Music

Grabbing a piece of the lucrative holiday market requires planning, luck and the occasional battle with a seasoned superstar like Mariah Carey.Last December, while the popular a cappella group Pentatonix was on tour with its fifth holiday album, the ensemble’s five members gathered backstage around a whiteboard to brainstorm ideas for 2022.High on the list: a sixth Christmas album.“Holidays Around the World,” Pentatonix’s latest, joins a holiday release wave that gets more crowded every year. Alicia Keys, Sam Smith, Lizzo, the Backstreet Boys and the duos of Dolly Parton-Jimmy Fallon and David Foster-Katharine McPhee are all out with new seasonal albums or singles, vying for radio time and the most coveted real estate of all: plum placement on the streaming services’ big playlists.Holiday music has long been a big business; back in 2018, Billboard estimated it at $177 million in the United States alone, and since then the overall recorded music business has grown by well over 50 percent.But streaming has supercharged it. Listeners now have easy access to decades’ worth of material, leaving contemporary artists to compete against not just each other but also all the hits of the past, by Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley or Mariah Carey. This week, streaming helped send Carey’s 28-year-old “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, beaten only by Taylor Swift’s latest.A vast audience awaits the victors: In the week leading up to Christmas last year, holiday songs accounted for 10 percent of all music streams in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. And on Christmas Eve, Amazon Music received 35 million voice requests around the world for holiday songs through devices like the company’s Alexa-enabled smart speakers.The a cappella group Pentatonix has made holiday music a core part of its identity and business.Jason Szenes/EPA, via ShutterstockSome of the standard strategies of pop streaming can help get an edge, music executives and marketers say. Front-load a song’s hook to deter skips. Tee up plenty of “features” — track-by-track collaborators, the more famous the better — to invite fan cults.Pentatonix’s new album, for example, includes Meghan Trainor, the classical pianist Lang Lang and Lea Salonga, who has been the singing voice for Disney princesses, alongside guests less known by mainstream American audiences, like the eclectic Los Angeles group La Santa Cecilia and the Indian vocalist Shreya Ghoshal. The group said it created a detailed spreadsheet to track all the cultures, songs and artists it wanted to include.Media tie-ins also help. Last week, Disney Plus released “Pentatonix: Around the World for the Holidays,” a special in which the group pokes gentle fun at its specialty. In the show, the members find themselves stumped in a recording studio, having already done every Christmas song in the book. So, while locked in a magical break room with candy cane décor (hey, it’s Disney), they sift through fan mail from around the planet and arrive at their concept: a multicultural holiday album with far-flung collaborators.“There’s a sense of spirituality in Christmas music,” Mitch Grassi, one of the Pentatonix singers, said in a recent interview. “It creates an atmosphere of togetherness and community, acceptance and warmth.”Yet holiday music can also be the most unforgivingly conformist side of the industry, in which old songs and styles dominate the market and anything new or unorthodox risks being buried under decades of tinsel.In an interview, Foster, the golden-touch pop producer who has worked on hit Christmas albums by Celine Dion, Michael Bublé and Josh Groban, relayed what he has learned as the three rules of the game.No. 1: The public prefers the old classics, and isn’t too interested in new songs.No. 2: Singers shouldn’t wander too far from the melody.No. 3: “You can’t be too corny at Christmas. You totally get a free pass.”Foster stressed the importance of the first rule, noting that violating it could sink any holiday album. “In general, people want to hear the old songs,” he said. “They don’t want to hear a songwriter like me write a song about sitting by the fireplace, Santa’s coming down the chimney, there’s snow outside.…” He trailed off.