Music

A global event today, the orchestra’s annual New Year’s Concert took shape during dark days in Austrian history.If the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Concert is a global success, its legacy and reach rest on five pillars: a marvelous orchestra; internationally renowned conductors; a timeless repertoire, by the Strauss family and other composers of the 19th century; a splendid location, the gilded Musikverein; and TV broadcasts watched most recently by some 1.2 million people in 92 countries on five continents.The event, which returns this weekend with Franz Welser-Möst leading the Philharmonic, is by now a familiar one, and a multiday affair with three concerts. Between the preview performance, the New Year’s Eve Concert and the New Year’s Concert, conductors and the orchestra are faced with the extreme demands of an emotionally and physically challenging marathon. Just days after the series of concerts, CDs and DVDs of the Jan. 1 concert are released for sale worldwide.In the 19th century, the repertoire of today’s New Year’s Concert was part of a diverse concert business in the many entertainment venues that existed in almost every district of Vienna, including open-air stages. On weekends, this mixture of Viennese popular music, including swinging waltzes, wild polkas and military marches, enthused thousands of visitors, often as many as 10,000.Gerald Heidegger, the editor in chief of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation’s online services, rightly said in the series “Straussmania” on Topos, produced with the Vienna Institute of Contemporary and Cultural History: “Our image of the Biedermeier era is slightly distorted. It is not completely true that the era of the authoritarian state of Chancellor Metternich only led us to retreat into a private sphere, when one considers the music played in public.”This kind of popular music was revolutionary in terms of its exuberance and the physical proximity encouraged by new forms of dance, and it accompanied Vienna’s booming development into one of the world’s largest cities in the rapid globalization during the years leading up to World War I. Today, in another era of fast-moving developments in technology and politics, the music has not lost any of its emotional impact; people still seem to seek joyful distractions.The ostensible lightness of the countless waltzes, polkas and marches, however, hides a technique that challenges the musicians. Crucial to pulling it off is a nonverbal rapport between the orchestra and the conductor — another characteristic quality of the New Year’s Concert. And the selection of the repertoire requires an exciting dramaturgy in the combination of familiar and unknown pieces. This year, Welser-Möst has dedicated some 70 percent of the program to new works.In the 19th century, the Strauss bands were very much competitors of the Philharmonic, which as the Vienna State Opera orchestra thrilled audiences in the Court Opera Theater while having to play for additional income as the private company known as the Vienna Philharmonic. The conductor Ernst Theis has researched the early interactions between these orchestras and noted that Eduard Strauss gave a New Year’s concert with a 60-person orchestra as early as Jan. 1, 1871, playing not only waltzes and polkas, but also lieder and opera excerpts.A report from 1872 shows, however, that many members of the Philharmonic thought the Strauss clan and their music “harmed the reputation of the Philharmonic concerts.” Still, in 1894, the Philharmonic played at the celebrations marking Johann Strauss II’s 50 years in the business, and a few months before his death in 1899, he conducted the Court Opera orchestra during the performance of his “Die Fledermaus” for the first and last time, the final success of a remarkable career.The conductor Clemens Krauss used relationships with Nazi leaders to further his career in Germany before returning to Austria, where he led the Vienna Philharmonic in an annual “Johann Strauss concert.”Imagno/Getty ImagesThis ambivalence toward the Strauss family would change after World War I. From 1927 onward, the conductor Clemens Krauss in particular repeatedly chose to perform pieces from the Strauss repertoire, including at the Salzburg Festival. It was only in 1934, when he succumbed to the temptations of the Nazi regime and abruptly left Vienna for Berlin, that the Philharmonic’s infatuation with Strauss ended.After the Anschluss in 1938, Krauss returned to Austria and revived the tradition of “Johann Strauss concerts” (a reference to both father and son). The musician Clemens Hellsberg, writing in 1992, and the historian Fritz Trümpi, in 2011, have emphasized Krauss’s role as the initiator of the “Johann Strauss concert” — then termed an “Extraordinary Concert” — as the calendar turned from 1939 to 1940. The proceeds went to the National Socialist wartime winter relief fund.Krauss soon developed the next important pillar of the New Year’s Concert on its way to becoming a global music event: radio broadcasts throughout the German Reich. In November 1940, a contract with the Reich Radio Corporation established that there would be “four Philharmonic Academies in the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna played for Greater German Radio” — on Dec. 13, 1940, and Jan. 1 (a “Johann Strauss concert”), Jan. 25 and March 15, 1941 — conducted by Krauss.Without any intervention by Nazi potentates, the refreshing and emotionally uplifting “waltzing bliss” was a perfect fit with National Socialist propaganda, in particular its broadcasting policy — as were Mozart and Lehár. The program notes for the first of these series performed in Vienna not only stressed the intended mass impact of the contribution to “German music,” but also included ideological emphasis on the early history of waltz compositions in “suburban inns” as an “expression of the East Bavarian tribe that stood here on advance border watch,” which was, of course, a complete distortion and misinterpretation of the cultural developments in Vienna during the Biedermeier period.Joseph Goebbels, third from left, with the opera singer Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender, left, the actor Paul Hartmann; the singer Jan Kiepura; the actor Gustaf Gründgens; the Nazi official Walther Funk; and Mr. Krauss, right, at a party in 1935.Heinrich Hoffmann/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesThe politicization of the music of the Strauss family and their milieu was taken to extremes when the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels even had the composer’s partly Jewish descent covered up by falsifying the baptismal registers in Vienna. Incidentally, this act was accompanied by a diary entry in which Goebbels revealed the sheer absurdity of his antisemitic beliefs:Some clever so-and-so has discovered that Joh. Strauss is an eighth Jewish. I forbid this from being made public. For firstly, it isn’t proven, and secondly, I do not want to have German cultural heritage in its entirety gradually undermined in this manner. In the end we will be left with only Widukind, Heinrich the Lion and Rosenberg. That’s not a lot. Mussolini goes about things much more cleverly here. He occupies the entire history of Rome from the earliest days of Antiquity for himself. We are just parvenus in