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      ‘Daisy Jones & the Six’ and the Ballad of Making Rock ’n’ Roll TV

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      It was the 36th day of what was supposed to be a 30-day shoot in New Orleans, but the cast and crew of the rock drama “Daisy Jones & the Six” were still at it.They were filming a scene, set in 1977, in which the actors Riley Keough and Sam Claflin, as the lead singers of the band Daisy Jones & the Six, unwind backstage after performing on “Saturday Night Live” for the first time. Half-empty liquor bottles, wood paneling, smoke-machine haze and framed photos of the Coneheads and Gilda Radner surround them.Claflin, who plays Billy Dunne, asks Keough, in the title role of Daisy Jones: “How’d it feel?”“It felt good, yeah,” she says, “I mean, not as good as cocaine.”Before New Orleans, the cast and crew had filmed for 69 days in the Los Angeles area, and afterward some of them headed to Athens and the Greek island of Hydra for a key episode. Production on “Daisy Jones & the Six” was initially scheduled to begin in April 2020, and even after it was postponed because of Covid for about 18 months, it had to be suspended a few more times. Despite daily testing protocols and mask mandates, the reality of filming concerts with hundreds of extras, hookup scenes and booze-and-Quaalude-fueled bacchanals had taken a toll.“Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll is hard to do in a pandemic,” said Lauren Neustadter, who with Reese Witherspoon executive-produced the series.“Daisy Jones & the Six” tells the story of a band’s rise to sold-out-stadium-level fame thanks to a hit album, “Aurora.” The musicians make and promote “Aurora” as Daisy, Billy and his wife, Camila Dunne (Camila Morrone), try to navigate the sharp edges of a love triangle.It’s based on a 2019 novel of the same name by Taylor Jenkins Reid that has sold more than 1 million e-book and print copies, according to NPD BookScan, and has been translated into more than 30 languages. Part of its appeal is the storytelling approach: Reid creates an oral history that reads like nonfiction, populating it with musicians and record producers who reminisce against the backdrop of beater vans, tour buses and Sunset Strip stages.“Daisy Jones & the Six” begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video on March 3.Amazon StudiosTo answer many Google searches: The Six is not a real band, though it’s inspired by Fleetwood Mac and others. Still, that uncertainty — as well as the will-they-or-won’t-they tension between Keough’s and Claflin’s characters — is something Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, and Amazon Studios hope will grip viewers when “Daisy Jones & the Six” begins streaming its 10 episodes on Amazon Prime Video, starting March 3.For Hello Sunshine, “Daisy Jones” could affirm its book-to-screen dominance after its successes with the film “Where the Crawdads Sing” and the Netflix series “From Scratch.” For Reid, whose books have become coveted source material in Hollywood, this will be the first adaptation to reach audiences, so its popularity is likely to influence the market for her material. For the up-and-coming actors in the cast, many of whom sidelined other projects to stick with “Daisy Jones” amid its realigned shooting schedule, it’s a chance to break out.The built-in fan base that the book provides will be a boon for the series but also brings its own anxieties. “There is for me a desire to make the fans happy and bring to life this book that has lived in their hearts and in all of our hearts for so long,” Morrone said. “I don’t think I’ve ever done a project that has this many eyes on it.”It is one of the first projects that the head of Amazon Studios, Jennifer Salke, ordered after Jeff Bezos hired her in 2018. “You have to make noise,” she said, discussing her early days at the company and her reaction to the “Daisy Jones” pitch. “You have to be able to do something that is different. It can’t feel like a show that you could just get everywhere.”“Daisy Jones” promised to deliver that, she said, and Amazon stood by the production as it waited out the restrictions of the pandemic.Covid delays provided a significant benefit: more than a year for the actors to take music lessons. Before then, the most noteworthy musical credential any of them had was that Keough is Elvis Presley’s granddaughter.‘I need you to bring your iPad to the beach tomorrow’If streaming-television economics are under pressure, as layoffs at Disney, Netflix and other companies indicate, you would not know it from Amazon’s investment in “Daisy Jones & the Six.”The 1970s-era sets are designed to shag-carpeted verisimilitude. For a week, the production took over the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, using vintage pornography as a visual reference when they transformed the Viper Room into the seedy Filthy McNasty’s. The principal characters alone required 1,500 wardrobe changes in the first half of production. With other characters and extras, the production sometimes needed 250 outfits a night.About 25 original songs have been written by Blake Mills, who wrote some in collaboration with others, including Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford and Chris Weisman. Eleven of those songs make up “Aurora,” which Atlantic Records will release when the series begins streaming. The first track, “Regret Me,” dropped earlier this month and by mid-February had garnered about 2 million streams on Spotify.Even the show’s P.R. efforts hark back to the era of big-studio budgets: More than 30 publicists were involved (or hoped to be involved) in the reporting, photographing and fact-checking of this article. The photo shoot drew multiple entourages.But the TV version of “Daisy Jones” started small, with a wife and husband in Los Angeles.The husband is Scott Neustadter, a screenwriter whose credits include the 2009 movie “500 Days of Summer,” which he wrote with Michael H. Weber.From left, Scott Neustadter, Taylor Jenkins Reid and Lauren Neustadter.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesOne day in 2017, Neustadter’s representatives got a call from Brad Mendelsohn, Reid’s manager, asking if the screenwriter might want to take a look at a manuscript about a fictional 1970s rock band whose trajectory and interpersonal drama resembled Fleetwood Mac’s. Neustadter, a fan of that era’s music, started reading it that morning.He got in touch later that day with his wife, Lauren Neustadter, who had just been hired by Witherspoon to lead Hello Sunshine’s film and TV division. He reminded her that he and Witherspoon had once talked about being captivated by Stevie Nicks. “I knew this was a passion of Reese’s,” he said.Lauren spent a few hours reading Reid’s manuscript. Then she interrupted her boss’s vacation. “I need you to bring your iPad to the beach tomorrow morning,” she remembered emailing Witherspoon, “because this book is so good, and it’s going to be so competitive.”The next morning, she said, Witherspoon replied: “I’m obsessed.”‘I have prepared my whole life to write this’Days later, the Neustadters hatched a plan.Lauren took Reid to breakfast at Hugo’s, in the San Fernando Valley. As she was praising the book, her phone rang.“I think this is for you,” Neustadter said, handing it to Reid, who by then had achieved modest success as an author. She maintained her chill, at least on the outside, as she listened to Witherspoon tell her how much she loved her book.That afternoon, Scott took Reid to lunch at a coffee shop on Larchmont Avenue. “I told her I have prepared my whole life to write this,” meaning a film or TV version of “Daisy Jones,” he said.Reid decided she wanted Hello Sunshine to spearhead the screen version, with Scott and his writing partner Weber attached as creators. She ultimately sold the “Daisy Jones” manuscript to Penguin Random House.In May 2018, Lauren Neustadter and Witherspoon met Salke for lunch at Tavern, a restaurant in Brentwood. Salke, a former NBC executive, told them she was looking for big, ambitious projects that could benefit from the breadth of Amazon, including its ability to market and sell books, audiobooks, music and merchandise.“They teased me with something, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was,” Salke said. “They were like, ‘We might have something right up your alley.’”On a Friday in July, Neustadter sent her the “Daisy Jones” manuscript, a series overview and a script for the pilot episode, written by her husband and Weber, and said Salke had the weekend to consider it before Hello Sunshine would shop the series to others. Salke ordered it to series on Monday. “We just were really invested from the get-go,” she said.The following March, the novel came out and was named the pick for Witherspoon’s book club. It sailed onto the New York Times best-seller list, as did one of Reid’s earlier books, “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” That novel’s paperback version has now spent more than 100 weeks on the list, and Netflix said last year that it is planning a screen adaptation.‘I was put on this earth to be Daisy’A few months later, the producers began to think about casting. Lauren Neustadter received a call from Alexandra Trustman, one of Hello Sunshine’s agents at C.A.A., who suggested one of her other clients, Riley Keough, for the role of Daisy.Keough had recently finished filming Janicza Bravo’s film “Zola,” in which she played a stripper, when she met in May 2019 with the Neustadters, along with Will Graham, who shared the job of being the showrunner of “Daisy Jones” with Scott Neustadter; and Mendelsohn, an executive producer of the series.