Music

Celia Bertoia’s father — the famous sculptor and not-so-famous musician Harry Bertoia — had been dead 30 years when she asked a psychic how to handle his legacy.The youngest of three children, she had long seemed to be her father’s favorite: a confidante who, as a child, would cut his hair outdoors on their forest-fronting property among the idyllic valleys of Eastern Pennsylvania. But after his death in 1978, she dodged the family business of welding together mountains of metal into behemoth public-art installations and “sounding sculptures” that made music. She became a real-estate agent in Colorado, then the owner of a Montana service that provided timing for road races.When she entered her 50s, Celia decided it was time to help manage the thousands of pieces her father had left. Her mother, Brigitta Valentiner Bertoia, had died in 2007. The next year, Celia consulted the psychic, who, knowing none of the back story, described “beautiful papers with abstract designs” — which Celia took as a reference to her father’s monotypes — and his lung cancer.Harry Bertoia is buried near the barn that houses his sounding sculptures, and under his biggest gong.Aaron Richter for The New York Times“She said: ‘The world is ready for these now. You should get these out,’” Celia, now 68, recalled in a phone conversation from the Utah office park that houses the Harry Bertoia Foundation, the nonprofit she started in 2013. “She gave me the direction.”Following the psychic’s guidance reignited the childhood rivalry between Celia and her older brother, Val, who had spent much of the previous three decades restoring, appraising and emulating his father’s sculptures in the workshop Harry established in 1952. Accusations of theft, forgery, avarice and betrayal erupted, prompting a bitter three-year lawsuit that led, in 2016, to the division of Bertoia’s most fabled work: a centuries-old stone barn stuffed with nearly 100 of his so-called Sonambients, intricate but austere sculptures he welded from rods of beryllium copper and played like a virtuoso.Many families struggle with issues of inheritance. But during the last decade, the Bertoias have learned how complicated those issues can be when that inheritance is unique.“When I first heard the sculptures, I went, ‘Wow, what is that?’ Their suppleness is so inviting,” said the composer Mark Grey, who captured their sounds with a mobile studio in 2002 to build simulacrums for the Kronos Quartet. “His sculptures leapfrog electronic music technology to create a different window into what we think sound is.”In late 2021, Sotheby’s auctioned 20 of Bertoia’s Sonambients (a rough portmanteau of sound and ambient) for nearly $6 million, prices that were in some cases ten times their estimates. Then Jack White’s Third Man Records reissued the 11 rare LPs Bertoia had recorded in the barn — recursive chimes that linger like church bells, powerful drones that roar like doom metal, tapped gongs that sing like seraphic choirs. The first pressing sold out in days. Last year, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas hosted the first domestic Bertoia retrospective in nearly half a century. There, musicians including Nels Cline and Craig Taborn played the Sonambients in a series of concerts.Those events were all partnerships with the foundation, part of Celia’s efforts to send her father’s work out into the world. Val, though, hopes to bring the world to the work. As children, they fought, and as adults, they have competing visions of their father’s legacy.“Celia and Val have the utmost respect for Harry,” Lesta Bertoia, the oldest sibling, who excused herself from the lawsuit, said in an interview. “But they have never had good communication. Now they can make up one another’s motives.”Val Bertoia with Melissa Strawser, his partner, at the Bertoia barn. Aaron Richter for The New York TimesTHE MORNING AFTER the Sotheby’s auction, 100 miles southwest of Manhattan at the family home in rural Pennsylvania, Val Bertoia bounded around what he called the “Sonambient Barn” with a devilish grin. He swatted and swiped row after row of musical sculptures ­— half of them made by his father, half by his own hand. The place shook with tectonic power, long southerly windows buzzing like beehives. His longtime partner, the artist Melissa Strawser, beamed.The Bertoia family arrived in tiny Bally, Pa., at the dawn of the 1950s. Harry was an accomplished jewelry and furniture designer who had worked with Charles and Ray Eames. He’d taken a job at the modern design bastion Knoll, where he developed the celebrated Diamond chair. Then the sound of a bending wire captured his attention and fired his imagination.An archival photograph of Harry Bertoia with his sculptures, and at left, a mallet used to activate them.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesBertoia’s grave in Pennsylvania.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesDuring his final 20 years, Bertoia developed an army of minimalist sculptures with long rods that waved like fields of grain, producing tidal washes of luminous overtones or pointillist symphonies. He added a second floor to the hay barn, where his desk remains; the rest of the barn functioned as a giant resonant chamber, filled with a rotating cast of 100 sculptures.“Being in the presence of those sounds brought me into a different world,” Celia said. “He would move around the room like a cat. He knew those sculptures better than he knew his family.”Val began working for his father at his sprawling, cluttered shop in the center of Bally in 1971. Their relationship was sometimes strained, but Val said he internalized his father’s methods. “Harry was my idol, my hero, my superman,” he said.After his father’s death, Val tended to the business. He continued making sounding sculptures, incorporating whimsy, a quality he felt his father had shunned, and numbering every piece sequentially. (After 45 years, he is nearing 2,700.) Harry Bertoia acolytes accused Val of being a charlatan who plagiarized, charged for tours and inflated appraisals.“I realized I could not replace Harry Bertoia,” Val, now 73, said. “I had my own personality and discoveries.”Harry Bertoia’s sounding sculptures are also housed at the foundation that bears his name in St. George, Utah.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesThis loose arrangement seemed to work until Celia launched her foundation. She’d been away from the sculptures for so long that she asked to shadow Val for two weeks, to get reacquainted with their dynamics and his own work. He agreed, then demanded $10,000; he admitted this was to scare her off. When Celia mentioned a few sculptures she’d requested years earlier, Val said they were gone. He’d split the proceeds only with Lesta, the sister who lived nearby. Celia hired a lawyer, battling Val over what belonged where until they settled in 2016.Celia and Lesta received 73 of the remaining 92 Sonambients. Val kept the barn, their childhood home, the workshop, and the other 19 sounding sculptures. Val described the day he spent crating his father’s sculptures as “emotionally swirling, like a hurricane.” For Celia, it was “a knife in the belly.” Lesta watched from the sidelines, telling them they were again behaving like children.A DECADE AGO, Bertoia’s musical legacy found an unexpected champion. John Brien is the owner of Important Records, a Massachusetts-based label that had documented the experimental recesses of international musical scenes for a dozen years, like harsh noise from Japan and New Zealand and graceful drones from England and Australia. He knew of Bertoia’s chairs and even kept a photo of the designer above his desk. He was embarrassed when he stumbled on a link to Bertoia’s music in 2012; how had he missed it?