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      Ryuichi Sakamoto, Oscar-Winning Composer, Dies at 71

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      Mr. Sakamoto, whose work with Yellow Magic Orchestra influenced electronic music, composed scores for “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant.”Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of Japan’s most prominent composers, who scored the films “The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “The Revenant” and was a founder of the influential Yellow Magic Orchestra techno-pop band, died on Tuesday. He was 71.His Instagram page announced the date of his death, but it did not provide further details. Mr. Sakamoto said in 2021 that he had received a diagnosis of rectal cancer and was undergoing treatment.Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr. Sakamoto created music that was catchy, emotive and deeply attuned to the sounds around him. Along with issuing numerous solo albums, he collaborated with a wide range of musicians across genres, and received an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes.His Yellow Magic Orchestra, which swept the charts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, produced catchy hits like “Computer Game” on synthesizers and sequencers, while also satirizing Western ideas of Japanese music.“The big theme of him is curiosity,” the musician Carsten Nicolai, a longtime collaborator, said in a phone interview in 2021. “Ryuichi understood, very early, that not necessarily one specific genre will be the future of music — that the conversation between different styles, and unusual styles, may be the future.”Mr. Sakamoto was beginning to achieve wide recognition in the early 1980s when the director Nagisa Oshima asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Mr. Sakamoto, having no background in acting, agreed under the condition that he could also score the film.The movie’s synth-heavy title track remained one of Mr. Sakamoto’s most famous compositions. He often adapted it, including for “Forbidden Colors,” a vocal version with the singer David Sylvian, as well as piano renditions and sweeping orchestral arrangements.Mr. Sakamoto in 1988. He won an Oscar for his work on “The Last Emperor.”Kyodo News, via Associated PressThen came music for films by the director Bernardo Bertolucci, including “The Last Emperor” (1987) “The Sheltering Sky” (1990) and “Little Buddha (1993). Mr. Bertolucci was demanding — he would shout “More emotional, more emotional!” at the composer, and made him rewrite music on the fly during recording sessions with a 40-person orchestra — but “The Last Emperor” won Mr. Sakamoto an Oscar in 1988. Mr. Sakamoto returned to his classical roots in the late 1990s with the album “BTTB,” or “Back to the Basics,” a collection of sentimental, delicate piano arrangements that evoked Claude Debussy, alongside more experimental wanderings into the innards of the piano in the spirit of John Cage.That release included “Energy Flow,” originally written for a commercial for a vitamin drink and released as a single after television viewers called in en masse to ask how they could find of the music. Amid Japan’s Lost Decade — a term for the economic stagnation that followed years of technology-driven growth — the tender piano ballad seemed to offer solace.“Perhaps it’s because people are looking for healing, for some answer to the stress of their country’s recession,” Mr. Sakamoto speculated, when “Energy Flow” became the first instrumental track to reach No. 1, in 1999, on Japan’s Oricon charts.After the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011, Mr. Sakamoto became an activist in Japan’s antinuclear movement, organizing a No Nukes concert in 2012 at which a reunited Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the band Kraftwerk, one of Yellow Magic’s major influences, performed.The day before the concert, he spoke at a protest outside the residence of Japan’s prime minister. “I come here as a citizen,” he said. “It’s important that we all do what we can and raise our voices.”Mr. Sakamoto learned he had throat cancer in 2014. During treatment, he halted work but made an exception when the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu asked him to write music for his film “The Revenant.” With Mr. Nicolai, who performs under the name Alva Noto, Mr. Sakamoto produced a score of luminous dread that was widely acclaimed.He conceived a new project in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, one of his abiding influences, which became the 2017 “async,” his first solo album in eight years and a summation of his career, with haunting chorales, ethereally synthesized soundscapes, and a recording of the writer Paul Bowles reciting a passage on mortality from “The Sheltering Sky.”Mr. Sakamoto, second from left, had a role in the film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and also wrote the music. With him, from left, are Jack Thomas, the film’s. producer; David Bowie, who starred, and Nagisa Oshima, the director.Jacques Langevin/Associated PressIn later years, Mr. Sakamoto’s music became increasingly spacious and ambient, attuned to the flow of time. In an interview with The Creative Independent website, he described why he played his older music so much slower than he used to. “I wanted to hear the resonance,” he said. “I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it growing.”Ryuichi Sakamoto was born on Jan. 17, 1952, in Tokyo. His father, Kazuki Sakamoto, was a well-known literary editor, and his mother, Keiko (Shimomura) Sakamoto, designed women’s hats.He began piano lessons at age 6, and started to compose soon after. Early influences included Bach and Debussy — whom he once called “the door to all 20th century music” — and he discovered modern jazz as he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels as a teenager. (At the height of the student protest movement, he and his classmates shut down their high school for several weeks.)Mr. Sakamoto was drawn to modern art and especially the avant-garde work of Cage. He studied composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo University of the Arts and began playing around with synthesizers and performing in the local pop scene.In 1978, Mr. Sakamoto released his debut solo album, “Thousand Knives,” a trippy amalgam that opens with the musician reciting a poem by Mao through a vocoder, followed by a reggae beat and a procession of Herbie Hancock-inspired improvisations. That year, the bassist Haruomi Hosono invited him and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to form a trio that became Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Mr. Takahashi died in January.)The band’s self-titled 1978 album was a huge hit, and influenced numerous electronic music genres, from synth pop to techno. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. Sakamoto wanted to pursue solo work. (They have periodically reunited since the 1990s.) Mr. Sakamoto continued tinkering with outré, high-tech approaches in his 1980 album “B-2 Unit,” which included the otherworldly electro single “Riot in Lagos.”Mr. Sakamoto performing in Rome in 2009.Domenico Stinellis/Associated PressAfter the Bertolucci films, Mr. Sakamoto was seemingly everywhere — appearing in a Madonna music video, modeling for Gap, and writing music for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. His collaborators for the eclectic albums “Neo Geo” (1987) and “Beauty” (1989) included Iggy Pop, Youssou N’Dour, and Brian Wilson, and he toured with a world-fusion band from five continents. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Sakamoto had refashioned himself as a classical composer, touring arrangements of his earlier music in a piano trio. His work simultaneously became grandiose in scale and themes: he wrote a symphony, “Discord,” exploring grief and salvation (with spoken word contributions by David Byrne and Patti Smith), and an opera, “LIFE,” a meditation on 20th century history that received mixed reviews.Along with writing music for video games and designing ringtones for the Nokia 8800 phone, Mr. Sakamoto oversaw live streams of his concerts that featured a “remote clap” function, in which online viewers could press their keyboard’s F key to applaud. The strokes would be registered on a screen in the auditorium.In the 21st century, he began to focus again on more experimental work, inspired by a new generation of collaborators including the producer Fennesz and Mr. Nicolai, who layered glitchy electronics over Mr. Sakamoto’s piano.“He taught me that I should not be afraid of melody,” Mr. Nicolai said, “that melody has the possibility of experimentation as well.”Mr. Sakamoto became outspoken as an environmentalist, recording the sounds of a melting glacier for his 2009 record “Out of Noise.” For portions of “async,” he performed on an out-of-tune piano that had been partly submerged in the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. He recorded what became his final album, “12,” as a kind of diary of sketches, following a lengthy hospitalization, through 2021 and 2022. “I just wanted to be showered in sound,” he said of the record. “I had a feeling that it’d have a small healing effect on my damaged body and soul.”In December, he gave a career-spanning, livestreamed solo piano concert at Tokyo’s 509 Studio.Mr. Sakamoto married Natsuko Sakamoto in 1972, and they divorced 10 years later. His second marriage, to the musician Akiko Yano in 1982, ended in divorce in 2006. His partner was Norika Sora, who served as his manager. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sakamoto greets fans after a performance in New York in 2010.Hiroko Masuike for The New York TimesMr. Sakamoto’s attention to sound suffused his daily life. After many years of eating at the Manhattan restaurant Kajitsu, he recalled in a 2018 interview with The New York Times, he wrote an email to the chef saying, “I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music.” Then, without fanfare or pay, he designed subtle, tasteful playlists for the restaurant.He simply wanted better sounds to accompany his meals. More

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      Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Nun With a Musical Gift, Dies at 99

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      Born in Ethiopia, she seemed headed for a career as a concert pianist before she chose a monastic life. Her intricate piano recordings gained a cult following.“Honky tonk” and “nun” are words not often seen in combination, but in 2017, when the BBC broadcast a radio documentary about the pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, “The Honky Tonk Nun” was the title of choice.It was a testament to the music she made, both before and after she became a nun in the 1940s, music that drew on her classical training but seemed to partake of rhythm and blues, jazz and other influences. The relatively few who discovered it knew they had found their way to something singular.The musician Norah Jones was one who did, especially after hearing the album “Éthiopiques 21,” a collection of Sister Guèbrou’s piano solos that was part of a record series spotlighting folkloric and pop music from Ethiopia.“This album is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard: part Duke Ellington, part modal scales, part the blues, part church music,” Ms. Jones told The New York Times in 2020. “It resonated in all those ways for me.”The documentarian Garrett Bradley used Sister Guèbrou’s music in the soundtrack of “Time,” her acclaimed 2020 film about a New Orleans woman’s fight to get her husband out of prison. Alex Westfall, writing in Pitchfork about that movie and its soundtrack, called the music “the sonic equivalent to infinity — untethered by conventional meter or rhythm, as if Guèbrou’s instrument holds more keys than it should.”Fana Broadcasting, Ethiopia’s state-run news agency, announced on March 27 that Sister Guèbrou had died in Jerusalem. She was 99. The announcement did not specify when she died.“Hers were some of the most extraordinary 99 years ever lived on this earth,” Kate Molleson, who made “The Honky Tonk Nun” and wrote about Sister Guèbrou in her book “Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the 20th Century” (2022), said on Twitter.Sister Guèbrou (the title emahoy is used for a female monk) was born Yewubdar Guèbru on Dec. 12, 1923, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. (She changed her name when she became a nun.) Her father, Kentiba Gebru Desta, held several titles, including mayor of Gondar, and her mother, Kassaye Yelemtu, was socially prominent as well. At age 6, Sister Guèbrou was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland. There, she said in the BBC documentary, she saw a concert by a blind pianist that made a strong impression.“It remained in my mind, in my heart,” she said. “After that, I was captivated by music.”She studied violin and piano and then returned to Ethiopia in 1933 to attend the Empress Menen secondary school. After Italy, under Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and forced its emperor, Haile Selassie, into exile, Sister Guèbrou and her family were deported to the Italian island of Asinara and then were relocated to Mercogliano, east of Naples.When the Italian occupation ended and Selassie was restored to power in 1941, Sister Guèbrou, still a teenager, accepted an offer to further her music studies in Cairo, though the Cairo climate did not agree with her. She eventually returned to Ethiopia, working for a time as an assistant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Ms. Guèbrou in an undated photo. After studying music in Italy and Cairo, she underwent a spiritual reassessment and became a nun, joining a monastery in Ethiopia. “I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she said. via Buda MusiqueShe had a chance to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London and seemed on the way to a career as a concert pianist, the BBC documentary says, but that prospect fell through for reasons Sister Guèbrou would not detail. That led her to a spiritual reassessment of her life, and by her early 20s, she was a nun. She spent 10 years in a hilltop monastery in Ethiopia.“I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she told Ms. Molleson. “No shoes, no music, just prayer.”She returned to her family and by the 1960s was recording some of her music; her first album was released in Germany in 1967, according to the website of a foundation established in her name to promote music education.She made several other records over the next 30 years, donating the proceeds to the poor. In the mid-1980s, she left Ethiopia and settled into an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem, spending the rest of her life there. Information on her survivors was not available.Sister Guèbrou came to much wider attention in 2006. The French musicologist and producer Francis Falceto, who had been releasing albums of Ethiopian music from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in a series called “Éthiopiques” on the Buda Musique label, made a collection of her solo pieces No. 21 in that series.