“I was put on this earth to be Daisy,” Keough told them.Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, plays the title character in “Daisy Jones & the Six.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesKeough declined an interview request in the weeks after the death of her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, but in an email, she said that it was the character’s combination of strength and vulnerability that moved her. “Daisy is complicated,” she wrote. “I didn’t identify with Daisy’s desire to sing and write songs, because that’s something I had never done. What I connected with was Daisy’s artistry and how she felt, not being taken seriously as a young woman.”She was one of several actors playing musicians who first came to the roles without much musical training. Suki Waterhouse, a novice pianist when she was cast, plays the keyboardist Karen Sirko. Will Harrison, who was in a band in college, plays the lead guitarist Graham Dunne. Sebastian Chacon, who had drummed a bit, plays the drummer Warren Rojas (in the book, his last name is Rhodes). Josh Whitehouse, who actually knows how to play guitar, was cast as Eddie Roundtree, the bassist.Claflin, as Billy Dunne, was the final band member cast. He had never played guitar. As part of an audition, he began to sing Elton John’s “Your Song,” before the musical supervisor urged him to stop. When Tony Berg — the veteran producer who has worked with artists including Bob Dylan, Aimee Mann and Phoebe Bridgers, and who is the show’s music consultant — asked Claflin to sing a Beatles song, the actor couldn’t think of one.“Out of everyone involved in this project, my knowledge of ’70s music, ’70s L.A., ’70s anything — especially in America and especially in the music sphere — was very, very, very lackluster,” Claflin said in an interview.The producers were determined to make it work. “We were going to lean on movie magic,” Lauren Neustadter said.After the pandemic upended the 2020 production schedule, the actors threw themselves into music. “I was incredibly into the idea of having three hours of piano lessons every single day,” Waterhouse said. “This is something that nobody gets a chance to do.”‘They sounded like a real band’The work of transforming actors pretending to be in a band into a band became the professional preoccupation of the music supervisor Frankie Pine. She oversaw a monthslong “band camp” consisting of one-on-one instruction and group rehearsal, in addition to taking and reviewing video footage of practice sessions so they could listen to their pitch and timing and watch their comportment.“I wanted to really try to create a sense that this is a real band,” Pine said. “When you’re a real band, you hang out together, you eat together, you drink together, you bitch to each other. You go through the normal motions of a group of people that are constantly together. So I was really trying to create this camaraderie that a true rock ’n’ roll band has.”“I don’t think I’ve ever done a project that has this many eyes on it,” said Morrone, bottom, with her co-stars Claflin and Keough.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAs the production prepared to start shooting in Los Angeles in September 2021, Lauren Neustadter felt it was important for the band to put on a live concert, performing songs from the show. They rented a Hollywood studio with a stage and, still limited by Covid, invited about 40 people who were working on the series.In attendance was Tom Wright, a veteran actor (“Tales From the Hood,” “Sunshine State”) who plays Teddy Price, the Berry Gordy-Quincy Jones-esque record producer. He was prepared to be underwhelmed.As a young actor, Wright lived in New York in the 1970s and had a roommate in the music business. “I got to know and hang out with people like Ornette Coleman and Chet Baker and Jim Hall — you know, some great jazz musicians. And I got to see them perform live, so I kind of have a high bar,” he said.At the friends-and-family concert, “I was shocked,” Wright said. “They sounded like a real band. It was incredible.”If this was the band’s smallest-scale concert, the largest was in New Orleans, where the production design team refitted the 26,500-seat Tad Gormley Stadium to appear, on camera at least, as if it were Soldier Field in Chicago, where the story’s biggest concert occurs.This was the accomplishment of the show’s production designer Jessica Kender, who said that because the look of the 1970s is so recognizable, details mattered. A scene at a gas station, for example, required them to remove ethanol warnings on the pumps that wouldn’t have been there decades ago.When Nzingha Stewart, who directed four episodes, envisioned a montage in which Billy and Daisy visited dozens of radio stations, the production design crew built one radio broadcasting booth that Kender remade over and over again with decals and details summoning Tulsa, Dallas and Fort Worth. In a concert scene, merch stands are piled with band T-shirts, like one with a sepia photo of Keough that reads, “Daisy Jones and the Six: Amsterdam, the Netherlands 5 Jun 1976.”Denise Wingate, the costume designer, once traveled with the 1980s band the Bangles. When she read “Daisy Jones,” she said, “I was like, ‘I have to do it.’” During the pandemic delay, she spent hours every day searching eBay and vintage sites. Once lockdowns eased, she said, “I went to flea markets every weekend for a year.”And she fielded requests. When Keough asked for “Stevie Nicks vibes” for the Soldier Field performance, Wingate found a Halston caftan in gold lamé that she cut up the front to turn it into a cape and paired with a vintage metallic crochet dress. (“Daisy’s wardrobe was a true highlight of my life,” Keough wrote.)To find inspiration for the “Aurora” album cover, Wingate made a mood board featuring Nicks in a billowing white dress. In the cover that resulted, Billy is in a denim shirt and Daisy wears a dress similar to the one Nicks wore, which Wingate had made. Just as it is described in the book, the rock stars are staring into each other’s eyes, but a space exists between them.For Reid, who imagined this story and took it from her head to paper starting in 2016, it’s hard to believe it’s all happening. “If your book is like your baby,” she said, “then the adaptation is like my grandchild. I don’t really get to take credit, but boy am I so proud of them.”She is thrilled by the show, she said. “When I think of Daisy now, I see Riley’s face. When I think of Billy, I think of Sam.” More

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      Friedrich Cerha, 96, Who Finished Another Composer’s Masterpiece, Dies

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      His skill in completing Alban Berg’s “Lulu” almost 40 years after Berg’s death was considered one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century.Friedrich Cerha, an Austrian composer and conductor who was best renowned for taking on the arduous task of completing Alban Berg’s unfinished “Lulu,” and whose skill in the effort confirmed that work as one of the greatest operatic achievements of the 20th century, died on Tuesday in Vienna. He was 96.His death was announced by his publisher, Universal Edition. It did not specify a cause.Mr. Cerha wrote several stage works, of which three — “Baal,” “Der Rattenfänger” and “Der Riese vom Steinfeld” — were produced by the Vienna State Opera. He composed orchestral, chamber and other music that found rare stylistic range within the broad confines of postwar modernism. He was a crucial figure in the rebuilding of the Viennese new-music scene, cofounding and then conducting its leading ensemble, Die Reihe. And he was a dedicated teacher to his students, who included the composer Georg Friedrich Haas.But at least outside Austria, Mr. Cerha was known less for his own work than for his celebrated contribution to another composer’s masterpiece.Berg had not quite finished orchestrating “Lulu” when he died in December 1935, although the opera, a successor to his earlier “Wozzeck,” had already become a cause célèbre for critics of Nazi cultural policies. He had set “Lulu” aside earlier that year to write his Violin Concerto and returned to it in the fall only to be struck down, partway into its third act, with an infected abscess.From its Zurich premiere in 1937 on, “Lulu” was staged in a two-act form that offered evidence of the work’s stature yet disfigured the composer’s theatrical and musical design. But by the early 1960s, scholars led by George Perle had become convinced that Berg had considered “Lulu” all but complete, and that the available materials, including a short score, made a realization both possible and necessary. Berg’s widow, Helene, banned any such thing, and his publisher, Universal Edition, publicly followed her lead. Privately, it did not.Mr. Cerha, meanwhile, had long been interested in the Second Viennese School, of which Berg was a part. Mr. Cerha had studied with former members of Arnold Schoenberg’s circle and had programmed a work by Anton Webern for the debut concert of Die Reihe, in March 1959. In June 1962, Mr. Cerha saw Karl Böhm lead “Lulu” at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna and found the two-act truncation painful to watch. The next day, he went to the offices of Universal Edition, asked for whatever documents they had and set secretly to work.A scene from Mr. Cerha’s