“There was nothing I could compare it to,” Brien said. “I wanted to know as much as I could.”Brien pitched the idea of a box set to the Bertoias, who consented despite the lawsuit. He began visiting the barn, where Harry’s Sony microphones still hung, to collect photos, slides and sketches. Released in 2016, the 11-disc “Sonambient” was the first compilation of Harry’s albums.Brien has since emerged as one of Bertoia’s most steadfast advocates, restoring and converting nearly 200 hours of unheard tape of music made on the sculptures. He has unearthed novel techniques within those recordings, including a primitive form of overdubbing. Brien said he can now identify several sculptures by sound alone.Amid the turmoil, Brien strove to be inclusive. He solicited essays from all three children. The art historian Beverly Twitchell, who organized Bertoia’s first two exhibitions while he was alive and wrote a definitive biography, contributed archival photos and guided Brien beyond the drama. And when the much-larger Third Man suggested partnering on a vinyl edition, defraying the massive cost of pressing such a large set, he agreed.“I wanted to reach a new audience unfamiliar with this music,” said Brien. “This was the way.”Celia Bertoia, the artist’s younger daughter, at the foundation.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesBrien’s work suggests an ideal path forward for the Bertoia family — partnerships, not divisions. But Celia and Val still seem hesitant to share resources, even while mounting exhaustive projects to document their father’s work.“Celia’s goal is to gain money, where I have the goal of gaining people,” Val said. (According to financial records, Celia has not drawn a salary as the foundation’s executive director for several years.) “We have two different directions — the foundation and the ‘Soundation.’ The Soundation is about how people can feel healed.”For five years, and with the help of Sotheby’s, the foundation worked to sell 60 of Celia and Lesta’s 73 Sonambients to a museum willing to build a new barn. Practicalities quashed the plan. Celia is now focused on a catalogue raisonné, a complete accounting of Harry’s work. That’s difficult to accomplish for an artist who never signed his creations, and harder still when a feud makes some of the pieces untouchable.“The catalog will survive far beyond any of the siblings,” she said. “It will ensure Harry’s work will live on.”Bertoia’s works at the foundation in Utah, which operates separately from Val Bertoia’s collection in Pennsylvania.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesVal has filled the half-empty barn with sounding sculptures of his own, opposite his father’s remaining Sonambients. Moving among them, he raved about the possibilities of what he called “the metaverse” — an augmented-reality program that will allow anyone to visit the barn virtually and play. Brien had once floated the idea, but Val and Strawser pursued it when the pandemic shuttered in-person tours.Grey, the composer, has started developing the program. It is not a question of technology, he insisted, but funding. “To see the barn in all its glory — the microphones hanging off rafters, cobwebs all over them — was remarkable, but time moves on,” Grey said. “We have the opportunity to keep this art alive.”When Twitchell, the Bertoia biographer, learned the barn’s contents would be scattered, she was sad. But practical considerations offset her disappointment. The aging barn has no security system or fire sprinklers, little parking or insurance. Even if the instruments are no longer in the same place, she said, they will at least survive.“Harry would like the idea of multiple approaches to his work,” Twitchell said. “No one would say ‘this is the only way to think about this stuff.’” More

Hear a playlist tuned to rebirth, as well as the risk to bloom. Plus: a selection of tracks that explain our readers.The cover of Waxahatchee’s “Saint Cloud.”Merge RecordsDear listeners,A few days ago, I was buried up to my neck in volcanic sand.Literally, and by choice! My sister and I spent a very restorative weekend at a spa, to celebrate her upcoming wedding and to shake off a winter that had been a challenge for each of us. This particular spa has imported natural volcanic sand from Ibusuki, a city in southwest Japan, and for a cool $30 they will have someone rake a hot, heaping quantity of it atop your body until you cannot move. Then you lay there for 15 minutes, letting the mineral-rich sand work its supposedly detoxifying magic and, if you are like me, expelling such an ungodly amount of perspiration from your face that an attendant who sees maybe a hundred people through this process each day remarks with slightly concerned awe, “Wow, you’re really sweating.”For the first few minutes, I felt like a corpse. By the end, though, as I wriggled out of the earth and once again stood upright, I have never felt more like a freshly sprouting flower in springtime. (Albeit an exceptionally sweaty one who had to sit on the bench for five extra minutes of observation because she’d been deemed a fainting risk.)The earliest weeks of springtime have such a distinct feeling that I decided to make a playlist to soundtrack them. Late March/early April is a time of rebirth but also of the friction and occasional struggle of transition — the lime-green shoot emerging from the dirt; the chrysalis stage before the butterfly. It’s the April-is-the-cruelest-month part of “The Wasteland.” It’s the “little darling, it’s been a long, cold lonely winter” part of “Here Comes the Sun.” It’s this perfect little 24-word poem by Anaïs Nin that I always find myself thinking of this time of year:And then the day came,when the riskto remain tightin a budwas more painfulthan the riskit tookto Blossom.Flowers are a recurring motif on this playlist: Waxahatchee’s blooming and then withering lilacs “marking the slow, slow, slow passing of time”; Hurray for the Riff Raff’s bemused cataloging of poetic plant names (“Rhododendron, night blooming jasmine, deadly nightshade…”). So, too, is rebirth and that worthwhile risk to bloom. Perhaps selfishly, I sneaked in one song in about “smoke floating over the volcano,” but that’s from an album I find speaks to a lot of these themes anyway, Caroline Polachek’s excellent, recently released “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.” My perennial favorites Nina Simone and the Mountain Goats make appearances, but don’t say I didn’t warn you in my introductory “11 Songs That Explain Me.”Speaking of which! Thank you so much for all your wonderful submissions when I asked last week for a song that describes you. I wish I could have included every one of them, but I wanted to share a few of my favorites below. So many of your responses were such vivid reminders of the humanizing power of music and the bone-deep connection we all have to certain songs. It was great to get to know more about who’s out there reading, too. I feel like we’re building something special together.