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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Leads His New York Philharmonic

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      Performing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the superstar maestro conducted the orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director.Gustavo Dudamel began his reign at the New York Philharmonic on Friday with an ending.Greeted with a roar from the audience as he appeared with the orchestra at David Geffen Hall for the first time since being named its next music director, this superstar maestro conducted Mahler’s ninth and final completed symphony, one of the repertory’s great evocations of farewell. Few works survey the span of a life — its highs and lows — more thoroughly and unsparingly, from the pastoral to the hysterical, from raucous existence to pianississimo death.The program was planned long before Dudamel’s appointment, but it turned out to be ideal for this moment. Nearly an hour and a half long, Mahler’s Ninth fills a concert on its own. No overture; no soloist; no intermission.On Friday it provided a long, focused communion between a conductor and the players he’ll be leading in the years to come. (Dudamel’s predecessor, Jaap van Zweden, finishes next season and, because of classical music’s ludicrously slow planning cycles, Dudamel, currently at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, won’t officially start his five-year contract until 2026.)The Ninth was ideal for the moment, too, because this orchestra has a particular claim on Mahler, who briefly but indelibly served as its chief conductor around the time he was finishing the symphony, just before his death in 1911. While hardly a rarity, the Ninth is a piece that the Philharmonic has mostly entrusted to its music directors — including Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein, two of the 20th century’s most influential Mahlerians.With the weight of this history palpable, Dudamel achieved in this sprawling, complex and bracing score a kind of casualness. He gave a sense of this as just another piece.This Ninth wasn’t a hothouse flower or a religious rite. Leading with easy flow and, especially in the great Adagio fourth movement, a tendency toward briskness, Dudamel had no interest in the self-seriousness that can easily bend this symphony toward exaggerated solemnity. The goal seemed to be bright freshness more than autumnal glow.Conducting without a score in front of him or a podium railing behind — there are, he seemed to be saying, no barriers between me, the players and the audience — Dudamel persuasively and naturally guided the score’s many slight, important shifts of pace. The deceleration to the end of the first movement was artful, and the complicated transitions at the close of the third were lucid. The music never felt bullied, manipulated or artificially inflated.At the start of the finale, the strings that interrupt a funeral dirge in the bassoon weren’t a slap in the face, but a swift tidal inundation. Those strings had earlier played with mossy darkness in the first movement’s passionately strange “Leidenschaftlich” passage.Throughout the symphony, the trumpets had the right coppery bite. The principal harp, Nancy Allen, brought the smooth, slightly unearthly resonance of temple bells to her music. Ryan Roberts, on English horn, played with his usual flawless poetry in small yet meaningful solos, especially near the end. Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, offered both tenderness and tanginess.And yet missing from the evening was a certain degree of personality and depth.If the beginning of the first movement was clear and straightforward, it also lacked mystery and poignancy — an establishment of mood beyond mere accuracy. The murky, brooding music later in that movement, a nod to Wagner’s depiction of the magical, shapeshifting Tarnhelm in his “Ring,” passed without phosphorescent eeriness.There was a sense of celebration as Dudamel took the podium for the first time since being named the Philharmonic’s next music director.James Estrin/The New York TimesWhile there was understandably a sense of celebration in the sold-out hall on Friday, which bled into the performance, it’s not clear that love-fest is the right mood for much of Mahler’s Ninth. In the second movement, bouncing up and down at the knees and making smiling cues with a flared left hand, Dudamel led a ländler dance that was more sweetly rustic than ominously rough. And there was a breezy, circuslike feel to the waltz it transforms into, rather than anything sinister. This was not a rendition of the Mahler who prefigured Shostakovich.Some restraint in that second movement — even some sunniness — might make sense so as to leave somewhere to go in the unquestionably more explosive third. But on Friday, that Rondo-Burleske third movement wasn’t really intense, either.While the first measures were sumptuously grand, there was no sense of grotesquerie, self-mockery or more than slight pepperiness in what followed, so the sudden slowing into the consoling, contrasting theme — like a roof opening to reveal the full expanse of the starry night sky — didn’t have the necessary impact. Dudamel hadn’t brought us to a