completed edition of Berg’s “Lulu,” staged by the Paris Opera in 1979. Colette Masson/Roger-Viollet, via Granger The task was considerable. Nine hundred or so bars of one of history’s most complex scores were left to orchestrate, and although Berg’s intricate structure meant that material from the first two acts could be reused in the third, some imagination was still needed. It took Mr. Cerha until 1974 to finish it, before making further revisions after Mrs. Berg died in 1976.There was pressure, too — far more than most composers faced in their own work. “Lulu” already had a towering reputation, and its effective banning by the Nazis had kept it a political symbol after the war. When the Paris Opera finally staged Mr. Cerha’s edition, on Feb. 24, 1979, it offered “perhaps the most important and glamorous operatic premiere since the end of World War II,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in a front-page review in The New York Times.Mr. Cerha’s contributions were so successful that he became almost a ghostwriter: He revealed “Lulu” at its full greatness, while shying away from the spotlight.His fellow composers were impressed. Pierre Boulez, who conducted the premiere, said Mr. Cerha had worked “with great care, competence and mastery.” Mr. Perle wrote that “nowhere does one have the impression that a hand other than the composer’s has had to take over.”Gyorgy Ligeti went further, saying in 1986 that Mr. Cerha, a friend, had a “total lack of vanity, which enabled him to enter wholeheartedly into the way of thinking of a congenial yet nevertheless different composer, and to sacrifice thousands of hours, and days, of his own composing.”“No one else,” Ligeti added, “could have done that.”Friedrich Paul Cerha was born in Vienna on Feb. 17, 1926, the only child of Paul and Marie (Falbigel) Cerha. His father was an electrical engineer. Friedrich learned the violin from about age 6 and had written a few compositions by the time of Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938.Like his parents, young Friedrich despised Nazism, but was conscripted first to aid the Luftwaffe in air defense and later, in 1944, into the Wehrmacht. He deserted, was caught, was sent to the front and deserted again, this time walking hundreds of miles south from Göttingen, in the middle of Germany, through the Thuringian Forest and into the mountains of Tirol, where he hid at high altitude in a hut at Lamsenjoch.The experience of fascism, and of his freedom from it, left Mr. Cerha with a lifelong reluctance to adhere to aesthetic dogmas, or even to focus solely on music; he painted, and sculpted a stone chapel in woods near his second home in Maria Langegg. After studying in Vienna at the conservatory and the university, from which he earned a doctorate in 1950, he spent three summers at Darmstadt, Germany, the hothouse of the European avant-garde, but did not lastingly embrace a single compositional school over another.“I have never fanatically advocated artistic goals,” Mr. Cerha told Universal Edition’s magazine in 2012. “I always acted from an inner conviction.”The legacy of the war is particularly audible in “Spiegel,” a frightening array of seven soundscapes for orchestra and tape that was arguably Mr. Cerha’s most important work. Dating from 1960-61, its clouds of sound resemble the far shorter, more static works that Ligeti wrote around the same time, like “Atmosphères,” and it made Mr. Cerha famous.But “Spiegel,” which he wrote without regard for practicality and did not premiere as a cycle until 1972, is also quite different, with narrative elements that add up to a terrifying hour-plus portrayal of disastrous force. In “Spiegel VI,” a maniacal march slams into nervous strings and winds, the brass braying grotesquely in the ensuing carnage; in “Spiegel V,” relentless drumrolls herald a consuming darkness — the abyss.“The pieces were invented in a purely musical way,” Mr. Cerha wrote in notes for a recording on the Kairos label. “It was only long after their completion that I understood the degree to which this work was influenced by the horrors of my war experiences and the limitless joy of freedom that I felt as a deserter in the midst of nature.”His wife, Gertraud Cerha, a musician herself, whom he married in 1951, was the keyboard soloist in the 1960 premiere of a serialist piece for harpsichord and ensemble, “Relazioni fragili.” She survives him, as do two daughters, Ruth and Irina, and two grandchildren.For some critics, the “Lulu” experience seemed to draw out a Bergian expressivity in Mr. Cerha’s style, and some of his later works — “Nacht” for orchestra, say, or his “8 Sätze nach Hölderlin-Fragmenten” for string sextet — indeed have a familiar, muted lyricism to them, though others do not. He bridled at the suggestion, however: His own works were his, alone.“That was very strange,” he told Universal Edition of this purported influence. “Before the third act of ‘Lulu’ had its world premiere, nobody ever connected me to Berg, but in the years after, this suddenly happened all the time. People detected a connection to Berg, which is of course nonsense.” More

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      Feist’s Electrifying Return, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Lana Del Rey, Pink, Janelle Monáe and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Feist, ‘In Lightning’Leslie Feist’s first album since 2017, “Multitudes,” is due April 14, and “In Lightning” is the noisiest and most changeable of the three songs she has released in advance. She sings about lightning as illumination, as power and as revelation; is it “in lightning” or “enlightening”? The track begins with clattering drums and banshee vocal harmonies, then veers between hushed contemplation and a brawny, Celtic-flavored stomp. At the end, the vocal harmonies that were so cutting when the song began return as tentative queries. JON PARELESLana Del Rey, ‘A&W’Lana Del Rey works in liminal spaces: between breath and melody, between confession and persona, between image and experience, between commerce and art. The pretty but utterly bleak “A&W” has nothing to do with root beer or fast food; the initials echo “American whore,” something she calls herself in the song. She sings as a woman without illusions or hopes, a celebrity who’s always under scrutiny: “Do you really think I give a damn what I do/After years of just hearing them talking?” In this long, subdued, radio-defying track, she sings about a loveless hotel hookup that may have turned into a rape; “Do you really think anyone would think that I didn’t ask for it?” she wonders. Halfway through, the track turns to synthetic sounds and the lyrics drift into a different obsession: “Jimmy only love me when he want to get high.” In this song, everyone is a user. PARELESJanelle Monáe, ‘Float’Since “Dirty Computer” in 2018, Janelle Monáe has focused more on acting than on music; the few songs the 37-year-old has released in the past five years have been one-off soundtrack recordings. The buoyant “Float,” though, certainly sounds like a harbinger of Monáe’s next era as a recording artist: It’s looser and more conversant with contemporary hip-hop than the musician’s work in the past. The Afrobeat heir Seun Kuti leads his late father’s ensemble Egypt 80 to provide some brassy fanfare while Monáe raps, “I had to protect all my energy, I’m feeling much lighter” in a carefree cadence that backs that assertion up. LINDSAY ZOLADZDesire Marea, ‘Be Free’The South African songwriter Desire Marea stirs up a maelstrom in “Be Free.” With lyrics in English and Zulu, it’s an exhortation and a reproach to someone who won’t accept his sexuality: “Maybe another day you will find courage to love me freely,” he sings, sympathetic but judgmental. Recorded with a 13-member live studio band, the song barrels ahead from the start: first with an insistent bass riff, accelerating with voices, brasses and four-on-the-floor drums, then rumbling and roiling under a solemn, string-laden plaint: “I just want to be free,” Marea insists. PARELESAnna B Savage, ‘Pavlov’s Dog’“Pavlov’s Dog,” from the London-based singer-songwriter Anna B Savage’s new album “In/Flux,” is a wonderfully tactile depiction of lust: panting backing vocals, escalating tension and Savage’s visceral, quivering voice. “Just call me Pavlov’s dog,” she sings against the atmospheric soundscape. “I’m here, I’m waiting, I’m salivating.” ZOLADZKelsea Ballerini, ‘Mountain With a View’With her strikingly candid new EP “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” the country star Kelsea Ballerini joins the recent ranks of peers like Kacey Musgraves and Adele in chronicling a young woman’s experience of divorce. “I’m wearing the ring still, but I think I’m lying,” Ballerini sings wrenchingly. “Sometimes you forget yours, I think we’re done trying.” The boldness of her confessionalism is paired with a sparse, airy new sound, full of echoing synthesizer chords, naturalistic sounds and plenty of empty space, evoking the home that Ballerini is suddenly learning to fill on her own. ZOLADZNaima Bock, ‘Lines’Following her lovely and eclectic debut album from last year, “Giant Palm,” the London musician Naima Bock’s new single, “Lines,” is dynamic and unpredictable, a folky rocker that rises and ebbs like the sea. Violin, saxophone and an unruly electric guitar all emerge at points to wrestle with Bock’s bracing vocal, but each one ultimately cedes the spotlight to her flinty presence. ZOLADZNickel Creek, ‘Holding Pattern’“Holding Pattern” is from “Celebrants,” the first album in nine years from the reconvened string trio Nickel Creek, due March 24. It’s a song that evokes the first months of the pandemic — “Washing my hands/Through the night can’t sleep for the sirens,” Chris Thile sings — and tries to draw comfort from companionship, urging, “Don’t forget we’re/Alone in this together.” The siblings Sara and Sean Watkins pick circular guitar patterns and add vocal harmonies, while Thile plays a counterpoint on mandola that rises like mist off a pond. PARELESPink, ‘When I Get There’At first, “When I Get There” sounds like a love song. It has basic piano chords and Pink singing, “When I think of you, I think about forever.” But soon it’s clear that she’s singing about someone who has died, maybe a songwriter: “Is there a song you just can’t wait to share?” It’s a careful crescendo that contemplates eternity. PARELESOval, ‘Touha’Plinking, glimmering, stuttering keyboard tones, somewhere between a piano and a music box, ripple across “Touha,” a track that previews “Romantiq,” the next album by Oval. Markus Popp, who has been recording computerized music since the 1990s as Oval, has long worked with loops, phantom spaces and electronic glitches. “Touha” proceeds in irregular flurries of keyboard activity and overlapping shards of melody, gradually interwoven with distant drones and glissandos and sporadic patterings of percussion. Aiming for neither dance nor meditation, it’s music for nervous introspection. PARELES More

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      Review: ‘In Seven Days’ Conjures the Creation, With Video

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      The New York Philharmonic, conducted by Ruth Reinhardt, played Thomas Adès’s “In Seven Days,” for piano, orchestra and moving image.When will the New York Philharmonic stop importing all things Los Angeles?First, New York poached the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive — then, earlier this month, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s conductor.And concerts this week bring more: images of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, projected over the stage of David Geffen Hall. It’s getting ridiculous!Not that you would recognize Disney Hall in this form. The images of the building have been abstracted as part of the film accompaniment to Thomas Adès’s 2008 piano concerto “In Seven Days,” which the (New York) Philharmonic is performing with the pianist Kirill Gerstein under the baton of Ruth Reinhardt, in her debut with the orchestra.Adès’s music here, some of the best and most moving he has written, was conceived alongside Tal Rosner’s video. The half-hour piece is described by its creators as a “concerto for piano with moving image,” drawing on footage of Disney Hall and the Royal Festival Hall in London, the two spaces for which it was commissioned.Some of the film is lovely; I like the evocation of a shadowy, glinting jungle, and shifting, expanding geometric shapes conjure the jazzy, mid-20th-century look of Saul Bass’s movie title sequences. But on Thursday the endless kaleidoscope fractals mostly felt like a busy albatross around the score’s neck.And what a score. This is Adès at his most confident, elemental and ingenious. Brilliantly, the chaos of genesis at the start is not immediately chaotic, but rather an assertive, spiky motif with the slightest off-kilter dip to the rhythm, like something trying to catch its breath, to gather itself. The darkness of the universe is a brooding, gorgeous aria; the creation of the stars, a superhigh undulation amid glassiness, scattered through the piano and orchestra.Grim density flows into shining expanses, but this composer’s changeability and the creativity of his instrumental combinations keep it from ever sounding saccharine or sodden. Gerstein, who has played the piece many times, calmly negotiated its furious runs, granitic chords and tender wandering. For an encore, he gave Adès’s arrangement of the lonesome Berceuse from his opera “The Exterminating Angel.”The concerto offers a tantalizing impression of organic development and proliferation. That same quality was present — if in a quite different, more formally minimal vein — on Monday at Geffen’s new, intimate Sidewalk Studio in Julius Eastman’s “Femenine,” a piece from the mid-1970s that has been central to this composer’s posthumous rediscovery.At the Sidewalk Studio space, members of the Talea Ensemble and the Harlem Chamber Players performed Julius Eastman’s “Femenine.”Chris LeeSmall cells of material — including annunciatory themes as compelling as Adès’s — repeat (and repeat and repeat) and slowly evolve through the 70-minute work, over the ceaseless wintry shake of sleigh bells. The performers on Monday, a group drawn from the Talea Ensemble and the Harlem Chamber Players, juxtaposed, as Eastman intended, rhythmic alertness and regularity with woozy, oozing, shaggy sprawl.The Philharmonic can certainly play the Adès concerto, but its textures were not as clear or vivid on Thursday as they can be: the darknesses not as brutal nor the transparencies as shimmering. Grazyna Bacewicz’s motoric Overture for Orchestra, which opened the program, felt thick, too.After intermission, Dvorak’s Fifth Symphony was sometimes overly forceful. Reinhardt gave welcome prominence to the winds, but this orchestra doesn’t tend to dance gracefully, which made the internal movements heavy. By the Finale, though, more drama was made out of contrasting dynamics, with a candied, fairy-tale character to both the wistfulness and the high spirits.At the start of the concert, Reinhardt told the audience that the Philharmonic wanted to respond to the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria, a lovely idea. But that response turned out to be an awkwardly played rendition of a cliché: the second movement of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D, best known as the “Air on the G String.”Couldn’t the ensemble have simply dedicated the whole concert — or at least Adès’s concerto, a musical depiction of the wonders and terrors of nature — to those affected?New York PhilharmonicThis program is repeated through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Sandra Trehub, Pioneer in the Psychology of Music, Dies at 84

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      She showed that basic musical ability is present in infants across cultures, laying a foundation for a growing field of study.Sandra Trehub, a psychologist and researcher whose work helped illuminate how children perceive sound, and how lullabies and music fit into their cognitive and social development, died on Jan. 20 at her home in Toronto. She was 84.The death was confirmed by her son Andrew Cohen.Over a half-century as a psychologist at the University of Toronto, where she began working in 1973, Dr. Trehub produced seminal work in the field that is now known as the psychology of music.“Back then, there were very few people in psychology and neuroscience who were studying music at all as a human behavior,” Laurel Trainor, a psychologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said in a phone interview. “Sandra said, look, music is universal, we spend a lot of time and energy on music — what is its purpose? Why do we do this?”Dr. Trehub’s research found that there are indeed universally shared responses to music among infants, beginning with sing-song-y baby talk by parents across different cultures.She found that infants prefer certain melodic intervals over others and can grasp the contour and shape of a lullaby. She further established that infants and toddlers can — better than adults — notice differences in some elements of music from other countries and cultures, both tonal and rhythmic. That finding suggested that as people get older, their ability to distinguish discrepancies in unfamiliar music decreases while their ability to notice nuance in familiar music increases.“Sandra was the first psychologist to study musical abilities for their own sake in infants,” Isabelle Peretz, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, wrote in an email. Before Dr. Trehub, she added, many researchers thought “that musicality was a pure cultural product which was acquired and possessed by a few select people: the musicians.”It is now widely accepted that music is an important developmental tool for everyone, starting in infancy, and that musical fluency among parents can deeply affect their children’s long-term health and mental development.“Her work helps to legitimize early childhood music education, which basically didn’t exist before the 1980s,” Samuel Mehr, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and director of the Music Lab at Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, said by email.Dr. Trehub’s findings might seem intuitive or even obvious now, he added, but that only highlights the importance of her work. “Every bit of research in the psychology of music over the past 40 years can be traced back to Sandra Trehub,” he said.Sandra Edythe Trehub was born on May 21, 1938, in Montreal. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economics at McGill University in Montreal in 1959 and her master’s in psychology there in 1971.After completing her doctorate, also at McGill, she began her career as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Some of her earliest work showed how infants as young as one month old could distinguish between speech sounds; in a paper, she wrote that babies would increase their “sucking rate” on an artificial nipple when new vowels were introduced.Using the same methodology, Dr. Trehub went on to show in another paper how babies can distinguish between sounds in some foreign languages better than adults. That finding, said Janet Werker, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, provided the groundwork for a large body of subsequent research demonstrating that babies are born with the ability to pick up on the basic acoustics of any of the world’s languages. The research has served to heighten the importance of early exposure to foreign languages, with continuing ramifications in education.As Dr. Trehub earned tenure at the University of Toronto, her work shifted from speech to music. She published prolifically in journals, including two influential papers in 1977. One showed that the heart rates of five-month-old infants changed when exposed to different rhythms. The other showed that infants can sense the relationships between notes — they can tell when the same melody is transposed to a different key. Dr. Trehub’s research was inspired in part by her own love of music; two of her favorite singers were Leonard Cohen and David Bowie.Dr. Trehub’s marriage to Norman Cohen in 1957 ended in divorce in 1968. She married Ronald Matthews in 1970; he died in 2007. In addition to her son Andrew, she is survived by two more children, Dana and Ira Cohen; her sisters, Estelle Ebert and Maxine Seidman; 18 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.She also leaves an intellectual lineage of psychologists who studied with her and went on to head some of the most active psychology of music labs in the world.Dr. Trainor, one of Dr. Trehub’s early graduate students, remembered going to talks on the psychology of music in the 1980s and ’90s with little more than 10 people in the audience. Now there are conferences with thousands of researchers.“Part of that is a testament to Sandra, and the quality of her work — she couldn’t be ignored,” said Dr. Trainor.Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who wrote more than 30 articles with Dr. Trehub, agreed. “She was like Joni Mitchell,” he said by phone. “In the end, she really got every credit that she deserved.” More

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      ‘The Romance of the Rose,’ Delayed by the Pandemic, Opens at Last

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      On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, a mezzo-soprano paced during an opera rehearsal before letting her sound loose. When she did, she appeared to shock herself — so much that she broke the fourth wall.“Whoa, whoa, that wasn’t my voice,” that vocalist, Tivoli Treloar, declared to her colleagues, and to an imagined audience. “I mean, I can’t sing like that!”A male voice in the cast parried with a hint of old-world courtliness: “Yet ’twas well sung, my friend!”Welcome to Kate Soper’s “The Romance of the Rose.”In addition to breaking the fourth wall, Soper’s latest work of music theater, which premieres on Saturday at Long Beach Opera, also collapses centuries, bringing its source material — a medieval French poem of the same name — into colloquial and witty collision with our understanding of opera as perhaps our most artifice-strewn art form.In Soper’s script, the mezzo, who is surprised to find herself singing (and so well!), is merely required to respond to that old-world praise with a simple “thanks.” But during the rehearsal, observed by video call, Treloar sang the word as though it were a grand encore, teasing its vowel sound into generous helpings of ornamentation.From left, Bernardo Bermudez, Tivoli Treloar and Tiffany Townsend rehearsing the opera, which was originally scheduled to premiere in 2020 but was canceled because of the pandemic.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesWhen Treloar brought her “thanks” in for a long-delayed landing, others in the room laughed at her effective resolution of the comic-opera beat. Yet the director, James Darrah, wondered if she could stretch out the revelry even more on the next pass. A rehearsal pianist began the scene again, and Treloar indulged Darrah — this time earning an even bigger laugh.This playful moment of extended experimentation felt appropriate to both Soper’s work — her hyperverbal, zigzagging scores, filled with pools of tonal lushness as well as thickets of philosophical discourse — and the prolonged path to Saturday’s premiere.“Rose,” which has been highly anticipated for years, was mere weeks away from opening at Peak Performances, in New Jersey, when, in early 2020, the pandemic shut it down. It then languished until Darrah selected it for his first full season of programming as the artistic director of Long Beach Opera.In an interview, Soper described how “Rose” both extends and deviates from her earlier, celebrated pieces like “Here Be Sirens.” For one, those works, unlike this opera, didn’t have an intermission. “You do the whole thing in one fell swoop,” she said. “Whatever those Aristotelian time-place things are; it’s kind of a big gulp. For this one, the idea of a full two-act opera was interesting to me.”A rehearsal for “Rose,” in which, Soper said, “Who are these characters who think their normal language is operatic singing? What falls apart for them when they start to question that?”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesIn “Sirens,” Soper gave subjective voice to characters who were mere devices in Homer; in “Rose,” she again reinterprets vintage literary concepts, but with expanded ambition and scope. In the three years since its canceled premiere, Soper has worked to refine the libretto. The text, she said, was difficult to write, when creating a “really strange story that was inspired by this incredibly bizarre medieval text.”In the medieval poem, the male protagonist — the Lover — is a dreamer whose affections are aimed at the symbolic entity of a rose. When his advance toward the rose is blocked, he’s schooled on and nudged toward the right way to think about love by a wide range of allegorical characters, such as Reason, Idleness or the God of Love.Two different contributors, separated by decades, worked on the poem as it is known today. And now Soper is having her turn to augment the text. Here, a figure she calls the Dreamer initially puts the character of the Lover through the various allegorical paces. (In the original poem, the pursuer of the rose is himself a dreamer.) And in Soper’s version, there’s a mysterious yet evident rapport between the Dreamer and the Lover — even as the latter, the mezzo-soprano, is still discovering her voice within this dreamy opera world.“Part of it is about: What is music, what does it mean when you sing opera?” Soper said. “Who are these characters who think their normal language is operatic singing? What falls apart for them when they start to question that?”Christopher Rountree, left, the production’s conductor, with Soper at a rehearsal.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesAs a composer, Soper answers such destabilizing questions with a wealth of sonic reference points. She’s firmly in the contemporary classical mold, which means comfort with experimentation and extended techniques — as well as the electronic processing of acoustic sounds. But as the piece progresses, she feasts on polystylism and hummable melody.The production’s conductor, Christopher Rountree, said that, during a recent rehearsal, he had the experience of feeling “like we were solidly inside of Philip Glass.” Then, “within a second, we were in Gilbert and Sullivan,” he added. “And then, a second later, we were in a very heartfelt new-music ballad, but with a character who had not sung in that new-music straight tone yet.”“It’s amazing to see all the things that are being asked of the singers by Kate,” Rountree said. “And it’s cool that we have folks who are willing to go there.”The casting intentionally brings together vocalists from different backgrounds. The dramatic soprano Tiffany Townsend, who plays Idleness, is in the young artist program at Los Angeles Opera, where she has specialized in the standard repertoire. But, she said, she enjoys the way Soper braids different traditions together. Referring to the “Torch Song,” which is sung by Pleasure and Idleness, she said, “The harmony speaks to medieval music; but the way it’s set gives a jazz feel.”The vocalist Lucas Steele, who starred in the musical “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” on Broadway, is making his opera debut in the role of the Dreamer. He said that in Soper’s writing, he sees “a height to the language that reminds me a little bit of Shakespeare” — but also a Brechtian sense of “talking to the audience, shifting in and out of the narrative.” (The rehearsal videos that Long Beach Opera has posted online give a sense of what Steele describes: Soper’s fluid approach to allegory and audience acknowledgment.)“Because Kate is so great at when she decides to insert accessible melody into a piece,” Steele said, “I think it’s going to give the audience something to grab onto, in the moments where it may start to become a little more on the experimental side of things.”Darrah said that “at an intellectual level, I look at it and I go, Oh, she’s very aware of opera as this centuries-old art form. There’s a way that she’s referencing clichés and mocking them at times, but also using the structure.”He paused for a beat, then added, “No one’s writing music like this.”Soper hopes to record the score soon. But for now, she’s enjoying the fruition of a yearslong effort that has pushed her into new creative directions. During her training as a composer — first at Rice University, in Texas, then at Columbia, in New York — she viewed opera singers as “a different species of beautiful people, swanning around wearing scarves. And I was with the composers trying to get people to play our music. I have this distant sense from it.”“I think opera for me,” Soper said, “is a premise and an element of the story rather than an actual medium that I’m writing in.”But with “Rose,” she said, she’s finding a way to edge closer to opera’s mainstream, even as she keeps questioning it on a fundamental level.“Playing around with quote-unquote real opera singers, and lower voices, and coloratura — if something about this is more of a real opera,” she said, “at the same time I can still kind of investigate what it means to be a real opera.” More