“Christmas Songs,” Foster’s seven-track mini-album with McPhee, his wife, is an illustration of this approach, featuring swinging pop-jazz takes on “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and others (though it does have one original, “My Grown-Up Christmas List”).To capture attention on streaming playlists, record labels start their work early. Lyn Koppe, the executive vice president of global catalog at Sony Music, said the company begins marketing songs in the summer, seeding search engines and prepping their own playlists. During the holiday season, Sony — whose thick portfolio of evergreens includes Presley’s “Blue Christmas,” Gene Autry’s “Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)” and Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — runs a global data dashboard tracking songs’ performance.David Foster, left, and Katharine McPhee released a mini album called “Christmas Songs.”Paul Archuleta/Getty Images“It’s not like we just wake up and go, ‘Oh, it’s Christmas,’” Koppe said. “We’ve been thinking for many, many months.”For current artists, the biggest challenge is turning a new song into a classic. In the old days, that meant having a catchy music video, pushing the song at radio and hoping that it stuck. Now the process can still take years, but it involves TikTok virality, perhaps a movie usage and, most important of all, user attention on streaming playlists, which can translate into return appearances year after year.“Getting on key algorithmic stations is really everything,” said Andrew Woloz of the music company Concord, who pointed to the version of “Carol of the Bells” by the crossover violinist Lindsey Stirling, which was released five years ago but has stuck around on TikTok, giving it an edge on current playlists.Relatively few new songs from the streaming era have become anything like classics. One of them is Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me,” from 2014, which Karen Pettyjohn, the principal music programmer for Amazon Music, added to its giant Holiday Favorites station last year — which sprinkles some new tracks in with the old chestnuts — and saw it “cut through” very well.“Ariana’s fans are aging with her,” Pettyjohn said. “It becomes a classic to them.”Grande’s song gets a small boost on TikTok, where it has been used in 371,000 videos — peanuts compared to Carey’s smash, which has been used on TikTok 12 million times and racked up more than 1.2 billion streams on Spotify alone.The enduring popularity of Carey’s song is one of the great phenomena of the contemporary music business. In 2019, after a yearslong push by Carey and her label that involved a children’s book, a new music video and numerous live Christmas shows, “All I Want” finally made it to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, 25 years after its initial release. (It topped that chart again in 2020 and 2021, and has a good shot of doing so again this year.)But Carey’s dominance in another arena became the subject of a legal fight this year, after she attempted to trademark the term “Queen of Christmas,” not only for music but also for fragrances, clothing, dog collars, hot chocolate and dozens of other products.Her only challenger was Elizabeth Chan, who a decade ago gave up a marketing job at Condé Nast to devote herself to writing holiday music, and who has called herself — and titled one of her albums — the Queen of Christmas.In a recent interview at her small home office in Lower Manhattan, which she keeps decorated for Christmas year-round, Chan said the trademark was a threat to her livelihood. While strictly D.I.Y., Chan has built a full-time business making holiday music, releasing 12 albums to date, including her latest, “12 Months of Christmas.” She would no longer be able to use the term “Queen of Christmas” if Carey’s application was approved.The costs of litigating a trademark can be huge, but Chan’s attorney, Louis W. Tompros, said his firm, WilmerHale, took the case pro bono because they viewed Carey’s application as an example of “classic trademark bullying.” Carey never responded to Chan’s opposition, and on Nov. 15, the Trademark Office’s trial and appeal board issued a judgment by default, denying Carey the trademark. Chan, and anyone else, is free to call themselves Queen of Christmas.Chris Chambers, a representative of Carey, said in a statement that the “world at large” began calling her “Queen of Christmas,” and added, “Ms. Carey wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and says anyone who wants to call themselves a queen can freely do so, anything else is petty and unfestive.” (Had her application been successful, other performers, like Chan, would not have been able to.)Chan said she had no choice but to fight the trademark, but still framed the result as suited to the holiday.“Everyone in this business wants to tell you what’s not possible because they don’t know what’s possible,” she said.“Not only do I want to leave a great Christmas song behind, I want to leave that lesson behind,” Chan added. “That’s Christmas too — the season of perpetual hope.” More

