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      For the Conductor Charles Munch, Virtuosity Meant Taking Risks

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      When Charles Munch started work as the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the fall of 1949, he gave a speech.There wasn’t much he could say, in truth. His English was poor, though he had just sacrificed an umlaut in his surname in deference to American spelling. An Alsatian sometimes known in Germany as Karl, and in France always as Charles, he had served the Kaiser on the Somme in the First World War, then defended French culture in resistance to the Nazis in the Second. If he bothered to hold a rehearsal at all, he spoke to his musicians in a variety of languages, or let his gestures, flamboyant yet intentional, do the talking.Munch wanted to make one thing clear to the Bostonians, though: He was not their former music director, Serge Koussevitzky. The orchestra’s players had toiled under him, an autocrat whose shadow lingered over Munch, too. Even after Munch died in 1968 — while touring the United States with the Orchestre de Paris, which he had formed a year before — his New York Times obituary labored over the comparison with his predecessor, describing his task as having been “on a par with trying to follow Thomas Alva Edison as an inventor or Magellan as a navigator.”Yet Munch had no interest in being Koussevitzky’s kind of maestro; once a Stradivarius-wielding concertmaster himself, he saw no artistic or human point in making a musician miserable. As Time reported in a cover story in December 1949, he spent his first weeks in Boston telling his players that they could rest easier. In his introductory remarks, he told them that “there will be joy.”Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3, finaleBoston Symphony Orchestra, 1959 (Sony)For him, “beauty, joy and goodness” were the calling of an artist. As such, music, as he said in 1954, could offer “reconciliation with life itself.” Munch was shy and private when his baton was not slicing through sound; his biographer, D. Kern Holoman, has argued that conducting gave him relief from sadness of all sorts, whether the grief of enduring two wars between the cultures that claimed him, or the anguish of an unhappy marriage. (Holoman taught at the University of California, Davis, until 2017, when he left over rape allegations.)Conducting may have given Munch relief, but perhaps not deliverance. His interpretations could be as extreme as his times, at one moment outlandishly swift or brutally violent, contemplative or uncommonly tender the next, giddy fun at the last. The critic Virgil Thomson wrote of his approach to Franck’s Symphony that “he plays it very slow and very fast, very soft and very loud, reins it in and whips it up, gives it (and us) a huge workout.” That description fits more broadly; Munch was the rare conductor who welcomed imprecisions, even coarseness of tone, in his pursuit of outright spontaneity. An objectivist he was not.All this and more is clear from Munch’s enthralling discography. His Boston recordings for the RCA label were collated in an 86-disc Sony set in 2016; it has sold out, but most of the contents are still on streaming platforms. Warner and Eloquence have since separately boxed their catalogs of his pre- and post-Boston releases, giving a sense of Munch from his first sessions, with the pianist Alfred Cortot in Saint-Saëns in 1935, to his last, with the Orchestre de Paris in Ravel in 1968.Schubert: Symphony No. 9, finaleBoston Symphony Orchestra, 1958 (Sony)Munch was a different musician under studio conditions than he was live, Holoman writes, and he controlled his most explosive tendencies in the hope of making records that would last. Even his two incendiary Boston readings of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” his trademark piece, come nowhere close to the maelstrom he inflamed onstage. He dared one of the world’s most proficient orchestras to play beyond itself in concert; some of his finest releases — his Schubert Ninth, his Mendelssohn Third — are, conversely, those in which he builds tension by refusing to let go as blatantly as he might in front of an audience.Even so, sample Munch’s recordings — more than the Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel in which he was justly celebrated — and it is hard to disagree with the verdict of the Times critic Howard Taubman, who wrote of a 1950 concert: “Whether the music is illuminated or driven, it is never just respectable or indifferent. It is alive; it is the natural outgrowth of the conductor’s point of view.”MUNCH WAS BORN in Strasbourg, which was then in Germany, on Sept. 26, 1891, into a dynasty of musicians. His father, Ernest, mounted a Bach revival leading the church choir of Saint-Guillaume; his brother, Fritz, was a conductor and conservatory director; his uncle Eugène was an organist who taught Albert Schweitzer, whose friendship and spirituality influenced Charles throughout his life.Charles learned all kinds of instruments, like a little Bach might, but settled on the violin and was playing under his father’s baton by his early teens. He went to Paris in 1912 to study with Lucien Capet, a famed quartet violinist, but returned home to his family days before Germany invaded Belgium. Conscripted into the German army with two brothers, he was injured as an artilleryman at Verdun; he subsequently embraced pacifism and took succor in music.The common critique of Munch as a mature conductor was that his volatility ill fit works in the Haydn-to-Brahms tradition, but he had a strong training in the Romantic school of German conducting. After playing as the concertmaster of the Strasbourg orchestra from 1919 to 1924, he spent a year under Hermann Abendroth in Cologne, then held the same post at the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig for six seasons, working for Wilhelm Furtwängler and Bruno Walter. His return to Paris in 1932 to start his podium career — with Brahms’s First — was made possible by the wealth of the Nestlé heiress Geneviève Maury, his new wife.At first, Munch was renowned for supporting new music, and during World War II, he made his allegiances clear by protecting and promoting French composers. At the helm of the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, France’s leading ensemble, Munch told his players in September 1940 that it was through art that they could “continue the fight.” One of his most intimate friends, the pianist Nicole Henriot, would have her hand crushed by the Gestapo; Munch joined the Resistance, helped those he could, and tried to avoid compromising situations.Munch leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Leonard Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony at Symphony Hall in 1964.BSO ArchivesResearch on the culture of wartime France by Jane F. Fulcher, Leslie A. Sprout and other scholars has suggested that while the Nazis visited