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      Sue Mingus, Promoter of Her Husband’s Musical Legacy, Dies at 92

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      Charles Mingus was among the greatest bassists in jazz. She worked tirelessly to ensure that he was known as a great composer as well.Sue Mingus, the wife of the jazz bassist, composer and bandleader Charles Mingus, whose impassioned promotion of his work after his death in 1979 helped secure his legacy as one of the 20th century’s greatest musical minds, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 92.Her son, Roberto Ungaro, confirmed her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.Though Charles Mingus’s reputation as a brilliant if volatile performer was secure by the time he died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, at 56, Sue Mingus made sure he was also elevated to the pantheon of great jazz composers, alongside the likes of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.She organized three bands, each with different strengths, to wrestle with the more than 300 compositions he left behind, including his posthumously discovered masterpiece, the two-hour orchestral work “Epitaph.” He had despaired of seeing it performed in his lifetime, hence its title, but Ms. Mingus managed to bring the piece to the stage in a landmark performance at Lincoln Center in 1989.Mingus had exacting ideas about how each note from each member of his band should sound. But his wife saw that he had left his compositions supple and wide open to interpretation, allowing generations of musicians to return to them again and again. What resulted was a fresh, alluring texture rarely found in legacy bands playing the music of Ellington, Glenn Miller and others.“None of those leaders posthumously had the advantage of a Sue Mingus,” the jazz critic and journalist Nat Hentoff, a close friend of the Minguses, told The Boston Globe in 2004. “She’s got players who really dig into that music and remember that Mingus used to say, ‘You can’t play your own licks. I want you to play the music, but be yourself.’”Ms. Mingus with her husband’s basses in the late 1980s.Mingus ArchiveCharles and Sue made an unlikely couple: He was a temperamental Black bohemian raised in the Watts section of Los Angeles; she was a white Midwestern former debutante. And yet they clicked almost immediately after a chance encounter in 1964 at the Five Spot, a club in Lower Manhattan.He was playing his regular gig; she was there to soak in the city’s jazz scene, having recently appeared in “OK End Here,” a short film by the photographer Robert Frank with a score by the saxophonist Ornette Coleman.“My life had been one of order and balance, founded on grammar and taste and impeccable manners,” Ms. Mingus wrote in “Tonight at Noon: A Love Story” (2002), her memoir of their relationship. “And yet something about the man across the room seemed oddly familiar, like someone I already knew.”By the end of the 1960s they were more than lovers: She was his manager, his agent, his confidante and emotional support system. She booked his shows, arranged grants and teaching positions, and helped keep him levelheaded and relatively clean of the prescription drugs and alcohol that had disrupted his earlier career.And when, in the mid-1970s, he received his A.L.S. diagnosis, she hunted down experimental surgeries. They were in Mexico for one such treatment when he died; following his wishes, she spread his ashes in the Ganges River in India.It was after his death that Ms. Mingus showed the true strength of her commitment. She arranged for a two-day festival of Mingus’s music at Carnegie Hall, and soon afterward oversaw the creation of Mingus Dynasty, a seven-piece band that played both old Mingus standards and pieces he never brought to life, often arranged by Mingus’s longtime collaborator Sy Johnson, who died in July.The Minguses at their home in the Manhattan Plaza complex in Midtown Manhattan in 1978.Sy Johnson/Mingus ArchivesMs. Mingus had her husband’s compositions cataloged and donated to the Library of Congress, one of the largest gifts ever of a Black musician’s work. When one of the catalogers found the 200-page, 15-pound score for “Epitaph,” she wrangled 31 musicians to perform it, under the direction of the composer and conductor Gunther Schuller.That concert, a decade after Mingus died, revived interest in his music and led to the creation of two more repertory bands.In any given week in New York, a jazz fan might head to the Fez, a basement club on Lafayette Street, to hear the Mingus Big Band, then shuffle over to the City Hall Restaurant in TriBeCa to catch the Mingus Orchestra, which put more focus on composition and featured exotic instruments like bassoon and French horn. In between, one could pick up any number of recordings released under her record labels, Revenge and Sue Mingus Music.Revenge, which released music previously available only on bootleg recordings, demonstrated just how dedicated Ms. Mingus was to her husband’s legacy.By the late 1980s she had grown exasperated with the high volume of bootleg recordings of Mingus concerts. She got in the habit of taking as many as she could from record stores, not bothering to hide her antipiracy vigilantism and daring clerks to stop her.On a trip to Paris in 1991, one clerk did. She was whisked off to see the manager, who berated her before picking up the phone to call the police.“I told him to go right ahead,” she wrote in the liner notes to “Charles Mingus: Revenge,” a 1996 concert album. “I also suggested he call the daily newspapers as well as the television crews for the evening news and also the principal French jazz magazines whose offices happen to be across the street, so that I could explain everything to everyone at once.”The manager put down the phone and let her leave, with the records in hand.Sue Graham was born on April 2, 1930, in Chicago and raised in Milwaukee. Her family was musical: Her father, Louis Graham, was a businessman and amateur opera singer, and her mother, Estelle (Stone) Graham, was a homemaker and harpist.After graduating from Smith College with a degree in history in 1952, she moved to Paris, where she worked as an editor at The International Herald Tribune.A later job editing for an airline magazine called Clipper took her to Rome, where she met and married the artist Alberto Ungaro. They had two children, Roberto and Susanna, and moved to New York City in 1958. She worked for New York Free Press, an alternative weekly, and in 1969 founded Changes, a cultural magazine.She later separated from Mr. Ungaro, who died in 1968. Along with her children, Ms. Mingus is survived by four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.For all her decades of effort, Ms. Mingus remained unwilling to take full credit for burnishing her husband’s legacy.“It keeps itself alive,” she told The Boston Globe in 2002. “I just happen to be a passenger.” More

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      On ‘Fossora,’ Björk Is a Daughter, a Mother and a Universe