The long-running stage show has been a part of the city’s theatrical landscape for nearly 29 years.“Stomp,” the long-running show that repurposed mundane items like brooms and metal garbage can lids to create a gritty percussive stage spectacle, will close in New York on Jan. 8, the show announced on Tuesday. Its North American and European tours will continue to run.Created and directed by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, “Stomp” made an immediate splash when it opened at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village on Feb. 27, 1994.The wordless show “is banged, tapped, swished, clicked and clomped by eight choreographed percussionists,” Stephen Holden wrote in his 1994 review for The New York Times. “A modern vaudeville revue with a rock-and-roll heart, it is part tap-dance display (using some of the heaviest taps ever attached to shoes), part military drill, part swinging street festival.”The New York production is ending its run because of declining ticket sales, the show said.The news comes on the heels of the closings of long-running Broadway shows like “Come From Away” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” and the news that Broadway’s longest-running show, “The Phantom of the Opera,” will play its final performance in April. All of those shows cited the damage done by the lengthy pandemic lockdown, and the fact that audiences have not fully returned.When “Stomp” closes, it will have played 13 previews and 11,472 regular performances.“While we’re sad to see it close at the Orpheum Theater, we couldn’t be prouder of the impact that ‘Stomp’ has had — and will continue to have — as the tours run both here and in Europe,” the producers said in a statement announcing the closure.Few shows have had such staying power, let alone widespread popularity around the globe — with performances reaching the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Japan and Norway, among dozens of other locales. There was a time when it was difficult to escape the troupe of performers, who showed up at the Academy Awards, on TV in a “‘Stomp’ Out Litter” public service announcement filmed across New York City and at President Bill Clinton’s millennium New Year celebration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.In 2019, the show celebrated its 25th anniversary. It shut down just over a year later, in March 2020, in response to the coronavirus and later became one of the first Off Broadway productions to resume performances when it returned to the stage in July 2021. More

“The McCartney Legacy” follows the superstar from the last gasp of the Beatles to “Band on the Run.” It’s 700 pages — and only the first volume planned.The MCCARTNEY LEGACY: Volume 1: 1969-73, by Allan Kozinn and Adrian SinclairAre the world’s libraries adequately stuffed yet with literature about the Beatles, still the best-selling band of all time, and their diaspora?Nah.Volume 1 of “The McCartney Legacy,” by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, arrives like a well-planned encore a year after the publication of “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,” by Paul McCartney, edited by the poet Paul Muldoon. The latter volumes were packaged in Kermit green, presumably a nod to the two Pauls’ Irish heritage. The new book is a saucy red, as if inviting customers to stack it atop “The Lyrics,” stick on a bow and cue up the bouncy seasonal synth of “Wonderful Christmastime.”Peter Jackson’s documentary, “Get Back,” also released at the end of 2021, changed the way many people thought about McCartney: always popular but wrongly blamed for the Beatles’ breakup, and often critically drubbed as a middle-of-the-roader given to sappiness or, worse, insincerity. There has always been blatant ageism and sexism in the dismissal of certain McCartney tunes as “granny music” — and this is a problem why? — likewise the idea that his ease with children and nursery-rhyme dabblings made him less of a rocker.Watching McCartney in “Get Back,” his boyish face solemnized by a beard, show up consistently (and at least once tear up), urging “a serious program of work” as his bandmates sulked or even stalked off, rebranded him as a devoted boss who brought his whole self to the office. Seeing him pull the film’s title song out of the air, soaring on bass and guitar before sinking into pillowy ballads at the piano, reminded viewers that, oh yeah, that guy who could be kind of corny and hammy in MTV videos is a musical genius (“about the only one that I am in awe of,” Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone); while his confidence in a sweater vest made even lesbians of my acquaintance swoon. At 80, McCartney continues to fill stadiums with screaming, lighter-hoisting fans.Kozinn, a former reporter and critic for The New York Times, and Sinclair, an English documentarian, were influenced by the methods of Mark Lewisohn, the exacting Beatles historian currently at work on the second volume of a trilogy about the group (the first was 900 pages, and that was an abridgment). In a way “The McCartney Legacy” out-Lewisohns Lewisohn, taking almost 700 pages to cover only five years, from the dying embers of “The End” (1969) to the Duracell bolt of “Band on the Run” (1973), by the star’s new group, Wings.McCartney with his wife, Linda, in 1971. Despite limited experience, she joined him as a keyboardist in Wings.