“While the sound of this musician’s pensive, repetitive drawing-room études owes something to Beethoven, Schumann and Debussy — although they are studded with little arpeggios special to Ethiopian music — there is a dusky, early-blues quality to much of it,” Ben Ratliff wrote in a review in The Times. “If you’ve heard some jazz, you could think it was written by Mary Lou Williams or Duke Ellington in their own moments of making their own quiet, original drawing-room music.”Ilana Webster-Kogen, an ethnomusicologist at SOAS University of London with an expertise in Ethiopian music, broke down one track from the “Éthiopiques” album, the inviting yet complex “The Story of the Wind,” which is less than three minutes long.“First, there is a lot of classical technique in there, particularly in the interplay between the right and left hands,” she said by email. “You might think you’re listening to a sonata for those first few seconds because there is so much harmony between the right and left hand. But then it becomes immediately clear that she’s improvising, so the genre signals jazz.”And then there’s the meter of the piece.“Most Ethiopian music is written in 6/8, which you can count either as duple meter or triple meter (1-2-1-2 or 1-2-3-1-2-3),” Dr. Webster-Kogen wrote. “If you try to count, you’ll see that she really fluctuates between duple and triple pulse. This would be innovative coming from any musician, and sure, there are other Ethiopian musicians who do this — now — but the idea that they got it from a woman who has dedicated her life to prayer and charity … anyone can see that this is unusual.” More

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      Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter Reveals Himself: As a Composer

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      After more than two decades at the forefront of electronic dance music (while in a robot-style helmet), the French artist is releasing “Mythologies,” a score for traditional symphony orchestra.The most shocking part of “Mythologies,” a ballet that premiered last summer in Bordeaux, France, came after the dance was over. It was a seemingly normal moment: The composer of the music came out and took a bow.What was surprising was that his face and his wild halo of dark curls were showing. After spending more than 20 years in public behind shiny, opaque robot-style helmets as half of the pathbreaking dance-music duo Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter was ready to be seen without barriers.“There’s nothing sensational about it,” Bangalter, 48, said on a recent video call. “It’s down to earth, my relationship to physical appearance that I feel now.”“Mythologies,” Bangalter’s first major solo project since Daft Punk announced its dissolution in February 2021, is arriving on Friday as an album on Erato, the distinguished French classical label. Conceived in 2019, long before Daft Punk’s breakup, it is a 90-minute instrumental score for traditional symphony orchestra, with nary an electronic sound in the mix.“With electronic music, it’s so hard and it takes so much time to infuse emotion in the machines,” the soft-spoken and thoughtful Bangalter said from his home in Paris. “So to write a chord or a melody and have the performers — human beings — play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating. It’s not the fight you have against machines.”“Mythologies” revels in the palpably human effects of an acoustic ensemble: the trembling friction of bows on strings; the exhalations of breath into brasses; the grumble of bassoon, with audible clicks of fingers on keys. The ballet is a stylized parade of myths from the distant past, but for Bangalter the project also has a kind of post-apocalyptic, back-to-basics optimism: “After everything, the violin will remain.”“I’m very grateful for the freedom and the creative latitude that I was able to explore with my partner,” Bangalter said. “The only thing it’s farewell to is Daft Punk, because that is in the past, but beyond that, there are many different things yet to explore.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesEven without the buffed, gleamingly artificial sheen and pumping tempos of Daft Punk’s trademark sound, much of the sprawling, 23-track new album does have the clean, poised formality and propulsive rhythmic regularity of Vivaldi and Bach — and of techno.“It was definitely a journey of learning and experimenting,” Bangalter said. “How to orchestrate, as well as the value of trial and error, and also exploring the ’70s or the ’80s. But not the 1970s or 1980s — the 1880s, or the 1780s.”The 1970s and ’80s are very much in the score, though, in the form of brooding, endlessly cycling small cells of material, like that in the work of Philip Glass or Michael Nyman, both favorites of choreographers. Relentlessly repeating small cells of material is also the way many electronica songs, including Daft Punk’s, are built.No one will mistake “Mythologies” for Bangalter’s work with his longtime musical partner, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. But this new project is as much a continuum with Daft Punk as it is a break or rejection. The duo’s “Tron: Legacy” soundtrack, from 2010, blended electronic sounds with a symphony orchestra (though, unlike “Mythologies,” Bangalter didn’t arrange those orchestrations himself).A sense of ambivalence about technology permeates the slouchy, melancholy mood of “Random Access Memories” (2013), the group’s last album, which was lauded for “restoring a human touch to dance music” and celebrating liveness over computerized composition. “Mythologies” is, in a sense, another step in that direction.“It’s a break of medium, but he’s the same person,” said Romain Dumas, who has conducted the work in its live performances and on the new album.A large-scale dance score is also a return of sorts to Bangalter’s youth in Paris, where he was surrounded by choreography, both classical and modern. His mother was a ballet dancer, and his father was a songwriter and producer; as a child, Bangalter took piano lessons from a member of the music staff of the Paris Opera.But from his late teens, he and Homem-Christo began to explore a style they thought of as retrofuturist, borrowing elements from the past — disco, ’80s electropop, R&B — to build an increasingly grand vision of joyful populism, touring with an enormous pyramid-shape stage set and taking on their robot personas in a spectacle simultaneously ironic and sincere. Thanks in large part to Daft Punk, dance music went fully mainstream.Daft Punk, Bangalter’s duo with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, announced its breakup in February 2021.Michael Falco for The New York TimesIt had been six years since the release of “Random Access Memories” when Bangalter was approached, in mid-2019, by the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, who had used Daft Punk’s music in his work in the past.