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      The Icelandic visionary’s 10th studio album can be thorny and intense, but it finds hope across generations.No way around it: “Fossora,” Björk’s 10th studio album, can be heavy going, thorny and intense. But it’s well worth an effort.“Fossora” continues the songwriter, producer and multimedia visionary’s lifelong project of linking personal experience to larger natural and cosmic processes — to place herself in the universe and the universe within herself. It arrives five years after “Utopia,” a determinedly airy album featuring the sounds of birds and flutes. “Utopia” was a deliberate, gravity-defying rebound and contrast to Björk’s wounded, heartsick, string-laden 2015 album, “Vulnicura,” and “Fossora” is yet another self-conscious change of elemental direction.“Fossora,” derived from the Latin for “digger,” prizes earthiness: the fleshy physicality of life and death, pleasure and suffering, romantic and parental love. To ground the music, Björk’s new tracks often feature low-register instruments like bass clarinets and trombones (though flutes also reappear).Björk’s production and arrangements on “Fossora” present her at her most unapologetically abstruse: closer to contemporary chamber music than to pop, rock or dance music. Her melodies, as always, are bold, declarative, and delivered with passion and suspense. But on “Fossora,” Björk doesn’t necessarily center those melodies as the hooks they could be. And while she collaborates on some tracks with the Indonesian electronic producers Gabber Modus Operandi, she’s not aiming for dance-floor beats.In her new songs, the tempos often fluctuate organically, like breathing. And more than ever, Björk places her voice within a teeming musical ecosystem that’s likely to include a tangle of instrumental polyphony and layered vocals, with every element of the mix insisting on multiplicity.The songs on “Fossora” encompass mourning, self-assessment and hard-won connection and renewal. “Obstacles are just teaching us/So we can just merge even deeper,” Björk declares in “Ovule,” a stately, trombone-weighted consideration of personal and digital togetherness.For much of the album, Björk, 56, contemplates the 2018 death of her mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, and her own generational roles as a child and a mother. (Björk’s children, Sindri and Isadora, appear among the album’s backing vocals.) In “Sorrowful Soil,” Björk summons overlapping, antiphonal choirs for a prismatic yet coolly scientific consideration of motherhood: “In a woman’s life she gets 400 eggs but only two or three nests.” It’s followed by “Ancestress,” with gamelan-like gongs and a string ensemble shadowing Björk’s vocal lines as she recalls moments of her mother’s life and death: “The machine of her breathed all night while she rested/and then it didn’t.”But the album also recognizes obstinate, essential life forces: love, hope and — as a biological analogue — subterranean fungal growth. The album’s graphics and the video for its opening song, “Atopos” (from the Greek for “out of place” or “unusual”), are full of mushroom imagery, and the title song of “Fossora” — an unlikely merger of neoclassical Stravinsky-like woodwinds, ricocheting vocals and sporadic and then brutal electronic thumps — boasts, “For millions of years we’ve been ejecting our spores.” In a song titled “Fungal City,” amid tendrils of clarinet countermelodies and pizzicato strings, Björk exults in a new romance, singing, “His vibrant optimism happens to be my faith too.”That optimism is by no means naïve. In “Victimhood,” the album’s darkest sonorities — six bass clarinets huffing and growling their lowest tones over an impassive ticktock beat — accompany and nearly engulf Björk’s vocals as she struggles with shattered expectations and longs for perspective: “I took one for the team/I sacrificed myself to safe us,” she sings. But she’s trying to “heed a call out of victimhood,” and she finds it as the song ends. Then celebratory flutes greet her in “Allow,” a paean to nurturing as healing: “Allow allow allow you to grow,” she sings. “Allow me to grow.”The album concludes with “Her Mother’s House,” an abstract near-lullaby that envisions children’s rooms as chambers of a mother’s heart. It intertwines the multitracked voices of Björk and her daughter, singing, “The more I love you, the better you will survive.” They find an evolutionary purpose in an emotional bond.“Fossora” doesn’t aim to be a crowd-pleaser. It’s hard to imagine these studio phantasms onstage (though Björk may well find a way). But Björk’s interior worlds are vast.Björk“Fossora”(One Little Independent) More

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      Coolio, ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ Rapper, Dies at 59