horrors on Jewish artists, neither the occupiers nor their Vichy collaborators — nor their Resistance opponents — sought to curtail concert life. Most musicians in the Resistance carried on as if the occupation did not exist; French music, except that by Jews, was not banned. Careful still to tend to proud Parisian traditions in the Germanic classics, Munch spent much of the war showcasing contemporary scores, such as politically ambiguous new works like Honegger’s Second Symphony and pieces that had been written in Nazi camps, including Jean Martinon’s “Stalag IX.”Munch and the Société became so busy, they reached a strikingly high standard. Their wartime recordings, now in the Warner box, are remarkable for their calm, even in “La Mer” or “La Valse.” After their liberation, they let loose for Decca; the Eloquence set superbly reproduces the orchestra’s distinctive postwar timbre, as well as Munch’s intensity of expression. There is crisp Beethoven, heartbreaking Tchaikovsky, delicate yet eager Ravel. An account of Berlioz’s “Le Corsaire,” from May 1948, is so exhilarating, it is little surprise that the authorities were reluctant to let Munch leave.Berlioz: “Le Corsaire”Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1948 (Eloquence)BUT LEAVE MUNCH DID. On an initial visit to the United States that started near the end of 1946, he enjoyed the New York Philharmonic yet found the Boston Symphony to be “the culmination of all orchestras,” as he told The Boston Globe. He led that ensemble in only seven concerts before he signed a contract to become its permanent conductor, in March 1948. Despite a brutal schedule that included the first tour by an American orchestra in the Soviet Union, in 1956, he stayed through 1962.While George Szell was giving the Cleveland Orchestra a focused power, and Eugene Ormandy sought glitter and gold in Philadelphia, Munch brightened Boston’s formerly dark hues, bringing its strident brass and cutting winds to the fore — most prominently the quivering principal flute of Doriot Anthony Dwyer, who became the only woman in the orchestra after Munch hired her in 1952.Debussy: “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune”Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1956 (Sony)Critics heard the transparent, though dry, results as typically French, but the ensemble’s fervor — its blare, some said — under Munch was his own, removed from the grace that his mentor, Pierre Monteux, drew from the same players. If Thomson had warned the Symphony in 1944 that “its form is perfect, but it does not communicate,” after a decade of Munch, the reverse might have been more true.The cliché about Munch’s Boston Symphony was that it was all but a Parisian ensemble in exile. “When I was living in New York in the ’50s,” Michael Steinberg of The Globe wrote in 1964, “I used to imagine Symphony Hall as the scene of a more or less perpetual performance of the Berlioz ‘Symphonie Fantastique,’ relieved now and again by ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ and ‘La Mer.’” That slur notwithstanding, Munch’s advocacy was unwavering and proud: His Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel were references for a generation.Although the beauties of Munch’s Boston-era recordings of French music are great, some of them stray intriguingly from the norm. He rarely treated Debussy or Ravel as scores only to paint with prettily: For all their gorgeous interplay of voices, there is often a bite to them, as if Munch were deliberately placing them in a lineage that ran back to Berlioz and forward to Roussel and Honegger, and later Dutilleux. Once or twice, his own loneliness breaks through; he draws out “Le Jardin Féerique,” at the end of “Ma Mère l’Oye,” until it is tear-inducingly poignant.Still, Munch’s tastes were broad, and he could be as fascinating beyond the French repertory. As a matter of principle and proclivity, he kept up Koussevitzky’s loyalty to new music, ardently recording Piston, Martinu and other works that he premiered. He largely avoided Germany after the war, but the most performed composers in his first decade in Boston were Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms. Little of his hard-driven Mozart and already-outdated Bach survive, but his Brahms was strong, and his Beethoven full of ideas.Beethoven: “Coriolan” OvertureBoston Symphony Orchestra, 1956 (Sony)Some of those ideas work, and some do not, but that’s the reminder that Munch offers today: Virtuosity is empty without the thrill of interpretive risk. “He was without peer in the things he did best and, even in the things he did worst, never less than interesting,” the critic Martin Bernheimer wrote after his death. “There are few like him left.” More

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      California’s Leading Conductors Come Together for a New Festival

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      Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Rafael Payare will assemble their orchestras and more for the California Festival: A Celebration of New Music.LOS ANGELES — Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Rafael Payare are the three most influential orchestra leaders in California, but the first time they met as a group was last week.The setting was a Right Bank hotel overlooking the Seine in Paris, and the subject was California: in particular a new, two-week music festival, announced by the three conductors’ orchestras on Tuesday, that will be staged in dozens of venues across the state in November.“I still can’t believe it worked,” said Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Paris Opera, of he and his fellow conductors getting together. They had just recorded a promotional video for the festival’s website. “Not only were we all in the same city, but we all happened also to be free for an hour.”The November event — called the California Festival: A Celebration of New Music — is a collaborative project organized by three maestros, Dudamel from Los Angeles, Salonen from the San Francisco Symphony and Payare from the San Diego Symphony. Cumulatively, they have spent about 35 years on California podiums.Salonen, who was the Los Angeles orchestra’s music director from 1992 until 2009 and remains a draw when he guest conducts here, said that the festival would pay tribute to the enthusiasm of California audiences for new music by little-known composers, the kind of works that he, Dudamel and Payare have each promoted from their podiums.“It’s been something I had been thinking about for a long time, from when I knew I would be taking over in San Francisco,” Salonen said in an interview from Paris, where he was conducting the Orchestre de Paris in a performance of his new Sinfonia Concertante for Organ and Orchestra. “Instead of seeing each other as rivals, we should do something together.”The festival, which is planned for Nov. 3 through Nov. 19, will feature, in addition to the three conductors’ ensembles, over 50 orchestras, chamber music groups, choirs and jazz ensembles. They will perform in grand spaces like the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, as well as smaller and more intimate ones tucked in communities across the state. The bulk of the repertory, which is still being organized, will be from the past five years, and from the worlds of jazz and classical music.