comparison. I’m doing what I can about it. That is also the Führer’s will.The selling point the New Year’s Concert enjoys today as a global event applied neither during World War II nor in the years that followed; it remained limited to Germany and, after the war, Austria. The former Johann Strauss concert was firmly a tradition, and Josef Krips, who conducted the Jan. 1, 1946, concert — the first to be billed as a New Year’s Concert — noted succinctly: “I began 1946 with the first New Year’s Concert in peacetime.”Krips, stigmatized by the Nazis as a half-Jewish conductor, clearly had no problem with the continuation of the concert, whose last performance had taken place when the mood was apocalyptic. The New Year’s Concert lived on as solely Austrian cultural heritage — with Krauss as conductor until 1954, followed by Willi Boskovsky, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster, until 1979.The violinist Willi Boskovsky conducting the New Year’s Concert in 1977.KPA/United Archives, via Getty ImagesIn 1959, the New Year’s Concert began to develop into an international event with its first television broadcast. The first color broadcast took place a decade later; the first overseas one, in 1972. And since 1980, the New Year’s Concert has been led by alternating, international conductors — a move that reflected its global interest.But the formative phase of the New Year’s Concert — the Nazi era — went unexamined in Austria and abroad until the past decade. Today, those years are extensively documented on the Philharmonic’s website. International music history in particular can make an important contribution to a critical assessment of Austria’s role in National Socialism, World War II and the Holocaust.In 2013, for instance, after much preliminary work, Clemens Hellsberg, then the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic, initiated a critical documentary on the orchestra and commissioned a comprehensive study by a team of historians — including me — on members of the orchestra who were persecuted, murdered or forced into exile. This was followed in 2014 by the international conference “The Arts of Vienna: A Proud History, A Painful Past.”Those artists whose lives were sidelined by the Third Reich will be memorialized with stones, placed at the sites where they last lived, that Daniel Froschauer, the Philharmonic’s chairman, will present to the public on March 23. In 2023, then, the orchestra aims to broadcast not just a rich tradition, but also a message of peace.Oliver Rathkolb is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Vienna in Austria, and the chairman of the Vienna Institute for Cultural and Contemporary History and the Academic Committee of the House of European History in Brussels.Lydia Rathkolb contributed research. More

A rancher for most of his life, he began his music career as half of the folk-era duo Ian and Sylvia and was also celebrated for his commitment to the culture of Canada’s ranch country.Before Canadian musicians like Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, there was Ian Tyson.Mr. Tyson, who began his music career as half of the folk-era duo Ian and Sylvia and went on to become a revered figure in his home country, celebrated both for his music and his commitment to the culture of Canada’s ranch country, died on Thursday at age 89 at his ranch in southern Alberta.His family said in a statement that he died from “ongoing health complications,” but did not specify further.Mr. Tyson, whose song “Four Strong Winds” in 2005 was voted the most essential Canadian piece of music by the listeners of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation public radio network, lived most of his life as both a rancher and a musician.Performances of his songs like “Four Strong Winds” by Mr. Young, Johnny Cash and others, and “Someday Soon,” particularly by Judy Collins, made his music, if not always his name, well-known in the United States.But his persona as a weathered rancher-musician, who performed and ran the Tyson ranch south of Calgary well into his 80s, stubbornly keeping on despite the ravages of time, changing tastes, economic hardship and, for a time, the loss of his voice, made him emblematic in Canada, much as Mr. Cash was on the other side of the border.Mr. Young, in the 2006 Jonathan Demme concert film “Heart of Gold,” recalled being 16 or 17 and spending all his money playing the Ian and Sylvia version of “Four Strong Winds” over and over on the jukebox at a restaurant near Winnipeg. “It was the most beautiful record that I’ve heard in my life, and I just could not get enough of it,” he said.Ian Dawson Tyson was born Sept. 25, 1933, in Victoria, British Columbia, the second child of George and Margaret Tyson. Mr. Tyson learned to ride horses on a small farm owned by his father, an insurance salesman and polo enthusiast who had emigrated from England in 1906. Mr. Tyson grew up entranced by horses, and beginning in his teens, he competed on the rodeo circuit. He learned to play guitar while in a Calgary hospital recovering from a broken ankle sustained in a fall.He began performing folk and rock in the late 1950s, but then graduated from the Vancouver School of Art in 1958 and moved to Toronto to work as a commercial artist.There, he performed in local clubs, and in 1959 began singing with a dark-haired young woman named Sylvia Fricker. They became a full-time folk act in 1961, performing as Ian and Sylvia, and were married four years later.In 1962, they moved to New York and became mainstays in the emergent American folk scene, and friends with Bob Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who described Mr. Tyson as “movie-star handsome” and “the best looking of all the cowboy dudes in Greenwich Village” in her 2008 memoir, “A Freewheelin’ Time.” The high-powered manager Albert Grossman, who managed Mr. Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary and others, signed them to Vanguard Records. Their first record, “Ian & Sylvia,” consisted of mostly traditional British and Canadian folk songs.Ian and Sylvia in 1970. They became a full-time folk act in 1961 and were married four years later.Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
Their second, “Four Strong Winds,” was more eclectic. It included Mr. Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” and the title track, Mr. Tyson’s first song, which he said he wrote in about a half-hour, spurred on by Mr. Dylan’s emergence as a songwriter.It was, he said, about “a lovely Greek girl, I was always leaving and regretting it,” in Vernon, British Columbia. (Her name was Evinia Pulos and, as it turned out they carried on an on-again-off-again love affair over six decades). A tale of lost love and itinerant farm and ranch work set against the Canadian West and the implacable forces of nature (“Four strong winds that blow lonely/Seven seas that run high/All those things that don’t change come what may”), it set the tone for how his work would evolve over time.In 1968, before the Byrds’ seminal country-rock album, “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” the two relocated to Nashville where they recorded two country-influenced albums and formed the country rock group Great Speckled Bird. The couple recorded 13 albums before they stopped performing and then divorced in 1975.Mr. Tyson returned to western Canada, where he resumed ranching, and focused on his solo career. And after hosting a show on Canada’s national television network, between 1970 and 1975, he had almost dropped out of music when he reinvented himself less as a folk act than as a cowboy and Western one.First came his well-received 1983 album, “Old Corrals and Sagebrush,” which combined traditional cowboy music and songs of the West he wrote himself. In 1986, his “Cowboyography” earned platinum status in Canada. Over time, he became a familiar Canadian presence in his trademark cowboy hat and stiff-legged gait, ranching, recording and performing at concerts and events like the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev.And he recorded a series of evocative, stubbornly unfashionable albums like “Songs from the Gravel Road,” about the allure and frustrations of the lonely ranching life. His own life remained complicated, too, including both an endless array of honors and awards and a 1986 marriage to a teenager, Twylla Biblow, less than half his age, that ended in divorce in 2008.