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      From a bookish, asthmatic child to crack addict to mainstream hitmaker, the West Coast M.C. charted a unique path to hip-hop stardom.Coolio, the rapper whose gritty and sometimes playful takes on West Coast rap and anthemic hits like “Gangsta’s Paradise” made him a hip-hop star in the 1990s, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 59.His longtime manager, Jarez Posey, confirmed his death.Mr. Posey, who worked with the rapper for more than 20 years, said he was told that Coolio died at about 5 p.m. at a friend’s house. No cause was given. Coolio, whose legal name was Artis Leon Ivey Jr., achieved mainstream superstardom and critical success with “Gangsta’s Paradise” in 1995. The track, which featured the singer L.V., spent three weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100 and was later named the chart’s No. 1 song of the year. It won the Grammy for best rap solo performance in 1996.The song, later certified triple-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, outshone the movie it was featured in, “Dangerous Minds.” Its music video won best rap video and best video from a film at the MTV Video Music Awards.“Coolio still builds his raps on recognizable 1970s oldies, and he delivers intricate, syncopated rhymes as if they were conversation,” Jon Pareles wrote in an album review in The New York Times, noting that “Gangsta’s Paradise” uses “the somber minor chords” of “Pastime Paradise,” by Stevie Wonder.The song nearly did not make it into “Dangerous Minds,” The Times critic Caryn James noted in 1996. She wrote that the late addition “turned a preachy Michelle Pfeiffer film about an inner-city teacher into a hit that sounded fresher than it really was.”Coolio’s other hits included “Fantastic Voyage” — the opening song on his debut album — and “1, 2, 3, 4 (Sumpin’ New),” which were both nominated for Grammys. “C U When U Get There,” which samples Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major,” was a standout track on his third album of the 1990s, “My Soul.”But nothing could match the success of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” a song that, with its piercing beat and ominous background vocals, became instantly distinguishable for millions of ’90s rap fans, especially with a memorable opening verse based on Psalm 23:“As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and realize there’s nothin’ left.”The song would expand the commercial possibilities of hip-hop, but Coolio would later say that he sometimes lamented how the track seemed to overshadow his other bodies of work, particularly follow-up albums.Still, he told PopkillerTV in 2018 that the song had taken him on “a great ride.” Its popularity has endured for decades, with the music video garnering a rare billion-plus views on YouTube.Artis Leon Ivey Jr. was born on Aug. 1, 1963. He grew up in Compton, Calif., a place known for producing some of hip-hop’s most successful artists, such as Dr. Dre and Kendrick Lamar.He told The Independent in 1997 that as a child, he would play board games with his single mother, to whom he later dedicated his success. After a turbulent youth — the bookish, asthmatic child became a teenage gang member, juvenile offender and drug addict — Coolio worked as a volunteer firefighter.In his 20s, he moved to San Jose to live with his father and fight fires with the California Department of Forestry, The Ringer reported. There, he became more spiritual. He later credited Christianity for helping him overcome his addiction to crack.When he embarked on his music career, he quickly gained a following among the rapidly growing audience of hip-hop fans, who had been enraptured by the music of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.After performing with the group WC and the Maad Circle alongside WC, Sir Jinx and DJ Crazy Toones, Coolio went solo. His debut album, “It Takes a Thief” (1994), garnered praise for clever lyrics infused with funky rhythms.“Gangsta’s Paradise” had a vast cultural imprint, even spawning a parody in Weird Al Yankovic’s “Amish Paradise” that replaced the streets with pastoral lyrics about churning butter and selling quilts.Reflecting on his career, and on the success of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Coolio told Rolling Stone in 2015 that he was on tour in Europe when the song went No. 1 on the charts and he realized: “I was No. 1 all over the entire planet — not just in the States. I was No. 1 everywhere that you can imagine.”On Wednesday, the rapper Ice Cube recalled the significance of Coolio’s music at the time, writing on Twitter that he had witnessed “first hand this man’s grind to the top of the industry.”Coolio, whose spindly and sprouting cornrows defined his look, went on to sell 4.8 million records throughout his career, according to Luminate, the tracking service formerly known as Nielsen Music.He expanded his influence by writing and performing the theme song for “Kenan & Kel,” a Nickelodeon staple in the late 1990s. Coolio later became a fixture on reality TV, starting with “Coolio’s Rules,” a 2008 series that focused on his personal life and his quest to find love in Los Angeles.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. Coolio had four children with Josefa Salinas, whom he married in 1996 and later divorced.Years after he topped the charts and solidified himself as a mainstream artist, Coolio confronted legal trouble, pleading guilty to firearms and drug charges.The rapper, who struggled with asthma all his life, served as the spokesman for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, according to his official online biography. At a 2016 performance in Brooklyn, N.Y., Page Six reported, he had an asthma attack and was saved by a fan who had an inhaler.In recent years, Coolio had become aware of his indelible mark on hip-hop. He said in 2018 that after years of lamenting over his struggles in the music industry, he had realized that “people would kill to take my place.”“I’m sure after I’m long gone from this planet, and from this dimension,” he said, “people will come back and study my body of work.” More

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      Timeline: The Long, Long Journey to a New David Geffen Hall