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesDescribed in minute detail are McCartney’s legal troubles with the Beatles manager he didn’t want, Allen Klein, and his retreat to rural Scotland with his new wife, Linda. Also the bumpy formation of Wings, which integrated the game but inexperienced Linda on keyboards and backing vocals — and his decision to go high (and get high, high, high) when his longtime writing partner, John Lennon, went low.But the text, dotted with tour ephemera and recording session recaps, reads less like a pop-rock “Power Broker” than a set of extended liner notes, a devoted document dump, assembled from diaries, court papers and reporting fresh and reconstituted. Seemingly finished with biographies since he authorized his friend Barry Miles to write “Many Years From Now,” published in 1997, the man himself was not interviewed for this project (though Kozinn has sat with him on other occasions) but gave the thumbs-up to other sources.The result is aptly patchwork, considering that McCartney — even as he became a billionaire — is constitutionally a saver and joiner of disparate parts, in life and art (listen to “Junk” for a meditation on waste in capitalist society). But it’s deft patchwork, the seams between old and new tucked away in the neat drawer of its index.Inevitably, too, “The McCartney Legacy” is a graveyard of the once-robust music print press: Melody Maker, Disc, NME — “Enemy!” McCartney once exclaimed. His jousts with journalists give the book some of its best points of tension. Displeased with a negative profile, he and Linda once wrapped up a turd made by their baby daughter Stella (now a major fashion designer), according to Wings’ former drummer Denny Seiwell, and sent it to the reporter responsible. “Hold your hand out you silly girl,” McCartney telegrammed one music critic, Penny Valentine, quoting the Beatles’ “Martha My Dear,” after she called his first solo album “a bitter disappointment.” She was just wrong, he told her. “It is simple it is good and even at this moment it is growing on you.”And you gotta love the aghast reaction of Clive James to the McCartneys’ somewhat cringey (though intermittently adorable) foray into television variety: a “monstro-horrendo, superschlock-diabolical special,” James wrote, that “burgeoned before the terror-stricken eye like a punctured storage tank of semolina.”Trivia, the coin of the realm in pop culture writing, is spilled here in abundance. Lots of it feels relevant or at least redolent, like that Seiwell once played at Mount Airy Lodge, the place in the Poconos known for heart-shaped tubs, and also at Judy Garland’s last performance. Other facts, like the exact dimensions and cost of the luxury liner that took the McCartneys from Le Havre to New York, might be superfluous.Most notably in a book that is all notes — both musical and literary — is how much its subject, in between eponymous albums, is forever trying to escape being Paul McCartney. The “man of a thousand voices,” as Valentine called him, is also a man of a thousand faces: writing songs for others under the fusty nom de plume “Bernard Webb”; checking into hotels under the alias “Billy Martin”; pretending to be a socialite named “Percy ‘Thrills’ Thrillington”; producing as “Apollo C. Vermouth”; signing his own sleeve copy as “Clint Harrigan”; even titling a song and album — his greatest, in my opinion — after a preferred pseudonymous surname, “Ramon.”There will be thousands more pages written about Paul McCartney, and yet, he seems to be taunting, we will never catch him.THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY: Volume 1: 1969-73 | By Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair | 720 pp. | Illustrated | Dey Street Books | $35 More

Two of the singer’s French bulldogs were stolen during the attack in Hollywood last year, during which her dog walker was shot in the chest, the police said.A man who shot Lady Gaga’s dog walker during a violent robbery last year during which two of the singer’s French bulldogs were stolen was sentenced on Monday to 21 years in prison, prosecutors said.The man, James Howard Jackson, reached a deal with prosecutors under which he pleaded no contest to one count of attempted murder and admitted to inflicting great bodily injury and to “a prior strike,” according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.Mr. Jackson, 20, was immediately sentenced to 21 years in state prison, the district attorney’s office said. “The plea agreement holds Mr. Jackson accountable for perpetrating a coldhearted, violent act and provides justice for our victim,” the office said in a statement.Ryan Fischer, the dog walker who was shot in the chest during the attack on Feb. 24, 2021, in Hollywood, spoke directly to Mr. Jackson in court shortly before Mr. Jackson entered his plea, Rolling Stone reported.