Rawal and Chandan Nath Rawal, sang backup. Though he had made more than 120 recordings during his career, this was the first time he had recorded “Rajula Malushahi.”Nain Nath Rawal, left, sings the entirety of “Rajula Malushahi” while playing the hurka. Accompanying him, left to right, are Baji Nath Rawal, Mohan Nath Rawal and Chandan Nath Rawal.Rawal remarked that he used to perform the ballad around Kumaon at all-night festivals, but that they were rare events these days. “My generation is trying to keep our local culture alive, as much as we can,” he said, “but times have changed.”For now, at least for those who recall it, the story is still woven into the landscape, which conjures memories of a young woman who, ages ago, defied convention to follow her heart.“I hope this song survives,” Rawal said, as we headed downstairs.Michael Benanav is a writer and photographer whose most recent book, Himalaya Bound: One Family’s Quest to Save Their Animals and an Ancient Way of Life, was published in 2018.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More

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      Kelsea Ballerini Is Ready for Lift Off

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      The country singer and songwriter has long tested Nashville’s boundaries while revealing herself to her listeners. Touring behind a recent album and a surprise EP, she’s finding new heights.Ever since Kelsea Ballerini saw Shania Twain soar into a theater on a flying motorcycle wearing a catsuit and closer-to-God hair, the rising country star has known she wanted to be a boundary-breaking daredevil. But, like Kelly Clarkson, she also wanted to be a bare-it-all open book — hitting the big notes and still cracking self-effacing jokes onstage in jeans and a T-shirt.On Ballerini’s latest tour, she’s got the glittery jumpsuit and the denim, the vulnerability — and the push she needed to lift off.Ballerini’s set includes upbeat, pop-inflected songs from her fourth album, “Subject to Change” from 2022, and adroitly crafted hits from her early days, like “Peter Pan” and “Love Me Like You Mean It,” that put her on the map in Nashville as a sassy young talent. But new heartbreak anthems from “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” a spare, emotional EP she dropped in February, after she went through a high-profile divorce from the Australian country singer Morgan Evans, supercharged the show. Fans full-throatedly sang along, having memorized lyrics that were only out in the world for a few weeks, exhaling the release along with her. Ballerini gladly shared the mic.“It’s not about me singing the song,” she said in an interview after the tour’s recent opening date. “It’s about us singing the song.”Over the past few months, Ballerini, 29, has entered new territory, including a potent performance on “Saturday Night Live,” her debut there. The EP has intensified interest in her personal life, as she was photographed with a new beau (the actor Chase Stokes) and joined the popular podcast “Call Her Daddy” to describe, in full girl talk detail, the unraveling of her relationship with Evans, whom she married when she was 24 and he was 32. It wasn’t easy to publicly air all this, Ballerini said, but “I don’t want to lose the openness that I’ve always tried to have.”Where once the country ideal — at least musically — was to “Stand By Your Man,” as Tammy Wynette famously put it, lately younger artists have been charting their wifely disappointments: Kacey Musgraves and Carly Pearce chronicled their respective relationships’ demises, too. Operating in the wake of songwriter-performers like Musgraves and Maren Morris, who upended Nashville’s traditional male tilt and pop suspicions, Ballerini is not coy about her career goals.“I want to play arenas,” she said — which she is, on an upcoming tour with Kenny Chesney. But, she continued, “I want to be the main draw. I want the pyrotechnics. I want to cross over, dare I say.”It was a day off, between “S.N.L.” and her tour, and Ballerini was cross-legged and barefoot on a chair in a Manhattan hotel room, her shearling-lined sandals tucked below. In forest colors and fuzzy corduroy sweatpants, she was cozy personified — a star that seemed soft to the touch. She’s a hugger, and an over-sharer. When I complimented the mane of blond hair beneath her pizza shop baseball hat, she explained that it was extensions.“I lost so much hair last year — just stress,” she said. “It’s growing back, in, like, little sprouts. It’s a whole thing.”Then she laughed. “I could’ve just said ‘thank you.’”Ballerini grew up in Knoxville, Tenn., the only child in a fairly religious household; she occasionally led the singing at worship service. Her rhythmic sensibility revealed itself early: Her mother has told her, she said, smiling, that even as a baby, she bounced along to music so intently that she would scoot her high chair clear across the room. At home, the stereo was tuned to Top 40 (thanks to her mother), and classic crooners (for her father).