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      After decades of failed attempts, the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center are hoping that the new $550 million renovation has finally fixed the hall.The efforts to fix the New York Philharmonic’s troubled Lincoln Center home date back almost to the night it opened in 1962, when the auditorium, originally called Philharmonic Hall, was found acoustically wanting.In 1976 a gut renovation transformed the space, which had been renamed Avery Fisher Hall in honor of a large gift from the audio equipment pioneer Avery Fisher, and tried to fix its acoustics. But problems persisted. More tweaks were made in the 1990s. The Philharmonic tried to leave for good in 2003 to return to its old home, Carnegie Hall. Plans for new designs by Norman Foster and Thomas Heatherwick came and went.Now the hall, renamed David Geffen Hall after a $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen, is reopening in early October after a $550 million overhaul that everyone hopes will finally get it right. Here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.Sept. 23, 1962A Glamorous Opening, Troubling SignsLeonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at the opening of the hall in 1962.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesPhilharmonic Hall, which was designed by Max Abramovitz and was the first part of Lincoln Center to be completed, opens with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at a white-tie gala attended by the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, and other luminaries. But in his review the next day the critic Harold C. Schonberg in The New York Times notes a “decided lack of bass” in the orchestra section that worsens in the loges and at the back of the hall, where he likens it to “a high-fidelity outfit with the bass control out of the circuit.”Sept. 25, 1962“We’re not going to tear down the hall and rebuild.”Philharmonic Hall on opening night.via New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThe hall’s acoustician, Leo Beranek, tells The Times that he is “not entirely satisfied” with the sound but believes that adjustments will improve it. “In other words,” the article quotes him as saying, “we’re not going to tear down the hall and rebuild.” A series of remodeling efforts begins, but by 1974 visiting ensembles, including the Boston Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra, decide to return to Carnegie Hall.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.1975Gutting the Hall and Starting Againvia New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesLincoln Center announces plans to gut the hall, now called Avery Fisher Hall, and to completely rebuild it under the supervision of the acoustician Cyril M. Harris and the architect Philip Johnson. “There was no point any longer taking halfway measures in relation to the hall,” Fisher says. “A fresh start was needed.”1976Avery Fisher Hall Reopens, to HopeThe philanthropist Avery Fisher, center, was in the audience when the newly renovated Avery Fisher Hall opened in 1976.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesAvery Fisher Hall reopens, and the early reviews are good. This time Schonberg writes in The Times that in “any part of the dynamic range, too, from the wispiest pianissimo to the most stupendous forte, Fisher Hall came through with extraordinary clarity.” But for all his early enthusiasm, he notes that the bass sound, while improved, “tends to be a little weak.”1992The Musicians Still Cannot Hear Each OtherSound reflectors were added around the stage to help the players hear each other.via New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesMusicians still complain that they cannot hear one another on the stage, so sound reflectors — some called “bongos” for their curved appearance — are placed on the walls and ceiling. Allan Kozinn writes in The Times that “Avery Fisher Hall’s acoustics have troubled musicians and listeners ever since it opened in 1962 as Philharmonic Hall. And although the 1976 renovation was considered an improvement, critics continued to complain of an overly bright brass sound and a weak bass.”2003The Philharmonic Tries to Leave Lincoln CenterThe Philharmonic stuns Lincoln Center by announcing that it plans to leave Avery Fisher to return to Carnegie Hall. The announcement throws the center’s on-again, off-again redevelopment plans into chaos (three finalists had been selected to compete to redesign Fisher: Norman Foster, Rafael Moneo and the team of Richard Meier and Arata Isozaki). But the plan, which also called for the Philharmonic and Carnegie to merge, proves unworkable and is soon abandoned.2005Norman Foster Tapped, But Nothing Comes of ItThe Philharmonic board selects the architect Norman Foster to redesign the hall, but plans stall.March 4, 2015David Geffen Gives $100 MillionDavid Geffen, center, with Katherine G. Farley, chairwoman of Lincoln Center, and Jed Bernstein, who was then its president.Richard Perry/The New York TimesDavid Geffen donates $100 million to renovate the hall, which is then named for him, after the Fisher family agrees give up the naming rights in exchange for several inducements, including $15 million.Dec. 9, 2015Heatherwick Studio Briefly on Design TeamThe London firm Heatherwick Studio, led by Thomas Heatherwick, and Diamond Schmitt Architects of Toronto are chosen to redesign the interior of David Geffen Hall. They join the acoustic design firm Akustiks and the theater design firm Fisher Dachs.2017Back to the Drawing BoardLincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic scrap the current plans and go back to the drawing board, saying that the proposals were growing too complicated and too costly, and would force the orchestra out of the hall for three seasons.2019A Plan, and a Design Team, at LastAn artist’s rendering of the plans for the new hall. New York PhilharmonicA new $550 million plan is unveiled to make the hall more intimate, cutting more than 500 seats, reducing capacity to 2,200 from 2,738. It also calls for adding seats behind the stage, fixing the acoustics, rethinking the public spaces and, yes, adding more restrooms. Heatherwick Studios is off the design team, which now consists of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (lobbies and other public spaces); Diamond Schmitt Architects (the auditorium); Akustiks (acoustics); and Fisher Dachs Associates (theater design). The hall is scheduled to open in March 2024.2021The Pandemic Shutdown Speeds ConstructionThe concert hall being rebuilt in 2021.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe pandemic, which has shut down live performance, allows the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center to accelerate the construction schedule, and to push the reopening to this fall. That keeps the orchestra’s nomadic period to just one season, which saw it play at Alice Tully Hall and the Rose Theater with forays to Carnegie Hall.2022David Geffen Hall Set to ReopenThe new hall, so many years in the making and remaking, will come to life this month. There will be two concerts Oct. 8 featuring the world premiere of new piece that Lincoln Center commissioned for the occasion: Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill,” about the vibrant neighborhood that was razed to make way for Lincoln Center. It will be performed by Etienne Charles & Creole Soul, and the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Jaap van Zweden. Tickets will be available on a choose-what-you-pay basis. More

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      The Syncopated Sounds of Old San Juan Hill at the New Geffen Hall

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      Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Before there was Lincoln Center, there was San Juan Hill — a diverse neighborhood located in the West 60s in Manhattan. The “hill” refers to a peak at 62nd Street and Amsterdam.To some, the neighborhood’s reputation was synonymous with racial conflict. In a Page 1 article, in 1905, The New York Times reported that, on a weekly basis, the “police of the West Sixty-eighth Street Station expect at least one small riot on the Hill or in The Gut,” a stretch of the neighborhood on West End Avenue, involving the area’s Black and white rival gangs.But beyond the notoriety of the police blotter, a different American cultural story was taking shape on San Juan Hill. Around 1913, James P. Johnson could be found playing piano at the Jungles Casino, on West 62nd Street; the dances he witnessed there, which he described as “wild and comical,” would inspire “The Charleston,” his syncopated Roaring Twenties-defining hit, a decade later.During a recent interview at Lincoln Center, the jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles noted that the musical legacy of San Juan Hill was particularly rich throughout the first half of the 20th century.“Thelonious Monk is from here,” Charles, 39, said. “And Benny Carter — to me Benny Carter is one of the most influential arrangers because he’s one of the first people to do a five-saxophone soli in big band, right? And he’s a great bandleader, a great improviser.”The musical aspect of the San Juan Hill story long predates the era in which the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, led by Robert Moses, razed the neighborhood to make way for the sprawling Lincoln Center arts complex. (Using eminent domain, Moses’ “urban renewal” project displaced more than 7,000 economically vulnerable families, nearly all of them Black and Hispanic.)It was the lack of a broader appreciation for this history, Charles said, that made him excited to propose a work about San Juan Hill when Lincoln Center approached him in 2020 for a piece to celebrate the reopening of David Geffen Hall. Turns out, the organization had been thinking along similar lines.“It had already been in conversation, here,” Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said; the organization was “starting to really think about: What was our history? How do we talk about our history?”They agreed that Charles would compose a piece evoking the old neighborhood — and that it would use the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center’s first-ever commission for a full orchestra. “San Juan Hill,” a 75-minute multimedia work, will have its premiere on Oct. 8, when Charles and his group, Creole Soul, join the New York Philharmonic for two performances.“We want to celebrate it and make sure as many people as possible see this as their first piece in the hall,” Thake said. (Tickets for the performances, which will be at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., were made available on a choose-what-you-pay basis; a limited number of free tickets will be distributed that morning at 10 a.m. at Geffen Hall’s Welcome Center.)The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.Thake said Charles’s new work “speaks volumes about what the future can look like” at Lincoln Center, adding that she couldn’t “imagine that it just won’t get deeper with time and that you’ll see more like this.”Charles at the piano. His score for the Philharmonic has a wealth of American musical textures, from vintage stride piano to modern hip-hop.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesAt the Kaplan Penthouse in Lincoln Center’s Rose Building, Charles was seated next to a piano and his score for “San Juan Hill” as he rattled off a roll-call list of all-stars with roots in the neighborhood, including, for a time, the writer Zora Neale Hurston. And he recalled learning about the neighborhood’s cultural legacy shortly after arriving, in 2006, to pursue a master’s degree in jazz studies at Juilliard.During preparations for a concert of Herbie Nichols’s music, the pianist and educator Frank Kimbrough gave Charles his first lesson on the topic — and pointed out a connection to Charles’s background. “He was like, ‘You’re from Trinidad?’” Charles said. “‘Well, Herbie’s parents were from Trinidad, and he was born right there.’ And he pointed to San Juan Hill.”It didn’t take long for that dual message — of local import, and of a broader tie to the West Indies — to be reinforced. When the pianist Monty Alexander stopped by the apartment Charles was sharing with another student, Aaron Diehl, he schooled Charles on a fresh way to hear the music of Monk. “Listen to Monk’s music and you hear that Caribbean bounce,” Alexander told Charles.On the Kaplan Penthouse’s piano, Charles played an appropriately bumptious figure from Monk’s “Bye-Ya” as punctuation for that anecdote. “It’s almost like dancehall,” he said.For Charles, one challenge of “San Juan Hill” was its scope. His first thought was: “I’ve never composed for orchestra,” he said. But thanks to his training at Juilliard, he had studied orchestration and completed some arrangements for orchestra. “So yeah,” he said to himself. “Let’s go.”