place from which we needed to be consoled.This wasn’t particularly light-textured playing, but the feeling was nevertheless almost airy, with a reticence in the lower strings. Eighty minutes seemed to pass quickly — perhaps too much so.With the orchestra’s principal horn position currently vacant, Stefan Dohr, who fills that role for the Berlin Philharmonic, was a guest, to uneven effect. In his crucial part here, Dohr was steady, but the mellow solidity of his tone, shading into leadenness, didn’t seem quite in the same sound world as his colleagues. The passing around of solos through the winds in the fourth movement offered a feeling of humanity but, like this performance as a whole, felt a bit stranded: neither elegant nor raw.The Philharmonic still tends to gesture toward super-soft playing rather than really achieving it, let alone relishing it. And with an edgy thinness to the orchestra’s sound at full cry, rather than rounded, blended warmth, I felt a revival of my concerns from the fall opening of the renovated Geffen Hall about the space’s clear but stark acoustics.Under Dudamel’s baton, the symphony’s final minutes, as the strings gradually dim to nothingness, were as sensible as I’ve ever heard them. This was a pleasantly even-keeled lullaby rather than a radical or wrenching depiction of life draining away. The playing was poised, but it left a ways to go in profundity.It was an ending. But for this conductor and this orchestra, it felt like a place to start.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Paul Simon Confronts Death, Profoundly, on ‘Seven Psalms’

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      The 81-year-old songwriter ruminates on mortality, faith and meaning in an album that could be a farewell.What do songwriters do when they feel death approaching? As time runs out, some choose to spend it by determinedly creating music to outlive them.“Seven Psalms” sounds like a last testament from the 81-year-old Paul Simon. It’s an album akin to David Bowie’s “Blackstar” and Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker,” which those songwriters made as mortality loomed; they each died days after the albums were released.Their generation of singer-songwriters has dedicated itself to chronicling their entire lives, biographically and metaphorically, from youth through last words. “Blackstar” was turbulent and exploratory; “You Want It Darker” was stoically bleak. “Seven Psalms” stays true to Simon’s own instincts: observant, elliptical, perpetually questioning and quietly encompassing.The album is constructed as a nearly unbroken 33-minute suite, nominally divided into seven songs that circle back to recurring refrains. It has places of lingering contemplation and it has sudden, startling changes; its informality is exactingly planned.Simon begins the album in his most casual tone. Over calmly precise and rhythmically flexible guitar picking, he sings, “I’ve been thinking about the great migration.”Almost immediately, it becomes clear that the migration is from life to death, a transition the singer is preparing to make himself. He’s thinking about time, love, culture, family, music, eternity and God, striving to balance skepticism and something like faith. “I have my reasons to doubt/A white light eases the pain,” Simon sings in “Your Forgiveness.” “Two billion heartbeats and out/Or does it all begin again?”Simon’s songwriting has never been particularly religious. Over the years, he has drawn on gospel music for songs like “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Loves Me Like a Rock,” which bring religious imagery to secular relationships, and his 2011 album, “So Beautiful or So What,” had touches of Christian imagery — but also imagined “The Afterlife” as one last bureaucracy, where arrivals have to “Fill out a form first/And then you wait in a line.”“Seven Psalms” is more humble and awe-struck. Its refrains return to, and work variations on, the album’s opening song, “The Lord.” As in the psalms of the Bible — which, as Simon notes in “Sacred Harp,” were songs — Simon portrays the Lord in sweeping ways: wondrous and terrifying, both protector and destroyer, sometimes benign and sometimes wrathful. The Lord, Simon sings, is “a meal for the poorest, a welcome door to the stranger.” Then he turns to naming 21st-century perils: “The Covid virus is the Lord/The Lord is the ocean rising.”Much of the music sounds like solitary ruminations: Simon communing with his guitar, which has been the subtly virtuosic underpinning of most of his lifetime of songs. As his fingers sketch patterns, he latches onto melody phrases and then lets them go, teasing at pop structures but soon dissolving them. And around him, at any moment, sounds can float out of the background: additional supportive guitars, the eerie microtonal bell tones of Harry Partch’s cloud-chamber bowls, the jaunty huffing of a bass harmonica and, in the album’s final moments, the voice of his wife, Edie Brickell.In the course of the album, Simon sings about personal distress and societal tensions. In “Love Is Like a Braid,” a song of gratitude and vulnerability, he sings, “I lived a life of pleasant sorrows until the real deal came/Broke me like a twig in a winter gale.” In “Trail of Volcanoes,” he juxtaposes