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      On ‘ForeverAndEverNoMore,’ Brian Eno Sings for the End of the World

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      The musician and producer’s new songs meditate on folly and annihilation, playing like a far more fatalistic sequel to “Another Day on Earth” from 2005.When you’re expecting extinction, it makes sense to record the threnody in advance. That’s what Brian Eno has done on “ForeverAndEverNoMore”: a mournful, contemplative album that stares down humanity’s self-immolation in what he calls “the climate emergency.”“These billion years will end/They end in me,” he intones in “Garden of Stars,” as electronic tones go whizzing by and distortion flickers and crests around him like a cosmic radiation storm. It’s a song that marvels at the mathematical improbability of human life — “How then could it be that we appear at all?/In all this rock and fire, in all this gas and dust,” he sings — while envisioning its cessation.Although much of Eno’s solo catalog is instrumental — soundtracks, ambient albums, video and multimedia projects — he is no stranger to songs. He embraced pop structures, and riddled them with noise, on his early solo albums after he left Roxy Music in 1973, tossing off flippantly highbrow lyrics like “If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics/You will find that their minds rarely move in a line” (“Backwater,” on the 1977 “Before and After Science”). Eno also produced hits, and sometimes sang, with U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie and others, and he has extolled the individual and collective benefits of group harmony singing.“ForeverAndEverNoMore” is decades and decisions removed from Eno’s 1970s song albums. At 74, Eno has taken on the stoic reserve of a sage. The new album plays like a far more fatalistic sequel to Eno’s most recent song-centered album, “Another Day on Earth” back in 2005, when he was already concerned with the state of the planet.On “ForeverAndEverNoMore,” Eno has traded percussiveness for sustain. Long drones underlie most of the tracks, echoing ancient traditions of mystical music; most of the instrumental sounds seem to arrive from great echoey distances. Eno sings slow, chantlike phrases, and his lyrics favor open vowels rather than crisp consonants. His productions — with the guitarist Leo Abrahams often credited as “post-producer” — open up vast perceived spaces in every track, as if he’s already staring into the void.The songs deliver indictments of human folly with measured calm. Slow, deep breathing sets the rhythm of “We Let It In,” as Eno sings, “We open to the blinding sky” to the soothing notes of a major chord; his daughter Darla Eno quietly repeats the words “deep sun.” In its reverberating solidity, the song makes global warming sound encompassing and inevitable.“There Were Bells” has bleaker lyrics, with birdsong and blue skies giving way to war and annihilation: “In the end they all went the same way,” it concludes. Singing a doleful melody over a tolling, inexorably descending bass line, Eno’s voice takes on a deepening melancholy as the music darkens, thickens and eventually thunders around him; all he can do is bear witness before going silent.There’s little comfort on “ForeverAndEverNoMore.” In “These Small Noises,” set to operatic keyboard arpeggios from Jon Hopkins, Eno imagines a useful afterlife by becoming compost — “Make us into land/Land of soil we owe our fathers” — but ends with a curse: “Go to hell/in hell to burn.” The album’s two instrumentals, “Making Gardens Out of Silence” (based on music from his sound installation at the Serpentine Galleries’ exhibition “Back to Earth”) and “Inclusion” return to Eno’s ambient side, placing elongated, breath-defying melodies in an electronic ether. On this album, they sound like they’re anticipating a post-human eternity.Perhaps the planet’s surviving species will appreciate the music.Brian Eno“ForeverAndEverNoMore”(Verve/UMC) More

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      Kate Nash Keeps Getting Back Up. This Time, Off Broadway.