“Any time I smell Bolognese, I hear Tony Bennett,” Ballerini said, “because my dad would be cooking some beautiful Italian meal and blaring that all through the house.”Her parents split when she was 12 — she used to bad mouth their divorce, she said, but now that she’s gone through one herself, “I have a lot more grace for them” — and she found a refuge in songwriting. “It’s the truest love in my life,” she said.It helped her get through another trauma, when she witnessed the death of a classmate in a school shooting in 2008. By then, she had started voice lessons and picked up the guitar. She performed her first original song onstage at a recital in high school; she and her mother moved to Nashville when she was 15. “I just had this, like, stupid little knowingness,” she said, that she would find her way in.She filled her days studying tour documentaries and credits on CMT music videos, searching for names online to learn “who worked where, and what was a Sony, and who was a Hillary Lindsey,” the chart-topping songwriter. By 19, she was signed as a songwriter herself, to the independent label Black River Entertainment, where she remains. Within four years, she was a Grammy nominee.But being an artist with pop ambitions on an indie label has had its challenges, she admitted, and there was a learning curve to being a female artist in a field that’s often hostile to them. She was 21, with her first Top 5 single, just after “Tomato-gate” happened — the brouhaha over a radio consultant calling women merely the garnish on the scene — and she suddenly realized how many yearslong gaps there were between female stars. “I was naïve and unaware,” she said, “part of a conversation that I wasn’t even ready for.” For her last two albums, she has chosen more female collaborators. “It really freed up this new creative space for me,” she said.She makes a point to have at least one solo-written song on each project — for herself, and for the industry. “I have this insecurity that because I’m blond and I’m glittery and I like production, that people don’t take me seriously as a songwriter,” she said. With the solo song, “The underlying tone is, ‘Hey, I did this by myself. I didn’t have a man in the room.’”“I want to play arenas,” Ballerini said. “I want to be the main draw. I want the pyrotechnics. I want to cross over, dare I say.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesBallerini drafted “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” mostly solo late last year, and finished and recorded it quickly, with just one collaborator. It came after Evans unexpectedly put out a single before their divorce was finalized last fall, claiming to be surprised at the breakup (his video is heavy on adoring female fans). Was her album a response to his track?“Yes and no,” she said. “I don’t know if I would have written a song like ‘Blindsided’” — which checks off their troubles and uses the chorus, “Were you blindsided / or were you just blind?” as a retort — “had I not been responding to something that was already out there.”Writing was a salve for her, she said, but she wasn’t expecting the music, with glimmers of the hip-hop syncopation that have been her hallmark, to connect so deeply.Alysa Vanderheym, a songwriter and producer whose credits include Little Big Town and Blake Shelton, worked with Ballerini on the surprise release. “She knew exactly what she wanted to say — she had her titles, her concepts,” she said in a phone interview. “It’s so unfiltered — she just went there, she didn’t even second guess it — which is so inspiring to me.”Ballerini was grateful, she said, that her label has never tamped down her ideas. In December, she called Patrick Tracy, the creative director she worked with on “Subject to Change,” and told him that, surprise, she was about to release a new EP, and that she wanted him to direct a short film to accompany it.Their timeline was brief, but Ballerini’s vision was so clear, down to a shot where a stack of dirty dishes collapses, that she was credited as a co-director. “The story line from the very beginning was hers and hers alone,” Tracy said.“The way she rallies her team around her ambition,” he added, “to me it’s sort of unmatched — it always feels collaborative.”For the EP, Ballerini said, she abandoned “the commercial country artist” part of her brain, the awareness of how things would fit into radio or playlists. The last track, “Leave Me Again,” is just her voice and acoustic guitar, plaintive and hopeful.“I feel really seen, and understood, as an artist right now,” she said.And she’s getting a taste of what she dreamed of. “I have a little baby hydraulic lift on this tour,” she said. “I think it brings me 10 feet in the air. And all of a sudden, my legs are, like, Bambi. I’m terrified. But I like it.” More

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      Review: Protecting and Defending Ukraine’s Cultural Identity