      Kaiso by Etienne CharlesWhile reflecting on the music that filtered into and out of San Juan Hill, Charles also went on fact-finding missions — looking through archives and speaking with people who lived in the neighborhood before 1959, including a former leader of one of its many gangs. (Charles said he couldn’t specify which leader or which gang.)Thake said such efforts were emblematic of how “deeply researched and how curious” Charles is as a performer. “He has a deep investment in this place, coming from Juilliard, moving through Jazz at Lincoln Center,” she said, noting that he was one of the first musicians to play a free concert in the organization’s Atrium space.That civic impetus is familiar to Charles’s former Juilliard roommate Diehl — a pianist who has also memorably collaborated with the New York Philharmonic. In a phone interview, Diehl remembered fondly Charles’s way of schooling him on the connections between Caribbean traditions and American jazz.“Spending time with him really revealed an entire world of Afro-diasporic music that I hadn’t even encountered,” Diehl said. “He will be very quick to tell you if you’re not playing one of those grooves correctly.”For the Oct. 8 performances, “San Juan Hill” will open with a mini-set by Creole Soul. While the group plays, images of the neighborhood, past and present, will be projected inside Geffen Hall. But the bulk of the piece involves the Philharmonic players and their music director, Jaap van Zweden, in dialogue with Creole Soul. Then, the images will be projected only between movements. (The multimedia aspects involve film elements directed by Maya Cozier, graffiti by the visual artist Gary Fritz (known as Wicked GF), and 3-D imagery by Bayeté Ross Smith.)The movements with the Philharmonic — there are five, representing about 55 minutes of the 75-minute performance — feature a wealth of American musical textures, from vintage stride piano to modern hip-hop.Charles: “I also wanted to channel the sounds of the immigrants. I’m from Trinidad; there was a significant number of English-speaking Caribbean people in this neighborhood — so I had to channel Calypso.”Josefina Santos for The New York Times“A lot of it is heavily influenced by what James P. Johnson was doing, what Fats Waller was doing,” Charles said. “And then I also wanted to channel the sounds of the immigrants. I’m from Trinidad; there was a significant number of English-speaking Caribbean people in this neighborhood — so I had to channel Calypso.”The historical record is also fodder for Charles’s musical imagination. The first movement with the orchestra, titled “Riot 1905,” refers to one of those infamous street altercations in San Juan Hill. That front-page story in The Times, from July 1905, had to do with a race riot that broke out when a Black man stepped in to assist a local ragman who needed help making his way through the neighborhood.But toward the end of “Riot 1905,” a rhythmic indication in the score name-checks the work of the hip-hop producer J Dilla, who died in 2006. It’s a playful fillip — and perhaps anachronistic, at first glance. But for Charles, it’s a way to draw a parallel between eras, since “people are still dealing with senseless acts of violence.”A movement for his group and the orchestra, “Negro Enchantress,” paints a portrait of Hannah Elias — at one point a courtesan and, later in life, a landlord and property owner and one of the richest Black women in New York City.Around the turn of the 20th century, Elias received hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from a lover, John R. Platt, a white man. “I don’t know if you want to call it like an 1895 version of ‘The Tinder Swindler,’” Charles said. “But he sued her. And they put it all in the papers. She had a mansion on Central Park West. Seven-bedroom mansion! And this whole mob showed up outside her house. She won the lawsuit; he lost the lawsuit. She bought property all over New York.”The music of this movement begins softly and seductively, before taking on a suspenseful tinge. “It gets really out,” Charles said. “It’s like Jekyll and Hyde. You thought this person was one thing — but it’s also really that you’ve been convinced by your family that you shouldn’t be giving this person money.”The third and fourth movements — “Charleston at the Jungles” and “Urban Removal” — address the sharply divergent legacies of the pianist James P. Johnson and Robert Moses. But Charles didn’t want to end the piece on a downer, so the final movement for the orchestra, “House Rent Party,” is a delirious fusion of ragtime, Afro-Venezuelan waltzes and turntablism.“What is it like being a DJ in a party with people from everywhere?” Charles asked, rhetorically, after I pointed to the profusion of styles in this portion of the score. “You’ve got to give them a little taste.” More

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      A Pioneering Orchestra Boss Had ‘Unfinished Business,’ So She Returned