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      What stuck out at a recent rehearsal of the new musical “Only Gold” was how little Kate Nash stuck out.It wasn’t just that her hair was not its signature fiery red anymore, but a shade of auburn. Nash, who wrote the score and plays the narrator, quietly melded with the rest of the cast, as the director-choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, of “Hamilton” fame, fine-tuned a couple of numbers. When not actively participating in a section, she tended to stand against a wall, her eyes intently tracking the dancers.The London-born singer-songwriter spent a decade and a half releasing records and touring the world — in 2007, her debut single, “Foundations,” was No. 2 in Britain while her debut album, “Made of Bricks,” hit the top spot of the charts there — and she also acted in the Netflix wrestling comedy “GLOW.” But despite “Only Gold” being her first experience in theater, Nash was at ease, maybe even at peace.“Being here, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, this feels like home for my music,’” she said happily, sitting in the empty mezzanine of MCC Theater, where the show is currently in previews before opening on Nov. 7.The show is, as Nash put it, “about having the courage to follow your heart. And we’re telling that story through Paris in the 1920s and the royal family from Cosimo.” (She is referring to a kingdom invented for “Only Gold.”)The period musical, which involves a king trying to marry off his daughter, may sound like a stretch for an artist known for an incisive, personal style anchored in the here and now. But Blankenbuehler, a three-time Tony Award winner and longtime fan of Nash’s, grasped early on that her sensibility and craftsmanship would fit the story he’d dreamed up and arranged a meeting in 2010. “The thing I liked about Kate’s lyrics were that I found them to be poetic and funky and weird, but at the same time rhythmic in a way that really catered to my choreography, because I like to be offbeat all the time and syncopated all the time,” he said. “I also liked that there was equal parts of low and high — like, she would write really high, quirky stuff and really low, nasty, badass stuff.”Nash, center, at an “Only Gold” rehearsal at MCC Theater.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesBut it didn’t just take clicking her heels together three times to find that artistic home. Nash’s life and career had taken a few turns since she burst onto the pop scene in 2007, fully formed at just 20. Since that early success, Nash has been through a personal and professional wringer that could have easily derailed her.Born in a middle-class family (her father worked in information technology, her mother was a nurse), Nash was barely out of the BRIT School, a London arts institution whose alums include Adele and Amy Winehouse, and working at a sandwich shop when her Myspace page caught the attention of record executives. When “Foundations” came out, its prickly, evocatively personal storytelling established her as a bracing new voice. In 2008, she won the BRIT Award for best British female solo artist and began touring extensively around the world. But in 2012, her record label unceremoniously dropped her. This barely slowed down the singer, who released her third album independently the following year.Then, in 2015, bad news came: Nash, then living in Los Angeles, discovered that her manager had been defrauding her. She was pretty much bankrupt.“I was selling all my clothes and having to move out of my apartment because I had no money,” she said. “I packed up all my things, I sold everything, I moved home to England and I was like, ‘What am I going to do?’ And then I got this audition for ‘GLOW.’”She was eventually cast as the street-smart Rhonda, a struggling model who becomes a wrestler with the nom de ring Britannica. The opportunity was a lifeline as well as a dream coming true for Nash, who had long dreamed of being an actress.In a joint video chat, the “GLOW” creators and showrunners Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch zeroed in on Nash’s team spirit and doggedness. To win them over during the casting process, she filmed herself performing guerrilla-style moves, “being like, ‘I’m auditioning! I’m coming! Don’t forget about me!,’” Mensch said. “She entered one of the most perfectly bonkers tapes.”“I was selling all my clothes and having to move out of my apartment because I had no money,” said Nash, second from left. “And then I got this audition for ‘GLOW.’”Erica Parise/Netflix“There’s something kind of gonzo about her,” Flahive added, admiringly. “Even as a musician, she has a real kind of punk-rock spirit and has been doing her own thing outside of the system for so long, and you get that feeling from her.”In the documentary “Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl” (2018), Nash’s indomitable grit is plain to see. “She just keeps getting up every time she gets knocked down,” said Amy Goldstein, the documentary’s director. (The two met through their mutual hairdresser in 2014.) “That is why I made the movie: to see a woman who just won’t fall down.”Netflix canceled “GLOW” in 2020, after three seasons. But “Only Gold,” which had been in the works on and off for a decade, was finally ready to taxi to the runway.Initially, Blankenbuehler, who wrote the show’s book with Ted Malawer, had wanted to retrofit existing songs to fit the concept of a period fantasy involving three couples with relationship troubles. “I was just kind of like, you want to make a musical with my music, knock yourself out. Have fun,” Nash said.It quickly became obvious that this approach had creative limits, so they both agreed that she would write original material. (Beloved oldies do appear in the show, like “Mouthwash,” from “Made of Bricks.”)“Kate’s the kind of person who — and this is a compliment — writes what she wants to write,” Blankenbuehler said. “If she’s feeling it, she writes it, so she’s always in her own music. To be in somebody else’s story was hard for her because she’s not those personalities. One thing she’s worked really hard at is wearing the character’s clothes, writing the song from the inside of the character.”Nash found that particular experience liberating rather than constraining. “Oh, my God, writing for male characters — it was euphoric,” she said. “I understand how rappers feel now, because it feels amazing: Big yourself up and talk about masculinity and power. It was really fun to start writing for characters. It was just another string to my bow.”“I naïvely thought I was just going to do music on the show,” Nash said. “Until I got my contract and it said ‘actor’ and I was like, wait, why does it say ‘actor’ on my contract?”Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesNow she can do more of that in other mediums: Earlier this year, she released the irresistibly catchy “Imperfect,” which she wrote for the Netflix series “The Baby-Sitters Club.” “I think that I’m able to dive fully into things like that because of ‘Only Gold,’” Nash said. “I was like, ‘OK, teenage girl, pop power, scene in their bedroom during a fashion show about embracing imperfections — give me five minutes!’ How I would express that for myself as a 35-year-old woman wouldn’t be ‘Imperfect,’ but now I can write and enjoy that and not worry about it.”In the musical, coming up with a batch of new songs for, well, a king (played by the Broadway veteran Terrence Mann) was only part of what awaited Nash, she discovered fairly late in the process. “Even our first workshop, I naïvely thought I was just going to do music on the show,” she said. “Until I got my contract and it said ‘actor’ and I was like, wait, why does it say ‘actor’ on my contract? And I suddenly got so scared.”For Blankenbuehler, having Nash in the musical was a no-brainer. “I felt like the mechanism of the show was the beat, the music,” he said, “and so it only made sense to me that this quirky voice — and nobody sounds like her — should narrate the show.”Her experience learning to wrestle for “GLOW” made figuring out choreography less daunting. Another point of entry was finding an unexpected connection with the other cast members, many of whom were trained dancers.“Someone in a workshop once told me, ‘Every dancer knows who you are because of “Nicest Thing,” because every girl performs it at dance competitions across the U.S.A.,’” Nash said, mentioning a track from her first album. “I wrote that in my living room on an acoustic guitar when I was 18, pining over wanting love,” she added, chuckling.Those days feel remote now, as Nash settles into her new life on the New York stage. “Every time I see the opening sequence, it brings me to tears,” she said, then laughed. “There’s going to be times when I’m going to have to really clench my jaw and not cry.” More

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      Alice Gerrard Didn’t Plan a Bluegrass Career and Broke Its Glass Ceiling