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Tyson badly strained his voice in 2006 at the Havelock Country Jamboree in Ontario, and a virus a year later caused further and irreversible damage.He returned two years later, his smooth baritone reduced to a hoarse whisper, but his popularity remained intact with the album “From Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories.”Throughout, his music reflected the solitary ranching life, the lure of the outdoors, the pains of heartbreak and lost love.A 2008 profile in The Globe and Mail when he was nearing 75 captured some of the details of it at his T-Bar-Y ranch: The 6 a.m.-to-6 p.m. work schedule. The Monday washing (five pairs of Wranglers to get him through the week). The “mean, garlicky” buffalo he cooked. The place filled with cowboy hats and books — “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a Georgia O’Keeffe biography, a dictionary, “The Western Buckle: History, Art, Culture, Function,” Michael Ondaatje’s “Divisadero.” The magnet on his refrigerator reading: “Life is tough. Life is tougher if you’re stupid. — John Wayne.”“I became a historian, a chronicler of this way of life,” he told the reporter Marsha Lederman, “and this way of life is just about over. The cowboys are all gone.”It was a theme he often came back to. “People tell me, ‘Tyson, you’re always longing for the old days,’” he once said. “And they’re right, that’s true — I live in the past. And it was way better.”Eduardo Medina More

Brent Reidy, the new director of Research Libraries, said he hoped to help democratize the 127-year-old library by reaching a younger generation.The New York Public Library on Thursday named Brent Reidy as director of its Research Libraries, putting the 40-year-old music historian at the helm of four vast public research centers whose holdings encompass 17th-century Shakespeare folios and sheet music belonging to Bob Dylan, Dizzy Gillespie and Mozart.Reidy, who has been serving as interim director since William P. Kelly retired in April, will preside over the collection, acquisition and preservation strategies at the Research Libraries, which have a budget of $145 million and welcome four million visitors a year. The position gives him an outsized voice on the direction of national humanities research.An amateur jazz pianist who unwinds by playing John Coltrane, Reidy said he hoped to help democratize the 127-year-old institution by appealing to a new generation of library goers. Among his priorities, he said, is the continued digitization of the Research Libraries’ holdings, which has become even more imperative during the coronavirus pandemic as users gravitated online. Attendance at the Research Libraries was 30 percent below the average attendance before the pandemic and had not yet returned to prepandemic levels, he added, a challenge facing cultural institutions across the country.“I want people to realize that you don’t need to be a tenured professor with a Ph.D. to have access to our collections — you just need a library card,” he said in an interview.Reidy has been an ardent supporter of federal funding for the arts. During the Trump administration, he criticized its attempt to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, citing former President John F. Kennedy’s assertion that artistic freedom was essential to nourish American culture.Reidy will be responsible for four public research centers — the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building; the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Yoseloff Business Center — which collectively have 47 million items in their collections. Among their treasures are Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence; an original Gutenberg Bible from 1455; an unpublished chapter from Malcolm X’s autobiography and an extensive James Baldwin archive.Among the treasures at the library’s research centers is Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence.Robert Kato/New York Public LibraryReidy studied music at Dartmouth College before earning a Ph.D. in Musicology from Indiana University, where he explored national cultural policy under the Kennedy administration, the subject of an upcoming book. Every week, he makes a pilgrimage to the library’s collection of manuscripts and scores belonging to John Cage, the eminent American composer of Minimalist music. “It helps me to de-stress,” he said.A native of Scotia, a village in Schenectady County, N.Y., Reidy said his passion for libraries and books was first ignited as a boy when he would go to the Schenectady County Public Library. With the encouragement of his father, he recalled that he bought about 1,200 LPs from the library, including classical and jazz albums, which he cataloged in the basement of his childhood home. More

Country songs are often filled with tragedy and hard times. Price has detailed her own catalog of traumas in a memoir and her music, but also turns her lens outward on a new LP, “Strays.”NASHVILLE — The alt-country musician Margo Price has a contrarian streak, and a wild one. When she was preparing to write her fourth album, “Strays,” in 2020, she and her husband and musical partner, Jeremy Ivey, decamped from their cozy family home in the suburbs here, and rented an Airbnb in Charleston, S.C. They brought guitars and notebooks, and a pile of hallucinogenic mushrooms.Tripping together in the backyard at a Live-Laugh-Love kind of cottage, listening to Tom Petty, Patti Smith and Bob Dylan, the couple reconnected and tried to “generate new sounds, new rhythms, new styles,” Price said, after a tumultuous period when her husband was gravely ill with the coronavirus. “It was, you know, big emotions and laughing hysterically in the kitchen, and then the next moment, I’m like, ‘I love you so much, don’t ever die,’” she said in an interview at her neo-Tudor home near Nashville.They wrote 20 songs, including the first two singles on “Strays,” which is out Jan. 13 and struts through big-hearted indie country, honky-tonk stomp and ’70s guitar-explosion psychedelia. “A lot of times, with the country world, they’re like, ‘Get in this box, and stay here,’” Price said. “So it was good to be able to paint outside of the lines. The mushrooms definitely helped.”Since her breakthrough studio debut, “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” in 2016, Price, 39, has tunneled her own path through the music industry, sometimes indignantly. She has always had ambition to spare and faith in herself as an artist, even in the face of repeated rejections, as she describes in her memoir, “Maybe We’ll Make It,” out last October.