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      At the Serpentine, Holly Herndon Taught A.I. to Sing

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      Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst are presenting their first large-scale solo museum show. It sounds gorgeous, even if its visual elements are lacking.Although it’s easy to feel alienated by the opaque processes behind artificial intelligence and fearful that the technology isn’t regulated, the artists Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst want you to know that A.I. can be beautiful.Their exhibition “The Call,” at the Serpentine Galleries in London through Feb. 2, is the first large-scale solo museum show for the artist duo, who have long been at the forefront of A.I.’s creative possibilities.Herndon — who was born in Tennessee, grew up singing in church choirs and later received a Ph.D. in music composition from Stanford — has made cutting-edge, A.I.-inflected pop music for over a decade. With Dryhurst, a British artist who is also her husband, she has branched out to make tools that help creatives monitor the use of their data online, and recently, into the visual arts.The couple’s work “xhairymutantx,” commissioned for this year’s Whitney Biennial, uses A.I. text prompts to produce an infinite series of Herndon portraits that highlight the playful nature of digital identities.The Serpentine show combines musical and visual elements. With the varied a cappella choral traditions of Britain in mind, Herndon and Dryhurst worked with diverse choirs across the country, from classical to contemporary groups of assorted sizes, to produce training data for an A.I. model. In a wall text, the artists explain that “The Call” consists of more than just the A.I.’s output. They also consider the collection of the data and the training of the machine as works of art.“We’re offering a beautiful way to make A.I.,” the artists’ statement adds. Their utopian take is that A.I. is collectively made: It learns from whatever it is exposed to and can therefore be shaped for good.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Cher: The Memoir,’ by Cher

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      The first volume of her frank autobiography is a testament to resilience, chronicling a grim childhood and the brazen path to stardom, with and without Sonny.CHER: The Memoir, Part One, by CherBefore Twitter morphed into the strange ghost town of X, with lurking users wondering whether to post or stomping off in high dudgeon for Bluesky and Threads, Cher was one of its finest sheriffs. Publications including The New York Times analyzed her grammar-defying style and compiled her stinging critiques of the then and future president Donald J. Trump.In Volume 1 of her confident, confiding new autobiography, which covers the period from her birth on May 20, 1946 (“under the sign of Taurus on the cusp of Gemini, so it’s like there are three of us in here”), to the dawn of her serious movie career in the early ’80s, Cher explains that her distinctive syntax on the platform evolved from undiagnosed dyslexia. “Punctuation marks are like symbols to me that you throw in the air and they land where they land,” she writes.Happily “Cher: The Memoir” is not the round of verbal 52 pickup this portends, but a detailed and characteristically profane recollection of its author’s eventful life: singing, dancing and acting her way out of a childhood so “Dickensian” there were rubber bands around the saddle-shoe soles and ants in the Rice Krispies.Cher’s embodiment of that trendy wellness buzzword “resilience” started from the moment her mother, Jackie Jean Crouch (later Georgia Holt), bailed on an abortion appointment. “It was her body, her life and her choice to make,” Cher writes. “Thank God she got off that table, though, or I wouldn’t be here to write these pages.” Her famous contralto has been modulated, but not Autotuned past recognition.Cherilyn, as she was called, though her birth certificate read Cheryl, is America’s melting pot personified, and her long place on the front (and sometimes back) burner of pop culture evokes both the country’s loftiest promises and its worst failures. A great-grandmother on her mother’s side had Cherokee heritage, raising her children in a log cabin in the Missouri backwoods, in poverty that dripped down generations. Cher’s biological father, who was Armenian, stole, gambled and would become a heroin addict. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jon Batiste Can’t Stop Thinking About Beethoven

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      Long before Jon Batiste was a bandleader, television personality and Grammy- and Academy Award-winning artist, he was a classical piano student.As an adolescent in Metairie, La., he spent Saturday mornings at the home of his teacher, known as Miss Shirley, working on scales and arpeggios, and music by Bach and Debussy.“I was the kind of student that would leave the books in the foyer to sit there until next week’s lesson,” Batiste said. “No practice at home. The beauty of the music didn’t dawn on me until later.”Now Batiste, 38, is returning to his classical roots with an album called “Beethoven Blues.” It features his improvisations on masterpieces like “Für Elise” and the Fifth Symphony, as well as Beethoven-inspired compositions like “Dusklight Movement” and “Life of Ludwig.”Unmute to hear Batiste riff on “Für Elise.”For Batiste, who recorded the album in a day and a half at his home in Brooklyn, the project is personal. It brings him back to the Maple Leaf Bar and other stages in New Orleans, where, as a teenager, he began fusing Chopin nocturnes and Bach inventions with his own music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jesse Ed Davis Was Rock Heroes’ Secret Weapon. And a Mystery.