“At first, I was interested to mix electronic music and symphonic, like they did in ‘Tron,’” Preljocaj said. “But I think Thomas wanted to have a completely new experience. He proposed to me to write a completely orchestral score, and obviously I respected his desire.”Marc Minkowski, the renowned Baroque maestro who until last year directed the Opéra National de Bordeaux, where the ballet premiered, recalled: “Angelin said, ‘I have a friend who’s one of the Daft Punks.’ And they were so popular in France, it was like Abba. He told me that his friend was about to start composing, and wanted to do something completely different. And I said, ‘Wonderful.’ I love crossover; I’m a conductor, and my dream is to accompany Lady Gaga in musicals.”The ballet’s mythology theme and its music arose in tandem: Bangalter sought a kind of story scaffolding from Preljocaj to begin to structure his writing, and Bangalter’s initial sketches inspired in Preljocaj the idea of exploring a range of myths, rather than a single narrative.Bangalter read classic treatises on orchestration — the art of how to properly use the different instruments and balance them — by Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakov. To write the score, he not only abandoned the computer, but also the keyboard, at which he would compose during the Daft Punk years.“Right away, I said I’m going to write everything at the desk,” he recalled. “I don’t want to be limited, both harmonically and rhythmically, by my own limitations at the piano.”After so many years working with machines, “to write a chord or a melody and have the performers — human beings — play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating,” Bangalter said.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesBut old habits died hard. “He was coming from an electronic world,” said Dumas, the conductor, “so some ideas were very odd and very difficult to do for humans. For example, in ‘Zeus,’ that’s one cell that’s repeating for like three or four minutes; that was very hard to do for an orchestra.”It’s a paradox: Bangalter clearly relished the human touch and immediacy of classical music, the sound of dozens of musicians playing together, unamplified, in Bordeaux’s 18th-century opera house. (Alain Lanceron, the head of Erato, said that Bangalter insisted on going back to the label’s original logo — “very, very classical and old-fashioned and traditional” — for the album cover.)But he also, just as clearly, missed the minute control he was used to — and the effects that only technology makes possible. When it came time for making tweaks, Dumas said, they weren’t big ones.“It was tiny elements that were changing: ‘We’re going to add a dot at this point, or change it to another dynamic and mix it with this little thing,’” he said. “As human interpreters, this kind of subtlety was kind of hard to do sometimes; it’s the kind of precision you can only have with machines.”Deep in the collaboration on “Mythologies” when Daft Punk’s split was announced, Preljocaj was surprised by the news. “I think these two guys are very, very demanding with themselves,” he said. “They are perfectionist, precise. I think they are not sure they will do something higher than the point where they were. I’m not sure of that, but it’s an intuition. And that shows the honesty of their work. They don’t want to produce something which is less than what they did.”Bangalter still shares a studio and equipment with Homem-Christo, who saw “Mythologies” in Bordeaux. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)“I’m very grateful for the freedom and the creative latitude that I was able to explore with my partner,” Bangalter said. “So it’s behind me now, but I’m really happy about it. I’ve always liked the idea of adding facets and possibilities more than shutting down ideas. The only thing it’s farewell to is Daft Punk, because that is in the past, but beyond that, there are many different things yet to explore.”Those things might involve more film scores — he has collaborated several times with the director Gaspar Noé — as well as work that is released with greater frequency than the sometimes glacial expanses between Daft Punk albums.And “Mythologies” does not represent goodbye to electronics. “I feel I’ve learned some things in this process that I would be happy to integrate in my future creative projects,” he said. “But what has always driven me is to go in one direction and then to do the opposite.”There is one thing, though, that he has abandoned, irretrievably and happily.“My priorities in the world in 2023 are on the side of the humans, not the machines,” he said. “I have absolutely no desire or intentions to be a robot in 2023. There is absolutely not one reason I would want to be one.” More

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      Morgan Wallen Makes It Four Weeks at No. 1 With ‘One Thing at a Time’

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      The country superstar’s latest album easily held off new releases by Lana Del Rey and Jimin of the K-pop group BTS.Another week, another No. 1 for Morgan Wallen, the mullet-maned country superstar whose latest album, “One Thing at a Time,” notches a fourth time at the top despite competition from new releases by Lana Del Rey and Jimin of the K-pop giants BTS.In its latest week out, “One Thing at a Time” had the equivalent of 197,000 sales in the United States, including 236 million streams and 17,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since its release a month ago, the 36-song album has been streamed about 1.3 billion times in the United States.New releases take up the next three spots on the chart, though none was popular enough to present much of a challenge to Wallen.“Face,” a six-track, 20-minute release by Jimin, opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 164,000 sales, including 124,000 copies sold as a complete unit — it came out in a variety of collectible CD packages, which included one bonus song — and just shy of 20 million streams. Jimin is the third of BTS’s seven members — after RM and J-Hope — to put out a solo album since BTS announced a pause in full-group activities last year.Jimin’s song “Like Crazy” tops the latest Hot 100 singles chart, replacing Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers.” Its success was largely driven by sales, with five versions of Jimin’s single selling 254,000 copies as downloads and CD singles. (Billboard determines chart positions on the Hot 100 by looking at streams, sales and radio airplay.)Del Rey’s “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” starts at No. 3 on the album chart with the equivalent of 115,000 units, including 36 million streams and 58,500 copies sold as vinyl LPs. Another young country hitmaker, Luke Combs, opens at No. 4 with “Gettin’ Old,” which had the equivalent of 101,000 sales, including 85 million streams.SZA’s “SOS” falls two spots to No. 5 in its 16th week out, and “So Much (for) Stardust,” the eighth studio album by the rock band Fall Out Boy, opens at No. 6. More

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      Seymour Stein, Record Biz Giant Who Signed Madonna, Dies at 80