“I admire Margo tremendously for her fierceness,” said her friend Brittany Howard, the guitarist and singer. “She doesn’t back down and she won’t become the kind of artist that the industry wants her to be. She is the kind of artist that cannot be manufactured.”Despite the friendship and cheerleading of legends like Willie Nelson, who duetted with her on her second album, Price has never felt welcome in the country establishment, she said. (She has yet to be invited to the genre’s flagship honors, the Country Music Awards.) Even a Grammy nomination for best new artist at the 2019 ceremony left her feeling like an outsider, when she wasn’t invited to perform or present (she was also pregnant at the time).She fretted about seeming irrelevant and losing the career momentum that she had worked to accrue over decades in Nashville if she stayed home with her daughter, Ramona, who was born in 2019.“I think it was actually only four and a half weeks after my C-section that I had opening dates with Chris Stapleton,” she said. So she got back on the tour bus. “Just put the Spanx on, and had my breast pump out, just rolling down the road with a baby and a 9-year-old” — her son Judah — “and a crew, and a band.”“When I wrote ‘Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,’ and when I put that album out, I was tortured,” Price said of her 2016 breakthrough.Scott Dudelson/Getty ImagesThe pandemic stopped that trajectory. But Price found another outlet in writing her memoir, which chronicles her hardscrabble, super-broke but resolute early years in Nashville; meeting Ivey, who is her co-songwriter and guitarist; getting pregnant as newlyweds while living under the poverty line; and the devastating loss of their child. Judah’s twin brother, Ezra, died two weeks after their birth in 2010, following surgery for a genetic heart condition. She had only been able to hold him once.His death sent her into an emotional spiral — for three years, she had a recurring nightmare about not being able to save a drowning infant. She was unfaithful to her husband, and he followed suit, as she writes in the book, and she descended further into alcohol abuse. And then there was “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” a deeply autobiographical album about her family (she was born and raised in tiny Aledo, Ill.) and her flaws. “Hurtin’ (On the Bottle),” a barroom wallop, became one of her signature tunes.To help pay for the recording, at Sun Studios in Memphis, Price pawned her engagement ring. Ivey got it back, but sold their car instead. “It was the most romantic thing he had ever done for me,” she wrote.On her book tour last fall, Price met fans and heard other stories of profound loss, doling out hugs and speaking to audience members for sometimes two hours after a reading.“As a musician and a writer, you think, ‘I’m doing this because it brings me joy,’” she said. “But when somebody else is like, hey, you got me through my divorce; you got me through this really tough time — I lost my mom to cancer, and I just listened to your record a lot. I’m like, yes, tell me about that, I need to hear that.”Price stopped drinking after she wrote her memoir. “I’m feeling my emotions more deeply than I have in a really long time, even though I thought, back then, that there was some kind of magic to feeling like garbage,” she said.Sara Messinger for The New York TimesShe started therapy only after she finished writing the book. When she turned in the final draft, “I started having all these, almost like panic attacks,” she said. “I was worried about people judging me.” She also quit drinking; her book editor had observed that “whiskey was like a character” in the pages, she said. (She still smokes weed and savors her mushroom trips, both substances she feels help clarify her vision — though even that, she worried, might make her seem like a bad mother. Do musician fathers get that rap?).Sitting cross-legged on a black leather couch in an airy living room furnished with vintage furniture and musical mementos, Price reflected on a life that would buckle many people.“When I wrote ‘Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,’ and when I put that album out, I was tortured,” she said. Her two dogs slept with their heads on her lap, and her two cats prowled inside and out (the Price-Ivey home covers six acres, leading up to woods and surrounded by moonshine stills).That songwriting was also “my first practice of being vulnerable,” she continued, adding that until that point, she had focused on being “tough” to avoid revealing her weaknesses.“But as the book and everything has evolved, I think that has grown as one of my strengths, and I’ve learned not to be embarrassed by it.”Especially now that she’s (mostly) sober, “I feel really creatively in a good place,” she said. “I’m feeling my emotions more deeply than I have in a really long time, even though I thought, back then, that there was some kind of magic to feeling like garbage.”As Ivey went to pick up Judah, now 12, Price gave me a tour of their home — the wood-paneled studio, with her drum kit and a prized guitar autographed by the likes of Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris; her custom closet, with a neat rainbow of cowboy boots and a typewriter she often used for developing songs. “Jeremy can create in front of all sorts of people,” she said of her husband, also a solo artist. “But I feel exposed, like I don’t want anyone to hear all the bad notes and dumb ideas. So, I come hide in here.”Howard met her a decade ago, singing background vocals together in Nashville, she said. Their friendship came naturally: “She is so welcoming, genuine and fun to be around,” Howard wrote in an email. “We’d stay out all night laughing and sharing music and philosophy and just encouraging each other that we were on the right track.”She often ended the night crashing on Price and Ivey’s couch. These days, the women like to go fishing together — catching bass and feasting on Howard’s peanut butter and raw garlic sandwiches. “She’s just like, don’t knock it until you try it,” Price said.A pregnant Price and her husband and collaborator, Jeremy Ivey, at the 2019 Grammys in Los Angeles.They were bonded by their perseverance, Howard said. “I was told ‘no’ a lot very early on in my life. Mostly because of the way I looked,” she said. “When people don’t give you the space, you have to absolutely carve it out for yourself.”“That practice creates a resilience inside of us,” she added. “It’s a great power to be able to fall to pieces and put yourself back together bigger, better and stronger”Part of Price’s stability comes from Ivey, to whom she’s been married 14 years, and writing and touring with even longer. Songwriting “definitely draws us together when other things are pushing us apart,” she said.They’ve earned their industry savvy, too: In her early years, as she writes in the book, she invented a manager, “John Sirota” — complete with a fake Myspace page and booking site — to give her more cred and send cajoling (or demanding) messages to club owners and bookers. (It worked — the band got more gigs with John running the show than when Price signed the emails herself.)Recently, when her label, Loma Vista, wanted her to bring in collaborators, “I tricked them into thinking that I was writing with one of Taylor Swift’s co-writers,” she said. Using an industry pal’s connection, she sent over some demos — “‘Check them out, see if you like these more than the ones that me and Jeremy wrote.’ Well, meanwhile, it was just a song that I wrote.” The track, the boppy “Radio,” made the album, withSharon Van Etten filling it out.They are “mother musician friends,” Price said — a rare breed that make it seem possible, if still enormously complicated, to tour while being a mom. (To make Price’s two-musician-parent household work, her mother lives with them.) Along with Mimi Parker from Low, Price “was one of the first moms I talked to, that I look up to,” Van Etten said. “They always just said, ‘you figure it out.’”“A lot of times, with the country world, they’re like, ‘Get in this box, and stay here,’” Price said. “So it was good to be able to paint outside of the lines. The mushrooms definitely helped.”Sara Messinger for The New York Times“Radio” could be the lament of a working mother during the pandemic, with lines about being exhausted and pleading to be left alone. But Van Etten said the magic of Price’s songwriting was that anybody can find themselves reflected in it. “Radio” is “how we feel as moms trying to find our own space,” she said. “But it can be anyone trying to have a moment, and that feeling of when you’re listening to a song, that’s all you can hear.”Van Etten said Price’s skill at using the vernacular of traditional country — “the double-entendres and the turnarounds” — to talk about issues like the gender wage gap, offered a blueprint for other left-of-center artists. Especially watching her in an early, career turning-point performance on “Saturday Night Live” in 2016, she said, “I just felt like she was a role model that actually had something to say.”“Of course her range is insane,” she added. “As much as her delivery — she can be sweet as much as sassy. She has an edge to her vocals that you don’t hear much in country music right now.” (In her memoir, Price writes about how self-doubt had her up partying all night before the “S.N.L.” performance; she was also diagnosed with strep throat hours beforehand.)Lately, Price has made her songwriting more narrative and less personal. The single “Lydia,” on “Strays,” tells the story of an unsettled woman in an abortion clinic. It’s conversational and spare, with Price on acoustic guitar. Her producer, Jonathan Wilson, had the idea to juxtapose her live take “with some really weird, atonal strings,” he said. Written before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the six-minute track was well-received and hailed as prescient.Price is thrilled about any accolades, of course. But where once she was anxious about achieving them, now she wants to let all that go. “I’m trying to just be really happy with all that I’ve accomplished,” she said.That doesn’t mean she’s lifted her boot off the gas. “I have actually been writing more songs than I have in a very long time,” she noted. She hikes around her property, she listens to the birds; inspiration strikes. “I wake up feeling good every day,” she said, adding: “I just feel this urgency. I want to create.” More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicEach year, oodles of questions pour in from the Popcast faithful, and each year, the pop music staff of The New York Times tackles them with gusto.On this week’s Popcast, heated conversation about Olivia Rodrigo and strategic disappearance, Taylor Swift and intoxicants, Dua Lipa and other female pop superstar aspirants, the state of indie rock and more.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

A three-CD set of music by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, released by the Wergo label, backs up a more expansive view of the artist and is among the standouts of 2022.For devotees of fiendish musical modernism, Bernd Alois Zimmermann was one of the 20th century’s most notorious — and at times elusive — composers.Born in Germany in 1918, he was among the generation of musical prodigies whose early studies were waylaid and then fully interrupted by the rise of the Nazi party, which drafted Zimmermann into service on both the eastern and western fronts of World War II. Yet after his discharge in 1942, the composer quickly resumed the kind of polymathic, globally curious aesthetic that the Third Reich had sought to stamp out of German music academies.By the 1950s, when he had become a part of the postwar German avant-garde, Zimmermann also declared his interest in Brazilian moods of saudade, American boogie-woogie, as well as the similarly eclectic music of French composers like Darius Milhaud. Such catholic tastes put the composer at odds with self-appointed priests of the avant-garde like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.Yet just as Zimmermann was coming into his full aesthetic maturity — with towering, forbidding works like “Die Soldaten” (the opera that seemed to dramatize his lingering wartime agonies) and “Requiem for a Young Poet” — he succumbed to depression and died by suicide in 1970, at age 52.But was that the entire story? This familiar capsule biography is supported by plenty of facts: “Die Soldaten,” long reputed to be “un-performable,” does require a fantastically large orchestra playing dense, 12-tone music. And it also needs a staging that can accommodate near-simultaneous narrative flashbacks and flash-forwards. In 2008, a traveling production landed at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. (There, the director David Pountney dragged seated audiences to and fro, between all of Zimmermann’s discrete scenic zones, thanks to makeshift risers hoisted on rails.)It was an unforgettable scene — and a critical success. Subsequent productions of “Soldaten,” at the Salzburg Festival and Zurich Opera, seemed to ratify this official understanding of the composer as a gnarly and tragic visionary, full stop. Writing for The New York Times on the occasion of Zimmermann’s centennial in 2018, the musicologist and critic Mark Berry said of this final act in his life: “Family notwithstanding, his life had been lonely, and became lonelier; his work dark, and became darker.”But what about earlier decades? Berry also noted that Zimmermann’s broader musical story was “more complicated, contested and interesting” than partisans of various musical debates preferred to acknowledge. And yet polished musical documentation of that complex history has remained hard to access, until now.A new three-CD set titled “Zimmermann: Recomposed,” on the German Wergo label, is among the standout releases of 2022, precisely because it backs up this more expansive view of the artist. Thanks to vivacious performances from the conductor (and oboist) Heinz Holliger and the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, we can now appreciate something we’ve rarely seen — namely, a Zimmermann who smiles.The venue for his good humor was the radio. Before Zimmermann could make a living with his own works, he brought his orchestrator’s skill to various groups — including light orchestras