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      The Native American guitarist graced records by Bob Dylan and John Lennon, but fell to addiction in 1988. A new book and exhibit are telling his story.In the spring of 1967, the blues singer Taj Mahal was about to cut his first solo album for Columbia Records and needed to find a new guitarist in a hurry. He headed to a bar in Los Angeles’s Topanga Canyon, tipped off about a young Native American musician with a mesmerizing touch on the Telecaster. Having already worked with the guitar prodigy Ry Cooder in the short-lived band the Rising Sons, Mahal’s standards were high. But it took barely a minute of hearing Jesse Ed Davis to realize he’d found what he was looking for.“This guy was speaking through his instrument,” Mahal recalled. “In those days everyone wanted to play the blues, but they’d overplay their licks at high volume, trying to get up into the stratosphere. They didn’t have the natural feeling he did — Jesse legitimately had the blues and played it his own way.”Revered by fellow musicians, Davis has remained a cult figure, despite an extraordinary résumé: He played on some of Bob Dylan’s most enduring records, worked closely with multiple Beatles, anchored the band at the Concert for Bangladesh and shaped classic albums by Rod Stewart, Harry Nilsson and Neil Diamond, among others. A complex character who didn’t fit Native American stereotypes or the typical notions of a rock ’n’ roller, in the decades since his 1988 death at 43, he’s remained something of an enigma.The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., is hosting a multimedia exhibition, “Jesse Ed Davis: Natural Anthem.”Zac FowlerThat should change with the publication of the biography “Washita Love Child: The Rise of Indigenous Rock Star Jesse Ed Davis,” by Douglas K. Miller. In conjunction with the book, the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., is hosting a multimedia exhibition, “Jesse Ed Davis: Natural Anthem.” In February, some of Davis’s friends — including Mahal and Jackson Browne — will play a tribute concert at Tulsa’s Performing Arts Center.“Jesse was a phenomenon,” said Browne, whose 1972 track “Doctor My Eyes” was transformed by Davis’s spontaneous one-take solo into a timeless pop hit. “He responded to music in such an immediate way. You always wondered how he became that kind of artist.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At 100, Luigi Nono Remains a Radical, Urgent Composer

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      In 1954, Arnold Schoenberg’s widow, Gertrud, and their daughter, Nuria, traveled from the United States to Europe for the first time since fleeing Nazism two decades earlier. They went to Hamburg, Germany, for the concert premiere of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” where Nuria met the young Italian composer Luigi Nono.They married each other the following year in Venice, uniting two families storied in art and invention. Nuria Schoenberg’s father was a revolutionary who broke with tonality and developed a new method of composition that would change the course of musical history; Nono’s father was an engineer and keen amateur musician, while his grandfather was a Venetian painter known for scenes of the poor — a background that foretold his own art of revolutionary politics, avant-gardism and technology.Nono, who was born 100 years ago and died in 1990, invited listeners to musical extremes, especially that of the dynamic pianississimo, or very, very soft. The score of “Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima” (1979-80), his sole work for string quartet, quotes words from the elusive German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, to be “sung” inwardly by the players: a political act of hope, of forging a whole from fragments, as much from silence as from notes.Nono’s enthusiasm for Schoenberg’s music burned stronger, and was less equivocal, than that of his Darmstadt School contemporaries, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. For them, Anton Webern, Schoenberg’s most radical pupil, was the truer prophet of new music.The Darmstadt School avant-gardists, especially Boulez and Stockhausen, continue to play key roles in music history. Yet since their deaths, their legacies have grown increasingly precarious, with repertory status remaining elusive, the passionate advocacy of a committed few notwithstanding. We ignore Nono at our peril, however: We miss out not only on a rich and varied body of work, but also on the opportunity to transform the ways in which we listen to music old and new, and to the world around us.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kacey Musgraves’s Nashville