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      Steeped in music, he championed Madonna, the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Pretenders and more on his Sire label, and helped found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.It was early 1957, and a nervous teenager named Seymour Steinbigle sat in a midtown office with his father and a hard-bitten record producer who was offering to mentor the young man in the ways of the music business.“Listen,” the producer, Syd Nathan, told the skeptical parent. “Your son has shellac in his veins,” referring to the brittle material used in 78 r.p.m. records.“If he can’t be in the music business, it’s going to ruin his life,” Mr. Nathan added. “He’ll wind up doing nothing and will have to deliver newspapers.”The pitch worked. Mr. Steinbigle agreed to let his son spend the next two summers in Cincinnati at Mr. Nathan’s company, King Records, home to R&B stars like James Brown and Little Willie John.The experience at King proved formative, and the young Steinbigle — better known as Seymour Stein, a name he took at Mr. Nathan’s suggestion — would become one of the music industry’s most successful and most colorful executives, signing Madonna, the Ramones, Talking Heads and the Pretenders to his label Sire, and helping to found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.He also worked with the Smiths, the Cure, Ice-T, Lou Reed, Seal, K.D. Lang and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys in a career that stretched well over 50 years. Mr. Stein died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles at age 80. The cause was cancer, his daughter Mandy said.Mr. Stein, left, with Hilly Kristal, owner of the club CBGB in Lower Manhattan, in the 1970s. Mr. Stein signed the punk rock group the Ramones after it made an appearance at the club in 1975. Joe StevensIn a business fixated on hits, Mr. Stein was a walking encyclopedia of 20th-century pop and more. He could rattle off the lyrics, chart positions and B-sides of seemingly any notable record going back to the 1940s, and lovingly sing their hooks in a nasal whine. A champion of punk rock in the 1970s, he would also tear up over “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem.“He knows all the lyrics to every song you’ve ever heard,” Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders once said.Even in the brusque world of old-school record executives, Mr. Stein could be startlingly impolitic. He sometimes told journalists — in jest, they hoped — that he would kill them if their work made him look bad. And while his memoir, “Siren Song: My Life in Music” (2018), written with Gareth Murphy, was filled with lighthearted anecdotes like the “shellac” scene with Syd Nathan, he also used the book to settle old scores with rivals like Mo Ostin (who died last year), the longtime, widely admired head of Warner Bros., which had acquired Sire.“Being liked was not my goal in life,” Mr. Stein wrote. “My business was turning great music into hit records.”Seymour Steinbigle was born on April 18, 1942, into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. His father, David, worked in the garment business in Manhattan; his mother, Dora (Weisberg) Steinbigle, had worked in a family market in Coney Island from a young age.As a child, Seymour took comfort and pleasure in pop music — listening to it as well as learning every detail he could about it. At age 8, while tuning in his favorite radio show, “Make Believe Ballroom,” he noticed that Martin Block, the announcer, saluted Patti Page on her 13-week run at No. 1 with her song “Tennessee Waltz” — an early sign of Mr. Stein’s lifelong obsession with music charts.In his early teens, he showed up in the Manhattan offices of Billboard, the music industry trade publication, with a request. He wanted to copy, by hand, the magazine’s pop, country and Black music singles charts for every week going back to his birth. The editors agreed, and were amazed to see him follow through.“He would come in every day after class and work on this project,” Tom Noonan, the magazine’s former chart editor, later told Rolling Stone. “It took him two years.”After graduating from high school, Mr. Stein took a junior position at Billboard, where in 1958 he was part of the team that introduced the Hot 100, which remains the magazine’s flagship singles chart. In the early 1960s, he worked at King and Red Bird, a short-lived label founded with the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; its first release, the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love” (1964), went to No. 1.Richard Gottehrer and Mr. Stein in 2010. The two went into business together in 1966 and named their company Sire, a blend of their first names.Chad Batka for The New York TimesIn 1966, Mr. Stein went into business with Richard Gottehrer, a young producer and songwriter who had established himself with hits like the Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back” (1963). Mixing up the first two letters of each man’s given name — S, E, R and I — they called their new company Sire.Mr. Stein developed a specialty of licensing British and European songs for American release. At first, New York cheesecakes helped open the necessary doors. According to Mr. Stein, he would board trans-Atlantic flights carrying a stack of cakes packed in dry ice and serve them to salivating record executives in London. “The more we delivered, the easier it was to walk out with bargains,” he wrote.Sire had its first hit in 1973 with “Hocus Pocus,” a yodeling rock novelty track by the Dutch band Focus. It went to No. 9 in the United States and, according to Mr. Stein, sold a million copies.Mr. Gottehrer left the label in 1975. One night that year, Mr. Stein’s wife, Linda Stein, came home from a downtown Manhattan dive raving about a new band. The bar was called CBGB and the group was the Ramones. Auditioning the band the next day, Mr. Stein was amazed if bemused by the band’s blistering take on 1960s bubble-gum rock; he later described the Ramones’ sound as the Beach Boys put through a meat grinder.“Ramones,” the band’s debut album, was released in 1976 and established punk rock’s blueprint of songs that were brutish and short, though with a tunefulness and winking humor that few could match. Still, Mr. Stein wrote in his memoir, “radio stations wouldn’t touch the Ramones with a toilet brush.” It took 38 years for their first album to go gold.After the Ramones, Mr. Stein signed Talking Heads to Sire and soon also brought to the label Echo and the Bunnymen, the Pretenders and Soft Cell (“Tainted Love”). Sire had its first No. 1 hit in 1979 with “Pop Muzik” by M, a new wave touchstone.Mr. Stein in 2010. After taking an early interest in the music business, he went on to become one of its most successful and most colorful executives.Chad Batka for The New York TimesMr. Stein made his most successful signing while hospitalized for a heart condition in 1982. Madonna Ciccone, a young singer and dancer, was beginning to attract industry attention for a demo tape of a song she had written called “Everybody.” Fearing competition from other labels, Mr. Stein summoned her to his bedside at Lenox Hill Hospital.“Just tell me what I have to do to get a record deal in this town,” she said (using saltier language), according to Mr. Stein’s book.“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You’ve got a deal.”Mr. Stein signed Madonna to a $45,000 contract for three singles, with an option for an album, and Sire released “Everybody” that fall. Madonna went on to sell more than 64 million albums in the United States alone, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.