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      Remaking Country’s Gender Politics, One Barroom Weeper at a Time

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Monday morning at the office: Shane McAnally was writing a country song with Josh Osborne, a regular collaborator. McAnally, compact and tight-strung in jeans and T-shirt, sat on a chair with his sneakered feet up and a laptop balanced on his thighs, an acoustic guitar and an enormous carryout cup of iced tea within reach. Osborne, mellower, in a purple hoodie, sat on a couch cradling another guitar, on which he picked out a loping groove in the key of A.They started with a line they heard spoken at a songwriters’ gathering, “I drank alone a long time,” when someone raised a glass in appreciation of getting together with fellow musicians after pandemic-induced isolation. McAnally recalls that he and Osborne exchanged a wordless look: That’s a song! Now they were writing it. When one of them had an idea, he would half-moan nonsense syllables as placeholders for the parts he hadn’t worked out yet: “Yeah that whiskey sure used to burn, now it’s sweet on your lips mmmmhmmmm anana turn …” The other would murmur along in harmony, a fraction of a beat behind, testing resonance and mouthfeel.The lines of the first verse had a cantilevered quality typical of McAnally’s songs, surprising the ear a little and adding a sense of urgency by going past the expected rhythmic endpoint and wrapping around into the next in a lilting run-on: “I don’t mind if they turn on the lights/And last call don’t faze me at all/My glass was half-empty before you were with me.” The developing song featured McAnally’s favorite chord change — “a 3 minor just breaks my heart,” he says — but his distinctive lyrical flow was the surest mark of his authorship. Plenty of popular songwriting sounds as if the words have been written to fit the groove, but McAnally’s songs sound as if the groove grows organically from the poetic rhythm inhering in the words. “I can almost instantly tell when I hear something Shane has written,” Kacey Musgraves told me by email, “even when it’s sung by another artist.” Once McAnally and Osborne got going, the song came in a rush. After they finished, they recorded a rough take to serve as a guide for a demo they could pitch to singers. McAnally would normally sing the rough take, but he had been having problems with his voice, so Osborne sang it. They talked about whether the song might be right for Blake Shelton. (“I Drank Alone” is currently on hold for Carly Pearce, meaning she has the right of first refusal to record it.) Afterward, McAnally told me that Sam Hunt, another regular collaborator, talks about “the window being open for a few minutes — it’s like God walks through the room and you better be holding a guitar when it happens.” Such inspiration makes frequent visits to this cozily appointed room in the Nashville headquarters of SMACKSongs, McAnally’s music publishing and management company. Framed posters of country artists who have recorded McAnally’s songs cover one wall. Another is tiered with “10 Songs I Wish I’d Written” awards from the Nashville Songwriters Association International, honoring songs like “Merry Go ’Round” (a hit for Musgraves), “John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16” (Keith Urban) and “Body Like a Back Road” (Sam Hunt — 34 straight weeks at No. 1, a record at the time). The windows look out on Music Row, the stretch of 16th Avenue South lined with the offices of record labels, radio networks, recording studios, public-relations firms and music-licensing and publishing outfits like ASCAP and BMI. It’s the Wall Street and Madison Avenue of country music, as well as a hub for gospel, pop, Christian music and other genres. Possibly it’s the place on earth with the greatest concentration of expertise for creating and distributing popular songs.McAnally, who has been wildly successful at reaching a lot of listeners and winning critical acclaim by making songs for other people to sing, would seem to be the quintessential Nashville insider. He has co-written or produced 39 songs that reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay or Hot Country Songs charts; Country Aircheck, which tracks radio airplay, puts his total at 43; and, depending on how you count Canadian, European and other charts, the number passes 50 — plus, of course, many more hits that topped out short of No. 1. He revived and is co-president of the historic label Monument Records, a joint venture with Sony. He has produced albums by Musgraves, Hunt, Pearce, Walker Hayes, Midland and Old Dominion, among others. He has won three Grammys, 19 N.S.A.I. “I Wish I’d Written” awards and an armful of honors from the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association. He has more C.M.A. song-of-the-year nominations than any other songwriter in history.But while McAnally may be a high-end craftsman operating deep within Nashville’s music-industrial complex, he also sees himself as an insurgent who has put himself in position to work subtle, far-reaching changes on an industry that has historically been hostile to what he represents. For most of the past 15 years, McAnally has been known as one of the very few out gay men in a position of creative influence in mainstream country music. Attentive listeners can discern in his body of work a gradual effort to rewrite the genre’s DNA to encourage mutation in its famously hidebound assumptions about sex and gender. It’s not that the industry doesn’t know about the full range of human sexual behavior; rather, part of its brand has been to act as if it doesn’t want to know about large sections of that range. Most country music fans may simply assume that the many romantic songs McAnally has written refer to loved ones of the opposite sex, especially when sung by singers they assume to be straight. But, as he likes to point out, those songs work just as well for same-sex attraction. The whiskey-sweet lips in “I Drank Alone” could belong to a man or a woman, and he would rather not force the listener to choose. When I asked him how conscious he was of trying to transform country’s gender politics, he said: “Oh, it’s conscious, but it’s also just who I am. I think part of it is being gay. I don’t like speaking in the masculine or the feminine. I feel like it corners things, compartmentalizes.” As far back as McAnally can remember, he has thought in songs. He hears fragments and nuggets of song in the speech and lives of family, friends, colleagues, strangers and characters in the Southern memoirs and biographies he likes to read. His mother’s turns of phrase, for instance, have helped inspire the choruses in hits like “Merry Go ’Round” (“Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay/Brother’s hooked on maryjane/And Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down”) and Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart” (“Go and fix your makeup, girl, it’s just a breakup/Run and hide your crazy and start actin’ like a lady”). When McAnally was a little boy in Mineral Wells, Texas, he would pace around the perimeter of the parking lot at his grandmother’s clothing store, making up lyrics in his head about people he knew, superimposing the words onto the melodies of songs he had heard at home, in church or during rides in his father’s Jeep, when the playlist skewed to the classic country of Merle Haggard and George Strait.That primal songwriting scene in the parking lot serves as a reminder that new songs come, at least in part, from old songs. Standard country music templates like the heartbreak tale or the evocation of small-town life stood ready to hand when someone said something that suggested the germ of a song. Think of a song as an ancient technology for imposing form and meaning on experience, a device for filtering the chaotic noise of inner life and the world around us so it can be translated into meaningful signal. Or think of a song as a container into which you can pour a distilled feeling that others can then imbibe by playing or singing or listening to it.The signature feeling in McAnally’s songs — even “I Drank Alone,” a story of love found — is a yearning, restless quality he described to me as “that sense of unrequited ‘almost’: it’s almost right, you’re almost there, but you can’t quite. …” Musgraves told me, “Shane and I always love finding the melancholy aspect inside of the greater feelings of happiness and love.” Or, as his friend and frequent songwriting collaborator Brandy Clark puts it, “He’s just a little bit addicted to heartbreak.” The unrequited almost running through McAnally’s songs makes an ideal