and pops ensembles — that populated West Germany’s airwaves in the late 1940s and early ’50s. This work has scarcely been heard since Zimmermann completed it. But what work it was (and remains)! Across the three CDs you can find witty, sparkling transcriptions of Villa-Lobos and Milhaud, and of Rachmaninoff and Mussorgsky — and much else, too.Best of all, this material is often recognizably Zimmermann-like in nature. Very little of it gives the impression of grudging work for hire. Instead, the same orchestrator’s intelligence that is apparent in the densest moments of “Die Soldaten” shows up for duty here. And its owner is often clearly having a ball.To take one example, the French chanson “Maman, dites-moi,” a staple of midcentury Met Opera stars like the soprano Bidu Sayao. On the first CD of Wergo’s set, you can listen to what Zimmermann did with it back in 1950: By including the surprising, brittle sound of the harpsichord inside his orchestra, the composer lends a new edge to the tune’s nervy questioning of the mother figure. Yet it’s still plenty sumptuous, thanks to Zimmermann’s work with harp, celesta and winds. (The soprano Sarah Wegener also excels in this take.)Later, in the 1960s, when Zimmermann was working with a jazz quintet on improvisations based on his theatrical music, he would again employ similarly wiry keyboard attacks. (That material ought to get a reissue from Wergo down the line.)But in this earlier era of his radio work, the density of Zimmermann’s orchestral textures pushes the envelope, yet never goes so far that a lay listener might be moved to pull the plug out of the wall. When the composer allows himself volleys of brash percussive playing — say, near the middle of a three-minute orchestration of Milhaud — the explosion is truly brief, yet no less powerful for that focused expression.Time and again across these new CDs, that balance makes for ravishing listening. Also in 1950, Zimmermann took Rachmaninoff’s “Romanze,” from the youthful Morceaux de salon, and re-envisioned it as a suave saxophone-and-orchestra miniature. (Find it on the second of Wergo’s new CDs.) Even more impressive is his translation of Rachmaninoff’s “Humoresque” (from the same series) into a Concertino for piano and orchestra; Wergo bills it as a Zimmermann original, modeled “after” the Russian composer’s example.In the liner notes, Holliger, speaking of Zimmermann, makes the claim that “everything he did for the radio laid the foundation for his later work.” Along with the current WDR orchestra, Holliger proves this by taking on a few of Zimmerman’s original pieces as well, demonstrating for us how these radio transcriptions were more than mere outliers.Each disc in the set opens and closes with the composer’s own material, before sliding in and out of the adaptations. These performances are equally revealing. The “Caboclo” movement of Zimmermann’s Brazil-influenced “Alagoana” — with its three superimposed dances — has never more closely recalled the music of “Die Soldaten” than it does here. But it still retains the direct, singing quality that once made it attractive to the conductor Ferenc Fricsay.And Zimmermann’s other theatrical and balletic music — including “Un petit rien” and “Souvenir d’ancien balet” — has rarely sounded as light on its feet as it does on these discs. Holliger and the WDR players have real affection for the material, and for the fuller portrait it affords us of an artist too often described as unremittingly bleak in his outlook. But by the third CD, when Zimmermann has left day-to-day orchestration work behind, you can clearly hear how the once-parallel paths in Zimmermann’s creative life have diverged for good.“Apparently it was impossible for him to work in isolation. He needed to be surrounded by people he trusted,” Holliger says in the interview included in Wergo’s CD set. The conductor then goes on to describe the profusion of music (and musicians) that passed through the radio offices while the composer worked there. When reading between the conductor’s lines here, it’s easy to imagine an alternate reality — one in which Zimmermann stayed on longer at the radio gig with its social environment, while perhaps managing to steer away from the depressive isolation of his final years.Yet the music Zimmermann actually managed to make during these decades can, in all its voluptuous weirdness, prove even more inspiring than well-intentioned speculation. Liberated from the West German radio archives, this material is the best kind of music-history corrective — the kind that’s a blast to hear. More

In 2022, stars including Harry Styles, Jack Harlow and Bad Bunny offered liberated takes on gender, but also risked pandering. Are men OK?In April, during his headlining set at Coachella, the reigning pop prince Harry Styles invited a surprise guest, Shania Twain, to the stage to sing a provocatively chosen duet: “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.”Clad in a low-cut, silver sequined jumpsuit, Styles strutted, twirled and belted out the cheeky anthem’s lyrics. “This lady taught me how to sing,” he told the raucous crowd of over 100,000 when the song was over. “She also taught me that men are trash.”The performance was fun, headline-generating and relatively radical: It is difficult to imagine Styles’s generational predecessor, Justin Timberlake — or even Timberlake’s successor, Justin Bieber — playing so fast and loose with gender roles. That is partially because the Justins embraced hip-hop and R&B — genres where such experimentation is often less welcome — more directly than Styles ever has. But it’s also because the cultural forces that shape the norms and expectations of what a male pop star can and should be are evolving.While the year in music was dominated by a handful of female powerhouses (critically, by Beyoncé’s widely praised dance-floor odyssey “Renaissance” and commercially, by Taylor Swift’s moody synth-pop juggernaut “Midnights”), the top male pop stars — Styles, Bad Bunny and Jack Harlow — all found success while offering refreshingly subversive challenges to old-school masculinity.Styles and Harlow seem cannily aware of how to position themselves as heartthrobs in a cultural moment when being a man — especially one that scans straight and white — can seem like a minefield of potential missteps, offenses and overextended privilege. Bad Bunny, even more subversively, ripped up the English-language pop star’s rule book and offered a more expansive vision of gender and sexuality.Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar whose summery smash “Un Verano Sin Ti” spent more weeks atop the Billboard chart than any other album this year, has gleefully rejected the confines of machismo. Instead, he has embraced gender-fluid fashion, called out male aggression in his songs and videos and even made out with one of his male backup dancers during a performance at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards — decisions that carry extra weight considering his aesthetic-hopping pop is rooted in reggaeton, a genre that has leaned on heteronormativity.Bad Bunny has gleefully rejected the confines of machismo.Isaac Esquivel/EPA, via ShutterstockStyles, too, has won fans and admirers by treating his gender presentation as something of a playground, whether that means wearing a dress on the cover of “Vogue,” refusing to label his sexuality or flipping the familiar script of the older male auteur/younger female muse in his much publicized relationship with his “Don’t Worry Darling” director Olivia Wilde, who is 10 years his senior. None of it has been bad for business: Styles’s “As It Was” was the year’s longest-reigning Billboard No. 1 and, globally, Spotify’s most-streamed song of 2022.But there’s also an increasingly fine line between allyship and pandering, one that fans aren’t shy about calling out online. Styles and Bad Bunny have been accused of the very contemporary crime of “queerbaiting,” or cultivating a faux mystique around one’s sexuality to appeal to an L.G.B.T.Q. fan base. To overemphasize straightness and alpha-male stereotypes, though, presents its own risks, especially in a post-MeToo moment. What’s a man to do?Harlow, the 24-year-old Kentucky-born rapper, spent 2022 trying to figure it out. A technically dexterous rapper with an easy charisma and a head of Shirley Temple ringlets, Harlow is known for making artistic choices that spotlight his skills and convey his seriousness as an MC. He’s also cultivated a persona as an irrepressible flirt with a particular attraction to Black women. He famously shot his shot with Saweetie on the BET Awards red carpet, repeatedly popped into Doja Cat’s Instagram live broadcasts and even parodied his reputation during a star-turning “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig, when he played himself in a skit that imagined him seducing Whoopi Goldberg on the set of “The View.”Harlow’s music, too, actively cultivates the female listener. As he explained in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, “I always think about if I was in the car and the girl I had a crush on was in the shotgun and I had to play the song, would I be proud to play the song?”Jack Harlow’s music focuses on a kind of glorification of the female listener.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesThroughout his second album, “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” Harlow paints himself as stylish and sensitive, a man who keeps his nails clean and discusses his romantic encounters in therapy. In the grand tradition of his elder Drake, Harlow often uses the pronoun “you” to directly and intimately address women in his songs. His biggest solo hit to date, “First Class,” which spent three weeks at No. 1 this spring, turned “Glamorous,” Fergie’s blingy 2007 hit about luxury and hard-earned success, into a chivalric invitation for a lady to come enjoy the good life on Harlow’s dime: “I could put you in first class,” he clarified.Stylistically, Harlow’s music is worlds away from Styles’s, but both share a kind of glorification of the female listener, a lyrical attentiveness to her pleasure and a subtle insistence that they are more caring partners than all those other men who, in Styles’s parlance (and on superhumanly empathetic ballads like “Boyfriends” and “Matilda”), are “trash.”In some sense, this is certainly progress. Consider that Timberlake’s early aughts success involved the excessive vilification of his ex Britney Spears, or that a performance that pantomimed a kind of hyper-heterosexual dominance over Janet Jackson had virtually no effect on his career, but nearly ended hers. Harlow’s collaboration with and public support for the gay pop star Lil Nas X and even his fawning over his female peers are worlds away from his predecessor Eminem, who negotiated his complex stance as a white man in a predominantly Black genre by punching down at women and queer people. Misogyny and homophobia aren’t exactly good for business anymore — and thank goodness.It’s hard to imagine these men making the same mistakes as their forebears, and overcorrection is in some sense welcome, given the alternative. (Bad Bunny, again, has taken even bolder risks, like vehemently criticizing the Puerto Rican government in response to island-wide blackouts.)But even responsibly wielded privilege is still, at the end of the day, privilege. And Styles’s and Harlow’s music often betrays that by its relative weightlessness, its sense of existence in a space free of any great existential cares. Styles’s songs in particular seem hollowed out of any introspection; most of the ones on “Harry’s House” pass by like cumulus clouds. The focus of Harlow’s music vacillates between girls and ego, with few gestures toward the riskier political statements he’s made on red carpets (decrying homophobia) and on social media (attending protests demanding justice for Breonna Taylor). That failure to see oneself as part of a larger problem is a symptom of privilege, too. Even if he’s wearing sequins, a man declaring that “men are trash” is just a very subtle way of saying “not all men.” What about the guy saying it?On “Part of the Band,” a moody, verbose single released this year by the British band the 1975, the frontman Matty Healy imagines overhearing a snippet of chitchat between two young women: “I like my men like I like my coffee/Full of soy milk and so sweet it won’t offend anybody.” The implication is that Healy is decidedly not one of those men, and it’s indeed hard to imagine a listener — particularly a non-male one — making it through all 11 tracks of the 1975’s soft-focused “Being Funny in a Foreign Language” without cringing at something Healy says. (Just one example: “I thought we were fighting, but it seems I was ‘gaslighting’ you.” Yeesh.)But in Healy’s musings, there’s something often lacking in Harlow’s or Styles’s music: a genuine sense of self-scrutiny, and an active internal monologue about what it means to be a man at this moment in the 21st century. Healy’s songs are, as the critic Ann Powers put it in an astute essay tracing the cultural lineage of “the dirtbag,” excavations of “the curses and blessings of his gendered existence.” Under his relentless microscope, straight(ish) white masculinity is, blessedly, freed from its status as the default human condition and instead becomes a curiosity to poke and prod at, exposing its internal contradictions and latent anxieties.“Am I ironically woke?” Healy wonders later in “Part of the Band.” “The butt of my joke? Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke calling his ego imagination?” Cringe if you want. He’s man enough to let the question hang there in the air. 