“The whole idea is that there will be new music, commissioned in the last five years, and with different composers from everywhere,” said Payare, who had taken a train from London to Paris to meet Dudamel and Salonen, where he was conducting “The Barber of Seville” at the Royal Opera House. “There’s a lot of music that has not been explored, that have never been performed. It tells us a lot about this period of California. It’s very welcoming and lets you be who you are and do things that are not traditional.”Most of the performances will be indoor. “As the festival happens in November, we’ll have all of our performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall,” said Dudamel, who also leads the Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. But in San Diego, which is temperate almost year-round, Payare said, some of the shows that he will conduct will be at the orchestra’s new outdoor Rady Shell.Salonen said that while these conductors were overseeing the festival, they were also letting the individual groups chose what they want to present to audiences. “This is not curated in any kind of centralized way,” he said. “It’s more like taking the temperature of what’s going on at the moment. These can be their own commissions, or some other pieces. New pieces that they feel compelled to present.”This kind of collaboration, Dudamel said, might be novel here, but he was used to it in South America, where he grew up.“In Venezuela we work like this all of the time, sharing and creating together, and this coming together feels like a meeting of old, like-minded friends to be honest,” he said. “It’s something that feels quite natural.” More

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      Tanglewood’s Summer Season Blends Familiar and New

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      The Boston Symphony Orchestra, grappling with leadership turnover, hopes to attract audiences with a program of classics and contemporary fare.Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, drew sold-out crowds last year, a milestone in its recovery from the pandemic.This summer, the orchestra hopes to build on that success with a program that blends familiar works with more contemporary offerings, the ensemble announced on Wednesday.The lineup includes works by 28 living composers, including the world premiere, in July, of a piece by Iman Habibi, led by the orchestra’s music director, Andris Nelsons. There are also more traditional works, including a concert performance of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” also led by Nelsons in July, and appearances by festival regulars including the pianist Emanuel Ax and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.“This year’s programs both inspire a sense of discovery and celebrate returning guest artists whose appearances move us so deeply year after year,” Nelsons said in a statement.The new season, which starts in late June and runs through late August, comes as the Boston Symphony grapples with leadership turnover. In December, Gail Samuel, the ensemble’s first female president and chief executive, said she would resign her post, just 18 months into her tenure. Soon after, another senior leader, Asadour Santourian, a vice president of the orchestra who oversaw Tanglewood and the orchestra’s education efforts, abruptly resigned.The Boston Symphony has declined to comment in depth on the departures. Samuel has been replaced on an interim basis by Jeffrey D. Dunn, a member of the orchestra’s advisory board. Ed Gazouleas, a former violist in the orchestra and a longtime faculty member at the Tanglewood Music Center, is overseeing the summer season as the orchestra searches for a permanent replacement for Santourian.After canceling its season in 2020 because of the pandemic and hosting a shortened season in 2021, Tanglewood returned almost to full force last year. The festival drew around 290,000 patrons, compared with 312,000 in 2019, though there were fewer events in 2021.This summer, a variety of contemporary works will be featured. “Makeshift Castle” by Julia Adolphe, which premiered at Tanglewood last year, will be performed again in August, paired with Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1, featuring Ma as soloist.Later that month, the orchestra will perform “Four Black American Dances” by Carlos Simon, alongside Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No. 5 and Gershwin’s Concerto in F, both featuring the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet.Keith Lockhart will lead five programs by the Boston Pops, including a new symphonic version of the musical “Ragtime.” More

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      Beyoncé Announces Renaissance World Tour

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      The star’s first solo tour since 2016 will start May 10 in Stockholm.For the first time since 2016 — a world before Beychella, Covid-19 and “Renaissance” — Beyoncé will headline a solo tour, the singer announced in a social media post on Wednesday.Beginning on May 10 in Stockholm, and continuing in Europe through June before coming to North America, the Renaissance World Tour, in support of her seventh solo album, will run for at least 40 dates, largely in stadiums, according to dates posted to Beyoncé’s website. The tour includes one night at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey (July 29) and one at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. (Sept. 2) amid stops in Chicago, Philadelphia, Toronto, Atlanta, Phoenix and Miami.Limited tickets for certain tour dates will go on sale beginning Monday for members of Beyoncé’s BeyHive fan club, followed by the staggered release of additional tickets by market, using a complex registration system for various tiers of buyer.The tour, produced by Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment and promoted by Live Nation, will use Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan system, which aims to limit bots and professional scalpers, marking one of the first major tests for Ticketmaster since extraordinary demand for early tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour last year led to fan backlash and regulatory scrutiny. At a Senate Judiciary hearing last month spurred by the botched presale, artists, fans and politicians cast Live Nation Entertainment, the concert industry giant that owns Ticketmaster, as a monopoly that hinders competition and harms consumers.Beyoncé’s shows will be the singer’s first live events available to the public since the On the Run II tour with her