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Waxahatchee: “Lilacs”“And the lilacs drink the water/And the lilacs die,” Katie Crutchfield sings on this bittersweet, gently twangy tune from her most recent album, “Saint Cloud”; that succinct image and the song’s stark arrangement lay bare her increasing confidence as a songwriter. (Listen on YouTube)2. Hurray for the Riff Raff: “Rhododendron”Alynda Segarra has a knack for writing songs that both celebrate the natural world and articulate the dangers of ignoring its glory. “Don’t turn your back on the mainland,” Segarra sings here, on a tuneful but defiantly prickly chorus. (Listen on YouTube)3. Troye Sivan: “Bloom”Here’s an underrated gem from a few years back: smeary, romantic, ’80s-inspired pop as vibrant as a bouquet of roses in every color. (Listen on YouTube)4. Beach House: “Lazuli”And from an album called “Bloom,” this is an atmospheric reverie from the indie-pop duo Beach House, a band that — despite the summertime humidity its name conjures — always sounds to me like the arrival of spring. (Listen on YouTube)5. Jamila Woods: “Sula (Paperback)”Inspired by Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel “Sula,” the ever-inquisitive Chicago R&B singer and poet Jamila Woods crafts an ode to self-discovery and personal growth with a refrain that stretches upward like a verdant stalk: “I’m better, I’m better, I’m better …” (Listen on YouTube)6. The Mountain Goats: “Onions”I love the way this simple, guitar-driven meditation on early spring entwines the personal with the more cosmic cycling of the seasons: “Springtime’s coming, that means you’ll be coming back around/New onions growing underground.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Caroline Polachek: “Smoke”“It’s just smoke floating over the volcano,” the avant-garde pop star Polachek sings, providing a potent reminder that all difficult periods — like, say, being buried up to your neck in a steaming pile of volcanic sand — do pass in time. (Listen on YouTube)8. Nina Simone: “Here Comes the Sun”This is such a deeply felt reading of a song so many of us know by rote: Simone’s particular phrasing cracks it open and makes you feel like you’re hearing George Harrison’s words anew. (Listen on YouTube)9. Dolly Parton: “Light of a Clear Blue Morning”Dolly Parton is, eternally, a human ray of sunshine, though perhaps never more explicitly than she is here, on this inspirational, soul-rattling classic from her first self-produced album from 1977, “New Harvest … First Gathering.” (Listen on YouTube)I feel that ice is slowly melting,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Spring Forward” track listTrack 1: Waxahatchee, “Lilacs” (2020)Track 2: Hurray for the Riff Raff, “Rhododendron” (2022)Track 3: Troye Sivan, “Bloom” (2018)Track 4: Beach House, “Lazuli” (2012)Track 5: Jamila Woods, “Sula (Paperback)” (2020)Track 6: The Mountain Goats, “Onions” (2000)Track 7: Caroline Polachek, “Smoke” (2023)Track 8: Nina Simone, “Here Comes the Sun” (1971)Track 9: Dolly Parton, “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” (1977)The songs that explain youLast week, we asked readers about the songs that explain them. More than 500 of you wrote in. Thanks to everyone who shared their stories.Cameo: “She’s Strange”I’ve always thought of it as my personal theme song in a way … it’s a tribute to a woman committed to being her unique self in the world. When I think about the things I am most proud of in my life, it’s the fact that somehow I did not let the world, society, Groupthink or even my culture of origin diminish my quiet determination to live my truth as best as my circumstances would allow. — Idara E. Bassey, Atlanta (Listen on YouTube)Mitski: “Dan the Dancer”Or perhaps the whole album of “Puberty 2.” I’m 18 years old so I feel as though I am experiencing my own second puberty, not one of first periods and training bras but one of questioning my place in the world, having new experiences, first relationships etc. For me, Dan the Dancer encapsulates my fear and questioning of the future and my life through this metaphor of hanging onto a cliff, while connecting to this experience of new relationships and letting yourself be vulnerable with those around you. — Natalie, Singapore (Listen on YouTube)Sonic Youth: “Teen Age Riot”In high school, I boarded the bus every morning in my rural Louisiana hometown wearing thick black eyeliner and a scowl, always with some flavor of abrasive alternative music blasting in my cheap earbuds. This song carried me through many of those bus rides, away from my mostly conservative, evangelical Christian peers who I couldn’t identify less with to a place where my frustrations could be heard and understood. I’m now a student at a law school where I feel immense pressure to pursue a corporate career and give up the idealism that has served as my enduring motivation. This song inspires me to look to the teenage riot that still persists within me, and remember what’s really worth fighting for. — Amanda Watson, Durham, N.C. (Listen on YouTube)Nina Simone: “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”It encapsulates the world I want to see, coupled with the wistfulness that we’re not there yet. I love the way the song starts with barely any instrumental accompaniment, just Simone’s piano and a gentle drumbeat (or maybe finger snaps?) and then builds and builds until it’s speaking to the whole world. I’ve been some kind of activist most of my life (I’m now 55), and it’s easy to be deeply discouraged by the political and ecological present we’re in and lose hope for what the future might be. This song (re-)energizes me: Nina was singing at a moment when civil rights were a legal reality but mostly a aspiration for those living with the daily indignities and violence of racism, so if she can imagine a better world, so can I. — Sarah Chinn, Brooklyn, N.Y. (Listen on YouTube)Brian Eno: “The Big Ship”I discovered this in the mid-80s at a time when I was a closeted gay teenager, longing for some sort of freedom. This ethereal piece of almost-ambience defies easy categorization. It simply builds, like a cloudy nebula descending from space, more and more sounds playing off one another until it envelopes you and reascends, taking you with it. If felt like an escape into another reality — like a peaceful transition to an open world. I’d play it on repeat with headphones to keep spiraling darkness at bay. It worked. It helped me survive. — George B. Singer, Long Beach, Calif. (Listen on YouTube)And a very special bonus track (from the artist)The dB’s: “Amplifier”I wrote this 40 years ago, and it’s probably my best-known song. It’s partially about me and my own life, but it has spoken to other desperate, depressed people, helping defuse some of their emotional distress with a little misplaced humor. Sometimes. People still react to it — this past summer, at the request of the hostess, I played the song with my dB’s rhythm section bandmates at a soundcheck for a book release party in Chapel Hill. An early attendee had a visceral meltdown over the words to the song, begging us not to play it again. So we didn’t. — Peter Holsapple, Durham, N.C. (Listen on YouTube) More