“You shot me and left me to die, and both of our lives have changed forever,” Mr. Fischer said, according to Rolling Stone. He added that the shooting led to “lung collapse after lung collapse,” as well as the loss of his career and friendships.Still, Mr. Fischer told Mr. Jackson, according to Rolling Stone: “I do forgive you. With the attack, you completely altered my life. I know I can’t completely move on from the night you shot me until I said those words to you.”It was not immediately clear who Mr. Jackson’s lawyer was.Mr. Jackson was accused of participating in the robbery along with two others, Jaylin White and Lafayette Whaley, who were also charged in the case last year.The area where Lady Gaga’s dog walker was shot and two of her French bulldogs were stolen in Los Angeles last February.Chris Pizzello/Associated PressThe police had said that the robbers, who grabbed the dogs and fled in a car after the shooting, were not targeting the French bulldogs because they belonged to Lady Gaga.Evidence instead suggested that the men knew that the breed was valuable, according to the police. Lady Gaga had offered a $500,000 reward for the safe return of the dogs, which are named Koji and Gustav.Mr. Fischer, who was critically wounded in the shooting, had recalled lying in a pool of blood and holding one of Lady Gaga’s dogs that had not been stolen in the attack.In August, Jaylin White and Mr. Whaley each pleaded no contest to one count of second-degree robbery, the district attorney’s office said. Mr. White was sentenced to four years in state prison, and Mr. Whaley was sentenced to six years in state prison, the office said.The police said last year that two others — Harold White and Jennifer McBride — had been charged with being accessories after the shooting. Ms. McBride reported that she had found the dogs and had responded to a reward email to return them, the police said.Ms. McBride ultimately took the dogs to a Los Angeles police station, the police said. The police said that they later discovered that Ms. McBride had a relationship with one of the men who had been arrested.According to the district attorney’s office, Harold White pleaded no contest on Monday to one count of being a former convict in possession of a gun. He is scheduled to be sentenced next year, the office said. Ms. McBride’s case is continuing, the office said. More

In a lawsuit filed on Friday in a California court, a group of 26 fans said Ticketmaster had engaged in anticompetitive conduct.A group of 26 fans of the singer-songwriter Taylor Swift filed a lawsuit on Friday accusing Ticketmaster’s parent company of anticompetitive conduct and fraud several weeks after a chaotic, glitch-filled sale of tickets for Ms. Swift’s upcoming tour left thousands of eager fans empty-handed and unhappy.The 33-page complaint, filed in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, came after Ticketmaster canceled the public sale of tickets last month for Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour, 52 shows scheduled to begin in March. The resulting outcry from fans prompted calls from lawmakers to break up the 2010 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation.The complaint accuses Ticketmaster of anticompetitive conduct, saying the company has long perpetuated a “scheme” by forcing fans to exclusively use it for presale and sale prices, which are higher than what a competitive market price would be.Ticketmaster also “forced attendees to exclusively use” the platform that it operates for the resale of tickets, called the Secondary Ticket Exchange, to obtain fees and profits above what it could earn in a competitive market, the complaint states. That “anticompetitive behavior,” according to the lawsuit, harms fans and the ticket market.Fans who tried to buy tickets during a presale in mid-November reported waiting in queues for hours or being locked out of online sales. They had to preregister on Ticketmaster and be designated Verified Fans, but, for many, that didn’t help. Ticketmaster ultimately canceled its planned public sale of tickets amid the high demand.The Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s MusicNew LP: “Midnights,” Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album, is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Here is what our critic thought of it.Millennial Anti-Hero: On her latest album, Swift probes the realizations and reckonings of many 30-something women around relationships, motherhood and ambition.Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings of her older albums: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun.Pandemic Records: In 2020, Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music.“Hundreds of thousands of people waited from four to eight hours and never got an opportunity to buy tickets, so they just want the system to change,” said Jennifer Kinder, a lawyer representing the fans.The lawsuit asks the court to stop Ticketmaster from engaging in similar conduct in the future and to fine the company $2,500 for each violation of a state code that governs unfair competition in California, where the parent company, Live Nation, is based.Even before the botched sale of Taylor Swift tickets, Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, had come under scrutiny for its power.Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock“It has to be made fair,” said Ms. Kinder, who added that she and her 11-year-old daughter were Swift fans. “This is not a fair market. This is not supply and demand. This is a manipulated market that benefits Ticketmaster.”In 2010, Ticketmaster, a ticketing giant, merged with Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promotion company, becoming Live Nation Entertainment. The company, which says it processes 500 million tickets per year in more than 30 countries, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.Greg Maffei, the chairman of Live Nation Entertainment, said in an interview on CNBC last month that the company “could’ve filled 900 stadiums,” and he partly blamed Swift’s popularity for the problems. “The reality is, Taylor Swift hasn’t been on the road for three or four years, and that’s caused a huge issue,” he said.Ticketmaster apologized in November to Swift fans for the problems with its ticket sales for the Eras Tour.It said that more than two million tickets for the tour were sold on Nov. 15, the most for an artist in a single day. Ticketmaster said it had faced a “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes” to buy tickets, resulting in 3.5 billion system requests, four times its previous peak.Even before the botched sale of the Swift concert tickets, Live Nation had come under scrutiny for its power and size. The Justice Department has in recent months been investigating its practices and whether the company maintains a monopoly over the multibillion-dollar live music industry, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.Ms. Swift called the situation “excruciating” in a sharply worded statement on Instagram last month that did not name Ticketmaster.Ms. Swift wrote that she was “extremely protective” of her fans and had brought “so many elements” of her career in house in order to improve fan experiences “by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do.”“It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse,” Ms. Swift added. “There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.” More

“Midnights” and “Anti-Hero” top the Billboard 200 and Hot 100, but nostalgic favorites are starting to arrive in force.Taylor Swift holds the top spots on the Billboard album and singles charts this week, as a wave of holiday music arrives with help from streaming playlists.Swift’s “Midnights” reigns atop the Billboard 200 album chart for a fifth time, with the equivalent of 151,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. Her single “Anti-Hero” notches its sixth No. 1 on the Hot 100, with 21 million streams and 69 million “airplay audience impressions,” a measurement of the song’s popularity on radio.Otherwise, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas — particularly on the singles chart, where six nostalgic favorites reach the Top 10. Mariah Carey’s 28-year-old “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is No. 2, and Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (1958) is No. 3, sending Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s recent dark pop hit “Unholy” to fourth place. Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957), at No. 5, and Burl Ives’s “A Holly Jolly Christmas” (1964), at No. 6, beat out the latest from Drake and 21 Savage, whose “Rich Flex” lands at No. 7.Also in the Top 10: Andy Williams’s “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (1963) is No. 9, and Wham!’s “Last Christmas” (1984) is No. 10.On the album chart, Drake and 21 Savage’s “Her Loss” holds at No. 2 and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is No. 3. (Along with “Midnights,” those positions have held firm for three weeks.) From there, the Christmas brigade begins. Michael Bublé’s “Christmas” (2011) is No. 4, bumping Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me” to fifth place.Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” (a version of an LP that dates to 1960) is No. 8 and the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965) is No. 10. More