husband, Jay-Z, in 2018, tied to the surprise release of a joint album, “Everything Is Love,” by the duo billed as the Carters. Beyoncé last toured alone behind her previous solo album, “Lemonade,” in 2016. Two years later, she headlined the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.That show — which went on to be released as “Homecoming” (2019), a live album and concert film — was called “rich with history, potently political and visually grand” in a review by the New York Times critic Jon Caramanica. “By turns uproarious, rowdy, and lush. A gobsmacking marvel of choreography and musical direction.”In the years since, Beyoncé has surfaced intermittently, including with songs like “Black Parade,” which won a Grammy Award for best R&B performance, and “Be Alive,” which appeared in the movie “King Richard” and was nominated for an Oscar. Last year, in a taped performance, Beyoncé performed the song at the 94th annual Academy Awards.But the singer made a return to the pop mainstream in earnest with the July 2022 release of “Renaissance,” a dance-floor-oriented album that she said was inspired by the L.G.B.T.Q. community and has spawned hits like “Break My Soul” and “Cuff It.” At the Grammy Awards on Sunday, Beyoncé is nominated nine times, with a chance to become the most-awarded artist in history.Upon its release, the singer called “Renaissance” part of a “three act project” that she recorded during the pandemic. “My intention was to create a safe place, a place without judgment,” she wrote of the album, which was billed as Act I. “A place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking. A place to scream, release, feel freedom.”Major music touring has largely recovered, especially at its highest levels, since the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the industry trade publication Pollstar, touring grossed a record-setting $6.28 billion last year, up more than 13 percent from 2019, due in part to pent-up fan demand, inflation and major acts like Bad Bunny, Elton John and Harry Styles.In addition to Beyoncé’s shows, this year will see blockbuster tours from artists including Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Metallica, Morgan Wallen and Madonna.Last month, Beyoncé proved more polarizing than usual when she headlined the grand opening of a luxury hotel in Dubai, performing for an invite-only collection of guests, including influencers and journalists.While some fans decried the optics of taking a major payday in a place that criminalizes homosexuality — “Beyoncé’s Dubai performance isn’t just an affront to LGBTQ+ fans, but workers’ rights in the UAE,” The Guardian declared — others noted that the singer’s set list did not yet include songs from “Renaissance.” More

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      Review: Leif Ove Andsnes Adds to Carnegie Hall History

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      The pianist Leif Ove Andsnes brought Dvorak’s sprawling 1889 rarity to New York with committed playing and interpretive wisdom.“Probably few pianists will have sufficient courage to play them all in succession,” Antonin Dvorak predicted about the 13 sections of his sprawling, nearly hourlong “Poetic Tone Pictures.” But, he added, “only in this way can the listener obtain a proper notion of what I intended, for this time I am not just an absolute composer but also a poet.”He was correct; since it was written in 1889, “Poetic Tone Pictures” has been taken up by so few pianists, it didn’t arrive at Carnegie Hall until Tuesday evening, as the dreamily kaleidoscopic second half of a recital by Leif Ove Andsnes.It has been a week of firsts at Carnegie. On Saturday, Yuja Wang accomplished the sensationally unheard-of — at the hall, if not in the world — by muscling through Rachmaninoff’s four piano concertos and his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” in a marathon with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Tuesday’s recital was another impressive milestone, but, in Andsnes fashion, a more modest one.His performance of the Dvorak — measured in appearance but interpretively varied, played with thorough commitment and characteristic wisdom — had the qualities of a standard-setting account. Even if “Poetic Tone Pictures” doesn’t return to Carnegie any time soon, Andsnes made a compelling argument for why it should: how, despite its unpianistic moments and longueurs, it is, in its entirety, a touching display of awe at life itself, told with a folk tune or a naïve melody, a solemn march or a sentimental dance.The work’s expansiveness was a contrast to the recital’s first half, which was thematically focused, with a trajectory from reticence to unambiguous passion in a clear but gentle gesture toward the war in Ukraine. Andsnes fashioned something like a suite from four pieces played straight through, beginning with Alexander Vustin’s “Lamento,” from 1974, and drawing from over 200 years of classical music history.Vustin, a Russian composer who is thought to have died of complications from Covid-19 early in the pandemic, straddled tonality and the avant-garde fashions of post-World War II music. In “Lamento,” for example, Andsnes’s left hand faintly beat chords of shifting harmonies, while his right one, more angular and unpredictable, entered with a trill before letting out atonal flourishes and chirping interjections — but never for long, like fervent ideas held back from full expression.By the end, all that remains are the chords, at a whisper, which on Tuesday led naturally into the quiet, pained opening of Janacek’s sonata “1.X.1905, ‘From the Street,’” written in memory of a 20-year-old Czech worker who was killed — pointlessly, Janacek believed — by a German soldier during a political demonstration. Here, it was as if the sentiment of “Lamento” had surfaced in mournful lyricism and waves of rage.Janacek destroyed the sonata’s third movement, tearing it out of the score and throwing it into a stove the day it premiered in 1906, but Andsnes programmed a fitting coda in a 2005 bagatelle by Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s pre-eminent composer. Like many Silvestrov pieces, this one was a touch too pretty, even in Andsnes’s unforced reading, but after the Janacek, its insistent serenity came off as a plea for beauty, if not for peace.That could have sufficed for the recital’s first half. If there was a misstep on Tuesday, it was in following the bagatelle with Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, which might have provided an impassioned climax had it not been performed with such a level head. Instead, it prolonged a point that had already been made.If anything, the slowly accumulating final chord of the bagatelle could have set up the softly arpeggiated one at the start of “Twilight Way,” the first of the “Poetic Tone Pictures.” (Hardly representational, Dvorak’s character pieces would be better served by a more literal translation from their Czech title, “Poetic Moods.”) From there, Andsnes was a masterly shepherd of this score, never losing sight of its sometimes obscured line and maintaining control of its agonizingly tricky articulations to bring out the reverent dignity of “In the Old Castle”; the sweet, I-could-have-danced-all-night shadow of a melody in “Furiant”; and the shards of light cutting through a chorale in “On the Holy Mountain.”At Carnegie, you could understand, even appreciate, Dvorak’s pride in what he had created with these humble observations of Czech life. “It is an ominous number,” he wrote to a friend of the 13 movements, “but there were just as many Moravian duets and they, after all, managed to wander quite a way through the world! Perhaps they will do so again.” Over 130 years later, they have.Leif Ove AndsnesPerformed on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: Willie Nelson, Missy Elliott and Sheryl Crow Nominated