youthful exploits with adult realities: “The pity is the damage that’s done/Leaves so little for amends”Meanwhile, Simon’s tartly aphoristic side reappears in “My Professional Opinion,” a swipe at social media context collapse set to a country-blues shuffle. “All rise to the occasion/Or all sink into despair,” he sings. “In my professional opinion/We’re better off not going there.”He ends the album — possibly his last — with a song called “Wait.” He protests, “My hand’s steady/My mind is still clear.” Brickell’s voice arrives to tell him, “Life is a meteor” and “Heaven is beautiful/It’s almost like home.” At the end, he harmonizes with her on one word, extended into five musical syllables: “Amen.” It sounds like he’s accepting the inevitable.Paul Simon“Seven Psalms”(Owl Records/Legacy Recordings) More

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      Andy Rourke, Bassist for the Smiths, Dies at 59

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      His sinewy bass lines were a vital — if, as one writer put it, “habitually unsung” — part of the influential British rock band’s success.Andy Rourke, the bass player who provided the muscle and drive behind the darkly poetic musings of the Smiths, one of the most influential bands of the 1980s, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 59.A representative said he died of pancreatic cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Center.While Mr. Rourke — along with the band’s drummer, Mike Joyce — received a tiny share of the accolades (and revenues), his sinewy bass lines provided both heft and melodicism behind Morrissey’s lachrymose vocals, which bounced between elegiac and funereal, and Johnny Marr’s intricate, layered guitar work, which could be almost symphonic in its complexity.“The nature of the music that we were playing in the Smiths meant that the sound needed a bit more of a kick,” Mr. Rourke said in a 2019 interview with Bass Player magazine. “And because it’s me,” he added, “every time I do something, I do it big.”Mr. Rourke’s playing, influenced by Paul McCartney and John Entwistle of the Who, was always “habitually unsung,” David Cavanagh, an Irish journalist, wrote in 1993, but it was also “incontrovertibly top drawer.”Discerning listeners understood Mr. Rourke’s value. Morrissey once said that Mr. Rourke was good enough to have been in Elvis Presley’s band. “He didn’t ever know his own power, and nothing that he played had been played by someone else,” Morrissey wrote in a tribute on his website after Mr. Rourke’s death.Mr. Rourke’s nimble, often effervescent bass lines were often foregrounded in landmark songs like “This Charming Man,” “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” and “Cemetery Gates,” all of which transformed the Smiths into a cult act in the United States and a chart-topping group in their home country.The Smiths — from left, Mr. Rourke, the singer Morrissey, the guitarist Johnny Marr and, in the back, the drummer Mike Joyce — in performance in 1984.Getty ImagesAndrew Michael Rourke was born in Manchester, England, on Jan. 17, 1964. He met Mr. Marr at school in Manchester in 1975.“We were best friends, going everywhere together,” Mr. Marr wrote in a recent Instagram post, adding, “I soon came to realise that my mate was one of those rare people that absolutely no one doesn’t like.”The Smiths formed in Manchester in 1982. The group had a couple of bassists before Mr. Marr brought in his childhood friend.In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, Mr. Rourke recalled playing his first show with the band in a tiny gay club. The Smiths always “rehearsed to death,” he said, so it was not surprising when they quickly soared in popularity.As they rose to prominence, the four Smiths were inseparable. “We were a gang,” he told Mojo. “A very tight band of brothers. When we were at our peak, nobody could penetrate that.” Within two years, the Smiths had their first Top 10 hit in Britain with “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”But success brought problems, including a heroin habit that Mr. Rourke developed. “You start getting a bunch of money and you don’t know what to do,” he recalled in a 2011 interview. “You start spending it on drugs.”In 1986, Morrissey fired Mr. Rourke, reportedly via postcard, because of his drug use. But he soon rejoined the band.The Smiths broke up for good in 1987 after releasing four albums. Two years later, Mr. Rourke and Mr. Joyce, the drummer, began legal proceedings against their former bandmates, claiming that they had been equal partners and should have been paid a bigger split of the royalties. (They had been given only 10 percent.)Mr. Rourke eventually dropped his case after being offered 83,000 pounds (about $100,000). But Mr. Joyce went to court and a judge found in his favor, saying that Morrissey should pay him compensation of around a million pounds, according to news reports at the time.As late as 2007, Mr. Rourke told the BBC that the Smiths’ breakup “still smarts a bit.” Still, not long after the split, he laid down bass tracks for solo singles by Morrissey like “Interesting Drug” (1989) and “Last of the Famous International Playboys” (1990).Post-Smiths, he also played on albums by Sinead O’Connor and the Pretenders and toured with Badly Drawn Boy. In 2009, Mr. Rourke moved to New York, where he performed at clubs with the D.J. Olé Koretsky in a duo called Jetlag, which evolved into a band called D.A.R.K. when they enlisted Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Long after his Smiths days, Mr. Rourke was asked about the origins of his melodic style. “It was just my love of bass playing,” he said.“If I wasn’t eating or in the bath,” he added, “I had a bass in my hand.” More