The radiant young soprano returned to the Metropolitan Opera to star as the Marschallin in a revival of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.”When the luminous soprano Lise Davidsen released her first solo album several years ago, she faced criticism over her repertoire.Chiefly, that while she was just in her early 30s she had chosen to record Strauss’s autumnal “Four Last Songs.” In an interview then, her characteristic geniality gave way to exasperation. “It pisses me off a little bit that you have to be a certain age to feel certain feelings,” she said. “Teenagers have all those feelings, and more, in a day.”With more measured calm, she added: “But I do believe that I’m entitled to take on those feelings, to take on the difficulties in life. That’s our job in opera.”She challenged doubters again on Monday when Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” returned to the Metropolitan Opera with Davidsen, 36, making her role debut as the Marschallin — a character more typically portrayed by seasoned grandes dames. So much so that this production, by Robert Carsen, opened in 2017 as a vehicle for Renée Fleming’s farewell to the role.Never mind that in the libretto, the Marschallin is in her early 30s. Or that Fleming was around Davidsen’s age when she first sang the part at Houston Grand Opera. But as Davidsen said of the “Four Last Songs,” a performer has every right to a role if she can persuasively “take on those feelings,” not to mention the notes. And Davidsen can, on both fronts.Davidsen excels in repertoire — mostly Wagner and Strauss — somewhere between the achingly human and the otherworldly: the saintly Elisabeth in “Tannhäuser,” the mythical title character in “Ariadne auf Naxos,” the forlorn Sieglinde in “Die Walküre.” The Marschallin, however, is entirely earthbound. In conflict with neither God nor the gods, she is simply staring down middle age and the inevitability of change.That said, the Marschallin is a woman of stature: influential, composed and well connected. Davidsen captures this naturally, exuding confidence more than wisdom, and behaving with discretion in public while reserving playfulness for the intimacy of her bedroom.When we meet the Marschallin, she has just spent the night with her 17-year-old lover, Octavian; over the course of the first act, her amorous bliss gives way to solemnity as she explains that their affair has an expiration date — “today or tomorrow, or the day after next.” When Fleming sang that line, it was with the authority of experience. But where her Marschallin looked back, Davidsen’s seems to look forward; she’s keeping it together while aware of the anxiety that sets in whenever she looks in the mirror.Throughout, Davidsen alternates between conversational restraint — enunciating each syllable of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s talky libretto with penetrating focus — and white-hot radiance. Her terms of endearment for Octavian emerge like a rising sun. And in the final trio, her sustained high A on the word “glücklich” (“happy”) soars and crescendos to a glowing benediction for her lover’s new life with Sophie.“Der Rosenkavalier” is an ensemble opera in which it can be difficult to call anyone a protagonist, but Davidsen’s Marschallin leaves the stage the most evolved. Among the lines that landed freshly on Monday was her last. With Sophie’s father, Faninal, she passes by the happy new couple. He sings, “Young people are always the same”; and she responds, “Yes, yes,” with a D sharp falling nearly an octave below to an E, as if sighing.On Monday, that moment was a reminder that while the opera often seems like the story of two generations, it is more like a tale of three: Octavian’s, the Marschallin’s and Faninal’s. With that “yes, yes,” Davidsen’s Marschallin suddenly matures, shedding the anxiety of wrinkles and lovers lost to enter the next phase of her life.Also remarkable on Monday was the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey, singing the role of Octavian at the Met for the first time. She made even bigger the mighty yet smooth sound, as well as the tireless energy and dramatic skill, that she brought to her performances last year in a “Rosenkavalier” at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. With a cherubic face she looked every bit the part of a young lover, and, with a touch of careless manspreading while lighting a cigarette, very much a boy.The baritone Brian Mulligan made a role debut, as well, as Faninal, with commanding ease and entertaining comedic instinct. And veterans of the production returned: the soprano Erin Morley, still a bright, elegant presence as Sophie; and the bass Günther Groissböck, still a dangerously handsome Baron Ochs, though more strained in this revival, his gravely low notes and declamatory articulation characterful but not always assured.Under Simone Young’s baton, the Met Orchestra improved as the evening progressed. The opening, a kind of pornography in music, was romantic where it should have been ecstatic, and a Mozartean interlude in the first act wasn’t scaled back to match the style; the dreamily glinting rose motif was more legato than lustrous. But Young effectively conjured the romping chaos of Ochs’s cohort in the second act, along with his famous waltz and the darker, “Salome”-like dancing rhythms of the third act.Carsen’s production remains the textbook-perfect staging of modern Met history: elegant and satisfyingly grand, smart but not daring. His major intervention — moving the opera’s setting from the 18th century to the year in which it premiered, 1911, from the cusp of revolutionary Europe to the brink of World War I — also remains eerily evocative.The Marschallin’s bedroom is covered in large canvases: portraits of great men, scenes from battle and court. It seems as though the walls can barely support the weight of history. In the first act, her life is saturated at a tipping point of decadence; a parade of visitors and excess — needy orphans, salespeople with the latest fashions, an attention-hungry tenor — overwhelm her, the score and the stage. By the end, the set opens up around Octavian and Sophie as they rejoice in their future together, revealing a line of soldiers charging into battle, and stumbling as they die.When the production opened in 2017, its depiction of a society blissfully unaware of the transformation ahead recalled the recent, surprise election of President Donald J. Trump. Since then, it has been redolent of much else in our time of too-muchness: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate disaster.If Carsen’s “Rosenkavalier” has staying power, it is because of this chameleonic resonance. As the Marschallin well knows, the only constant, in a forward-spinning world, is change.Der RosenkavalierThrough April 20 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

Embracing her boyfriend, a blanket around them, she appeared on the cover of the ubiquitous soundtrack album of “Woodstock,” the 1970 documentary film about the music festival.Bobbi Ercoline, who one morning during the Woodstock music festival rested her head on her boyfriend’s chest and in that drowsy moment became a symbol of 1960s hippiedom, died on March 18 at her home in Pine Bush, N.Y. She was 73.Her Woodstock boyfriend and later her husband, Nick Ercoline, said the cause was leukemia.About a half-million people attended the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Aug. 15-18, in 1969, a cultural phenomenon that has endured in the popular imagination partly with the help of “Woodstock,” a 1970 documentary, and its album soundtrack, featuring Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Jefferson Airplane, Richie Havens and many more musicians.Ms. Ercoline’s tender moment became the subject of a photograph chosen for the cover of the soundtrack album, a three-LP set that was once a familiar sight in record collections in dorm rooms and coffee houses throughout the country.Behind a pair of big shades, clad in a multicolored garment and partly covered by a comfy pink-trimmed blanket wrapped around her boyfriend, she seemed to embody the flower-child spirit.In fact, she and Nick represented something else: the broad appeal held by the counterculture of the 1960s.Mr. Ercoline was a bartender and construction laborer putting himself through college. Ms. Ercoline — Bobbi Kelly at the time — was a bank clerk. They were observant Roman