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      Cyndi Lauper, Joy Division, George Michael and the White Stripes are also among the first-time nominees up for induction this year.Willie Nelson, Missy Elliott, Sheryl Crow, the White Stripes and Cyndi Lauper are among the first-time nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, the organization behind the museum and annual ceremony announced on Wednesday.Artists become qualified for induction 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording; both Elliott, the trailblazing rapper, and the White Stripes, the defunct garage-rock duo, made the ballot in their first year of eligibility. (Because of changes in when the nominating committee meets, the Rock Hall said releases from 1997 and 1998 were eligible this year for the first time.)Nelson, who turns 90 in April, became eligible in 1987, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993. Last year, Dolly Parton at first protested her nomination, saying that she didn’t “feel that I have earned that right” as a country musician. (Voters disagreed, and she joined the Hall in November.) Crow, whose career began in the 1990s, has been eligible for several years, while Lauper, the singer behind hits like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” could have been nominated more than a decade ago.Among the 14 nominees this year, other first-time picks include: George Michael, the English singer-songwriter who died in 2016; Joy Division, the English rock band that became New Order in 1980 after the death of the group’s frontman, Ian Curtis; and Warren Zevon, the singer-songwriter whose work was beloved by performers like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and who died in 2003.More than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals will now vote on the nominees to choose the final class of inductees, which typically include between five and seven musicians or groups that have increasingly over recent years spanned a wider mix of genres: rap, country, folk, pop and more.Will 2023 be the year for musicians who have been nominated repeatedly, to no avail? The politically minded group Rage Against the Machine is on the ballot for the fifth time. Kate Bush, whose song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” was resurgent on the charts last year after an appearance in the TV show “Stranger Things,” has been nominated three times before, as have the Spinners, one of the leading soul groups of the 1970s.The hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, the heavy metal band Iron Maiden and Soundgarden, a rock band that was ascendant in the ’90s and lost its singer Chris Cornell in 2017, have all been nominated once before.While an unnamed nominating committee within the Hall of Fame is in charge of choosing the slate of possible inductees, power now flips to the voters, and fans are also asked to weigh in online. (A single “fan ballot” is submitted as a result of those votes.)The inductees will be announced in May, and the ceremony is slated to take place in the fall. More

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      Five Minutes That Will Make You Love 21st-Century Jazz

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      We’ve done a lot of listening back. So where is jazz today? Writers and musicians including Sonny Rollins, Melanie Charles and Terri Lyne Carrington share their favorites from this millennium.Over the past few months, The New York Times has asked jazz musicians, critics and scholars to answer the question, What would you play a friend to make them fall in love with Duke Ellington? Or Alice Coltrane? We’ve also covered bebop, vocal jazz and the catalogs of Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra.That’s a lot of listening back. So this month, we decided to explore what’s happening now. Where is jazz today? It’s a good time to be asking. Just a dozen years ago, the music seemed to be having a crisis of self-worth. Where was its center? Could anything guarantee its relevance?But over the past five or 10 years, you could say that jazz has gone through a kind of ego death, and then a rebirth: Today there’s no particular sound or style that young players all want to preserve, but jazz as a general practice — a commitment to taking on musical adventures together, live and in real time; to treating musical instruments as the writing utensils for a narrative — hasn’t been this alive in decades. As a result, all across the jazz spectrum, artists are in comfortable contact with hip-hop, contemporary poetry, the Black Lives Matter movement and visual art.Below, we asked writers and jazz musicians of various generations to recommend their favorite recordings from the new millennium. Enjoy reading their commentary and listening to the excerpts, and find a playlist at the bottom of the article with full tracks. As always, be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Terri Lyne Carrington, drummerDuring the swing era, jazz was a leader in the trends of pop culture and even perceived as dance music, but then there was a seismic shift toward sitting down and listening. I’m encouraged by the emergence of artists today who have pursued “groove” in their jazz without compromising creativity, reminding us that this can be music that makes you want to move. Kassa Overall is such an artist. I love his song “Who’s on the Playlist” because it invites the question, “Is this jazz or is this hip-hop?” Kassa is a pre-eminent style bender and blender, successfully juxtaposing genres through his production expertise and use of melodic and harmonic forms that deftly integrate the new with the old. This track is authentic and unpretentious, blending acoustic instruments with electronic sounds, catchy hooks with improvisation and diverse musical sections, and jazz chords with polyrhythmic raps that express personal stories in hip-hop vernacular. It powerfully exhibits the consistent innovation in the continuum of Black music and encourages us not to draw lines in the sand.