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      Donna Summer’s Bedazzled Closet and Ephemera Will Go Up for Auction

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      Eleven years after her death, the disco legend’s family has combed through her possessions, deciding to sell many of her glittering dresses, manuscripts and paintings.For nearly a decade after Donna Summer’s death in 2012, her home in Nashville remained like a shrine to the Queen of Disco’s decades-long music career.Beaded gowns that she had worn onstage remained tucked away along with designer pumps in the upstairs closet; ephemera such as an annotated album cover design for “She Works Hard for the Money” were stored downstairs; and in the basement, there was an accumulation of brightly colored paintings, awards and gold records.Never eager to talk about death, Summer — who died of lung cancer at 63 — had not given directions for what should be done with her possessions, her husband, Bruce Sudano, said recently. It was only in the past few years that Summer’s family was ready to fully comb through her belongings at the Nashville home, many of which will go up for sale at Christie’s next month, the auction house announced Friday.“You’d go into these spaces and it would be almost a time capsule of your life,” said Brooklyn Sudano, one of Summer’s three daughters.One of the items up for sale is a silver goblet that Summer often had onstage with her, filled with caffeine-free Pepsi. Brooklyn Sudano remembered that when she and one of her sisters were on tour with their mother in the 1990s, one of their jobs would be to stir the soda inside the goblet to get rid of any bubbles. (“While she’s singing she can’t be burping,” she explained.)The singer drank flat, caffeine-free Pepsi from this silver goblet during performances, her family said. Christie’s estimates that the cup will sell for between $400 and $600.Courtesy of Christie’sA versatile singer-songwriter whose music spanned funk, dance, rock and gospel, Summer shot to fame in 1975 with the erotic extended cut of “Love to Love You Baby,” followed by the pioneering electronic song “I Feel Love,” whose pulsating club beat can be heard in Beyoncé’s “Summer Renaissance.”The announcement by Christie’s comes shortly before HBO’s release on Saturday of a new family-backed biographical documentary, directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano. Chronicling Summer’s rise from a cast member in a German production of “Hair” to an international superstar, the film, called “Love to Love You, Donna Summer,” is as much about her personal life as her career, discussing her struggles with depression, physical abuse by a boyfriend, and her chapter as a born-again Christian.The auction includes glamorous possessions and others that are more mundane. On the glamorous end: a glittering blue and green dress Summer wore in the music video for her 1983 song “Unconditional Love,” a rhinestone-studded dress and bolero jacket that she wore at a concert in 1995, and a collection of the diva’s sunglasses.As for the mundane — but perhaps intriguing to the most devoted of fans — the sale includes unworn shoes and a dozen unused Louis Vuitton towels.“There are people in the world who love her,” said Bruce Sudano, who is in charge of caring for her estate. “It felt like we can’t just hoard all of this stuff for ourselves.”An early draft of Donna Summer’s 1977 song “Now I Need You,” written by the singer on hotel stationery.Courtesy of Christie’sSummer’s rhinestone-spotted evening dress, worn onstage in 1995, is estimated to sell for between $1,500 and $2,500.Courtesy of Christie’sThe online sale, which Christie’s expects to garner about $200,000 to $300,000, begins on June 15. A portion of the proceeds from the sale will go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Save the Music Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation, the auction house said.One item, a poster for a 1998 concert supporting the nonprofit Gay Men’s Health Crisis, gestures to the history of Summer’s at times strained relationship with L.G.B.T.Q. fans, many of whom boycotted her music in the ’80s after they had helped to fuel its rise.The documentary briefly addresses that history, with Summer’s husband recounting how an off-the-cuff comment onstage — “God didn’t make Adam and Steve, he made Adam and Eve,” he recalled her saying — deeply hurt many gay fans. Summer worked to repair her relationship with the fan base, especially after New York magazine wrote that she had described the AIDS crisis as a “divine ruling” on gay people, a report she fiercely denied and ultimately sued over.The sale also includes about 15 paintings and manuscripts with scrawled lyrics, including for the 1977 song “Now I Need You,” written on stationery from a hotel in Munich, as well as edits in pencil to the lyrics for the hit “On the Radio.”Brooklyn Sudano scrutinized documents like those while piecing together the HBO film, which she said bolstered her belief that her mother was not a pop star engineered by outside forces, but rather an artist who was deeply involved in creating the hits that made her famous.“People just saw her as this persona,” she said. “I don’t think that they truly understood that she was an artist and had an active role in creating the Donna Summer that people knew.” More