Catholics working in Middletown, a small city near the festival site in upstate New York, and had begun dating on Memorial Day weekend.A fuller version of the photograph than appeared on the “Woodstock” album shows, to the right of the Ercolines, a sleeping young friend of theirs, Jim “Corky” Corocoran. Far from being a draft card-burner, he had recently returned from duty with the Marines in Vietnam.The $18 tickets to Woodstock struck the couple as pricey, and initially they did not plan to go.On the festival’s first night, they sat on Ms. Ercoline’s front porch with friends, including Mr. Corcoran, listening to the radio. Newscasters spoke of colossal traffic jams and hordes of young people.At about 8 o’clock the next morning, the group got into Mr. Corcoran’s mother’s 1965 Chevy Impala station wagon and set out to see what all the fuss was about.They ditched the car miles from the festival, held on a farm in Bethel, N.Y., and continued down a back road on foot. Ms. Ercoline found the blanket, which had been discarded, on the way. They also picked up a Californian, named Herbie, who was on a bad acid trip. He supplied the plastic butterfly attached to a wooden staff in the photo.The photographer who happened upon the group was Burk Uzzle, freelancing for the Magnum agency. He had visited the concert stage but decided that the story was elsewhere — the hundreds of thousands of audience members, some tripping, others building tents, skinny-dipping in a pond and sharing crates of bananas and loaves of bread.Mr. Uzzle woke up at about 4:30 on Sunday morning and roved through the crowd. He spotted Bobbi and Nick from about 15 feet away and made use of advice from the Magnum founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had told him to study the detailed compositions of the Quattrocento painters of Renaissance Italy, as Mr. Uzzle told The New York Times in 2019.“I walk up and I know the curvature of the hill has to work with the curvature of the heads,” he recalled. “And there’s the flag, it’s going to have to be there, and just enough of the people.”The day the “Woodstock” soundtrack came out, Mr. Corcoran bought a copy, and the group gathered to listen to it. They did not immediately realize that they were pictured on the cover because they had looked first at the back of the record sleeve to see which songs had been included.“That’s when I realized I needed to tell my mother that I had gone to Woodstock,” Ms. Ercoline told The New York Post in 2019, on Woodstock’s 50th anniversary.The group’s initial intent was to get home in time for church on Sunday, she told New York’s Eyewitness News in an interview the same year. The picture was incriminating, she said with a smile: “Proof that I did not go to Mass.”Bobbi and Nick Ercoline visiting the Woodstock site in 2019. Fifty years earlier, they were part of a horde of festivalgoers half a million strong. Dan Fastenberg/ReutersBarbara du-Wan Kelly was born on June 14, 1949, in Middletown and grew up not far away in the hamlet of Pine Bush. Her father, John, was a mechanic, and her mother, Eleanor (Gihr) Kelly, was a homemaker.She and Mr. Ercoline married in 1971. After focusing on raising their sons, Mathew and Luke, she got an associate’s degree in nursing at Orange County Community College in 1986. As a nurse, she worked mainly at an elementary school. Mr. Ercoline became a union carpenter and a construction inspector.In addition to her husband, Ms. Ercoline is survived by her sons; a brother, John; and a sister, Cindy Corcoran (who married one of Mr. Corcoran’s brothers); and four grandchildren.The Ercolines became frequent interview subjects for historians of Woodstock, and they often spoke about their marriage as a symbol of its lasting influence and an example of peace and love in action. Every morning when they woke up and every night before they went to bed, they kissed and held each other for about a minute — just as they had on a grassy hill in the summer of 1969. More

The singer and songwriter’s ninth album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” asks big, earnest questions and isn’t afraid to get messy.“I wrote you a note, but I didn’t send it,” Lana Del Rey sings on her rangy ninth album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” — a 16-song, 78-minute collection as sprawling, hypnotic and incorrigibly American as an interstate highway.Many of the tracks have the run-on, handwritten feel of letters never mailed, and this particular one, the fluttering piano ballad “Sweet,” is addressed to a paramour who seems unwilling to go as deep as the 37-year-old Del Rey. “Lately we’ve been making out a lot,” she sings, spinning her signature, soft-serve swirl of the sacred and profane, “not talking ’bout the stuff that’s at the very heart of things.”More than any of its predecessors, this Del Rey album is about the very heart of things. Its themes and lyrical preoccupations are philosophical and weighty: the existence of God; the afterlife; the precise moment the soul leaves the body; the concessions of marriage and motherhood; fate; familial bonds; and, on the strikingly melancholy centerpiece “Fingertips,” recent scientific progress into the attainment of eternal life. “God, if you’re near me, send me three white butterflies,” she sings three-quarters into the LP, in a voice that’s almost childlike in its surging sincerity. Throughout “Ocean Blvd,” an artist who arrived on the scene sounding like a nihilist is now searching and sincerely self-scrutinizing, sending earnest questions into a possible void.The album’s title itself suggests hidden depths beneath picturesque surfaces — something Del Rey knows a thing or two about. When she debuted with the 2011 viral hit “Video Games” and an awkward, excessively maligned “Saturday Night Live” performance, the musician born Elizabeth Grant was dismissed by some skeptics as nothing more than a pretty face, all retro artifice and pouty pastiche. But as she’s sharpened her pencil, most powerfully on the eerie 2014 LP “Ultraviolence” and her sublime 2019 album “Norman _____ Rockwell!,” Del Rey has proved to be an expert chronicler of her own interiority as well as a larger, more diffuse cultural subconscious. Del Rey, at her best, has a finger not just on the pulse, but somewhere beneath the flesh.And she is occasionally at her best here. “Ocean Blvd” is Del Rey’s strongest and most daring album since “Rockwell,” though it’s also marked by uneven pacing and occasional overindulgence. On an excellent four-song opening stretch, Del Rey establishes the album’s unhurried pace and her connection to that fabled tunnel, a sealed-up, subterranean bit of West Coast architecture — one of the few places in California where the sun can’t shine. “I can’t help but feel somewhat like my body marred my soul,” Del Rey croons on the mournful, gorgeously string-kissed title track.A few songs later, on the shape-shifting nightmare “A&W,” she finds an even darker line of inquiry: “Look at my hair, look at the length of it and the shape of my body,” she sings atop a droning, monotonous chord progression that conjures early Cat Power. “If I told you that I was raped, do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?” The line is more shocking for the vaporous, ultra-femme falsetto in which she delivers it — as if the ballerina inside a music box opened her mouth and sang.Part of the thrill of Del Rey’s music is the sense that she can and will say absolutely anything, regardless of who it may offend. She makes a somewhat clumsy admission of her own white privilege on “Grandfather Please Stand on the Shoulders