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      Six decades ago, the singer’s duo with Hazel Dickens revolutionized the genre. As their albums are reissued, she reflected on her unexpected life in folk music and what’s next.For almost 60 years, death has rarely spurned Alice Gerrard. Instead, it has spurred the work of the consummate folk singer and inveterate archivist. During a series of discursive phone calls last month from her home in Durham, N.C., she was eager to remember the people she’s lost.First there was her father, Jerry, a British sailor who settled in Seattle and died from heart disease when Gerrard was 7. Then there was her first husband, Jeremy Foster, an avid old-time musician who was killed in a car crash in 1964, just before Gerrard recorded her debut. Suddenly a single mother of four, she made an album that became a bluegrass landmark. And then there was Hazel Dickens, the sharp tenor to Gerrard’s keening lead for nearly two decades, who died in 2011 from pneumonia after years of ailments. The sole survivor of a duo that revolutionized a genre, Gerrard soon made the album “Follow the Music,” netting her first Grammy nomination at 80.“When somebody dies like that, your father or mother, you’re left with this well of sadness that never really goes away,” Gerrard, 88, said with a soft laugh. “That might be one reason I’m drawn to these death-and-dying songs, these mournful sounds.”When Gerrard and Dickens walked into a church in Washington, D.C., almost six decades ago to record for the traditionalist record label Folkways, they were not thinking about starting careers or breaking a glass ceiling by becoming the first women to lead a popular bluegrass band. They just liked to sing together.Still, they did both: Their four hardscrabble albums helped expand the form’s purview, not only with personnel but also with the politics of unions, feminism and civil rights. The first two of those albums, recorded for Folkways, are set for reissue on Oct. 21, as stand-alone records and, together, as “Pioneering Women of Bluegrass: The Definitive Edition.”Gerrard and Hazel Dickens join Bill Monroe for the Sunday morning gospel sing at the Bean Blossom festival, an annual bluegrass event, in June 1970.Carl FleischhauerAfter the duo’s 1976 split, Dickens remained a genre star and an activist on behalf of the coal miners of her native West Virginia. Gerrard became a fervent documentarian, chronicling the songs and stories of community musicians throughout the rural South before they, too, died. She shared those tales in the magazine she started, The Old-Time Herald. Gerrard is now one of the few living links to American folk musicians alive during the 19th century.“I have always been interested in the lives of other people,” she said, excitedly remembering the time she tracked down the ramshackle homestead of the Virginia fiddler Emmett Lundy, born a year before the Civil War ended. “It’s not just the music. It’s the life that the music grows out of.”But now Gerrard is turning back toward her own life, something she has often resisted. She plans to crowdfund not only her first new album in eight years, but also a sprawling memoir that pairs a lifetime of photos and her conversations with folk legends like Elizabeth Cotten, Bill Monroe and Tommy Jarrell with her experiences making space for women in bluegrass and beyond.“Alice is inspiring as hell, one of those people who made the world a better place so those who came up behind her didn’t have to fight so hard,” said Rhiannon Giddens, who has in turn made bluegrass more inclusive as a Black singer, songwriter and banjo player. “She makes me want to keep telling the stories I tell and live the way I want to live, with or without the music industry.”GERRARD’S UNEXPECTED CAREER began as a hard-luck tale, the kind of tragic saga she might have rendered in song. After she met Foster at Antioch College in the mid-1950s, they fell hard for the rawest, wildest strains of old American folk, encapsulated by Harry Smith’s epochal compendium. They quit school when she was pregnant and headed for Washington, D.C., a borderland between North and South teeming in that period with old-time music and country. They roamed festivals outside the city and played house parties overflowing with folk music. That’s most likely where Gerrard met Dickens and, in late 1963, Peter Siegel, a young New York producer gobsmacked by Gerrard and Dickens’s sisterly harmonies.“For us kids who grew up in ‘rarefied’ or ‘intellectual’ households, there was an authenticity we wanted nurtured. We knew this was the real stuff,” Siegel, a New York native, said by phone from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “They were so emotionally authentic, an incredible voice. It rang so true to me.”Before Siegel could return by bus to D.C. with borrowed recording gear, Foster was dead. Gerrard, suddenly a widow without his paycheck from a naval laboratory, pressed ahead with the sessions. Gospel tunes like the fast-picked “Gabriel’s Call” acquired new brittleness, shadowy standards like “Long Black Veil” an extra gravity. While living with family, Gerrard survived on social security and sued the driver who killed Foster for $35,000, allowing the family of five to buy a space of their own. But it was the network of folk musicians — ad hoc babysitters, grief counselors, life advisers — that helped most.From left: Gerrard, Peter Siegel, Dickens and Mike Seeger during a recording session in New York.John Cohen“I was living in this big city, but there was this large community of musicians we’d been involved with. They supported me,” Gerrard said. “It was music that saw me through. It’s always been the community.”She reinvested herself in that broader network during the eight-year gap between the duo’s Folkways albums. (They quickly cut a follow-up, but the infamous label head Moses Asch simply forgot they’d made it.) She photographed and recorded the titans of old-time and bluegrass. She and Dickens enlisted in the tours of the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, where an integrated confederation of musicians trekked across the South for little money, reintroducing the musical heritage to the communities that fostered it. Gerrard often drove the cramped little van through the fraught region, the diverse roster making for a mobile political statement.“The people whose music we admired so much did not go on about themselves, didn’t brag about what they had done,” Gerrard said. She remembered Dickens’s facetious and lascivious tour rider, written on mauve toilet paper, which demanded daily lobster, sex and onstage martinis. The only thing they really wanted was water.In 1981, after divorcing her second husband, Mike Seeger, a fellow archivist and musician, Gerrard decided to commit fully to that community. She moved to Galax, Va., without the kids, renting a ramshackle cabin for $50 a month near the epicenter of American old-time music. She scoured the town for songs and stories. When she helped make a documentary about Jarrell, the fiddling master, with Les Blank, she befriended and even played alongside him, as she did with most of her subjects. Gerrard never pretended to be an academic anthropologist or folklorist — this was her life, not her career.“The young wanted to learn that high-powered stuff, so they weren’t interested in their parents’ music,” Gerrard said, noting she never felt like an outsider, because her enthusiasm was so unabashed. “It was a two-way street. We gave them the pleasure of being able to tell us their story and to know their music would live on, carried on by younger people.”Yet again, death compelled a fundamental change. She’d documented her elders and lived among them, staying up with the likes of the fiddler Luther Davis, then in his late 90s, to play until midnight. But then they started dying, a depressing reminder that this work wasn’t the only music with an expiration date. She had her own songs to share. “I needed to stop being the mentee,” she admitted.“The people whose music we admired so much did not go on about themselves, didn’t brag about what they had done,” Gerrard said.John CohenGerrard moved to her little house in Durham in 1989, lured by the music community there and the promise of state funds for The Old-Time Herald, then six years old and growing fast. She made solo records, started a string of bands and transformed into a mentor for area musicians.When the songwriter Mike Taylor arrived in North Carolina for school in the summer of 2007, he vowed he would meet Gerrard, whose voice on those Hazel and Alice records had long transfixed him. When they had coffee soon after he arrived from California, she eyed him with a little skepticism, a fellow West Coast interloper.Just as his band Hiss Golden Messenger was beginning to earn attention, Taylor worked as Gerrard’s assistant at Duke University, where she briefly taught a course in documenting traditional music. When he asked her to record an album with his friends, she agreed with customary nonchalance. She gave him the flexibility to add unorthodox chords and dissonant textures, creating a gothic folk that distilled her tragedies and hope into the graceful “Follow the Music.” At 80, she had made an entirely different kind of record.“I could tell she was rubbing against something she hadn’t done before, and she was into that,” Taylor said in an interview. “I get the sense from Alice that nothing is permanent, and that’s a profound belief when you’re working in traditional music, where everything is handled so gently because it might break. But she doesn’t live like that.”IN 2004, AFTER Gerrard had been in North Carolina for 15 years, she recorded “Calling Me Home,” a song she’d written in Virginia as she watched elders like Davis and Jarrell die. An a cappella elegy about letting go, the song stemmed partly from Davis’s lament that all his old friends had already gone. He had no one to talk to about their good-old days, no one to ask about the past. “That song is a direct reflection of a life lived and a healthy way of looking at death,” said Giddens, 45, who began playing it during lockdown livestreams. “That is not a 25-year-old’s song.”In September, Gerrard had a question about her past, some bit of minutiae that eluded her. She thought about who to call for the answer. Seeger, Dickens and Blank were all dead, as was an old friend named Ralph Rinzler, who had also been the Smithsonian’s former folk expert. “I realized there was nobody who would actually know anymore,” Gerrard said, pausing her usual rush of stories for several seconds. “Anybody who would have a clue is gone. I didn’t get to them in time.”Gerrard joked that she spends her days not working so much as watching horror movies and gory crime shows or teaching her dog, Polly, to fetch IPAs from the fridge and drop the empties into the recycling bin outdoors. Still, when she spoke of a half-dozen pending projects, like the album and the memoir, she sounded more energized by finishing them than daunted by the prospect of never having the chance.“Hazel and I really did something. There is still a small piece of me that has a hard time believing that, because we were just doing what we loved,” she said. “I have this hesitancy to award myself, you know? They have these lifetime achievement awards they always give you. My life isn’t over.” More

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      Bob Dylan’s “The Philosophy of Modern Song”: An Excerpt