“Who’s on the Playlist”Kassa Overall feat. Judi Jackson◆ ◆ ◆Sonny Rollins, saxophonistJ.D. Allen’s got a nice, full sound: It really fills up the room when he’s playing. When I was living in Chicago many, many years ago, there used to be a player called Alec Johnson. Alec had one of these strong sounds that would really captivate you: “Wow, listen to that — to the music, to the volume!” So when I hear J.D., he reminds me of Alec in that way. He’s got a nice, big, fat sound, and he’s got a lot of ideas. He doesn’t sound like he’s ever wanting to find something to play. So I really am struck by that, and I really liked him when I heard him perform live. There’s so much music out here today, I’m glad that he’s keeping the flame.“Sonhouse”J.D. Allen◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerI’ve long admired Luke Stewart’s artistic versatility: You can see him plucking the upright bass as a member of the free jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements, playing the electric as one-half of the psych-rock-leaning Blacks’ Myths, or engaging in traditional and free-form hybrids at the helm of his Silt Trio. While it’s tough to single out one Stewart song as my favorite, I always find myself coming back to “Awakening the Masters,” the propulsive opener of his 2020 “Exposure Quintet” album. The bass loop captivates, enticing the reedists Ken Vandermark and Edward Wilkerson Jr., the pianist Jim Baker and the drummer Avreeayl Ra to build upon it with ascendant saxophone wails, escalating cymbals and billowing piano chords suspended gently in the mix. Even as the harmony develops and mutates, Stewart saunters along, his bass keeping the song in a steady rhythmic pocket. I think that’s why I like it so much: It’s a microcosm of Stewart’s centered presence across the spectrum of experimental music. No matter the subgenre, he’s an immovable force guiding the music forward.“Awakening the Masters”Luke Stewart Exposure Quintet◆ ◆ ◆Theo Croker, trumpeterI was thinking about what would honestly bring people to this music, and it’s hearing something young. Because young people have always been the pioneers of this music. People become great masters as they age, but it’s something that they did when they were young that everybody caught onto and connected with. With Domi & JD Beck, they don’t sound jaded by jazz school; they sound like they’re doing their thing. They respect everything else that’s come before and they’re pushing forward with their own thing. It has a lot of integrity, but it’s also playful; it’s very technical, but it’s also fun. And with this track, they gave us a gem: another Herbie Hancock vocoder song! There were always those two classics — “I Thought It Was You” and “Come Running to Me” — but now we’ve got another.“Moon”Domi & JD Beck feat. Herbie Hancock◆ ◆ ◆Billy Hart, drummerImmanuel Wilkins is clearly spending a lot of time on the instrument, just like John Coltrane did. He’s obviously putting the horn in his mouth a lot. There are some other guys that have talent but their desire is to be popular. But Immanuel Wilkins’s music has really got some depth, and it’s going to influence the future, at least the way I see it. That first album of his, “Omega,” really broke some ground. It’s substantial. And it has to do with the tradition.“Grace and Mercy”Immanuel Wilkins◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticWhen you really tune into a piece of music, what are you usually paying attention to? The words? The beat? A line you can go off humming? Nicole Mitchell’s music with the Black Earth Ensemble rewards listening of about any kind, but it’s best received with a sense of surrender. Limit your expectations of what might be coming next. Put your body under the influence. On “Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds,” a 2017 LP influenced by Octavia Butler’s writings, the poet and vocalist Avery R. Young lends Pentecostal flair to lines of earnest recognition — “I want to pick up my blade/But then again there’s gotta be another way,” he hollers — while Mitchell’s flute whips and shivers around him, a well-contained force of nature. Playing a mix of Asian, European and Afro-diasporic instruments, the eight-piece ensemble raises the high-water mark gradually, in splashes, until you’re swept up. Mitchell is calling up the spirit-memories of this music, which are so often grounded in a particular place: Ornette Coleman at Prince Street, Fred Anderson on the South Side, Alice Coltrane in California, Archie Shepp in Algeria. But she’s also reaching toward somewhere unimaginably better — what Saidiya Hartman calls “the nowhere of utopia,” if you like.“Shiny Divider”Nicole Mitchell◆ ◆ ◆Melanie Charles, vocalist and flutistI remember graduating La Guardia High School, hearing this song and feeling liberated and excited about the possibilities of how my generation could interact with improvised music. Renée Neufville’s voice fits perfectly with Roy Hargrove’s playing and singing. Compositionally, the tune appears to be very simple. However, if you try to sing along, you find it may require a bit more out of you. And that’s the fun of it. The song evokes feelings of house parties and underground shows, and you feel like you are in the studio with the band. It’s a very honest and no-frills, in-and-out track that you can’t help but want to play on repeat.“Crazy Race”The RH Factor◆ ◆ ◆Ayana Contreras, criticTranslated as “Tribute to the Old Guard,” this cut is a slinky reimagining of Idris Muhammad’s 1974 jazz-funk classic “Loran’s Dance,” a record that was part of my own initiation as a jazz fan. The combo of Karriem Riggins and Madlib is behind this unit, two multihyphenate producers who’ve unwaveringly bridged the narrow trench between jazz and hip-hop in increasingly electrifying ways. With just the right mix of distortion and dusty synths, crisp boom-bap drum licks and sunshine, the record feels like what Raphael Saadiq classifies as “instant vintage,” and yet fresh as sun on bare shoulders on the first warm day of spring.“Hommage À La Vielle Garde (Pour Lafarge Et Rinaldi)”Jahari Massamba Unit◆ ◆ ◆David Renard, Times senior editorFive minutes, five hours, five days — once this album-length composition by Natural Information Society sucks you in, it feels like it could flow forever. Joshua Abrams, the group’s leader, was in an early version of the Roots before he moved to Chicago and became part of that city’s indie and jazz scene; he now plays the guimbri, a three-stringed African bass lute that is the most constant element anchoring the ever-shifting “descension (Out of Our Constrictions).” The guimbri’s interplay with Lisa Alvarado’s (vibrating, psychedelic) harmonium, Jason Stein’s bass clarinet and Mikel Patrick Avery’s drumming creates a bed of sound, like a woven pattern, that leaves space for the free-blowing saxophone of Evan Parker, a 20th-century improv veteran still going strong in the 21st, to soar over the top. When Natural Information (minus Parker) performed this piece live at the Woodsist Festival in upstate New York in 2021, slotted between sets by Angel Bat Dawid and Kurt Vile, it felt even more like a loose game of Minimalist musical Ping-Pong — a round robin with no winners, just each player hitting the right spot and falling back as the next stepped up to join the entrancing cascade.