The British composer Julian Anderson won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for “Litanies,” a meditation for cello and orchestra.When a fire broke out at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019, the British composer Julian Anderson was devastated.“Seeing a precise and beautiful and precious structure like that dissolving almost into the fire was very, very traumatizing,” he said in an interview.Anderson soon began channeling some of his despondence into “Litanies,” a 25-minute meditation for cello and orchestra. In the second movement, a series of chords emerges then melts away, echoing the disaster.On Monday, “Litanies” won the 2023 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, one of contemporary music’s most prestigious prizes. The Grawemeyer, which is administered and was announced by the University of Louisville in Kentucky, comes with $100,000.In choosing Anderson, 55, the prize paid homage to a prolific composer known for his vivid imagination. His music draws on a variety of traditions — blending folk, for example, with more modern sounds. He has won commissions from top orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.The composer Marc Satterwhite, who directs the award, praised “Litanies” for its exploration of “virtually every sound a cello and orchestra can make together.” Anderson wrote the piece for the cellist Alban Gerhardt, who premiered the work in 2020 with the National Orchestra of France.“It spans a vast emotional range and is constantly inventive,” Satterwhite said in a statement, “but always toward an expressive end, never for the sake of novelty.”Anderson completed “Litanies” in 2019, several months after the fire and a year after the death of his close friend Oliver Knussen, the influential composer and conductor.Knussen’s death also influenced the work. “There is a sense of time running out,” Anderson said of a cadenza that gradually dissipates.The Grawemeyer has been awarded to some of the most important modern composers, including Gyorgy Ligeti, John Adams, Tan Dun, Thomas Adès, Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, Olga Neuwirth and Esa-Pekka Salonen, among others. Anderson will accept the prize in Louisville in the spring.Anderson, a professor of composition and composer-in-residence at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, said that he hoped the award would help bring attention to the importance of contemporary music and live performance.“There is nothing that replaces the live experience,” he said. “The joy, the pleasure, the revelation, even, of hearing wonderful music played actually in the room with you, not just on a computer screen with headphones.” More

In the new Broadway show, Will Swenson plays the superstar, who seems perpetually dissatisfied, as if on a quest — but for what?For decades, Neil Diamond was on top of the world. He toured arenas packed with shrieking fans. He wrote “Sweet Caroline,” an irresistible anthem that continues to trigger Pavlovian singalongs — a feat that would delight most performers, but Diamond didn’t leave it at that and was a prolific hit machine.A 1986 profile in The New York Times described him in these words: “Olympian aspiration, raw aggression and agonizing self-doubt.”As unlikely as this might sound, it is that last trait that forms the narrative engine of “A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond Musical,” the ambitious, often rousing, occasionally heavy-handed biographical show that opened on Broadway on Sunday at the Broadhurst Theater. We meet a superstar with no confidence, despite being known to engage the beast mode in concert and prowling stages in tight pants and a wide-open satin shirt. He seems perpetually dissatisfied, as if on a fruitless quest — but for what? What gnaws at him?To answer those questions, the book writer, Anthony McCarten, put Diamond on the couch, or more exactly in an armchair: “A Beautiful Noise,” directed by Michael Mayer, is framed as an extensive therapy session between the aging singer (Mark Jacoby) and a psychologist (Linda Powell).Diamond is there because his wife Katie — spoiler alert: she’s the third one — and kids forced his hand. Apparently Diamond is “a little hard to live with these days,” we’re told. Maybe his family is frustrated by his grouchiness and poor interpersonal communication skills, at least based on his laconic sullenness with the doctor. When she presses him for insights, he curtly says, “I put everything I have into my songs.” Fine, then let’s see what they have to tell us about the man who wrote them.Mark Jacoby, seated left, as Neil Diamond and Linda Powell, seated right, as his therapist in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd so Diamond makes a second entrance, but now he is in his prime and portrayed by Will Swenson (“Les Misérables,” “Assassins”) in a gravity-defying statement