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      An Ambient Playlist to Create a Bubble of Tranquillity

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      Listen to 8 airy, cumulous songs (keeping in mind that not all ambient music sounds like this).Never miss a chance to experience Laraaji’s sonic opalescence.Balarama Heller for The New York TimesDear listeners,In times when I need to tune out the busy exterior world and tune into my own subconscious, I turn to ambient music.I have read entire novels — on rush-hour subway commutes, no less! — thanks to the dulcet tones of Laraaji. I retained (most of) my sanity when a new apartment building was going up across the street because of the textured, hypnotic drones of Bitchin Bajas. I have written more articles to the placid soundtrack of Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” than I can possibly count.Ambient music — a vast and nebulous genre that I’d very loosely define as wordless music that focuses more on atmosphere and tone than on rhythm and melody — has had a surprising and somewhat controversial uptick in popularity in the past decade. It became a common method for quelling anxiety during lockdown, but even before the pandemic it had become something of an ever-present millennial commodity, in the form of endless streaming playlists advertised to help one study, work or just chill.The Canadian experimental musician Tim Hecker called ambient music “the great wellspring — but also the bane of my existence,” in a recent Times profile by Grayson Haver Currin. His reason? “It’s this superficial form of panacea weaponized by digital platforms, shortcuts for the stress of our world,” he said. “They serve a simple function: to ‘chill out.’ How does it differ from Muzak 2.0, from elevator music?”Hecker is definitely on to something. In the streaming era, ambient music has too often been branded as yet another tool for hyper-capitalist optimization — either a way of focusing more deeply at work or relaxing more deeply in order to return to work recharged and ready to be more productive. The actual artistry involved in composing such music, at least according to this viewpoint, is woefully beside the point.In fall 2020, when I had the delight of interviewing the ambient pioneer and perpetual crossword answer Eno, he recalled composing his earliest works of what he called “Discreet Music” in the late 1970s, and voiced reservations similar to Hecker’s. “When I started making ambient music,” he said, “I was very conscious that I wanted to make functional music. At that time, functional music was almost exclusively identified with Muzak — it had a very bad rap. Artists weren’t supposed to make functional music. So, I thought, ‘Why shouldn’t they?’”I appreciate Eno’s challenge that artistry and functionality don’t have to be mutually exclusive. When he considered how he used music in his own life, he realized, “Well, I use it to make a space that I want to live in.” Sometimes that desired atmosphere was kinetic and upbeat, so he’d listen to Fela Kuti all day. Other times, he preferred slow orchestral music. “I started to think, I imagine a lot of other people are doing this as well,” he said. “Ambient was really a way of saying, ‘I’m now designing musical experiences.’ The emphasis was on saying, ‘Here is a space, an atmosphere, that you can enter and leave as you wish.’”In that spirit, today’s playlist is a space that you can enter and leave as you wish. I designed it to be airy, tranquil and cumulous, like a house of drifting clouds illuminated by slashes of sunbeams. Of course, not all ambient music sounds like this. (I love Hecker’s music, for example, but much of it features evocatively woolly textures and a general sense of foreboding that would have felt out of place here.) I tried to find a unifying harmony in the feelings and tones that all of these songs conjure, and, though they’re all very different artists, I found that Julianna Barwick’s heavenly vocal tapestries, Laraaji’s sonic opalescence and Hiroshi Yoshimura’s burbling electronics worked exceptionally well together.Many of these songs have existed in my own life as “functional music,” as Eno calls it, but not just in the soulless “Music for Productivity” sense that Hecker rightly bemoans. I have used some of these songs, time and again, to slow down and daydream. I used a few of them on a playlist at a friend’s wedding that I D.J.ed, for those liminal but still sacred moments when the guests were arriving. I tested this exact playlist earlier this week on a noisy New Jersey Transit train, and it gave me enough mental elbow room to get lost in Annie Ernaux’s gorgeous and immersive novel “The Years.” May this music find its own unique and gloriously unproductive function in your life.