of My Father While He’s Deep-Sea Fishing”: “I’m blue, I’m green, regrettably also a white woman/But I have good intentions even if I’m one of the last ones.” The line is complicated by the fact that, save for her brief forays into hip-hop on her grab-bag 2017 album “Lust for Life,” “Ocean Blvd” is more conversant with Black music than any other entry in her discography. Gospel is a particular touchstone. Some of the first voices heard on the record are Melodye Perry and Pattie Howard, onetime backing singers for Whitney Houston; later, the jazz musician Jon Batiste accompanies Del Rey on the pirouetting duet “Candy Necklaces” and stays, to testify, on a fiery three-minute interlude.At this unfettered stage in her career, Del Rey’s music is driven by a tension between freedom and structure; her greatest material finds its quivering equilibrium. Two six-minute compositions in the middle of “Ocean Blvd,” though, test the limits of Del Rey’s penchant for free verse. “Kintsugi,” an aching meditation on the deaths of several family members, mostly works; it’s discursive and diaristic, but a repeated refrain borrowed from Leonard Cohen (“that’s how the light gets in”) is an effective anchor. “Fingertips,” despite containing some of the record’s most piercing lyrics, simply drifts. The return of meter, on the elegant “Paris, Texas,” comes as a relief.Partly based on a piano-driven instrumental track by the indie composer SYML, “Paris, Texas” is one of 11 songs that Del Rey co-produced with Jack Antonoff, who has become a trusted collaborator. A handful of songs also evolved out of impromptu Sunday jam sessions that Del Rey’s boyfriend at the time, the film producer and amateur guitarist Mike Hermosa, recorded on his phone; a few of them (“Peppers,” “Let the Light In”) have a playful, flirtatious feel. (“When we broke up,” Del Rey said in a recent Rolling Stone U.K. interview, “I was like, ‘You know at some point we’re going to talk about the fact that you have half of this album.’” He is credited as a writer on five songs.)“Ocean Blvd” closes with a trio of those lighter and more irreverent tracks that stray from the heart of things, giving the album’s concluding moments the sense of a cosmic shrug: “Get high, drop acid, never die,” she sings in responses on the final track. But she also seems to have embraced the more superficial pleasures of gaudy, earthly delights. “Peppers” is at once inane and irresistible (“me and my boyfriend listen to the Chili Peppers”). Del Rey has asked God for guidance and accepted Anthony Kiedis’s scat-nonsense as the answer. What could be more Californian than that?That three-song suite that concludes “Ocean Blvd” can certainly feel like an anticlimax, or a retreat from the existential questions posed in its opening movement. But it’s also a perfect distillation of the duality that makes Del Rey’s 21st-century siren songs so singular. Nine albums into her career, she has become a musical mermaid, capable of breathing as easily on the surface as she can in the ocean’s darkest depths. More

The country star’s hit-stuffed streaming blockbuster is just shy of one million equivalent sales. U2 opens at No. 5 with an album of acoustic rerecordings.Morgan Wallen is not budging from No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, with the country star’s latest hit-stuffed double album holding the top spot for a third week in a row.Wallen’s 36-track “One Thing at a Time” racked up the equivalent of another 209,500 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate, bringing its three-week total to just shy of one million. In its most recent week, it had 256 million streams and sold 12,500 copies as a complete package.Two years ago, Wallen’s last release, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” spent its first 10 weeks at No. 1, even amid a media controversy and temporary radio ban after Wallen was caught on video using a racial slur. Can “One Thing at a Time” match the success of its predecessor? That album’s success, by the way, is ongoing; this week “Dangerous” holds at No. 7, logging its 112th week in the Top 10.Also this week, SZA’s “SOS” climbs two spots to No. 2, and Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” rises three to No. 3; both are former No. 1s that got boosts from their creators being on tour. Miley Cyrus’s “Endless Summer Vacation” is No. 4.U2, the veteran Irish rock band, is No. 5 with “Songs of Surrender,” a retrospective project of mostly acoustic rerecordings of some of the group’s signature songs. It arrived with the promotion of a Disney+ documentary and the recent announcement of a concert residency this fall at a high-tech new venue in Las Vegas, the MSG Sphere.The most complete form of “Songs of Surrender” — standard on streaming services, and a “super deluxe” four-LP doorstopper — includes 40 songs over nearly three hours. The album opens with the equivalent of 46,500 sales, mostly from copies sold as a complete package. More

In works like “John Somebody,” he mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.Scott Johnson, a composer and guitarist who forged an original style involving the rhythmic cadences of speech and the gestures and timbres of popular music, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 70.Mr. Johnson’s sister Susan Lee Johnson said the cause was complications of aspiration pneumonia. Mr. Johnson had also been diagnosed with lung cancer in May 2021.Mr. Johnson immersed himself in music and art from an early age and played in rock bands in high school. His artistic breakthrough came with “John Somebody,” a playfully inventive work for solo electric guitar with taped accompaniment, which he assembled from 1980 to 1982, and which, as performed regularly and recorded in 1986, won him considerable acclaim.To create that work, Mr. Johnson transcribed into approximate musical notation portions of a friend’s telephone conversation he had recorded in 1977 (“You know who’s in New York? You remember that guy, John somebody? He was a … he was sort of a…”), along with other snatches of speech and laughter.Mr. Johnson added dense layers of guitar, saxophone and percussion, and a virtuosic solo part for live guitarist, with pitches, melodic motifs and rhythms derived from the recorded vocalism. The result mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.“To these ears, the music mirrors the subterranean rumble, the welter of voices and other overlaid sounds of the city, with the cries of superamplified guitars hovering like angels above the fray,” Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote about “John Somebody” in 1986. “It’s a compelling marriage of rock elements and classical formalism that doesn’t shortchange either.”Mr. Johnson refined and extended the process he developed for “John Somebody” in several subsequent works. He also created purely instrumental works and, for a time, led an ensemble comprising three saxophonists, two electric guitarists, an electric bass guitarist and two drummers.The technical demands of Mr. Johnson’s music could make collaboration a daunting prospect. But he formed close bonds with younger artists and groups like the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound and the guitarist and composer Mark Dancigers, who came of age at a time when fluency in rock and pop idioms became more prevalent among concert-music composers and performers.