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      The title of Bob Dylan’s latest book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” is, in a sense, misleading. A collection of brief essays on 65 songs (and one poem), it is less a rigorous study of craft than a series of rhapsodic observations on what gives great songs their power to fascinate us.Dylan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, worked on these for more than a decade, though they flow more like extemporaneous sermons. The chapter on Johnnie Taylor’s “Cheaper to Keep Her,” for example, is mainly an indictment of the lawyers whose profiteering of heartbreak drives the divorce “industry.”Elsewhere, Dylan writes in oracular riddles. His one-paragraph piece on “Long Tall Sally,” by Little Richard, likens Sally to the Nephilim giants of the Old Testament, and postulates Richard as “a giant of a different kind” who took a diminutive stage name “so as not to scare anybody.”About half the essays in the book — his first collection of new writing since “Chronicles: Volume One,” in 2004 — are accompanied by what Dylan’s publisher calls “riffs”: even shorter, even looser pieces, in which Dylan attempts to embody the spirit — the philosophy? — of the song itself. On “Poor Little Fool,” by Ricky Nelson: “She sized you up, she was captivating and shrewd and lousy with lies. Oh yeah, you were an absolute blockhead beyond a doubt.”In these excerpts, each featuring an essay and a “riff,” Dylan looks at songs that represented two poles of mid-1960s culture. He locates the paradox within the Who’s “My Generation” as youth’s dread of becoming what it most detests: old. Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” on the other hand, is a glimpse of “tramps and mavericks” hooking up in the twilight of the “Mad Men” age — though Dylan, ever unpredictably, devotes most of his ink to an apocryphal claim about the song’s authorship.Students of Dylan have long known to just listen and not ask why. — Ben Sisario—Strangers in the Night, by Frank SinatraMusic by Bert Kaempfert. Lyrics by Charles Singleton and Eddie SnyderFrank Sinatra, 1967, shooting a movie in Manhattan.Neal Boenzi/The New York TimesListen to Dylan read his riff on Strangers in the NightThe song of the lone wolf, the outsider, the alien, the foreigner, and night owl who’s wheeling and dealing, putting everything up for sale and surrendering his self-interest. On the move aimlessly through the dingy darkness — slicing up the pie of sentimental feelings, dividing it into pieces all the time, exchanging piercing penetrating looks with someone he hardly knows.Tramps and mavericks, the object of each other’s affection, enraptured with each other and creating an alliance — ignoring all the ages of man, the golden age, electronic age, age of anxiety, the jazz age. You’re here to tell a different story, a bird of another feather. You’ve got a tough persona, like a side of beef, and you’re aroused and stimulated, with an ear-to-ear grin, like a Cheshire cat, and you’re rethinking your entire formless life, your entire being is filled with a whiff of this heady ambrosia. Something in your vital spirit, your pulse, something that runs in the blood, tells you that you must have this tender feeling of love now and forever, this essence of devoted love held tightly in your grip — that it’s essential and necessary for staying alive and cheating death.Intruders, oddballs, kooks, and villains, in this gloomy lifeless dark, fight for space. Two rootless alienated people, withdrawn and isolated, opened the door to each other, said Aloha, Howdy, How you doing, and Good Evening. How could you have known that the smooching and petting, eros and adoration was just one break down mambo hustle away — one far sided google eyed look and a lusty leer — that ever since then, that moment of truth, you’ve been steamed up, head over heels, each other’s hearts’ desire. Sweethearts and honeys right from the beginning. Right from the inaugural sidelong sneak peek, the origin — the starting point. Now you’re yoked together, one flesh in perpetuity — into the vast eternity — immortalized.Warner Bros.By the time Frank Sinatra stepped into the studio to record “Strangers in the Night” on April 11, 1966, he had already been singing professionally for thirty-one years and recording since 1939. He had seen trends come and go in popular music and had, in fact, set trends himself and spawned scores of imitators for decades.Still, it was amazing that the soundtrack of the summer of 1966, according to the July 2 edition of the Billboard Hot 100, was topped by that little pop song. Amazingly, in the middle of the British Invasion, “Strangers in the Night” by Hoboken’s own beat out the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” and the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.” Today, the charts are so stratified and niche marketed, you would never see something like this happen. Nowadays, everyone stays in their own lane, guaranteeing themselves top honors in their own category even if that category is something like Top Klezmer Vocal Performance on a Heavy Metal Soundtrack Including Americana Samples.But Frank had to slug it out with everybody, even though “Strangers” was a song he hated, one that he regularly dismissed as “a piece of shit.” But let us not forget, Howlin’ Wolf allegedly once said the same thing about his first electric guitar and the Chess brothers put that quote in big letters on one of his album covers.Frank may have hated the song, but the fact of the matter is, he chose it. And therein lies a tale. By the time we had heard “Strangers in the Night,” it had gone through at least two sets of lyrics and a few people had already laid claim to its authorship. It’s a confusing tale that spans a couple of continents. I present it here in the interests of entertainment and will not swear to its veracity.Many cigar smokers have enjoyed the Avo XO, a fine Dominican cigar. The well-known Swiss tobacconist Davidoff of Geneva introduced them to the world and now more than two million a year are sold. These cigars were a rebound revenue stream for an Armenian musician, a Beiruti immigrant living in New York, who felt he had been swindled out of the profits of a chart-topping composition.As a youth, Avo Uvezian was a jazz pianist, playing his way across the Middle East during the early forties, at one point teaching Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi how to correctly swing-dance. With the grateful shah’s help, Uvezian relocated to New York in 1947 and enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music.Here is where the story gets murky. According to Uvezian, he sent one of the little melodies he composed to the only person he knew in the music industry — the German orchestra leader and composer Bert Kaempfert. Today that melody, under the title “Strangers in the Night,” is listed as a Bert Kaempfert composition.One way or another, the song was presented to Frank Sinatra. According to legend, Frank requested the lyrics be changed. Charles Singleton and Eddie Snyder were brought in. They took the melancholy song about parting lovers titled “Broken Guitar” and returned a week later with “Strangers in the Night.” Interestingly, Charles Singleton also co-wrote “Tryin’ to Get to You,” a song recorded in 1954 by Washington, D.C., vocal group the Eagles. That song was again recorded the following year by Elvis Presley while he was on Sun Records. Other people also made claims against Bert Kaempfert’s authorship of “Strangers in the Night.” One was made by the Croatian singer Ivo Robić and another by the French composer Philippe-Gérard, though neither has held up as well as Avo Uvezian’s.And as for him, his name is not on the record label, but it is on a lot of cigar bands. He maintained a good attitude and lived joyfully into his nineties. Though he shrugged off the music business, he did not shrug off music, performing regularly and entertaining friends with his piano playing while enjoying millions of dollars of Swiss cigar money. Not all stories have to have sad endings.And as far as I know, no one has ever contested the writing of Frank’s hit from the following year, “Somethin’ Stupid,” though it is worth mentioning that it was written by Van Dyke Parks’s older brother Carson.—My Generation, by The WhoSong written by Pete TownshendPete Townshend performs at the Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival in 1966.Pictorial Press Ltd/AlamyThis is a song that does no favors for anyone, and casts doubt on everything.In this song, people are trying to slap you around, slap you in the face, vilify you. They’re rude and they slam you down, take cheap shots. They don’t like you because you pull out all the stops and go for broke. You put your heart and soul into everything and shoot the works, because you got energy and strength and purpose. Because you’re so inspired they put the whammy on, they’re allergic to you, and they have hard feelings. Just your very presence repels them. They give you frosty looks and they’ve had enough of you, and there’s a million others just like you, multiplying every day.You’re in an exclusive club, and you’re advertising yourself. You’re blabbing about your age group, of which you’re a high-ranking member. You can’t conceal your conceit, and you’re snobbish and snooty about it. You’re not trying to drop any big bombshell or cause a scandal, you’re just waving a flag, and you don’t want anyone to comprehend what you’re saying or embrace it, or even try to take it all in. You’re looking down your nose at society and you have no use for it. You’re hoping to croak before senility sets in. You don’t want to be ancient and decrepit, no thank you. I’ll kick the bucket before that happens. You’re looking at the world mortified by the hopelessness of it all.In reality, you’re an eighty-year-old man, being wheeled around in a home for the elderly, and the nurses are getting on your nerves. You say why don’t you all just fade away. You’re in your second childhood, can’t get a word out without stumbling and dribbling. You haven’t any aspirations to live in a fool’s paradise, you’re not looking forward to that, and you’ve got your fingers crossed that you don’t. Knock on wood. You’ll give up the ghost first.You’re talking about your generation, sermonizing, giving a discourse.Straight talk, eyeball to eyeball.UMGListen to Oscar Isaac read Dylan’s riff on My GenerationToday it is commonplace to stream a movie directly to your phone. So, when you are watching Gloria Swanson as faded movie star Norma Desmond proclaim from the palm of your hand, “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small,” it contains layers of irony that writer/director Billy Wilder could never have imagined. Of course, someone streaming something to their phone is most likely watching something even shorter and faster paced on TikTok, certainly not anything in black and white with a running time of 110 minutes.Every generation gets to pick and choose what they want from the generations that came before with the same arrogance and ego-driven self-importance that the previous generations had when they picked the bones of the ones before them. Pete Townshend was born in 1945, which puts him at the front end of the baby boomer generation, born right after the Second World War ended. The generation who fathered Pete and the rest of the boomers has been called the Greatest Generation — not a self-congratulatory term at all.It might be helpful to take a moment and define terms just a bit. What exactly is a generation? Currently, the common definition is the period of time that the statistically largest portion of the population born within a thirty-year period is in control of the zeitgeist. Recently, we have entered a new phase, where anyone entering the age of twenty-two as of 2019 is now a member of Generation Z. While people make jokes about millennials, that group is now old news, as obsolete as all of the previous generations — the baby boomers, Gen X, the Fragile Generation, the Intermediates, the Neutrals, the Dependable, the Unshaken, and the Clean Slate.Marlon Brando, like Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and the first wave of rockers, fell somewhere between the greatest generation ever and the baby boomers; too young to fight against the Nazis, too old to go to Woodstock. Yet when Brando replied, “Whaddya got?” when a local girl asked him what he was rebelling against in the movie The Wild One, it set the stage for the sixties and the rebellion against the picture-perfect prefab communities the boys came home from the war to build.Like a lot of boomers, Pete seems to have a chip on his shoulder in this song. But he’s not totally confident, he’s somewhat back on his heels. There’s a certain defensiveness. He knows people put him down just because he gets around. Perhaps he feels like he will never measure up or he knows they resent his generation’s newly abundant leisure time. He wishes they would just disappear, fade away. He hopes he dies before he gets old and is replaced like he is replacing them. Pete can’t even point the finger himself, he depends on his mouthpiece Roger to hurl the invective. That fear is perhaps the most honest thing about the song. We all rail at the previous generation but somehow know it’s only a matter of time until we will become them ourselves.Pete would probably be the first to tell you. He has a front-row seat for the history of his generation. He could read the picket signs against hatred and war. Well, that certainly ended that, thank you for your service. Each generation seems to have the arrogance of ignorance, opting to throw out what has gone before instead of building on the past. And they have no use for someone like Pete offering the wisdom of his experience, telling them what he has learned on the similar paths he has trod. And if he’d had the audacity to do so, there’s every chance that person would have looked up at Pete and told him that he couldn’t see him, he couldn’t hear him.And that gave Pete another idea.—Excerpted from THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG by Bob Dylan. © 2022 Bob Dylan All rights reserved. Audio excerpts courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio, read by Bob Dylan, Oscar Isaac, John Goodman, Alfre Woodward, Jeffrey Wright, et.al. (P) 2022 Simon & Schuster, Inc. Used with permission from Simon & Schuster, Inc. More