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Laraaji: “Trance Celestial — Movement 3”A gently luminous slice of bliss from the prolific New Age legend and laughter enthusiast’s 1983 composition “Trance Celestial.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Julianna Barwick: “Envelop”To create the songs on her magnificent 2011 album, “The Magic Place,” Barwick wove layer upon layer of ethereal vocal loops into intricate symphonies of breath. (Listen on YouTube)3. Harold Budd and Brian Eno: “An Arc of Doves”In 1980, for the second album in his Ambient series, Eno teamed up with the Minimalist composer Harold Budd for the evocative “The Plateaux of Mirror.” On “An Arc of Doves,” Budd’s improvised clusters of piano notes glide along the marbled surfaces of Eno’s electronics. (Listen on YouTube)4. Hiroshi Yoshimura: “Feel”A pioneer of Japanese ambient music, Yoshimura’s “Feel,” from his landmark 1986 album “Green,” uses synthetic sounds to construct an otherworldly landscape. (Listen on YouTube)5. Laraaji: “Trance Celestial — Movement 4”Back to the celestial trance already in progress. I love the rippling effect Laraaji achieves here. (Listen on YouTube)6. Mary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena: “Hundred Dollar Hoagie”Though its title is charmingly down-to-earth, the harpist (and, here, synth wizard) Mary Lattimore’s 2022 collaboration with the guitarist Paul Sukeena sounds like a warped transmission from a distant galaxy. (Listen on YouTube)7. Bitchin Bajas: “Pieces of Tape”The adventurous Chicago group Bitchin Bajas create soundscapes of all sorts of tones and textures, but here, on a nearly 10-minute composition from their 2014 self-titled album, they sound like warm-blooded aliens. (Listen on YouTube)8. Brian Eno: “2/2”I just had to include something from “Music for Airports.” Ken Emerson’s 1979 New York Times review of the album is an illuminating time capsule, too. As he concludes, “if it were ever actually piped over the p.a. system at LaGuardia, travelers would either ignore it — or miss their flights.” (Listen on YouTube)Wordlessly,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“An Ambient Playlist to Create a Bubble of Tranquillity” track listTrack 1: Laraaji, “Trance Celestial — Movement 3”Track 2: Julianna Barwick, “Envelop”Track 3: Harold Budd and Brian Eno, “An Arc of Doves”Track 4: Hiroshi Yoshimura, “Feel”Track 5: Laraaji, “Trance Celestial — Movement 4”Track 6: Mary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena, “Hundred Dollar Hoagie”Track 7: Bitchin Bajas, “Pieces of Tape”Track 8: Brian Eno, “2/2”Bonus tracksJon Pareles’s radiant profile of the 79-year-old Laraaji, from earlier this year, is a must-read.So is Isabelia Herrera’s poignant and beautifully descriptive essay from last year, about how ambient music helped her relinquish control after her mother had a stroke. “In its call to suspend time,” she writes, “the music carries the potential to press pause on the punishing velocity that attends disaster, that robs our attention and predetermines a fixed future.”And I cannot mention Annie Ernaux without also pointing you toward the great Rachel Cusk’s definitive piece on the recent Nobel Laureate.Plus, as always, check out the Playlist for the latest song recommendations. This week, we have new tracks from Blur, Bad Bunny, Anohni and the Johnsons, and more. More

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      Jimmy Buffett, Hospitalized After Bahamas Trip, Cancels Show

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      The 76-year-old performer canceled a Saturday performance in Charleston, S.C., for unspecified health reasons. He had resumed touring this year after canceling a series of shows in October.Jimmy Buffett, the singer-songwriter who has built a lucrative lifestyle empire on the basis of beach-bum anthems like “Margaritaville” and “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere,” canceled a show scheduled for Saturday in Charleston, S.C., after he was hospitalized for an unspecified illness.Mr. Buffett, 76, said in a statement on Thursday that he had a “sudden change of plans this week” after returning from a trip to the Bahamas.“I had to stop in Boston for a checkup but wound up back in the hospital to address some issues that needed immediate attention,” he said. “Growing old is not for sissies, I promise you.”Mr. Buffett said that he would perform again when he is “well enough.”A representative for Mr. Buffett responded to a request for information about his condition by referring to his statement and declined to comment further.It was unclear on Friday how long Mr. Buffett would refrain from performing. There were no events listed on his tour page, which told Parrotheads, as Mr. Buffett’s fans call themselves, to “stay tuned” for upcoming show announcements.Nick Pezzorello, the president of a Charleston-based Jimmy Buffett fan club, said that the Lowcountry Parrothead Club wished Mr. Buffett a “speedy recovery” so that his fans “may enjoy and celebrate his music and lifestyle for many more years to come.”