fit with the cathartic blend of sadness and joy that comes factory-installed in country music, a hurt-obsessed genre rich in dark songs about love and jaunty songs about sorrow. McAnally cites a past toxic romance as a continuing inspiration, but when we talked about his own experience, he kept coming back to his father, “a certain ultimate concept of a Texas man.” He went on: “He and his two brothers, they played football, there were stories about how wild they were. He was a badass, and they were small-town kings.” McAnally’s parents, high school sweethearts, had a volatile relationship. “It lasted 12 years, and they got divorced and remarried in the middle of it — very George Jones,” a reference to the towering marital melodrama between Jones and Tammy Wynette, owners of two of the greatest heartache-drenched voices of all time. Classic country music themes like hard work, prison (he recalls that his father served a four-year term that ended the marriage for good) and abandonment also figure in McAnally’s family story; a gingerly respectful cordiality now prevails between son and father. “I wanted to be like him,” he told me. “That was the great out-of-reach thing I aspired to, and, being gay, thinking of it as being a sissy, that kept me in the closet for a long time.” In our conversations McAnally pointed to Dolly Parton’s “Here You Come Again” and the Eddy Arnold-Ray Charles ballad of hopeless longing “You Don’t Know Me” as touchstone songs for him. Both are nominally about romance, but the feelings they express extend well beyond. “Continuing to reach out for someone who’s just not quite available,” McAnally said. “That’s my dad.”McAnally wasn’t out yet when he sang and wrote his way from Mineral Wells to Nashville in the 1990s and took his shot at an onstage singing career. When stardom eluded him, he moved to Los Angeles for a few years, where he heard more than his share of last calls and wrote a lot of songs, some of which were picked up by well-known singers. In 2007, he returned to Nashville as a battle-tested songwriter, and he also came out as a gay man in an industry that had always insisted on the closet. Now, at 48, he’s two years sober and raising 10-year-old twins with his husband, Michael McAnally Baum, who is the president of SMACKSongs.If these days McAnally is no longer regarded as a lone exception, you might credit his prominent example — Nashville’s mayor presided at his nuptials with Baum in 2017 — for helping embolden other gay men and women associated with country to come out, a growing list that includes T.J. Osborne of the Brothers Osborne, Lily Rose, Orville Peck, Lil Nas X, Brandi Carlile and Brandy Clark. But McAnally says: “I don’t think we’ve actually come that far in terms of major commercial figures. Baby steps are huge, but they’re baby steps.” He notes that most of the names on the out list are identified with Americana, pop or behind-the-scenes songwriting.“I’m stuck in the habit of ‘what Nashville thinks,’” he says, by which he means that he measures progress in terms of onstage stars in the industry’s commercial mainstream. “T.J. is such an important part of the long-term story, because he’s trying to show his queerness and his allyship to any sort of queer person, but he’s half of a duo, and they’re not in competition with the Jason Aldeans and Luke Bryans of the world because they’re left of center. And Lily Rose seems totally authentic, and she’s getting close to a big hit, but she hasn’t had one yet. I do see that people are fighting for it, though, and that matters.”At times he has felt that he had something extra to prove. “When gay songwriters come up to me and they’re like, ‘You inspire me,’ I say, ‘You just have to be better and outwork them,’” McAnally says. “I was like, ‘I can out-bro you, I can out-country you,’ which comes from this fear of being stereotyped. Like, ‘Well, he’s gay, so he probably can’t write songs that Luke Bryan or George Strait would want to sing.’”Thinking constantly about what others want to sing and what the industry would allow them to sing has taken a toll on McAnally, a feelingful guy prone to intense self-examination. He believes that it’s at the root of his voice problems. After a lifetime of being able to sing whatever he felt like singing, in the last couple of years he has lost the ability to sing in full voice or even hold a note. He can knock around musical ideas in a songwriting session, but any attempt to stretch his voice, even to make himself heard in conversation in a loud room, can cause it to seize up.Shane McAnally sees himself as an insurgent in Nashville — one of the few out gay men with creative influence.Kristine Potter for The New York TimesThe diagnosis is muscular tension dysphonia, a vocal cousin of the yips, the twisties and other such sudden inexplicable crises that can render a seasoned athlete unable to perform. “What happened to Simone Biles is what made me decide to get help,” he told me. “They tell me there’s nothing wrong with my body that they can find, so it’s mental, spiritual, but it feels physical.” Dysphonia troubles many singers — his vocal therapist told him that she counted nine other artists with whom she had worked when she saw him on a C.M.A. awards telecast — and its onset can be mysterious, often causing profound doubts to set in. It’s hard not to feel that your body’s trying to tell you something by refusing to do what has always come naturally.As McAnally tells the story of his career, the music he made in his youth as a would-be Nashville star was less than authentic because he was closeted, then he came out and wrote more authentic songs for himself to sing that, it turned out, others wanted to sing. But hitting the jackpot as a songwriter ushered in another phase of unrequited almost. “My material voice has diminished as my metaphorical voice has diminished,” he says, tracing the roots of the affliction to the moment he realized he could win praise and riches by writing songs for others to sing. “You become a box-checker,” he says. “Especially if you’ve had a lot of hits, you can’t help but imitate what’s worked before. If you’re always saying, ‘Would Luke Bryan say this?’ you have compromised yourself.” Yes, his success has taken him deep into the machinery of Nashville’s establishment, but the words he uses to describe his situation there — boxed-in, claustrophobic, smothered — are the same ones he uses to describe the panic that comes over him when he feels that his voice is going to fail and make him look foolish.McAnally has been spending more time away from Nashville of late — in New York, traveling in Africa with his family, pricing houses with his husband in California — and that seems to revive his voice. These days he finds that sometimes, under certain conditions, he can sing. “There will be an hour when my voice feels all right,” he told me, “and I can do it where it’s quiet, nobody in the studio but me and the engineer, the right reverb and vocal sound in my headphone, and I feel very safe and very much in control of my singing.” He has been using such moments to record songs for a self-funded solo album he plans to put out this year. They’re quiet, introspective songs written from his own hard-won, middle-aged perspective, a point of view of little interest to country-music stars. “ ‘Too young for the old, too old for the young,’” he said, quoting from a song on the album. “They don’t want to say that.”Saying that, singing that, speaking as himself, may be a remedy. He expresses confidence that his voice will recover. “I’m closer to it every day,” he said. “My physical voice has some spiritual link to finding my own voice. And I know that when I finally get to say it the way I want to say it, my voice will be there.”If Nashville is the problem as well as the promised land, where does McAnally go from there? Warner Bros. is currently developing a TV series he created that is based on his life, and maybe there’s a book or two in his future. But right now there’s his current big non-Nashville — or get-out-of-Nashville — songwriting project, the one that has been taking him to New York: “Shucked,” a musical he co-wrote with Brandy Clark that will open on Broadway on April 4 (previews begin March 8). “The musical is this great source of inspiration,” he said, “because it’s something else entirely different.” Writing show tunes allows him to use a greater variety of chords and different emotional colors than he does in country songs, he told me, and also requires him to do some things he isn’t used to doing, like writing songs that tell only part of a story.