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      In ‘Tár,’ a Female Maestro Falls Into the Same Old Traps

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      The film’s thesis is blunt: Put a woman in power, and she’ll be as sexually inappropriate and badly behaved as any man.Early in the new film “Tár,” an eminent conductor, played by Cate Blanchett, has strewn classical LPs over her floor. They’re designed in the old-school style of the Deutsche Grammophon label, which had the grandest maestros of the 20th century — the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan and Claudio Abbado — brooding from the covers of recordings of symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner.Lydia Tár is sorting through them with her foot — as if in disgust, like she can’t bear to touch them. As if she’s toppled the whole patriarchal tradition and can now stand above it, a David who’s killed all the Goliaths.But we soon discover that she wasn’t mulling over the records in that spirit; she was merely looking for inspiration. For her new Mahler album, she’s decided that she wants to be photographed sitting alone — oversize score open, face solemn, lighting dramatic — in the seats of the Berlin Philharmonic’s home hall. Just like Abbado and the rest.Tár represents a radically different face of classical music. Barely any women — in the film or in real life — have done what she has: made it to the top tier of the world’s orchestral podiums. Let alone that of the Berlin Philharmonic, perhaps the most celebrated of them all, which Blanchett’s character rules with cool authority.“We don’t see women at the top of this food chain ever,” said Marin Alsop, who during her tenure at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was the first and only female leader of one of the 25 largest American ensembles.But, as we gradually learn, Tár represents anything but a radical break with the past.In the music world, that past is embodied in the worship of maestros, whose hard-to-define, near-spiritual, silent yet crucial role as conduits of the great composers has long granted them fearsome dominance. Theirs is a position so flush with power that it has been all too easy for them to abuse it.Blanchett plays a powerful conductor in “Tár,” which posits that classical music is addicted to the myth of the all-knowing, all-hearing leader.Focus FeaturesIt’s become an assumption for many inside and outside the field that, as women and people of color slowly but steadily diversify the ranks of top conductors, the problems associated with maestro worship — that outsize power, eye-popping (even deficit-encouraging) salaries, sexual misconduct, anger issues, reactionary repertory choices, dependence on name-brand conductors to sell tickets — will ease.Not so fast, says “Tár,” written and directed by Todd Field.The film posits a more unsettling, intractable possibility: that classical music remains so robustly addicted to the myth of the all-knowing, all-hearing leader that it will continue to grant those leaders a degree of power that will inevitably corrupt women and men alike.For Lydia Tár is no better — certainly no better behaved — than any of the rageaholic, underling-seducing men we are often assured are going extinct.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Big-Screen Aesthetics: “Tár” was among several movies at the New York Film Festival that offered reflections on the rarefied worlds of classical music and visual art.That some of those men have, in recent years, undergone steep falls from grace for their misconduct doesn’t seem to give Tár pause. She is a sexual predator, imperious, controlling. She grants plum gigs to her crushes and turns up her nose at fresh sounds as she elevates the standards: The movie centers on her rehearsing the Berlin orchestra in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which she decides to pair with Elgar’s equally classic Cello Concerto (featuring, of course, a talented young woman who has caught her eye as soloist).“Tár” says that the fundamental structure of the field — the persistent over-glorification of the podium, casting even benign conductors in a paternal role — is the problem. And it’s a problem that won’t necessarily be solved by changing the identity of the person holding the baton. The film’s thesis could be bluntly stated: Women, too, can be inappropriately horny and generally evil.The woman Field creates has achieved more power than any female conductor in history. She wields it malignantly, and she is humiliated for doing so, even more catastrophically than any of her real-life male counterparts.If that fantasy is persuasive, it’s because, for all its noirish, even horror-movie trappings, “Tár” is a largely realistic depiction of its subject matter. (Far more so than “Black Swan” in relation to ballet, or “Whiplash” to jazz.) Blanchett gestures on the podium like a real conductor; a few references to the symphony she is preparing as “the Five” — rather than “the Fifth” or “Mahler Five” — are almost the only slips of tone.Marin Alsop, here conducting the Baltimore Symphony in 2015, was the only female conductor of a top American orchestra, when she stepped down last year. (Now, a year later, there is again one.)Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesThe protagonist is clearly based partly on Alsop, who stepped down from the Baltimore podium last year — leaving the number of women in top American positions at zero until Nathalie Stutzmann became music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra this month.Alsop, like Tár, is a lesbian with a partner and a child. And like Tár, she founded a fellowship program for young women seeking to follow in her footsteps. Unlike Tár, Alsop has never been accused of misconduct, with the fellows or otherwise.When we spoke by phone recently, Alsop said that the premise that women would fall into the traps laid by traditional power structures was “premature.”“There haven’t been any women in those positions,” she added. “There haven’t been any people of color in those positions. To assume that they will also be taken under the spell of this maestro mythology, it really is presumptuous.”Presumptuous or not, the film is a reminder that the change we should hope and work for is as much about modesty as it is about identity: a vision of conducting as a vehicle for building community, for giving back, rather than solely for wielding authority in the service of a tiny group of pieces from the ever more distant past. (It is not only men who perpetuate this limited view of the repertory: Stutzmann, for one, told The New York Times recently that she would proudly be focusing on music from before the 20th century.)Cultural changes may well force modesty on the field, like it or not. In the wake of pandemic lockdowns, and as classical music continues to drift further from the mainstream, ticket sales that were once energized by the names and faces of beloved maestros have dried up. Audiences haven’t heard of almost any conductors. Deutsche Grammophon and the other record labels that hawked those brooding visions of paternal authority are shadows of what they were just a few decades ago.Conductors will always be responsible for wrangling a single vision from a stage of 100 musicians; for making decisions; for leading. But that leadership can be more demystified, more collaborative, more modest. It’s a change that must involve more diversity on the podium — but, as “Tár” cautions us, not just that.“I hope the premise that women or people of color will be just as autocratic can be disproved,” Alsop said. “I hope we’re given the opportunity to disprove it.” More