“Words cannot describe how I felt at this moment after years of grinding and being broke and getting every door slammed in my face,” Madonna said of her signing in a post on Instagram after Mr. Stein’s death. (“I am weeping as I write this down,” she said.) “Not only did Seymour hear me,” she wrote, “but he Saw me and my Potential! For this I will be eternally grateful!”In 1983, Mr. Stein was part of a group of music and media executives who created the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, and in 2005 he was inducted into the hall as a nonperformer.In the 1980s, he coaxed new albums from aging rock legends. He signed Brian Wilson for his first solo album, and Lou Reed for “New York,” the 1989 album that reestablished Reed’s credentials as a cold-eyed commentator on urban life. In later years, Mr. Stein remained at Warner Music while the Sire imprint shuffled between divisions and was inactive for a time. He retired in 2018.In addition to his daughter Mandy, a filmmaker whose projects have included a documentary about CBGB, Mr. Stein is survived by a sister, Ann Wiederkehr, and three grandchildren. His marriage ended in divorce. Ms. Stein, his former wife, was a co-manager of the Ramones who became a successful real estate agent in New York. In 2007, she was killed by her assistant, who was sentenced to 25 years to life for second-degree murder. His daughter Samantha Jacobs died of brain cancer in 2013.In his memoir, Mr. Stein discussed his sexuality, including his attraction to men and the gay subculture that permeated the entertainment world, particularly in London. “I somehow knew we’d make a rock-and-roll king-and-queen combo,” he wrote of his marriage to Linda, “even if the roles were a little confused.”Mr. Stein became a noted collector of art and antiques, which he often acquired while on scouting trips for new music. “The Siren,” a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse that Mr. Stein had owned for more than 30 years, was sold at Sotheby’s in London in 2018 for about $5 million.But Mr. Stein always maintained that the business of music was his true calling.“When I first got hired at Billboard, I went home and told my mother. I said, ‘Ma, they actually pay me!’” Mr. Stein told Rolling Stone in 1986, the year that Madonna’s album “True Blue” went to No. 1.“I just love music and love this business,” he added. “And you know what? I still don’t believe I get paid for it.” More

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      Review: John Luther Adams’s ‘Vespers’ Pray for an Earth in Crisis

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      John Luther Adams’s latest premiere, “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” is a tear-splattered departure from his usual style.Lately, the composer John Luther Adams has been thinking about art — and artists — in times of crisis.Amid war, a pandemic, political precarity and looming climate disaster, someone like him can retreat into nostalgia, or turn to an aesthetic of proselytism, or speak directly to current events as if following Brecht’s famous epigraph from his “Svendborg Poems,” “In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.”Adams sees himself as something of a modern Monet, painting his monumental water lilies during World War I. “Like Monet, in my own lesser way, the best thing I can do now, for myself and for other people,” he wrote in a recent essay, “is what I’ve done throughout my life: to follow my art, with an ever-deeper sense of urgency and devotion.”That sense has led him to his latest work, “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” which received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on Friday, one night after its unveiling in Philadelphia. Rarely, if ever, has Adams written music that has been so explicitly felt, and more directly stated — but also so ineffective.In a way, the urgency of climate-related art has caught up to Adams, whose career has been an extended exercise in marveling at the natural world through music. He was once an activist but settled on full-time composition, mostly from his minimalist, longtime home in Alaska, a place lovingly and eloquently documented in his books “Winter Music” and “Silences So Deep.”And his work, while not overtly political, has come from a place of wonder and conscience, qualities that extend to his everyday life: Rather than fly, he took a train to Philadelphia from his house in New Mexico. Adams has long been a master of creating environments in sound — not tone paintings per se, but immersive, inventive evocations of, for example, bird song, the desert and, most famously, the open water in “Become Ocean,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize (and the love of Taylor Swift). Awe-inspiring, nearly religious to experience, his music is, at its finest, a font of appreciation for forces larger than ourselves.The “Vespers,” however, are different. Over five sections, this tear-splattered score mourns and damns, and declares where in the past Adams might have simply observed. It is, he told The New York Times in an interview, unusually expressive and personal. But in its bluntness — down to a spoken-word introduction, delivered on Friday by Charlotte Blake Alston, that laid out not the structure of the piece but its purpose — it feels like the work of a less assured artist.These first performances — by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Crossing, one of our most consistently thrilling choral ensembles — didn’t happen under ideal circumstances. The conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, withdrew because of illness; and the original soprano soloist, Ying Fang, has been recovering from a vocal cord hemorrhage. She was replaced by Meigui Zhang, and the Crossing’s director, Donald Nally, took up the podium for the Adams (while at Carnegie, Marin Alsop filled in for the concert’s second half, a precise and transparent, yet terrifyingly alive “Rite of Spring”).But the reading didn’t seem to suffer. Nally is an experienced hand in Adams’s music, having premiered and recorded his “Canticles of the Holy Wind” with the Crossing. And on Friday, he navigated with cool command the idiosyncratic layout of the “Vespers” — four choruses and four string-and-percussion ensembles arranged across the stage, with a piano and harp in the middle, then woodwinds, brass and additional instruments aloft in the balconies.Adams’s score calls for brasses and woodwinds to be perched in balconies on either side of the stage.Chris LeeIn the first section, “A Brief Descent Into Deep Time,” percussive ringing and ghostly breaths give way to geological texts — the names and colors of rocks — describing two billion years’ worth of layers in the Grand Canyon. The words, set against suspended, seemingly static strings, come quickly, unintelligible as they blend and best taken in, as with most of Adams’s music, as if letting them wash over you.Insistently downward melodic phrases appear to echo section’s title until they emerge as the idée fixe of the entire piece, doleful and reflecting a world in decline. The gesture takes form next, in “A Weeping of Doves,” as wailing vocalise; and is subtler in “Night-Shining Clouds,” as the slowly sloping sheen of harmonics in the strings.The clearest allusion to the work’s liturgical title comes in the fourth section, “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction,” which is