“He was a player who embraced complexity,” Mr. Dancigers said in a phone interview. “The writing is challenging from a number of perspectives: There are leaps, there are rapid virtuosic passages, there are chord voicings that change very rapidly.”Mr. Dancingers suggested that Mr. Johnson’s compositions paved the way for younger composers similarly inclined toward hybridity. “The first time I heard him present his music,” he said, “I thought, this guy’s a little ahead of his time.”Mr. Johnson developed a passion for electric guitar in high school, and his music mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.Patricia NolanScott Richard Johnson was born in Madison, Wis., on May 12, 1952. His father, Robert Warren Johnson, worked in marketing, merchandising and sales positions for a battery company. His mother, Janet Mary (Stecker) Johnson, was a homemaker. They both belonged to a church choir and attended concerts by the local symphony orchestra.Intellectually inquisitive and artistically inclined, Mr. Johnson played clarinet before switching to electric guitar in high school. An early infatuation with folk groups like the Kingston Trio ceded to a passion for Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.“His bands practiced in the family basement,” his sister Susan wrote in an email, “and the practice sessions shook the house.”Hearing Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring” sparked Mr. Johnson’s interest in modern classical composition. By college, he wrote in a biography on his website, “I was studying music theory during the week and playing in bars on the weekends.”Daunted by the serialist compositional style that held sway in academia, Mr. Johnson turned to visual art. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a bachelor’s degree in art in 1974 and then drove a cab in Madison for a year to finance his move to New York City in 1975.By that time he had temporarily set music aside. But he quickly established himself among a rising generation of versatile, inquisitive Downtown creators, including the composers Rhys Chatham, Peter Gordon and Arthur Russell, the choreographer Karole Armitage and the interdisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson, with all of whom he collaborated.On arrival, Mr. Johnson supported himself by demolishing and renovating lofts with a friend from Madison, Scott Billingsley, later known as the filmmaker Scott B. He also joined Mr. Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra.“It sometimes took Scott days to be able to use his fingers for guitar, after sanding floors all day” Mr. Gordon said by email. Like many other downtown composers, including Mr. Gordon, Mr. Johnson also worked as a tape editor for the sound artist and performer Charlie Morrow.Tape played a key role in Mr. Johnson’s oeuvre. For the earliest work he acknowledges on his website, “Home and Variations” (1979), he manipulated the voices of members of a dance company to accompany a dance.In the liner notes he wrote for a 2004 reissue of “John Somebody” on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Mr. Johnson said that germinal material for the piece dated as far back as 1977. At that time, he had to cut up strips of magnetic tape and then tape them back together. One particular passage in the work, he recounted, required a tape loop 25 feet long.Addressing the work’s development in a 2018 interview for the web publication NewMusicBox, Mr. Johnson cited several inspirations: early tape works in which Steve Reich looped and layered recorded speech, the call-and-response convention fundamental to the blues, and compositions in which Olivier Messiaen transcribed and notated bird song. In turn, “John Somebody” announced a signature style that anticipated Mr. Reich’s landmark 1988 piece “Different Trains,” and had a strong influence on other composers.Despite the seeming novelty of his approach, Mr. Johnson asserted his alliance to a historic lineage of rigorous formal composition. In his view, bringing elements of rock into the concert-music world extended a tradition of composers borrowing from vernacular styles, like folk songs. “John Somebody,” he wrote, resulted “when the partially developed elements laid out on my table met the animating idea of the Baroque dance suite, episodic but unified.”Mr. Johnson performed the work regularly. A 1986 recording made for the upstart record company Icon benefited from a partnership with Nonesuch, a more established label whose cachet was growing, and the commercial clout of that label’s corporate parent, Warner Bros.Mr. Johnson’s score for the 1988 Paul Schrader film “Patty Hearst” was released on Nonesuch. So were portions of “How It Happens” (1991-93), an evening-length composition for the Kronos Quartet with the recorded voice of the political commentator I.F. Stone, scattered across three different albums.Mr. Johnson, increasingly used his speech-manipulation technique to address social and philosophical concerns. In “Americans” (2003), he sampled the speech of immigrants recorded in Queens to examine cultural isolation and assimilation. For “Mind Out of Matter” (2009-15), a 75-minute work for Alarm Will Sound, he employed the voice of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has examined the history of religion.The Alarm Will Sound conductor Alan Pierson grew familiar with Mr. Johnson’s exactitude while preparing “Mind Out of Matter.” The percussion parts included some nearly impossible passages, and at one point players suggested altering a few notes.“Even as a conductor and a listener, I’m thinking you’re probably not even going to hear those notes,” Mr. Pierson said by phone. “But having to rethink that was so intense for Scott. Watching the amount of attention that he would put into reconsidering just a couple of notes, in a passage where there was so much going on, was really something to see.”In addition to his sister Susan, Mr. Johnson is survived by another sister, Lynne Ann Johnson. His wife, Marlisa Monroe, a classical-music publicist, apparently died on Friday: A Police Department spokesperson confirmed on Saturday that a 70-year-old woman was found unconscious and unresponsive, and later pronounced dead, at the Manhattan address where Mr. Johnson and Ms. Monroe lived. No cause of death has yet been determined; an investigation is ongoing.In his last months, Mr. Johnson completed a final composition: a wholly acoustic work for string quartet and mezzo-soprano. The piece, titled “Map,” features an elegiac text by Mr. Johnson, which reads in part:Every route is a branching fatewell worn path or departureshared inherited highwaysengineered exitsor unmarked dirt swervesaccidents, errors, discoveries. More