“descension (Out of Our Constrictions) I”Natural Information Society with Evan Parker◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Redman, saxophonistOut of an infinite sea of compelling options, stretching all across jazz’s stylistic map, I ended up selecting a track that some might call “straight ahead” (even though I’m not particularly fond of that term), just to try to help make the case that this particular mode of communal expression is still flourishing and forward-moving. It is no small thing to take a chestnut such as “Body and Soul” — one of the most-played standards in the history of recorded music — and make it feel fresh, relevant, interesting and beautiful. The pianist Gerald Clayton, the bassist Joe Sanders and the drummer Marcus Gilmore are, without question, three of the greats of their generation and some of the most active and emulated musicians on the scene today. They have thoroughly absorbed and internalized the evolved vocabularies and common practices of their art and made them wholly and unmistakably their own. Their connectedness — with each other, with their audience, and with this shared musical language — is nuanced, empathic, generous and unforced. They are not trying to prove anything. They are in it for the ride, and what a ride it is: dance music.“Body and Soul”Gerald Clayton◆ ◆ ◆Kris Davis, pianistIf you ever have a chance to see Craig Taborn play solo, go without delay, and you will be transfixed. On this track, “Gift Horse/Over the Water,” you can hear influences of electronic music, Minimalism, contemporary classical music and jazz, specifically from the pianists Geri Allen and Keith Jarrett. Craig has made significant contributions to jazz and solo piano in the 21st century through his unique touch on the piano and seamless synthesis of disparate influences. You can hear his influence among many improvising pianists over the last 20 years, including Vijay Iyer, Marta Sanchez, Matt Mitchell, Micah Thomas and myself.“Gift Horse/Over the Water”Craig Taborn◆ ◆ ◆Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeterI’ve always been under the impression that discovery is the best value of humankind, and when one is fortunate enough to discover something it’s never lost, because it becomes part of them. Whenever I’ve played onstage with Sylvie Courvoisier, I’ve never felt handicapped or abandoned or like I had to look for a way to continue. It’s always been a journey that has been mutual and creative. She’s got courage, and you can see it when she’s at the piano: When she is inspired to go toward something, she doesn’t just go near it, she advances as if she’s going there to save creation. That’s the kind of courage that she has. And she finds every way to express music with that attitude. This is the music of our times that is hidden, like a crown jewel — and only the ones that are really curious and have great fantasies and imagination will find it. Because in darkness everything is dark except the ones that’s got light.“Requiem d’un Songe”Sylvie Courvoisier, Ned Rothenberg and Julian Sartorius◆ ◆ ◆Tomeka Reid, cellistThis whole record, “Like-Coping,” from 2003, is beautiful: from the opening notes of “Miriam” to the last track. This is Parker’s first solo release on Delmark, a label based in our shared hometown, Chicago, with Chad Taylor on drums and Chris Lopes on bass. I can’t believe it is 20 years old this year! It still sounds so fresh. Each member contributes extremely well-crafted earworms that will get stuck in your head, in the best way. Even the way the record is sequenced is brilliant. “Pinecone,” written by Lopes, is the composition that most makes me want to dance.“Pinecone”Jeff Parker◆ ◆ ◆◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ at 50: Those Are Magic Numbers

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      The educational snippets are the ultimate font of Gen X nostalgia. But what is it we’re nostalgic for?When I was in second grade, my teacher held a contest: The first students to memorize their multiplication tables would get dinner at McDonald’s. I was one of them. I’d like to credit hard work or the motivation of those golden fries, but in truth it was easy. I learned it from “Schoolhouse Rock.”It was not the last time that watching too much TV would pay off for me, but it was perhaps the sweetest.If you were an American kid around when I was (nineteen-seventy-cough), you probably have “Schoolhouse Rock” hard-wired into your brain too. The musical shorts, which began airing on ABC in 1973, taught Generation X multiplication, grammar, history and, eventually, nostalgia.That last lesson stuck best. Winona Ryder and company crooned “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill” in the 1994 generational-statement film “Reality Bites.” De La Soul borrowed “Three Is a Magic Number” as the backbone for their buoyant self-introduction, “The Magic Number,” in 1989. Nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.On Wednesday, ABC will tap into that spirit with a prime time “50th Anniversary Singalong,” in which the Black Eyed Peas, the Muppets, Shaquille O’Neal and others will hook up the words, phrases and clauses of the Saturday-morning favorites.The Muppets are among the many guest stars who will appear in the ABC special “Schoolhouse Rock! 50th Anniversary Singalong.”Christopher Willard/ABCThe special promises wholesome family fun, and I can think of worse things to do on a weeknight than musically unpacking my adjectives in the judgment-free zone of my living room. But nostalgia is not just a fun emotion. Like some of the best “Schoolhouse Rock” songs, it carries a note of wistfulness.More on U.S. Schools and EducationHeavy Losses: A new global analysis suggests that children experienced learning deficits during the Covid-19 pandemic that amounted to about one-third of a school year’s worth of knowledge and skills.Police in Schools: Footage of a student’s violent arrest by a school resource officer has raised questions about the role of armed officers on campuses.Transgender Youth: Educators are facing new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students change their name, pronouns or gender expression at school.In Florida: The state will not allow a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies to be offered in its high schools, citing examples of what it calls “woke indoctrination.”In this case, it’s a reminder of a time when network TV gave us a common culture, language and lyrics, before we were sliced into subcultures and demographics. Pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-DVD — pre-VHS, even — “Schoolhouse Rock” convened a classroom of millions