“Shucked” is a fable about Maizy, a girl from a rustic hamlet cut off from the world by fields of corn, and a crisis that obliges her to journey to the big city to save her fellow provincials. The songs mostly have a traditional Broadway feel, including one in which Maizy glories in the cosmopolitan wonders of Tampa, though a couple of rousing numbers for supporting characters display the expertise of veteran country hitmakers. The book — by Robert Horn, who wrote the Broadway musicals “Tootsie” and “13” — is full of broad, frequently ribald yuks that try to tiptoe between lovingly evoking small-town sensibilities and exploiting crude stereotypes.That’s where “Shucked” displays its origins in “Hee Haw,” the TV variety show that ran for 23 seasons fueled by a blend of cornpone humor and high-test country music. More than a decade ago, the keepers of the “Hee Haw” franchise approached McAnally about adapting the show for the stage, a connection that has mostly disappeared into the musical’s developmental back story, but it persists in the way “Shucked” goofs on country ways, a deceptively delicate layering of irony and shtick. McAnally says that he was also inspired by “The Book of Mormon” to write songs with the simple objective of having fun, rather than the endless descent into heartbreak that he pursues at his day job.At that day job, meanwhile, McAnally is still writing and producing songs for other singers. “I have more songs in the pipeline than ever, and six songs I wrote or produced in the Top 50,” he told me in early February. “I work more efficiently when I’m away from Nashville.” His ongoing revision of country’s gender politics also continues to advance, one heartbroken or party-hearty line at a time. Sometimes it’s McAnally who writes the line that says something that hasn’t been said before on country radio, and sometimes he’s the collaborator giving someone else permission to write or sing such a line. Progress might show up as a little surprise that tests taboo with a light touch, like the singalong chorus of Musgraves’s “Follow Your Arrow”: “So make lots of noise/Kiss lots of boys/Or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into/And if the straight and narrow gets a little too straight/Roll up a joint, or don’t/And follow your arrow wherever it points.”Country radio, which still exercises outsize influence on what becomes a hit, wouldn’t play the song. And yet, “Follow Your Arrow” is one of the lowest-charting songs ever to win C.M.A.’s song of the year, which McAnally takes as a sign that the industry recognized the change it made in what mainstream country music could say. McAnally is known for songs, like “Follow Your Arrow” or Ashley McBryde’s hard-bitten “One Night Standards,” that open up new dimensions of agency for female narrators and for songs that open up new dimensions of vulnerability for male ones. Kenny Chesney told me by email that he was eager to record the angsty “Somewhere With You,” which became a No. 1 hit for him, because it was “unlike anything out there, anything I’d heard in terms of the intensity of the emotion or the way the song moved.”When popular genres change, they do so almost imperceptibly at first, then all at once. Like writing a haiku about cherry blossoms or a Western about a laconic hero with good aim, writing a barroom weeper or a cheatin’ song means walking the line between doing it right and making it new. A commercially successful country song must nail obligatory elements of the form so that music-industry insiders and fans hear it as something they’re already inclined to like, but it also must rearrange familiar elements to refresh the formula. If enough bits of genetic information are rewritten in that process, though any individual change may be tiny, after a while you might suddenly notice that the songs on country radio are about inviting your gender-unspecified object of affection to climb into your hybrid pickup so you can drive down a dirt road to the unfracked watering hole, where bathers of all identities and preferences are welcome.Carlo Rotella is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of “The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood.” Kristine Potter is an artist and an educator. She was a 2018 Guggenheim fellow in photography. She is an assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University. Her monograph “Dark Waters” will be published by Aperture this spring. More

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      A Ukrainian Orchestra on a Mission to Promote Its Country’s Culture

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      Members of the touring Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine have watched the devastation of war from a distance.The Ukrainian violinist Solomia Onyskiv arrived in the United States last month on a mission.With the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country approaching, she worried that the world was quickly forgetting the suffering there. She had come with 65 other musicians from the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine to lead a 40-concert tour aimed at promoting Ukrainian culture.“We are almost in a state of panic now,” Onyskiv said. “We worry deeply about the future of our country because this war won’t stop. Russia won’t stop. And if we don’t stand up, if the world doesn’t stand up, there will be more suffering.”On Wednesday, Onyskiv and her colleagues will get one of their most visible platforms yet: the stage of Carnegie Hall, where they will perform a program that includes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, as well as the Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych’s Chamber Symphony No. 3.The concert is a milestone, but also a bittersweet moment for many of the musicians: They have spent much of the past year on tour, away from family and friends, watching the destruction of war from afar. Some have struggled to keep their focus as they embark on their cultural mission, checking constantly for news of Russian attacks and reading stories about Ukrainians who have been killed.Michailo Sosnovsky, the orchestra’s principal flute, who is featured in the Stankovych piece, said he worried about the safety of his wife and five children, who live in Lviv, and the safety of friends, including some musicians, who serve in the military. He speaks with his family by video every day, but gets anxious if they do not respond quickly to his messages.“I think about my family every minute of every day,” said Sosnovsky, who has played in the orchestra for two decades. “It’s a very difficult situation. But we must stay and do our part to help our country from here.”Members of the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine performing at the Lviv National Philharmonic hall last year. Adri Salido/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesThe Lviv orchestra, established in 1902, is among many Ukrainian cultural groups that have gone abroad since the invasion in efforts to highlight the country’s cultural identity. The Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, an ensemble of refugees who fled the war and musicians who stayed behind, toured Europe and the United States last summer. The United Ukrainian Ballet, made up of refugee dancers, has toured widely and made its U.S. debut this month; and the Shchedryk Children’s Choir, which is based in Kyiv, was featured at Carnegie in December.Over the past year, the Lviv musicians have toured in Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Austria and other countries. Their visit to the United States began last month in Vero Beach, Fla., and will conclude next month at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Earlier this month, the orchestra performed four concerts at Radio City Music Hall, playing music from “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” After the Carnegie concert, the tour will continue in New Jersey, as well as at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts in the Bronx.The tour was mostly planned before the war, but the continuing devastation has added poignancy and meaning. In some cities, the musicians have been greeted with prolonged applause and shouts of “Glory to Ukraine!”Theodore Kuchar, the ensemble’s principal conductor, said the orchestra had been encouraged by moments like that. He recalled a recent performance in Miami in which many audience members were wearing Ukrainian flags and shouting “Bravo!” before the orchestra had started playing.“The orchestra hadn’t even tuned,” he said, “and you would have thought that you were you were there five seconds before the end of the Super Bowl with the score tied.”Kuchar, who is Ukrainian American, said that while the tour had been eagerly anticipated, many musicians felt guilty for being away from the country during such a difficult time.“I’ve not met a single person who privately doesn’t say to me, ‘Maestro, we’re so fortunate to be here, but our hearts are back there,’” he said.Kuchar said the emotional toll of the war was present as the musicians work to build support for Ukraine’s cause.“There’s nobody in this orchestra that does not know somebody who has either lost a finger, an arm, a leg or their life,” he said. “Everybody has been affected.”The Carnegie performance was added last spring. The hall’s leaders heard about the tour and thought that hosting the orchestra would help show solidarity with Ukraine. The actor Liev Schreiber, who has Ukrainian roots and has been involved in efforts to raise money for Ukraine over the past year, hosts the program.“We hope the performance will be a powerful opportunity to showcase the musicians’ artistry, their personal resilience and to remind everyone of the cultural richness that is an integral part of Ukraine,” said Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director.The violinist Vladyslava Luchenko, a soloist on the tour, said audience members’ enthusiasm had given the musicians hope. She described music as the “best way to reach people’s souls and hearts.”“We have to use music to fight for good, for freedom, for human values,” she said. “We have to think about what we can bring, and not what we have lost.”Luchenko, who is from Kyiv but lives in Switzerland, recalled losing friends in Ukraine to Russian missile attacks. She said that performing during the war was a “double emotional load.”“You open your heart and feel all the pain so much more,” she said. “It has been a challenging but beautiful journey.” More