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      Deborah Borda led the New York Philharmonic in the 1990s, and was frustrated by its subpar hall. After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, she “finally saw a path forward,” she said.When the musicians of the New York Philharmonic gathered inside what was still very much a construction site in mid-August to hear for the first time how they would sound after the $550 million renovation of their home, David Geffen Hall, Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, handed out roses to the arriving players.“This is a historic moment,” Borda, who had barely slept the night before, told them from the conductor’s podium. “Welcome to your new home.”It was a homecoming that Borda, 73, has been working toward for decades.She first led the Philharmonic in the 1990s, and left partly out of frustration that there was no will to rebuild its perennially troubled home, known then as Avery Fisher Hall, which had long been plagued by complaints about its look and, especially, its sound. She spent 17 years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, ushering the orchestra into the acclaimed Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall and signing Gustavo Dudamel as music director. Then, just as she began to consider a new chapter, perhaps teaching, she was lured back to New York five years ago: a $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen had revived plans to remake the hall, but momentum seemed to be stalling.“It was unfinished business,” she said. “I had been dreaming about this since the 1990s. And then I finally saw a path forward.”So there was a lot on the line that afternoon in August, when she listened intently as the orchestra tuned up and then, under the baton of its music director, Jaap van Zweden, played excerpts from Bruckner’s elegiac Seventh Symphony. She felt reassured.“It sounds terrific,” she told the small crowd in attendance, including leaders from Lincoln Center, board members, sound experts and construction workers.When Borda returned to New York in 2017, arts leaders had real concerns about the health of the Philharmonic, the oldest orchestra in the United States. It had top-flight musicians and a storied tradition — over the years it has been led by giants like Mahler, Toscanini and Bernstein — but it ran deficits every year, its audience was aging and it faced competition from the many international ensembles that tour New York. When she arrived, its endowment fund had less money than when she been in charge in the 1990s.It was the Geffen gift — secured in 2015 by Katherine G. Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center, which owns the hall and is the Philharmonic’s landlord — that finally put a revamped hall within grasp. But there were still serious obstacles. Lincoln Center was going through a period of management churn as top executives came and went. The renovation plans under consideration were growing too expensive and hard to build, not to mention impractical (glass walls?) for an orchestra. Soon after Borda arrived, she and Lincoln Center officials announced they were going back to the drawing board.Undeterred, Borda kept working toward the ultimate goal. “She is a force of nature,” van Zweden said. “What she wants, she gets.”In 2019 Lincoln Center tapped Henry Timms, who formerly led the 92nd Street Y, as its president and chief executive. He returned stability to the organization, rethought the mission of the arts complex — which produces work on its own while serving as the landlord of independent constituent groups including the Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet — and got the renovation project moving forward.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.He and Borda worked to turn the historically acrimonious relationship between Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic — which reached a low point in 2003, when the Philharmonic tried to leave and return to its old home, Carnegie Hall — into a collaborative one. That message was driven home by stickers and tote bags about the project that proclaimed, perhaps aspirationally, “Working in Concert.”Henry Timms brought stability back to Lincoln Center after a period of management tumult when he became its president and chief executive in 2019. That year he and Borda unveiled plans for the renovation of Geffen Hall, and surveyed the old hall. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTimms recalled meeting Borda at her home for coffee shortly before he took office, when they vowed together to finally finish the Geffen project.“It was a priority that I think we both signed up for,” he said. “But what we needed to do was make our relationship a priority.”“She could have stopped before this job and gone down in history, but she chose not to,” he said. “She went the other way and chased this final triumph.”Borda said the hard work and support of Timms and Farley at Lincoln Center, as well as the co-chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang, had been critical. “They had the heart and the hunger and the vision to do this,” she said.Borda, whose mother was a lobbyist and whose father immigrated from Colombia and worked as a salesman, grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. She attended her first New York Philharmonic concert when she was 4, and from the balcony she watched Leonard Bernstein conduct. Her parents divorced when she was 6, and when she was 12, the family moved to Boston, where they lived with Borda’s stepfather, a psychiatrist, and she played in a youth orchestra. She initially envisioned a career as a performer, studying violin and attending the Royal College of Music in London for graduate studies, and working as a freelance musician in New York. But she was drawn to management early on.In 1979, when she was 30, she landed her first major job, as general manager and artistic administrator of the San Francisco Symphony. Her appointment caught attention: She was one of the first women to lead a major orchestra in the United States. But because of her gender and sexual orientation — she is gay — she sometimes faced obstacles in the male-dominated classical field. She recalled the surprise she felt losing out on a job managing the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 1980s after being told that its maestro, Lorin Maazel, would be uncomfortable working with her because she was a woman.“It didn’t even occur to me that my gender and sexual orientation might be an impediment,” she said. “I never even thought of it.”After stints at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, she came to New York in 1991 for her first round as the Philharmonic’s chief. She balanced the orchestra’s budget and led efforts to attract more young people to concerts with innovations like short evening “rush-hour” concerts. But her tenure was also marked by feuds, including acrimonious negotiations with the orchestra’s musicians over a labor contract, and persistent tensions with Kurt Masur, who was then its music director.Borda with the music director Kurt Masur during her last stint running the New York Philharmonic, in 1991. Jack Manning/The New York TimesShe first tried to remedy some of the hall’s stubborn acoustic problems in 1992, when Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic placed curved wooden reflectors around the stage — their shape inspired her to dub them “the bongos” — to help spread the sound. But the problems persisted.She left for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999, in part, she said, because she did not believe cultural leaders in New York were committed to a full-scale renovation of the hall.“I didn’t think there was the heart or the vision to get it done at that time,” she said. “It was frustrating and that’s why I left.”She flourished in Los Angeles, leading the orchestra to new heights. She more than quintupled its endowment, earned the orchestra a reputation for creative programming, helped make Dudamel a superstar and started an ambitious youth orchestra program for the city’s underserved communities. Then, just when she was thinking about retiring from orchestra management to teach or start a think-tank, New York beckoned her back.She returned in 2017, energized by the opportunity to finally remake Geffen Hall. “It was sort of like a karmic circle,” she said. (She also wanted to be closer to her longtime partner, Coralie Toevs, who oversees development at the Metropolitan Opera; the two maintained a long-distance relationship when Borda was in Los Angeles.)Back in New York she worked to balance the budget, raising $50 million to help the orchestra stay solvent. She built up its endowment, which was valued at $195 million when she arrived, lower than it had been when she led the orchestra in the 1990s, and which is now valued at around $220 million. And she championed innovative programming: she commissioned works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred the states from denying women the right to vote, and one work, “Stride,” by Tania León, won the Pulitzer Prize.Then the pandemic hit. The orchestra canceled more than 100 concerts — losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue — and laid off 40 percent of its staff.“I genuinely thought we could go out of business,” she said.But Timms and Borda pressed ahead, seizing on the long pandemic shutdown period to accelerate the project, which was originally scheduled to take place over several seasons.Now Borda, having made good on her promise to usher another Philharmonic into another modern home, has announced plans to step down at the end of June, when she will hand the reins of the Philharmonic to Gary Ginstling, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, in Washington. (She will stay on as a special adviser to assist with fund-raising and other matters.)But she still has work to do: planning enticing seasons to lure concertgoers to a new hall.“A hall can’t just be a monument to itself,” she said.And a critical decision looms: before she departs, Borda hopes to name a successor to van Zweden, the music director, who will leave his post in 2024. A 12-person committee of Philharmonic staff, musicians and board members is sifting through candidates. Among the likely contenders are Dudamel; Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, the former music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Susanna Malkki, the music director of the Helsinki Philharmonic; and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Borda said she was looking for a leader who “clicks with the orchestra” and “clicks with New York.”On a recent day, as she led a tour of the hall for the Philharmonic’s board, her cellphone often sounded, filling the hall with her ringtone: “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” from Handel’s “Solomon.”Standing before a new digital wall in the lobby, she smiled, saying she was moved that the Philharmonic would finally have a home to match its artistic caliber.“It energizes me completely,” she said. “It’s like a dream.” More