for three-minute servings of revolutionary art alongside installments of “The Great Grape Ape Show.”Like much classic kids’ TV, “Schoolhouse Rock” was brought to you by Madison Avenue. The ad executive David McCall, who noticed that his son could memorize pop songs but struggled with arithmetic, suggested to George Newall, a creative director, and Thomas Yohe, an art director, that they figure out how to set math to music.As Newell told the Times in 1994, they pitched the idea to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, who happened to be meeting with the legendary Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. “I think you should buy it right away,” Jones said.Unlike the dutiful news interstitials that vitamin-fortified other Saturday-morning cartoon lineups, “Schoolhouse Rock” harnessed the power of comedy and ear worms. The facts and figures made it educational. But they weren’t what made it art.That was the animation, psychedelically colorful and chock-full of rapid-fire slapstick gags. Above all, there was the sophisticated music. The jazz composer Bob Dorough wrote the banger-filled first season, “Multiplication Rock,” surveying a range of styles from the duodecimal prog-rock of “Little Twelvetoes” to the spiraling lullaby of “Figure Eight.”The lyrics were sly and funny but could also detour, like a fidgety schoolkid sitting by the window, into daydreams. The blissful “Three Is a Magic Number” isn’t just a primer on multiples; it’s a rumination on the triad foundations of the universe, from geometry to love. (If your voice does not break singing, “A man and a woman had a little baby,” you’re doing something wrong.)The following seasons, about grammar, American history and science, added other contributors, including Lynn Ahrens, the future Broadway songwriter thanks to whom an entire generation cannot recite the preamble to the Constitution without breaking into song.The short “Conjunction Junction” was referenced in the 1994 film “Reality Bites,” a sign that nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.ABC, via Everett CollectionThe words and numbers in “Schoolhouse Rock” were never just words and numbers. Like the early years of “Sesame Street,” the shorts had an anarchic spirit and a pluralistic sensibility. “I Got Six” is a funk explosion whose Afrocentric animation includes a dashiki-ed African prince with six rings on all 10 fingers. “Verb: That’s What’s Happening” — imagine if Curtis Mayfield taught your English class — depicts a Black superhero long before Black Panther made it to the movie screen.When my kids were school-aged, I got the full “Schoolhouse Rock” DVD set for them, which is to say, I got it for me. (You can now stream the ’70s seasons, plus a brief 1980s series about computers and a clunky 1990s revival, “Money Rock,” through Disney+.)Rewatching the series taught me about a new subject: Time.The songs are as catchy as ever. But to screen “Schoolhouse Rock” as an adult is to visit a different period in cultural history, and not just because of the bell-bottoms. The America of “Schoolhouse Rock” was divided by Vietnam and Watergate, but it could at least subscribe to basic common facts and civic principles.Consider Bill, the underdog paper hero of “I’m Just a Bill,” longing to become a law that would keep that cartoon school bus safe at railroad crossings. Now he’s a time traveler, from a pre-Reagan age when government activism, however imperfect, was considered a force for good.Today, with culture-warring politicians like the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, red-penciling school curriculums, weaponizing pronouns and hammering history teachers for “indoctrination,” the potential land mines add up. “The Great American Melting Pot” did not imagine a future president telling asylum seekers, “Our country is full.” When “Interjections” depicted a doctor giving a child a shot, it did not anticipate legislators denouncing Big Bird for advocating childhood vaccination.A scene from the anniversary special. Whatever its flaws, “Schoolhouse Rock” told children that they counted with the same numbers and were entitled to the same rights.Christopher Willard/ABC(Likewise, when “Elementary, My Dear” taught counting by twos with a gospel-style Noah’s Ark song, it didn’t fear repercussions for bringing religion into kids’ TV.)And that’s before you even get to “Science Rock.” “The Energy Blues” makes a matter-of-fact pitch for conservation that would cause smoke eruptions today. (In 2009, a climate-focused season, “Earth Rock” went straight to DVD.) When “Schoolhouse Rock” showed kids a three-minute video on how the body worked, there was no internet algorithm to suggest a rebuttal by someone who “did his own research.”That said, I wouldn’t romanticize the “Schoolhouse Rock” era as a paradise of educational consensus. In 1974, the year before the “America Rock” season began, protesters against desegregation in Boston threw rocks at buses carrying Black students. And the series had its own blind spots, which historians and educators have since pointed out.In particular, “America Rock,” an upbeat celebration of the bicentennial, covers the American Revolution and women’s suffrage but skips over the Civil War and slavery. (The Roots filled in this hole in a 2017 episode of “black-ish” with “I Am a Slave,” about Juneteenth.) “Elbow Room” is a jaunty story of westward expansion from the point of view of white settlers, with little note of who got elbowed out. (One scene shows a settler taking a toy arrow through his hat.) America’s unflattering history didn’t make the cut because mass broadcasting meant not alienating the masses.But whatever its limits, “Schoolhouse Rock” at least told us we were equal: We counted with the same numbers, our hearts pumped the same blood, we were entitled to the same inalienable rights.And it operated in a period when people saw the same media and accepted the same facts. Months after its premiere, the Watergate hearings also aired on national TV. They were able eventually to turn even many Republicans against President Nixon, in part because Americans watched the same story together, without a partisan cable and internet ecosystem to spin the investigation as a witch hunt.It’s tempting to say that you couldn’t make “Schoolhouse Rock” again today. But I’m sure you could, even if it would be slightly different. Current kids’ shows like Netflix’s “We the People” are in a way exactly that. What you couldn’t create again today is the mass audience, or the context in which we assembled, one nation, sitting cross-legged in front of our cathode-ray teacher.Instead, we have “Schoolhouse Rock” binge-watches and sing-alongs, which, like all exercises in nostalgia, offer the tantalizing pleasure of stretching to touch yesterday, though we know we can’t. The past is like infinity, a concept that “Schoolhouse Rock” also introduced to my generation. “No one ever gets there,” as “My Hero, Zero” taught us. “But you could try.” More