“We will anxiously await his return to the Holy City,” Mr. Pezzorello said, referring to Charleston.It was the second time in seven months that Mr. Buffett has had to reschedule shows because of his health. Citing “health issues and brief hospitalization” in September, Mr. Buffett canceled five shows that had been planned in Las Vegas, San Diego, Salt Lake City and Nampa, Idaho, in October.“On doctor’s orders, he must take this time to recuperate and heal,” an announcement on Mr. Buffett’s website said in September.Mr. Buffett was soon back on the road, performing monthly since February. He rescheduled and performed two shows in Las Vegas in March and one in San Diego in early May. He also played in Key West, Fla., and Phoenix.Last month, his hit “Margaritaville” from the 1977 album, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” was among 25 recordings that were added to the National Recording Registry.The registry, which is part of the Library of Congress, designates recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and “worthy of preservation for all time.”When “Margaritaville” was released, the song stayed on the sales charts for months, “scoring with pop and country audiences alike, as well as teenagers and adults,” the Library of Congress said in a statement in April.The song celebrates a life of sunny leisure and frozen drinks, from the opening lines, “nibblin’ on sponge cake, watchin’ the sun bake,” to its earworm refrain, “wastin’ away in Margaritaville, searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt.”“Today, its lyrics are as memorized as any song in history,” the Library of Congress said, adding that the song is “as well known and omnipresent as ever — a regular component of bars, beach parties, karaoke and any place cool vibes are required.” More

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      Why Do We Listen to Sad Songs?

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      When Joshua Knobe was younger, he knew an indie rock musician who sang sorrowful, “heart-rending things that made people feel terrible,” he recalled recently. At one point he came across a YouTube video, set to her music, that had a suicidal motif. “That was the theme of her music,” he said, adding, “So I had this sense of puzzlement by it, because I also felt like it had this tremendous value.”Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      This ‘Magic Flute’ Has Ringtones, Bird Tracks and a Foley Artist

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      Supernatural happenings, curses and romances, heartbreaking arias and vocal fireworks — what’s not to love?Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”), a wildly popular gateway opera, has been a frequent presence on stages since its premiere in 1791. It’s a fair bet, though, that Simon McBurney’s production, which opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, is the first to feature a ringtone duplicating the bird catcher Papageno’s five-note musical trademark. Or to use about 100 speakers strategically placed all over the house.Morley (Pamina) and Brownlee (Tamino) rehearsing “Die Zauberflöte.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe tenor Brenton Ryan, as Monostatos, in the production.Lila Barth for The New York TimesFor McBurney, the use of technology is less about embracing the present than about nodding to the creation of “Zauberflöte.” That was at Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, which was run by the multitasking Emanuel Schikaneder, the opera’s librettist and originator of the role of Papageno.“Schikaneder had the latest ways of making thunder, he had machines make the sound of rain, he had bird calls, he had people making the sound of horses’ hooves,” McBurney said in an interview. “The use of sound creates a magical world, and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”The juxtapositions of intimacy and cosmic scale, simplicity and complexity, low and high technology have long been emblematic of McBurney’s work as a founder and artistic director of the London-based theater company Complicité. Audience members at his solo show “The Encounter” (which had a Broadway run in 2016) experienced the production through earphones, immersing them in sophisticated soundscapes. Something that could have added distance between performer and theatergoer brought them closer.Morley rehearsing with the orchestra, which is raised almost to the level of the stage.Lila Barth for The New York TimesMcBurney experimented with sound again for “Zauberflöte,” which was first staged in 2012 at the Dutch National Opera and has been presented around Europe. (It replaces the 19-year-old Julie Taymor production at the Met; her abridged, English-language version for families remains in the repertory.) A distinctive trait of McBurney’s “Zauberflöte” is the importance of the sonic environment.“For a forest scene I have five or six bird tracks that I can send out, a running brook that I’m going to put in a speaker in the far right side of the stage, two tracks of wind blowing in trees,” Matthieu Maurice, a sound designer, said at a recent rehearsal.The singers are amplified through body microphones, though only for the spoken sections — plentiful in “Zauberflöte,” which is a singspiel, a numbers show with dialogue between arias. The mics are turned off for the sung parts, requiring constant adjustments by two sound mixers.