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      Lizzo Plays New Notes on James Madison’s Crystal Flute from 1813

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      A classically trained flutist, the singer, rapper and songwriter spent more than three hours admiring the flute collection at the Library of Congress. Madison’s instrument was made for the second inauguration by a Parisian craftsman.Lizzo looked uncharacteristically nervous as she crossed the stage in a glittering mesh leotard with tights and sequined combat boots.A classically trained flutist who began playing when she was in fifth grade and considered studying at the Paris Conservatory, she has woven flute into many of her songs, has played virtually with the New York Philharmonic, and her flute, named Sasha Flute, even has its own Instagram page.But waiting for her on Tuesday night was an exquisite (and highly breakable) musical instrument that had arrived at her concert in Washington under heavy security: a crystal flute that a French craftsman and clockmaker had made for President James Madison in 1813.“I’m scared,” Lizzo said, as she took the sparkling instrument from Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, a curator at the Library of Congress, who had carefully removed the flute from its customized protective case. “It’s crystal. It’s like playing out of a wine glass.”As the crowd roared, Lizzo played a note, stuck out her tongue in amazement, and then played another note, trilling it as she twerked in front of thousands of cheering fans. She then carried the flute over her head, giving the crowd at Capital One Arena one last look, before handing it back to Ms. Ward-Bamford.“I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s,” Lizzo proclaimed. “We just made history tonight.”It was a symbolic moment as Lizzo, a hugely popular Black singer, rapper and songwriter, played a priceless instrument that had once belonged to a founder whose Virginia plantation was built by enslaved Black workers. And the flute had been lent to her by Carla D. Hayden, the first African American and first woman to lead the Library of Congress.The moment came together after Dr. Hayden asked Lizzo on Friday to visit the library’s flute collection, the largest in the world, with about 1,700 of the instruments.Dr. Hayden wrote on Twitter: “@lizzo we would love for you to come see it and even play a couple when you are in DC next week. Like your song they are ‘Good as hell.’”Lizzo responded without much hesitation.“IM COMING CARLA! AND IM PLAYIN THAT CRYSTAL FLUTE!!!!!” she wrote.Lizzo arrived on Monday, with her mother and members of her band. Dr. Hayden and staff members ushered her into the “flute vault,” and gave her a tour of the collection, which includes fifes, piccolos and a flute shaped like a walking stick, which Lizzo said she might want as a Christmas present.Lizzo spent more than three hours at the library, trying out several instruments, staff members said.She played a piccolo from John Philip Sousa’s band that was used to play the solo at the premiere of his song, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” And she played a plexiglass flute, made in 1937, filling the ornate Main Reading Room and marble Great Hall with music, to the delight of library workers and a handful of researchers who happened to be there.“Just the enthusiasm that Lizzo brought to seeing the flute collection and how curious she was about it,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s been wonderful.”Most of the collection — including Madison’s crystal flute — was donated in 1941 by Dayton C. Miller, a physicist, astronomer and ardent collector of flutes.The flute’s silver joint is engraved with Madison’s name, title and the year 1813.Library of CongressMadison’s flute had been made for his second inauguration by Claude Laurent, a Parisian craftsman who believed that glass flutes would hold their pitch and tone better than flutes made of wood or ivory, which were common at the time.The flute’s silver joint is engraved with Madison’s name, title and the year 1813. “It’s not clear if Madison did much with the flute other than admire it, but it became a family heirloom and an artifact of the era,” the library said.The library believes that the first lady, Dolley Madison, might have rescued the flute from the White House in 1814, when the British entered Washington during the War of 1812, although it has not found documentation to confirm the theory.Only 185 of Mr. Laurent’s glass flutes remain, the library said, and his crystal flutes are especially rare. The Library of Congress has 17 Laurent flutes, it said.When Lizzo asked if she could play Madison’s crystal flute at her concert on Tuesday, the library’s collection, preservation and security teams swung into action, ensuring the instrument could be safely delivered to her onstage.“It was a lot thrilling and a little bit scary,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said.Or as Lizzo told her cheering fans after she played the instrument: “Thank you to the Library of Congress for preserving our history and making history freaking cool. History is freaking cool, you guys.” More