set to the scientific binomials of 193 species Adams describes in the score as “critically threatened and endangered.” (Why that includes the Kauai O’o, the long-extinct bird whose call inspired the fifth section, “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” is beyond me.)If the litany doesn’t quite land, it’s not Adams’s fault — though he does overlay the names to the point rendering them indistinguishable, with no time to register, much less grieve for them. The bigger difficulty, though, is that since 2020, a list like this has lost its power; people routinely saw unfathomably high infection rates, and the deaths of more than one million Americans. If that hasn’t been enough to inspire collective mourning, what chance could there have been for him?The last name among the “Litanies” is Homo sapiens — uncharacteristic for Adams, and more expected of a comparatively immature artist’s rhetoric. But there is a return to form in that “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” in which the strings are again suspended, though foundational, under Zhang’s elegant but sorrowful vocal line, which is revealed to be drawn-out adaptation of the Kauai O’o call.That bird song — captured in 1987, in a recording of the last of the species — does appear as a transcription at the end, played by a piccolo and orchestral bells perched in a balcony at the rear of the hall. The moment unfurls with freedom, its long rests patient, its repeated call beautiful and heartbreakingly lonely. It’s here, as Adams turns his ear and pen back toward nature, that his music is most powerful.Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Friday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: ‘Fragments’ Proposes a New Kind of Cello Recital

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      Alisa Weilerstein brought her new project, a mix tape of new works and movements from Bach’s cello suites, to Zankel Hall.Alisa Weilerstein, a cellist of explosive emotional energy, gave the New York premiere of her new project, “Fragments,” at Zankel Hall on Saturday. I was there, but she wouldn’t want me to tell you exactly what happened.Journalists have been asked to include a spoiler alert if they plan to reveal the concert’s program — which I will do, so consider yourself warned.“Fragments” is a new, multiyear series in which Weilerstein plans to pair each of Bach’s six cello suites with new works she commissioned for the project in general, but not for any suite in particular.Weilerstein and her director, Elkhanah Pulitzer, are aiming to rethink how artists connect with their audiences by reconfiguring the traditional concert format, which they feel has gotten, if not quite stale, predictable. An element of surprise — and the abandonment of preconceived notions — is critical to their concept.Gone are the usual program notes, intermission, encores and set lists. On Saturday, an evening built around Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G, ushers handed out playbills that listed composers’ names but not their biographies, inspirations or influences. Left out, as well, were the pieces’ titles and the order in which they would be played.In fact, whole works would be broken up, scrambled out of order and integrated with the other pieces. The purpose, Weilerstein told The New York Times recently, came from a desire to foster “an appreciation for being in one communal space.” In that sense, the format was a success: Audience members, untethered from any explanation that could ground them, focused intently on Weilerstein and the kaleidoscope of sound emanating from the stage.The program wasn’t entirely random. Weilerstein’s unconventional means yielded a conventional arc, with a gradual start, fiery middle and contemplative end. The first selection came from Joan Tower, who contributed a single, unified, untitled piece instead of a work that could be split up and dispersed across the program: A long-held note, something of an invitation, gave way to harmony-driven momentum. The first movement of Reinaldo Moya’s “Guayoyo Sketches,” a tribute to Venezuelan coffee culture, came next. Its dusty pizzicato tremolo had the predawn rustle of someone waking up and shuffling to the kitchen to prepare the morning’s brew before the household had awakened. Without a title or program notes, though, a listener couldn’t so easily have connected Moya’s evocation with any personal experience.At times the concert felt like a TikTok-ified recital: a stream of strongly linked bits of content, broken down into parts and divorced from their original context, that came and went in brief, entertaining flashes without pause or time for reflection.Weilerstein sat on a powder-blue stool in the middle of the stage surrounded by 13 blocks resembling variously sized portions of a wall with picture molding. The scenic designer, Seth Reiser, made Weilerstein a room of her own by breaking down a wall and reassembling the scattered pieces into a circular shape that, in its own way, felt complete — fragments forming a new whole.The most compelling stretch of music came toward the end, when Weilerstein used the private wistfulness of the Bach suite’s Gigue — a quality that plenty of other players have found in it — to pivot toward a sequence of introspective pieces. The broad opening chords of Gili Schwarzman’s “Preludium” — a stand-alone piece like Tower’s — found strength in patience, and Bach’s Sarabande, already the suite’s most pensive music, felt utterly transformed in its murmuring solitude. Wrapping up the section, the ghostly harmonics of the second movement of Allison Loggins-Hull’s “Chasing Balance” and the whispered echoes of Chen Yi’s “Mountain Tune” seemed to emerge from the distant place of the Sarabande.It all was a tour de force, but those Bach movements took on a scratchy tone, coming as they did after the furious, screeching assertiveness of the third movement of Loggins-Hull’s piece and the bumblebee flight of Yi’s “Spin Dance.” And when Bach’s bouncy Courante followed that section’s extended contemplations, it sounded a little slick — a puzzle piece that had been smoothed out to fit a place where it didn’t belong.Each composer was assigned a specific color in Reiser’s lighting design, and that one bit of signposting flooded the walls as Weilerstein played — teal for Loggins-Hull, red-orange for Moya, a palate-cleansing white for Bach, and so on.But with so much randomness and manufactured confusion, I wonder whether future installments in the “Fragments” series would benefit from yet a different structure. Perhaps each Bach movement could introduce a whole work by a single composer, to give its ideas room to breathe.The program’s final piece, a greatest hit saved for last, was Bach’s Prelude, the suite’s first movement. It felt as though the preceding 60 minutes had been building to this pure, epiphanic point, turning an ending into another beginning.As concertgoers left Zankel, they were handed a set list so that they could piece together what they had seen and heard. But the catharsis of the Prelude, the comfort of its familiarity, rendered in a beautifully slender tone, made any explanation unnecessary.FragmentsPerformed on Saturday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Apple’s New App Aims to Make Classical Music More Accessible