Lyric Opera of Chicago follows a recent world premiere with yet another: “Proximity,” a set of works by three librettist-composer pairs.CHICAGO — Major opera companies used to put on new or recent works once in a blue moon. But, astonishingly, pieces by living composers make up about a third of the Metropolitan Opera’s coming season. And on Friday, Lyric Opera of Chicago, just a month after one world premiere, presented another.Houses like these have been spurred by a hunger for fresh audiences that don’t have any particular devotion to “Aida” or “La Traviata.” But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Creaking into development mode is a huge shift for institutions that have, for decades, almost solely done works from the distant past.And in Lyric’s premiere here on Friday, “Proximity,” the company gave itself an even more ambitious assignment than one new commission: three of them, by three composer-librettist pairs, sharing a single evening. Moreover, each opera takes on a different capital-I Issue, dealing with our closeness to and dependence on others: gun violence in Chicago; the difficulty of connection in a world mediated by technology; and the threat we pose to our planet.That this unwieldy idea ended up being stageworthy — sober, often blunt, sometimes meditative, sometimes listless, sometimes aggressively affecting — is largely because of the production’s ingenious director, Yuval Sharon.In shows like his “La Bohème,” which presented the opera’s four acts in reverse, Sharon has proved himself adept at executing thorny, even silly-sounding concepts in ways that end up being surprisingly clever and moving. With “Proximity,” he avoided the obvious decision to play the three pieces one after the other, à la Puccini’s “Il Trittico.”Instead, Sharon showed them off to better effect by putting them in closer, well, proximity: weaving them together, alternating scenes from the operas in a two-act evening. So, for example, the final half-hour of Act I brings the audience from a stylized Chicago L ride in “Four Portraits” (music by Caroline Shaw; text by Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke) to a realistic funeral in “The Walkers” (Daniel Bernard Roumain; Anna Deavere Smith), to the abstract poetry of “Night” (John Luther Adams; John Haines).Caroline Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke’s “Four Portraits” features a stylized ride on Chicago’s elevated train system.Todd RosenbergWith the edges of the scores smoothed by the conductor, Kazem Abdullah, and Lyric’s excellent orchestra, the three sound worlds play nicely together, with a shared grounding in repeating, minimal motifs, steady tonality and sensible, self-effacing lyricism — no earworm melodies, but no harshness, either, and hardly any look-at-me virtuosity.For a flexible set, the production designers Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras have stretched an LED screen across the stage floor and, halfpipe-style, up the backdrop. The screen is filled with spiffy and colorful imagery: slowly panning Chicago streetscapes seen from above; vast vistas of outer space; pulsating visualizations of communications networks. Without unwieldy scene changes, the three operas blend into a single performance with impressive seamlessness.It helps that Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera, is experienced with collaborations (and logistics) even more complicated than this. For “Hopscotch” — presented in 2015 by the Industry, the experimental company he founded in California — audience members got into cars that drove around Los Angeles, and six composers and six writers shared billing.And his job is made easier here in Chicago by the fact that these are not three roughly equal installments, like the ones in “Il Trittico.” “The Walkers,” at an hour, is longer than “Four Portraits” and “Night” combined, so those shorter pieces naturally feel like interludes, breaking up a work that would otherwise dominate the threesome.And none of the three tells a story so realistic or sustained that it feels jolting to interrupt. The libretto of “The Walkers” is the latest in Smith’s long career of creating politically charged dramatic texts drawn from interviews she has conducted — in this case, with people she was introduced to through Chicago CRED and Choose to Change, organizations devoted to addressing gun violence in the city.Some passages from the interviews are sung as lamenting monologues, in the style of TED Talks; some remain spoken, with light underscoring. Quirks of speech — “you know,” “uh” — are preserved in a bit of naturalism that, especially when sung, is also endearingly strange.But some confusion is introduced because Smith and Roumain have, alongside these somber, stand-alone statements, embedded a loosely developed, difficult-to-follow plot about a gang rivalry, formed from composites of interview subjects. However impassioned the soprano Kearstin Piper Brown may be, it’s hard to make the plight of her roughly sketched character — who is targeted for killing after she is wrongly assumed to have shot a child — as clear or compelling as the plain-spoken truth of the longer monologues.The score is least convincing in slouchily rhythmic, singsong passages with drum kit. But Roumain pulls his orchestra back to a mellow steady-state undercurrent for the monologues, emphasizing the clarity of the text above all.And the funeral scene near the end of Act I is a persuasive Requiem, with lightly neo-Baroque solemnity and some stirring arias, including ones for the noble-toned baritone Norman Garrett and the shining tenor Issachah Savage as two of the figures who “walk” among vulnerable youth and attempt to guide them.The first of Shaw’s “Four Portraits” conveys a relationship between characters named only A (the countertenor John Holiday) and B (the baritone Lucia Lucas) that is stymied by an inability to connect: The call literally won’t go through.Shaw’s instrumental textures — ethereal strings; pricks of brasses and winds; sprightly pizzicato plucking; Minimalism-derived repetitions, more tentative than relentless — support a babble of fractured voices representing the technological ether, a conceit Nico Muhly explored in his 2011 opera “Two Boys.” Here and in the second section, that crowded L ride, the dramaturgy is hazy, the music bland.The last two sections are more interesting and beautiful, with troubled darknesses under the surface serenity. Shaw renders a car’s GPS as an electronically processed voice that veers from turn-left instructions to poetic flights, yielding to an introspective aria just right for Lucas’s tender voice.And in the final “portrait,” Lucas and Holiday, his tone floating into a soar, at last encounter each other without barriers, the music grandly building as a choir makes a trademark Shaw sound: a kind of modest, sliding low hum. (While Carlos J. Soto’s street clothes in “The Walkers” are an agile mixture of everyday and fanciful, the shapeless gray robes in “Four Portraits” do neither singer any favors.)Zoie Reams as the Erda-like narrator of John Luther Adams and John Haines’s “Night.”Todd RosenbergThe most disappointing of the three pieces is the 12-minute “Night,” a monotonous and clotted score from Adams, a usually inventive composer whose sonic depictions of ocean depths and parched, flickering deserts have been uncannily evocative. Here, his mezzo-soprano Sibyl (Katherine DeYoung, filling in for an ill Zoie Reams), like Erda in Wagner’s “Ring,” is a kind of earth goddess offering gnomic warning about a coming reckoning. Lowered from the flies and walking amid images of planets and stars, she is interrupted for stretches by a stentorian chorus.It’s a dreary way to end the first act. The second comes to a close in more powerful, if also emotionally manipulative, fashion, with the last scene of “The Walkers.” Singing the first-person account of Yasmine Miller, whose 20-month-old baby was killed in a 2020 shooting, Whitney Morrison’s gentle soprano is a little timid and tremulous. But the story is so obviously heartbreaking, and her performance so sincere, that criticizing her feels like actually criticizing a grieving mother.Mustering a warmly supportive chorus and a clichéd, echoey faux-choral keyboard effect, this finale is almost orgiastically sentimental, down to Miller’s smiling story about the new child she’s pregnant with and a quotation ascribed to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey emblazoned on the screen: “For Black people, hope has to be resurrected every day.”Treacle is, of course, hardly foreign to opera. But bending real tragedy into thin uplift is.ProximityThrough April 8 at the Lyric Opera House, Chicago; lyricopera.org. More