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      Review: In ‘Monochromatic Light,’ Artists Saturate and Vacate Space

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s music, initially written with Mark Rothko’s abstractions in mind, comes to the Park Avenue Armory with art by Julie Mehretu.If you write a musical composition in homage to Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” and if you premiere it in the actual Rothko Chapel in Houston, you’d seem to be anchoring its meaning and context in rather firm ground. But the American composer and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey is a more restive and conjectural artist than that; and his “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the chapel earlier this year, has come to New York rewritten, reorganized and reinvigorated.This latest, and now staged, version of “Monochromatic Light” premiered at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, and it retains the spare and ritualistic tenor of Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” with long rests between its inquiring viola phrases and soft rumbles of the timpani. Here in New York, though, Sorey’s music is heard in the company not of Rothko but of another American painter: the contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, whose dense and digitally conversant abstractions flow and swarm where Rothko’s brooded. The production, by the avant-garde journeyman Peter Sellars, has been souped up for the Armory’s cavernous drill hall and augmented with young dancers. The running time has ballooned, too, from under an hour to a good 90 minutes.In scaling up, Sorey may have sacrificed the ecclesiastical concentration that both he and Feldman before him had found in Houston. The night has its longueurs. But this rethought and more antagonistic “Monochromatic Light” strikes a new richness in New York, and it affirms how abstraction can give form to suffering and freedom in ways more straightforward expression so often cannot.At the Armory, “Monochromatic Light” is staged in the round. Sorey, at center, conducts an ensemble of just three musicians, playing viola, keyboards and percussion: nearly the same instrumentation as Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel.” Singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street sit at a distance, and behind the audience is an octagonal gangway, with one massive reproduction of a Mehretu painting hanging above each side. Three of the eight abstractions were seen in her 2020 exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery; one appeared this year at David Zwirner in a group show devoted to Toni Morrison; and four are new, incorporating dense layers of halftone dots, sprayed clouds of bright yellow or green and seething black squiggles.The staging echoes Philip Johnson’s octagonal nave of the Houston chapel, but from the opening moments of gently struck tubular bells, it’s clear that Rothko’s dark reticence is being left behind. For Mehretu’s works here are not paintings but blowups on translucent screens, lit from front and back by colored spots. (The lighting designer, James F. Ingalls, a longtime Sellars collaborator, synchronizes the color adjustments across all eight paintings so that, at a given moment in the score, their backgrounds will all glow purple or aquamarine and their tremulous blacks will emerge or recede.)Deidra “Dayntee” Braz, one of the eight dancers who performed in the Brooklyn-born style known as flex.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesUp on the gangway are eight dancers, one per painting, who bend and writhe throughout in a Brooklyn-born style of dancing known as flex. The performers are athletic, the men among them perform shirtless, but choreographed by Reggie Gray (also known as Regg Roc) they appear vulnerable, fragile, under threat; they contort their arms as if they’re fractured or disjointed and draw in their stomachs as if taking a punch.The score is rangy and spatial, the tempo largo to larghissimo. (There’s no beat as such; Sorey marked time with strokes of his baton lasting a second or longer.) Its opening minutes are especially minimal. Against a long and attenuated trill of the viola, Mehretu’s backgrounds become a lurid green or mysterious blue and the black lines of the paintings start to look more querulous. The dancers moonwalk and roll their necks; their motions are smooth and spasmodic by turns, and several of them present bulging eyes and pained expressions that recall the existential intensity of butoh.The dancers’ broken movements, and Mehretu’s colliding layers and shaking lines, bring out an anxiety in Sorey’s score that probably did not come through in front of Rothko’s hushed paintings in Houston. There’s an angst and frailty in the scattered notes Kim Kashkashian brings from her viola, while the percussionist Steven Schick bows between the bars of a marimba to produce a spooky, theremin-like keening. The silky ah-ah-ah choral lines, a Feldman quotation that I imagine worked better amid the Rothkos, feel out of place against Mehretu’s unsettled paintings, though there is sharper accompaniment from Davóne Tines, the solo bass-baritone, walking through the audience and later circumnavigating the gangway. As he wrenches forth fragments from the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the words octaves apart and isolated by long silences, the evening takes on the tone of a funeral march.The solo bass-baritone Davóne Tines singing in front of an enlarged reproduction of a painting by Julie Mehretu, with the flex dancer Jeremy “Opt” Perez lying on the gangway below.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSorey’s interpolation of a spiritual into “Monochromatic Light,” as well as the dancers’ channeling of Jamaican vernacular movements and the violent news imagery that Mehretu abstracts into her churning backgrounds, all imbue this threnody with the particularities of Black grief. But it resists resolution throughout. This is a work of Blackness (or blackness) in abstraction — one that defies the supposed blankness of nonobjective painting or art music on the one hand, and current market demands for social advocacy on the other. Blackness in abstraction, as the curator Adrienne Edwards has written, is a more capacious and immanent model of artistic creation than many of our institutions can handle. It requires a dual engagement with form and identity, which, in Edwards’s words, “shifts analysis away from the Black artist as subject and instead emphasizes blackness as material, method and mode.” It can draw as much from Rothko, whose murals in Houston are black with purplish-blue undertones, as from Du Bois or Eastman or O’Grady. It pushes past biography or storytelling, and enters the realms of the psychic, the global, the cosmic.What I most admired about Mehretu’s midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year was how she used magnitude to defy the diminishment and simplifications that even our “diversified” cultural institutions still assign to artists outside the dominant representation. Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light,” for all its spareness, does the same. Where Mehretu saturates space, Sorey vacates it, yet both painter and composer offer vital examples of how to create at full scale when the times impel others to reduce their ambition. This is how you speak to some and to all at once; this is how you mourn and stay free.Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)Through Oct. 8 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More