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      The company says it has a fix for the unwieldy world of classical streaming. But it’s unclear how much traction a stand-alone app can get.In the streaming era, fans of classical music have had reason to grumble.It can be hard for veteran listeners to find what they want on platforms like Spotify, Tidal, Amazon and YouTube, which are optimized for pop music fans searching for the latest by Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. And for curious newcomers, it can be difficult to get beyond algorithmic loops of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major” and Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca.”Apple last week released a stand-alone app meant to address these problems. The app, known as Apple Music Classical, features a refined search engine, a sleek interface and a host of features aimed at making classical music more accessible, including beginners’ guides to different musical eras and commentary from marquee artists like the violinist Hilary Hahn and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.Apple hopes that the app, which has been in development since 2021, when the company acquired Primephonic, a classical streaming start-up in Amsterdam, will attract die-hard classical fans and new listeners alike. But it remains unclear how much traction the app can get in a crowded streaming market, in which Apple competes with behemoths like Spotify as well as dedicated classical services like Idagio.“This is just the beginning,” Oliver Schusser, a vice president at Apple, said in an interview, adding that Apple would continue to improve and build the app’s database. “We’re really serious about this.”I spent a few days putting Apple Music Classical to the test, trying out its search, playlists and guides to classical music. (The app is currently available only on iPhone, though an Android version is in the works; at the moment, there is no desktop version.) Here are my impressions.Cutting Through the MetadataFor pop music, a listing of artist, track and album is generally sufficient. But in classical, there are more nuances in the metadata: composer, work, soloist, ensemble, instrument, conductor, movement and nickname (like Beethoven’s “Emperor” concerto or Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony).Apple has amassed 50 million such data points, the company says, in the app — encompassing some 20,000 composers, 117,000 works, 350,000 movements and five million tracks — and its search function generally feels more intuitive than its rivals.On many streaming platforms, I have struggled to find Rachmaninoff’s recordings of his compositions. A search for his name on Spotify, for example, returns a disorderly display of his most popular works, such as “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” performed by a wide variety of artists.But on Apple Music Classical, it is easier to quickly locate his recordings because the app can distinguish between Rachmaninoff the composer and Rachmaninoff the pianist or conductor. The search function is not perfect; a Rachmaninoff track by the Chinese pianist Niu Niu also shows up in the mix of recordings by Rachmaninoff. But the app makes it much easier to hunt down specific pieces of music.A Sprawling CollectionApple Music Classical has a clean and inviting interface that mimics the main Apple Music app. But it still struggles with a problem that has long vexed classical streaming: the sheer volume of the catalog.A search for Verdi’s “Aida,” for example, turns up an eye-popping 1,330 recordings. Apple has tried to make it easier to navigate a sprawling list like that. A page for “Aida,” for example, has a brief description of the opera, an “editor’s choice” recording (Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia) and five of the most frequently played versions.But it can still feel overwhelming. It helps to know exactly what you’re looking for: the list can be searched, scrolled or sorted by popularity, name, release date or duration. If you’re interested in recordings of “Aida” featuring Leontyne Price in the title role, for example, you can type in “Leontyne” and find her performances under the baton of Erich Leinsdorf, Georg Solti, Thomas Schippers and others.
      Opera can be especially difficult to navigate on streaming platforms because of long lists of cast members. While Apple comprehensively lists singers on each track, it can be hard to figure out quickly who the stars are when perusing albums. This could be fixed through more consistent album descriptions, or an option to enlarge album covers to make the words more legible. And while Apple has introduced the ability to search by lyrics for pop songs, no such feature exists in classical yet.Apple makes the vastness of the classical repertoire more manageable through inventive playlists, which help resurface celebrated recordings. These playlists cover a variety of genres, including opera, Renaissance music, art song and minimalism. There are also lists for composers, including the usual suspects — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven — as well as contemporary artists like Kaija Saariaho and Steve Reich. “Hidden Gems” highlights overlooked albums (“Breaking Waves,” a compilation of flute music by Swedish women, for instance, or “Consolation: Forgotten Treasures of the Ukrainian Soul”). “Composers Undiscovered” showcases lesser-known works by prominent composers, like Beethoven’s Scottish songs.Attracting NewcomersApple hopes the app will help draw new listeners to classical music, and many features are aimed at shedding its elitist image.On the home screen, the app offers a nine-part introduction called “The Story of Classical,” described as a guide to the “weird and wonderful world of classical music.” The series takes listeners from the Baroque to the 21st century, with forays further back, into medieval and Renaissance music.
      A series called “Track by Track” features commentary by renowned artists, including Hahn and Ma. The cellist Abel Selaocoe, introducing an album of pieces by Bach and South African and Tanzanian folk songs, describes how hymnal music from England and the Netherlands mixed with African culture. The pianist Víkingur Olafsson talks about feeling naked onstage when he plays Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 16, “a piece we all have to face as pianists.”Part of Apple’s mission appears to be to help elevate overlooked artists, particularly women and people of color. For example, a tab of composers begins with Beethoven, Bach and Mozart but then expands to Clara Schumann, Caroline Shaw and Errollyn Wallen, as well as William Grant Still.The pianist Alice Sara Ott and the conductor Karina Canellakis are featured on an exclusive recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic.
      While using the app on a recent morning, I encountered the music of Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century Benedictine nun and composer of Gregorian chants. Hildegard, I soon discovered, is something of a star on the app, where she is described as a scientist, mystic, writer and philosopher and sits adjacent to Tchaikovsky on a composer roster. (Many of the great composers have been given enhanced digital portraits as part of Apple’s efforts to make them more realistic; Hildegard is shown in a habit, with a piercing stare.)Hildegard’s music could easily be lost in the chaos of streaming. But in the Apple universe, it gets fresh life. More