“There’s so much more I can do with the dialogue with a mic,” said the soprano Erin Morley, who plays the pure-hearted princess Pamina. “I can face upstage, I can whisper something. I’m sure there will be some purists out there who will hate this, but the important thing is that we are not singing with mics.”The director Simon McBurney at the Met. “The use of sound creates a magical world,” he said, “and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesNathalie Stutzmann, this production’s conductor, was also on board. “In a house as big as this one, it is obvious to me that we need to use modern technology,” she said. “The Met is huge. It’s a lack of intelligence not to adapt to a space. It’s normal to help the singers fill the space when they are speaking. It’s also important that the volume of the spoken parts match the volume of the sung parts in an opera like this one, otherwise it feels like two different works.”Amplification also allows the integration of a live Foley artist, Ruth Sullivan, who operates out of a self-contained space, visible stage left, that looks like a zany inventor’s laboratory. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said of Sullivan. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance in the same way Nathalie Stutzmann is dancing with the singers, trying to make the cellos and the voices work together.”The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects to live projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesHabermann’s drawing adds to the projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesStutzmann works as closely with Maurice as she does with the musicians and singers. (The associate sound designer, he has been implementing Gareth Fry’s original vision for the past eight years, while adding flourishes of his own, including the ringtone.) The sound effects are indicated on the sheet music, so she knows exactly what to expect and when.Adding to the increased interconnection among the opera’s moving parts, the pit is almost level with the stage.“We decided, ‘Let’s raise the orchestra, let’s make people aware of the players,’” said Michael Levine, the set designer. “Because we’re so used to the players being hidden, and they weren’t in the 18th century.”From left, Luka Zylik, Deven Agge and Julian Knopf as the three spirits that guide Tamino and Papageno.Lila Barth for The New York TimesDuring the spoken sections at rehearsal, players in the orchestra turned toward the stage like flowers to the sun. They could watch the action for a change.“There’s nothing more boring than being an orchestra musician and being in the back of a cave with no idea of what’s happening on the stage,” Stutzmann said. “Can you imagine spending three or four hours, five for Wagner, at the bottom of a pit and have no idea what’s happening above you?” Not only can the musicians see this “Zauberflöte”; some also become part of the action.Being positioned higher creates a challenge, though. “We have to be careful not to cover up the singers,” Stutzmann said. “The sound balance is changed because we’re up and above, so we’re louder. You have to be vigilant while avoiding being bland.”Ruth Sullivan, the production’s live Foley artist. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesMuch of the production’s visuals are also created in plain view. The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects — watch how he renders a starry sky — to live projections. “I show all my tricks and then they become doubly magical,” McBurney said with an impish grin.For Levine, making the entire house part of one organism reminds everybody that the artificiality and evanescence of the art form constitute its strength. “What we wanted to do is to bring the audience into the fallibility of theater,” he said. “Things are being made before your eyes, and it’s live, and it’s not going to happen again. And the people that are constructing it are here with you in the same room, and we’re all doing it together.”A scene from the production at the Met.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIf the projections are the modern equivalent of the magic lanterns developed in the 17th century, McBurney and Levine also came up with a contemporary version of a magic carpet: a central square platform that can transport the characters, but that also suggests the instability they experience. It can go up and down, and it can be inclined as various angles; the singers can scamper on top or scurry below. “It is much more secure when you’re on it,” Morley said. “From afar, it looks terrifying.” Laughing, she allowed that “when we go underneath the platform, there were a few moments in rehearsal when I said, ‘You want me to do what?’”Some modern directors have been criticized for overemphasizing an opera’s staging over its music, and forcing interpretations that depart from the familiar. But McBurney’s North Star remains the music, and trying to stay faithful to what it meant for its creator.“I think that for Mozart, if you can make music so beautiful, people will come out changed,” he said. “We can debate whether he was right or not well, but it’s called ‘The Magic Flute.’ The flute changes the way that people behave.”Mozart, he added, had confidence in his music: “He knew that it could move people in a way that might alter their lives.” More