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On any given weekend, there are dozens of parties happening on VRChat, a platform where users assume fantastical avatars of their own design.On a recent Saturday night, the street outside the nightclub Tube VR looked typical for East London: a boat moored on the canal, trendy retail spaces lining the waterfront, an underpass covered in graffiti. Inside, however, I found myself dancing next to a hedgehog wearing a top hat, an anime nun with an acid green halo and a humanoid fox in hot pants.Tube VR is a venue and one of the most popular party events on VRChat, a video-game-like social platform that takes place in virtual reality, or V.R., where users can assume fantastical avatars of their own design. When I removed my V.R. headset, I was alone in my bedroom. Wearing it again, I was thrown back into the throbbing heart of a party.During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, regular partygoers flocked to virtual clubs hosted on platforms like Zoom, but since physical venues have reopened, the popularity of these digital spaces has waned. Not so with VRChat. When much of the world was locked down, the platform’s daily user numbers steadily increased. That trend has mostly stuck, with numbers continuing to surpass prepandemic levels, according to data cited by the platform.To attend a virtual club in VRChat you only need a standard PC, but getting the most immersive experience requires a V.R. headset, and a moderately powerful computer. The Tube nightclub is just one of hundreds of thousands of discrete VRChat worlds where people gather and socialize in avatar form.via VRChatThe Tube VR nightclub is just one of hundreds of thousands of discrete VRChat worlds where users can assume fantastical avatars of their own design.via VRChatI felt out of place at my first V.R. party. There was a new social etiquette to learn around how to approach and talk to other clubbers, and I felt my default avatar looked basic compared with the imaginative creatures surrounding me. But with my headset translating my voice and movements into the virtual space and avatars dancing and chatting all around me, it felt surprisingly close to being in a real club.This experience provides a glimpse of how socializing might look in our increasingly technologically mediated future. “Just as video conferencing via Zoom has become a central part of ordinary life for so many people, now that it’s convenient and useful, it’s easy to imagine that in ten years’ time, VR could be playing that role” in daily socializing, too, David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University who has written a book about V.R., said over email.Naturally, some aspects of VRChat cannot compete with real life, and V.R. events suffer frequently from delays and glitches. But partying in virtual reality also offers distinct advantages: Personal safety and harassment are less of a concern; users have more control over their environment, and can adjust the volume of people’s voices or the music to their liking; and aside from the upfront hardware cost, events are free.This increased accessibility is particularly meaningful for people who live far from clubbing hot spots, and for users with impaired mobility. The VRChat user Turels was a professional musician until he was diagnosed with adult onset Still’s disease, a form of arthritis that meant he could no longer use his hands to play instruments.“When I got the diagnosis, I thought I was done — time to pack up my music equipment and sell it off,” Turels, who asked that his real name not be published for reasons of privacy related to his illness, said in a recent phone interview. But friends he made in the virtual club encouraged him to try out D.J.ing in virtual reality using specially adapted hardware. He now performs music in VRChat regularly.“VRChat has given that part of my life back to me,” he said.via VRChatShelter is a popular VRChat club that evolves according to a conceptual sci-fi narrative.via VRChatOn any given weekend, there are dozens of VRChat parties. There is Mass, a rave inside the head of a giant robot; Shelter, a popular club that evolves according to a conceptual sci-fi narrative; and Ghost Club, a pioneering Japanese venue that users enter via a phone booth. Each “VRchitect” who constructs a club makes the most of their freedom from the constraints of budget and physical space.One of VRChat’s distinguishing features is that almost all of its content is created by its users. There are few opportunities to monetize their in-game creations, and while some venues run Patreon pages to cover costs, a vast majority are created and run by volunteers — some, like Tube, also raise money for charity.VRChat itself is free to use and largely funded by investors, receiving $80 million in its last funding round in 2021. This caution around monetization has fostered a club scene that feels authentically grass-roots. There are, however, plans to introduce a creator economy in the near future.The ravers are just one of VRChat’s major communities. There are also L.G.B.T.Q. groups, worlds dedicated to role-playing, dancing, Buddhist meditation and erotic encounters. A deaf community teaches V.R. sign language in a virtual school‌.The avatars that users choose are often cartoonish, but the relationships they build in VRChat are unquestionably human.via VRChatMay S. Lasch’s avatar, center, at Concrete, an L.G.B.T.Q. club on VRChat. Lasch began to experiment with their gender expression in virtual reality and said it “helped me find my real self.”via VRChat“I met so many new people that I call my best friends nowadays, who I also met up with in real life,” May S. Lasch, who runs the L.G.B.T.Q. club Concrete on VRChat, said in a video interview. “In the end, V.R. is about the people, not the technology. The technology just brings people from far away closer.”One of the utopian promises of the internet was that you could reinvent yourself online and be anyone you wanted. In VRChat, Lasch is an anime girl with blushing cheeks and long white hair. Born in Germany, Lasch was assigned male at birth but realized at a young age they did not relate to that label. Today, they identify as nonbinary and use they and them pronouns.They did not feel supported in this by their conservative family, but began to experiment with their gender expression in virtual reality, which helped them build the confidence to start presenting differently in real life, too. “During rough times, I remade myself in this game,” they said, “and it helped me find my real self.”Perhaps the biggest barrier to VRChat becoming more of a mainstream clubbing space is the limitations of V.R. hardware. The best headsets are still expensive, and many find them bulky and report experiencing headaches or nausea. But with continued heavy investment in virtual reality from Meta and Sony, and with Apple working on a headset, the technology should keep improving and becoming more accessible.Since V.R. technology is relatively new, there has not been much research into the long-term effect of spending large amounts of time in virtual reality. “I’ve spent so much time in VRChat, close to 4,000 hours,” Lasch said, “I have dreams that are in V.R. Sometimes I spend 12 hours in V.R. and then when I come out of it, I still see the little mute microphone symbol in my vision.”Another obstacle is the fear that virtual reality is a substitute for actual reality. But many of its users said VRChat supplemented, rather than supplanted, real life.This is certainly true for Lincoln Donelan, who runs parties called Loner both virtually and in his hometown, Melbourne, Australia. I found him one evening in the virtual club’s dingy bathroom chatting with a giant fox, a couple of skater girls and a guy in a dinner jacket smoking a cigarette.Donelan’s avatar — an anime girl with dark hair, mint green eyes and tattoos spread across bone-white skin — explained his schedule for the coming weekend: D.J.ing in a real-life club on Friday night, running a V.R. party on Saturday afternoon before going out for dinner and another party in Melbourne, then getting up on Sunday to head back into virtual reality.“V.R. will never, ever replace real-life clubbing, ever. I think it’s the perfect complement to it, though,” he said. “Ultimately, V.R. is just another thing you can choose from.” More