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      Art Laboe, D.J. Who Popularized ‘Oldies but Goodies,’ Dies at 97

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      A familiar voice on the California airwaves for almost 80 years, he saw the appeal of old rock ’n’ roll records practically before they were old.Art Laboe, the disc jockey who as a mainstay of the West Coast airwaves for decades bridged racial divides through his music selections and live shows, reached listeners in a new way by allowing on-air dedications and helped make the phrase “oldies but goodies” ubiquitous, died on Friday at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 97.An announcement on his Facebook page said the cause was pneumonia.Mr. Laboe worked in radio for almost 80 years. In 1973, The San Francisco Examiner was already calling him the “dean of Los Angeles rock ’n’ roll broadcasting,” and he would be on the air for almost a half-century more after that.He started in the business as a teenager during World War II, working at a San Francisco station, KSAN, before gravitating to KPMO in Pomona and KCMJ in Palm Springs. The idea of a disc jockey with a distinctive personality had not yet become the norm in radio — at KCMJ, a CBS affiliate, he was mostly an announcer doing station identifications and such between radio soap operas — but for an hour late at night he was allowed to play music.He featured big bands, crooners and other sounds of the day. But as tastes changed, his selections changed, and sometimes he was at the front edge of the evolution. In 1954, by then working in Los Angeles, Mr. Laboe “was largely responsible for making the Chords’ ‘Sh-Boom’ (sometimes cited as the first rock ’n’ roll record) an L.A. No. 1,” Barney Hoskyns wrote in “Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles” (1996).He also saw the appeal of “oldies” practically before they were old. Around 1949 he had started working at KRKD in Los Angeles, selling advertising by day and playing music in the wee hours. He thought an all-night restaurant, Scrivener’s Drive-In, might be interested in advertising on his all-night show, so he paid a visit and sold the owner, Paul Scrivener, some spots. A few months later, Mr. Scrivener made a suggestion.“‘You know, that show’s pretty good,’” Mr. Laboe, in a 2016 interview with The Desert Sun of Palm Springs, recalled Mr. Scrivener saying. “‘Why couldn’t you do that show from my drive-in?’ So I did.’”Mr. Laboe issued the first volume of his “Oldies but Goodies” series of compilation albums in 1959. It stayed on the Billboard chart for more than three years, and many more volumes followed.JP Roth CollectionHe would broadcast from the restaurant (he moved to KLXA and then KPOP in this period), stopping by cars and asking the occupants to pick a song from a list.“At the bottom of the list,” The San Francisco Examiner wrote in 1973, “were a half a dozen ‘oldies’ titles — songs at that time no more than three years old — and when this portion of the list began to show the heaviest action, Laboe wondered if there might be something to this.”He had already formed his own record label, Original Sound, and in 1959 it issued “Oldies but Goodies, Vol. 1,” a compilation album — a relatively new concept — that included “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins, “Earth Angel” by the Penguins and 10 other songs that, although they’d been on the singles charts only a few years earlier, had already begun to acquire a nostalgic feel. The album stayed on the Billboard chart for more than three years, and many more volumes followed.Early in his career Mr. Laboe began taking requests on the air, allowing listeners to dedicate a song to a friend, love interest or other special person. It became one of his signatures; few if any other disc jockeys were doing that in his early days. Some callers would dedicate a song to a loved one who was incarcerated. And early on, Mr. Laboe welcomed Black and Mexican callers, a barrier-breaking thing to do at the time.In the 1950s, Mr. Laboe also began producing and serving as M.C. at live music shows at the American Legion Stadium in El Monte, a blue-collar city east of Los Angeles, that were known for the racially diverse crowd they attracted. The Penguins, Ritchie Valens and countless other acts performed at the El Monte shows.Mr. Laboe with Jerry Lee Lewis at the American Legion Stadium in El Monte, Calif., in 1957. The shows Mr. Laboe produced there were known for the racially diverse crowd they attracted. Art Laboe Collection“Friday and Saturday night rhythm-and-blues dances at the El Monte Legion Stadium drew up to 2,000 Black, white, Asian American and Mexican American teenagers from all over Los Angeles city and county, becoming an alternative cultural institution from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s,” the scholar Anthony Macias wrote in American Quarterly in 2004.Mr. Laboe was still producing live shows into his 90s.“If you come to one of our concerts,” he told KQED in 2019, “you’ll see a mixture, a complete mixture, of what we have in California.”He was also still on the radio, on the syndicated “Art Laboe Connection,” after having logged time at assorted stations. In 2002, Greg Ashlock, the general manager of KHHT-FM in Los Angeles, where Mr. Laboe had a long run, summed up Mr. Laboe’s appeal in an interview with The Los Angeles Times.“There’s nobody that connects with the community like him,” he said. “The audience knows him and loves him like a family member. It’s almost like tuning in to Uncle Art.”Wherever he was spinning, Mr. Laboe made it a point of mixing genres and generations.“Sometimes the 20-year-old who wants to hear Alicia Keys will tolerate the Spinners,” he told The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., in 2008. “It’s not off the course enough to make them want to change stations.”Russell Contreras/Associated PressArthur Egonian was born on Aug. 7, 1925, in Salt Lake City to a family of Armenian immigrants. His obsession with radio began at a young age: His sister gave him his first radio for his eighth birthday. In a 2020 interview with The Press-Enterprise, he recalled being amazed by the “box that talks.” That experience sparked his interest in the nascent radio scene.He attended George Washington High School in Los Angeles and studied engineering for a time at Stanford University.He was hired at KSAN while still a teenager; his voice, he said, had not yet acquired the timbre that became his calling card.“The very first words I uttered on radio myself, I said, ‘This is K-S-A-N San Francisco,’ and it was in 1943,” he said.The station manager suggested he Americanize his name, and he is said to have taken “Laboe” from the name of a secretary there. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he moved to Southern California, which became his home base.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.In 2015, the nonprofit online radio station DubLab turned the tables on Mr. Laboe, the man who was a conduit for so many on-air dedications, giving his fans an opportunity to call in and dedicate a song to him.“I don’t know what we would have done without you,” one caller said. “I spent a lot of time in a car without anything but a radio, and you made it good, and you exposed me to a lot of beautiful music.” More