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      A festival responds to the assaults and insults of war by celebrating the composer who shaped the nation’s contemporary music, Borys Liatoshynsky.The shadow of the war in Ukraine once again hovered over the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival on Friday when it began its three-day tribute to the 20th-century composer Borys Liatoshynsky at Merkin Hall.Hours before the opening-night program, which highlighted composers who influenced Liatoshynsky, the International Criminal Court accused the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, of war crimes, and issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children. Oleksii Holubov, Ukraine’s consul general in New York, recounted that news to the audience on Friday and was greeted with applause.When the 2022 festival took place, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was fresh, with Putin attempting to justify his actions in part by claiming that Ukraine had no independent cultural identity. Holubov, in his remarks on Friday, said that this year’s festival, the fourth, comes at a time “when our cultural identity, our history and our music are at stake.”On Saturday, the second day of programming traced a pedagogical lineage from Liatoshynsky to several living composers. The Sunday afternoon program pairs two Liatoshynsky quartets with works by Bartok and Copland, composers who, like Liatoshynsky, are credited with defining a national style. Again and again, reclamation resists erasure.Born at the end of the 19th century, Liatoshynsky lived through the Ukrainian War of Independence, the rise of Lenin and Stalin and both world wars. He embraced expressionism early in his career and became an influential teacher at Kyiv Conservatory, where his students included Valentyn Sylvestrov, Ukraine’s most famous living composer.Liatoshynsky, a composer with an intensely volatile style, wrote music that didn’t comply with the Soviet Union’s aesthetic of socialist realism. He was dogged by censors and branded a formalist. After Stalin’s death, he found his way back to his original compositional voice late in life and is now remembered as the father of Ukrainian contemporary music.Liatoshynsky’s Violin Sonata (1926), a thorny work full of short bursts of agitation, opened the program on Friday. The violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv gave the piece’s core thematic material — a melody that skitters, scrapes and then leaps upward — a bold arc, and she applied an eerie calm to passages marked sul ponticello (a technique of bowing near the bridge that produces a high, scratchy sound). At times, though, she and the pianist Steven Beck seemed to set aside interpretive matters just to get through a piece of hair-raising difficulty.Following the Violin Sonata, Alban Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano (1913) sounded almost lissome, with the clarinetist Gleb Kanasevich shaping long melodies with a full, lovely tone and understated warmth. The violist Colin Brookes and the pianist Daniel Anastasio likewise cultivated the beauty of Liatoshynsky’s Two Pieces for Viola and Piano (Op. 65), with Anastasio painting a dappled night sky in the Nocturne and Brookes hinting at a mixture of solitude and disturbance.The conductor James Baker made perfect sense out of the unusual instrumentation for Liatoshynsky’s Two Romances (Op. 8), which uses voice, string quartet, clarinet, horn and harp. He highlighted Liatoshynsky’s text painting in the first song, “Reeds,” with strings that rustled like paper and then refracted like shards of light. The bass Steven Hrycelak was a genial narrator with an oaken timbre.Liatoshynsky’s avant-garde-minded students inspired him, and they were represented by two pieces. Sylvestrov’s “Mystère” was a symphony of percussion in which the alto flutist Ginevra Petrucci elegantly snaked her way through a battery of timpani, cymbals, glockenspiel, marimba, Thai gong and more. Each instrument cut through the air with its own vibrations — splashes, thwacks, tinkles, knocks — for a cumulative effect that was captivating to experience live. The brief “Volumes,” by Volodymyr Zahorstev, blared forth with a chaotic play of instrumental timbres.The concert closed with Liatoshynsky’s “Concert Etude-Rondo,” a devilish showpiece given a crisp performance by Anastasio. This was a late piece, written in 1962 and revised in 1967, a year before Liatoshynsky’s death. Its stubborn character extends from driving octaves in the bass to shattered-glass effects in the piano’s delicate upper reaches.The transliteration of composers’ names in this review follows a 2010 resolution adopted by the government of Ukraine, according to Leah Batstone, the festival’s founder and creative director. As Holubov said at the start of the concert, Ukrainian language is the heart of the Ukrainian nation — and Ukrainian music, its soul.It was hard not to see — or rather, hear — a symbol for the persistence of the Ukrainian people in the uncontainable, endlessly restless music of a composer who refused to concede his identity to the state. More

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      Three Convicted in 2018 Murder of Rapper XXXTentacion