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      “I always knew that Nashville would be a destination of some sort for me, that I would land there in terms of music,” said the singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves during a Zoom call. A native Texan who is nominated for five Grammys this year, including best country album for “Deeper Well,” her fifth studio album, she began singing at a young age and at 18 competed on season five of the country music television show “Nashville Star.” A year later she moved to Nashville and never looked back. “I do owe so much to the community there for absolutely shaping me and my songs, and for giving me the opportunities that I’ve had,” she said.Her love for the city runs deep. “Nashville is home to an unparalleled songwriting community. Some of the best songwriters in the world are based there,” she said. Indeed, the city pulses with the energy of its musical heritage, and you can soak it all up everywhere you go — from its groovy lounges to its record stores and hole-in-the-wall bars.So where should a visit to Music City begin? “Even if you’re not necessarily a fan of country music, the Country Music Hall of Fame is really interesting,” she said. “Country music is a very historic genre, and this museum really honors the roots of that.”One of her favorite haunts in the East Nashville area is Grimey’s, a record store set inside an old church, complete with vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows. Right next door is Anaconda Vintage, a used clothing store where she “can always find a little treasure or two.” Across town near Vanderbilt University is Brown’s Diner, the oldest burger joint in the city and “notoriously John Prine’s favorite spot to get a hamburger.”Ms. Musgraves is currently on tour across North America in support of “Deeper Well,” which was reviewed in The Times as “a study in quiet thoughtfulness rooted in gratitude.” Her last stop, on Dec. 7, is back home in Nashville at Bridgestone Arena.Here are her favorite places to visit in the city.1. Sperry’sRoast of prime rib beef with creamy horseradish sauce, asparagus and a twice baked potato is one of the classic dishes at Sperry’s.William DeShazer for The New York TimesWith its classic decor, Sperry’s is the kind of restaurant that seems frozen in time.William DeShazer for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Man Behind the Legendary Donkey Kong Country Soundtracks

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      David Wise turbocharged the Super Nintendo for scores inspired by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Prokofiev, Duran Duran and more.The initial hype about Donkey Kong Country, which was released for the Super Nintendo 30 years ago this week, was centered on its impressive 3-D-ish graphics. But the game’s legacy proved to be its soundtrack.As players led a brawny ape and a cartwheeling monkey through jungles, ancient ruins and snowscapes, they were treated to a musical smorgasbord of atmospheric tunes. The self-taught British composer David Wise, with valuable contributions from Robin Beanland and Eveline Fischer, had managed to coax a richer variety of sounds than had ever emanated from a game console.“Dave really knew the S.N.E.S. inside out, so he could push it as hard as he could to make it do things that people hadn’t heard before,” the video game composer Grant Kirkhope said. At the core of Wise’s music, though, is “melody, melody, melody.”Wise joined the studio Rare in 1985 and composed for its games, including several entries in the Donkey Kong franchise, until 2009. He has continued to work in the industry, with his latest score accompanying Nikoderiko: The Magical World.A legion of gamers cherishes the music for Donkey Kong Country and its sequel, which are a bit like the “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper” of video game music. In a recent interview, Wise unpacked the process and inspirations, musical and otherwise, behind his music for the first two Donkey Kong Country games.‘DK Island Swing’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two Bee Gees Drummers Die Within Days

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      Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the original drummer, and Dennis Bryon, who played during the band’s disco heyday, died within four days of each other.Two drummers for the Bee Gees — one during the long-running Anglo-Australian pop group’s early days of hit-making ballads, the other during its white-hot disco superstardom — died four days apart, according to posts from a tribute band and former bandmates.Dennis Bryon, 76, the Bee Gees’ drummer starting in 1973, died on Nov. 14, according to Blue Weaver, who played in the band Amen Corner with Mr. Bryon. He announced his death on Facebook on Thursday, but gave no cause of death for Mr. Bryon.Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the band’s first professional drummer, died on Nov. 18 at the age of 78, according to Evan Webster and Sue Camilleri, who work on The Best of The Bee Gees Show, a tribute band. Mr. Petersen died from a fall, they said.Mr. Petersen, who joined the Bee Gees in 1967, played on the band’s first four albums. He started playing in the The Best of The Bee Gees Show five years ago, Mr. Webster said.Mr. Petersen played on a string of hit ballads from 1967 to 1970, including “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “I Started a Joke” and “Words.” He was also a child actor, known for his role in the 1956 film “Smiley,” which was the origin of his nickname, among a few other movies in the late ’50s.In a 2022 interview with The Strange Brew Podcast, Mr. Peterson said that the band would always create songs together in the studio.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More