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      MacArthur Foundation Announces 25 New ‘Genius’ Grant Winners

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      The 2022 awards are going to artists, activists, scholars, scientists and others who have shown “exceptional creativity.” The grants are a bit bigger than before: $800,000 over five years.The 2022 MacArthur fellows include a sociologist working to understand what drives people to own guns; an astrodynamicist trying to manage “space traffic” and ensure that satellites don’t crash into each other in Earth’s orbit; and a lawyer seeking to expose inequities in the patent system that stifle access to affordable medications.The 25 winners of the fellowship, announced on Wednesday, study things as small as molecular materials and as vast as outer space. They are esteemed in their fields, if not yet all household names. And now, in addition to being publicly celebrated for their work, they will have more funding to keep it going.Known colloquially as the “genius” award — to the sometime annoyance of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation — the MacArthur Fellowship comes with a no-strings-attached grant of $800,000 to be awarded over five years. (Program officials noted that the size of the stipend has increased for the new group of fellows, from $625,000.)The class includes scholars tackling some particularly timely topics. Jennifer Carlson, 40, investigates the motivations and assumptions that shape gun culture in America. The longtime activist Loretta J. Ross teaches a class that works to combat so-called cancel culture. And some of Yejin Choi’s work involves using computational linguistics to help detect everything from fake consumer reviews to fake news.“I didn’t think much of myself,” said Professor Choi, 45. “I thought this award was supposed to be for other people out there — not ever for me.”“Being an immigrant, being a woman — I had to overcome a lot,” she said. “I had impostor syndrome.”The fellowship is meant for those who “show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future,” according to the foundation.The purpose “has always been to provide recipients with unrestricted financial support so that they might further their creative work and their creative inclinations with as much freedom as flexibility as possible,” said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program.Few honors carry the prestige — and mystique — of the MacArthurs. Potential fellows cannot apply but are suggested by a network of hundreds of anonymous nominators from across the country and narrowed down by a committee of about a dozen people, whose names are not released.Professor Ross said she was driving when she got a call from the foundation. She assumed, at first, that someone wanted an employment reference: “I told them, kind of rudely, ‘I’m driving right now, I’ve got to teach today, call me back at 4:15.’”She did not give the caller time to explain. “I don’t drive and talk,” she said.The foundation called back at 4:15 p.m., as instructed.“I felt honored and I felt a little bewildered,” Professor Ross said. “The hardest part is that they told me a month ago and I had to keep it all to myself.”Much of the winners’ work feels urgent. Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer, investigates the scale and pathways of plastic pollution and is among the researchers who provided the first estimate of the amount of plastic waste entering the ocean annually (eight million metric tons).Moriba Jah, 51, the astrodynamicist, is an advocate for a different kind of environmentalism: space environmentalism, which calls for treating Earth’s orbit, which now contains almost 30,000 human-made objects, as a finite natural resource.Priti Krishtel, 44, the lawyer, is trying to change the patent system so that pharmaceutical companies can no longer file multiple patents on small changes to existing drugs — a move aimed at increasing access to affordable medications.In some cases, the urgent work is the study of the past. The literary historian P. Gabrielle Foreman founded the Colored Conventions Project, a digital initiative that documents Black organizing efforts between 1830 and the 1890s.“We know about white-led movements for social change in a way that has a tendency, in the public square, to overshadow Black brilliance, Black leadership and Black organizational capacity,” Professor Foreman said.“Why don’t we know about Black-led movements? One reason is because they are saying the same thing we are saying today,” she continued, noting that the conventions dealt not just with ending slavery but also with issues like equal pay, labor rights, voting rights and other issues that remain pressing almost two centuries later.There are multiple artists in the class as well. Among them is Amanda Williams, whose “Embodied Sensations” installation was at the Museum of Modern Art in 2021. There are also musicians like Ikue Mori, who, over five decades, transformed the use of percussion in improvised music, and the jazz cellist and composer Tomeka Reid.The youngest fellow is Steven Prohira, 35, a physicist engineering new tools to detect subatomic particles. The oldest, at age 69, are Professor Ross and Robin Wall Kimmerer, a plant ecologist known for environmental stewardship that is grounded in both scientific research and the body of knowledge cultivated by Indigenous peoples.Steven Ruggles, 67, is also among this class of fellows. A historical demographer, he built the world’s largest publicly available database of population statistics.“I’m not the most obvious candidate for something like this,” he said, noting that he is older and has already procured considerable grant money. Still, he, conceded, “It’s a humbling thing.”This year’s fellows also include: the artists Paul Chan, Sky Hopinka and Tavares Strachan; the mathematicians June Huh and Melanie Matchett Wood; the historian Monica Kim; the writer Kiese Laymon; Danna Freedman, a synthetic inorganic chemist; Martha Gonzalez, a musician and scholar; Joseph Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and naturalist; Reuben Jonathan Miller, a sociologist, criminologist and social worker; and Emily Wang, a primary-care physician and researcher.Professor Choi, a computer scientist with expertise in what is known as natural language processing, has focused much of her recent research on common sense knowledge and reasoning — and developing artificial intelligence systems that can reason with that common sense.“People really looked down on me,” she said, recalling that someone had once chased her down at a conference to convince her that attempting to study common sense was a fool’s errand.Getting a MacArthur, she said, has been “enabling” — both financially and mentally, Professor Choi said. The same person who had sought her out at the conference asked her years later to recommend reading for a class the person wanted to teach, she said. The topic of the class? Common sense. More