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      After more than 27 hours of deliberation, a Florida jury found three men guilty of killing the rising rapper during a robbery in the parking lot of a motorcycle shop.Nearly five years after the killing of the rising rap star XXXTentacion, who was fatally shot in broad daylight during a 2018 robbery just as his polarizing career was exploding, a jury in Florida on Monday ended more than a week of deliberations when it found three men guilty of first-degree murder in the case.Prosecutors said that Michael Boatwright, 28, and Trayvon Newsome, 24, were the gunmen that June afternoon, with Boatwright firing the fatal shot during a struggle over money. The third man convicted, Dedrick Williams, 26, was said to be the getaway driver and mastermind behind the robbery.All three face mandatory life sentences; prosecutors did not seek the death penalty in the case, which was tried at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.Surveillance video played in court showed the rapper’s BMW being blocked by an S.U.V. as he tried to leave a motor sports store in Deerfield Beach, Fla., leading to a confrontation with two masked assailants, who escaped with $50,000 in cash.The trial turned largely on the jury’s interpretation of testimony from a fourth man present that day, Robert Allen, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last year and testified against his alleged co-conspirators. The Broward County prosecutors also relied on surveillance video from the store that showed two of the men inside, seemingly observing XXXTentacion (born Jahseh Onfroy), as well as cellphone and Bluetooth data tying the men to the location and the S.U.V.XXXTentacion onstage in 2017. The rising rapper was shot and killed during a robbery in 2018.Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald, via Tribune News Service and Getty ImagesThe evidence also included videos that prosecutors said showed the defendants dancing and posing with cash hours after the killing.During more than 27 hours of deliberations across eight days, jurors had asked to review more than 1,000 text messages, along with photos and videos, seized from the cellphones of two of the defendants, including a picture of a news story about the shooting.Defense lawyers for Boatwright, Newsome and Williams, who were tried together, argued that DNA evidence failed to link them to the shooting. (The jury was asked to decide separately on each man’s guilt or innocence, and could have convicted just one or two of those accused.)The defense pointed vaguely to other theories of the crime — including behind-the-scenes wrangling that attempted to include information about XXXTentacion’s online beef with the megastar Drake, who fought successfully to avoid being deposed in the case. They also said that Allen, who had previous felony convictions, was an unreliable witness.“Plans hatched in hell do not have angels for witnesses,” Pascale Achille, the lead prosecutor, said in her rebuttal after closing arguments.The foursome had been planning to commit robberies that day, prosecutors argued, when they happened upon XXXTentacion at the motorcycle shop, where they had hoped to buy a mask. After confirming the musician’s identity inside, the men then waited for him in the parking lot and pulled in front of his car, allowing the two gunmen to attack, their faces covered. A passenger riding with XXXTentacion fled, and a scuffle over the rapper’s Louis Vuitton bag containing the $50,000 ended when Boatwright shot the rapper, prosecutors said.XXXTentacion, 20, a singer, songwriter and rapper who blended genres and first took off on the streaming platform SoundCloud, was high up on the roller coaster of viral fame when he was killed.In the 18 months before the shooting, he had gone from a little-known, troubled teenager making music in his bedroom to the top of the Billboard chart thanks to the success of his anarchic breakout single, “Look at Me!,” and a follow-up album, “?,” which debuted at No. 1.At the same time, he was awaiting trial on charges of battery, false imprisonment and witness tampering stemming from the alleged violent assault of a former girlfriend.“If I’m going to die or ever be a sacrifice, I want to make sure that my life made at least five million kids happy, or they found some sort of answers or resolve in my life, regardless of the negative around my name, regardless of the bad things people say to me,” the rapper said in a video posted to social media before his death.Since his killing, XXXTentacion — whose striking visage has been absorbed into modern hip-hop’s iconography — has been the subject of a documentary, “Look at Me,” and been featured on albums by Kanye West and Lil Wayne, in addition to the posthumous music released in his name. More

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      Morgan Wallen Holds at No. 1 With Strong Streaming Numbers

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      “One Thing at a Time” had the second-biggest streaming total for a country album, after its debut last week. The nine-woman K-pop group Twice opens at No. 2.After a big opening last week, the country star Morgan Wallen easily takes No. 1 again with his latest album, “One Thing at a Time,” holding off new releases from Miley Cyrus and the K-pop group Twice.The 36-track “One Thing at a Time” tops the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 259,000 sales in the United States, including 308 million streams and 21,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.Its total is down 48 percent from last week, when it started with 501,000. But “One Thing at a Time” still had the second-best streaming week ever for a country album, topping even the debut of Wallen’s last blockbuster album, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” more than two years ago. (“Dangerous” remains a hit, landing at No. 7 this week.)Twice, which comprises nine women, opens at No. 2 — a new peak for the group — with “Ready to Be,” a seven-track EP. It had the equivalent of 153,000 sales, mostly from copies sold as a complete package, of which there were a variety of collectible offerings on physical media, including 11 CD versions and two vinyl LPs. Of the 145,500 copies of “Ready to Be” sold as complete units, 86 percent were on CD, according to Billboard. Songs from “Ready to Be” were also streamed 10 million times.Cyrus’s latest, “Endless Summer Vacation,” starts at No. 3 with 119,000 equivalent units, including 55,000 sales in album form and 81 million streams. SZA’s “SOS” falls two spots to No. 4 and Karol G’s “Mañana Sera Bonito” is No. 5. More