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      A Lifelong Friendship’s Latest Chapter: A Concerto Premiere

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      At the San Francisco Symphony, Magnus Lindberg’s music is being conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, his fellow Finn and former classmate.Look at the biographies of Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and you’ll notice that the similarities stack up pretty quickly.These two Finnish artists — both composers, both performers and, in Salonen’s case, one of the world’s great conductors — are the same age, 64, attended the same music school and, on Thursday, will jointly present the premiere of Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the San Francisco Symphony.Well, they’re not exactly the same age. “Magnus is four days older than me,” Salonen said in a joint video interview with Lindberg, “which I’ve never let him forget.”Lindberg laughed. They are friends, of course, and this week’s premiere is the latest chapter in a lifelong relationship defined by mutual support and even the occasional collaboration, as when Salonen recorded Lindberg’s first piano concerto, a 1994 work loosely inspired by Ravel but in a thoroughly modernist vein.The second piano concerto, which the New York Philharmonic debuted in 2012, is a product of Lindberg’s residency there, and was conducted by Alan Gilbert. It is a grand, deceptively conventional piece, running nearly half an hour over three movements. During a reunion with Gilbert three years ago in Hamburg, Germany, Lindberg saw Yuja Wang perform Shostakovich’s two piano concertos with the NDR Elbphilharmonie.“I found that interesting, and we had dinner, and we started to discuss this and that,” Lindberg said, recalling his first meeting with Wang. “I said I would like to do another piano concerto one day, and it became a project.”In the interview, Lindberg and Salonen discussed their history and that project — in which Wang will be the soloist, and which will travel to the New York Philharmonic in January under the baton of their fellow Finn Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Salonen and Lindberg — both composers, both performers and, in Salonen’s case, one of the world’s great conductors — are the same age, 64, and attended the same music school.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesHow did you meet?ESA-PEKKA SALONEN We met at 15 in a music theory group in the precollege department of the Sibelius Academy.MAGNUS LINDBERG We were thrown out of music theory after two weeks because we were trying to know everything better than everyone else. And that teacher put us in the hands of another teacher, who became our theory teacher for eight years. We spent basically all Saturday mornings together during those years.SALONEN We had this iron principle that no matter what happened Friday evening — whether a party or whatever — we were always there Saturday morning.LINDBERG It was typically the three of us playing on two pianos, six hands. We would go through Scriabin’s First Symphony, and then we would analyze it and check the harmonies and play it. Also, we ended up having Esa-Pekka conduct if we played four hands. For me, at least, it was sort of a lifesaver because music theory was always around music with this teacher. It was always making noise, never theoretical.SALONEN During those years, we went through not only the Western music canon but all kinds of things that did not belong to the canon. We developed a party trick that became really unpopular, which is that we played music by Josef Matthias Hauer, the weird Austrian composer who invented a 12-tone system before Schoenberg. We played “Apokalyptische Phantasie” on four hands, and it was not super popular, but we did it anyway because we thought the best thing we can give to friends is to widen their horizons.Yuja Wang, left, will be the soloist on Lindberg’s new piano concerto, which she helped influence.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesAnd to the public. You were founders of the group Korvat Auki.SALONEN We had a group of composing students and also instrumental students who were interested in contemporary music, who felt that we needed something new in Finnish music life and to open the windows to the newest things in Europe. So together with other friends and fellow students we started Korvat Auki. That’s how we met Kaija Saariaho, in the first meeting of the society. The first meeting, in fact, took place in Kaija’s then-boyfriend’s apartment. He was a painter, so he brought in his visual arts friends, and there was cross-pollination.The idea was to bring new music to people. So we did concerts in schools and hospitals and so on — outside gas stations in the middle of nowhere, in snow banks. I organized one concert in my old school, which was totally faultlessly executed except that I had forgotten to announce it. Nobody knew that this concert had happened. I started studying conducting as well, mainly because no one seemed interested, so we had to bring someone from our own ranks.LINDBERG We founded a group called Toimii, and that definitely came out of an enormous respect for what Stockhausen was doing. Aside from playing written music, we also did a lot of improvisation. We thought that should be a natural way of expressing musical thoughts.SALONEN That was the group that once performed music at Ojai in bunny suits. That was a children’s concert; the kids seemed to like it.Children have the most open ears.SALONEN Exactly. They are the best audience, no question.How have those years influenced your careers?SALONEN In terms of Magnus and me, the cross-influence has been massive. We have spent countless hours talking about orchestration, notation, form, this and that. It’s been a lifelong school, in a way, and it’s still ongoing. Now I’m getting ready to rehearse his piano concerto tomorrow morning, and it’s a style that I know very well. But the delight here is for me to see, “Oh that’s new; that chord you haven’t used before.”I tell my young conducting colleagues and students: Form relationships with composers. Because in the best-case scenario, you might find a working partner for the rest of your professional life. Of course, growing up in Helsinki in the 1970s was a great place for this to develop because it was a statistically unusual situation where like-minded composers were studying together and hanging out, and despite the different stylistic approaches, we were completely loyal to one another.LINDBERG And we’ve been keeping on with the tradition that every time one of us has written a new piece, we gather and listen, and we give feedback. Being a composer in this strange world is astonishingly alone. Having someone you can trust telling you what he is thinking is crucial.SALONEN The funny thing is that composing gets lonelier as you get older and become more famous. Because fewer people dare to say anything. So at the end of the day, you have your old friends and colleagues.“In terms of Magnus and me, the cross-influence has been massive,” Salonen said. “We have spent countless hours talking about orchestration, notation, form, this and that. It’s been a lifelong school, in a way, and it’s still ongoing.”Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesWhat new directions, Magnus, did you take with this new piano concerto?LINDBERG I am sort of free. I don’t have to invent the concerto as a sort of individual-collective setup. This piece, despite being in three movements, would almost rather be like three concertos — a concerto in three concertos. I spent a lot of time working on it, and last winter, when it wasn’t fully ready, Yuja and I went through, and I allowed her to influence the writing. The specialties of her technique and her approach to the piano are quite stunning.What should audiences listen for?SALONEN The first time I went through this score, I spotted a few old friends: a moment, very fleeting, where there is a strong allusion to an existing piano piece. There’s one where the orchestra quiets down and the piano starts playing the first bar of “Ondine.” It’s like this hallucination almost, and it goes by very quickly. This is a technique that Magnus has been using since the very beginning. It’s like bumping into somebody in the crowd on the subway. It’s a familiar face — “I must know that person” — and then it’s over.LINDBERG You think you invent something, then you realize, Oh, my God, that was so close to something that exists. Instead of abandoning it, for a brief moment you can give it a tribute, and go away from it.SALONEN These moments, the accidental ones, happen to every composer — at least all the composers who respect the history of music and are aware of it. There’s something nice about the fact that you sometimes go back to your ancestors. It’s a sign of love and respect. More