pompadour. This is a swaggering coif that means business, but it is contradicted by the 1965 Diamond’s passive posture and apologetic stammering.As the doctor and the older singer revisit his catalog — often commenting on the action from their chairs, like a double vision of the narrator in “The Drowsy Chaperone” — we retrace Diamond’s journey, starting with his early days at the Brill Building. One of the influential American hit factories, the location also played a key role in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” and it’s where the mighty Ellie Greenwich (an amusingly perky Bri Sudia) starts mentoring the shy young man from Brooklyn in the mid-1960s.Diamond, after writing hits for others, like “I’m a Believer” for the Monkees, sets out to perform his own material, with smashing results. In one of the most entertaining episodes, he signs with Bang Records, a mob-associated label run by Bert Berns (Tom Alan Robbins), himself a songwriter good enough to earn his own tribute musical, “Piece of My Heart.”By the end of the ’60s, Diamond was a serial chart-topper; by the early ’70s, he had mutated into the Lord Byron of soft rock, all strutting gloom and troubled romanticism. That turning point is when Swenson, a stage veteran and Tony nominee for the 2009 Broadway revival of “Hair,” really takes ownership of the role. While he doesn’t entirely let go during the concert scenes — a common issue with Broadway performers playing rockers — Swenson gets close to Diamond’s swaggering sexuality and delivers hit after hit with a relaxed confidence: “Sweet Caroline,” of course, and especially “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show.” But there is no “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” the epitome of Diamond in his louche Lee Hazlewood mode, which could have really spiced up a musical that can feel timid; likewise, the show’s title echoes Diamond’s 1976 album and one can’t help but wonder what would have happened if his 1968 LP “Velvet Gloves and Spit” had inspired McCarten instead.In any case, the superstar continues seeking, especially love. While still married to his first wife, Jaye (Jessie Fisher), he falls for Marcia (Robyn Hurder, channeling Ann-Margret). The latter gets some of the numbers directly connecting a character’s motivation or emotion with a song — she sings “Forever in Blue Jeans,” for example, when feeling neglected by her constantly touring husband.Robyn Hurder as Marcia and Will Swenson as the younger Diamond.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut much of the time McCarten — who wrote the screenplays for the Freddie Mercury biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” and whose play “The Collaboration” opens on Broadway later this month — refrains from shoehorning new meaning into existing lyrics by manipulating the context in which the songs are used, à la “Mamma Mia!” Many of this show’s most effective moments simply use the songs as surface signposts, an approach that defeats the purported point of the book but reflects the way many listeners experience pop music: We associate it with events and moods, recall what was happening when a hit came on the radio or when we attended a concert.One such scene is Diamond’s debut at the Bitter End. He performs “Solitary Man” and the audience members, sitting at nightclub tables, slowly lean forward, like flowers drawn to the sun. This is the most striking example of Steven Hoggett’s subtle choreography, which to its credit looks like nothing else on Broadway right now: The movement is fluidly, organically incorporated into the scenes, rather than awkwardly grafted onto them.As Diamond sharpens his live persona in Act II, David Rockwell’s set, until then dominated by hanging lamps, morphs into a “Hollywood Squares”-like concert stage that incorporates the orchestra. (Considering how energized Diamond was when performing, having to retire from touring in 2018 because of Parkinson’s disease must have been especially painful.) It all looks and sounds great, but the clock is ticking — therapy! — and we are no closer to understanding the real Neil.Until, at long last, the older singer cracks and stops obfuscating. Naturally, the source of his discontent can be found in his childhood, and the show finally makes the essential connection between Diamond’s artistry and his roots, including his Jewishness. By that point it feels rushed and not quite earned, not to mention a little too nakedly sentimental.And yet, the beating heart of “A Beautiful Noise” is that sequence, featuring “Brooklyn Roads” and “America” leading into “Shilo,” which becomes Diamond’s Rosebud and is performed with almost unbearable grace by the ensemble member Jordan Dobson. Never mind: naked sentimentality is just fine.A Beautiful NoiseAt the Broadhurst Theater, Manhattan; abeautifulnoisethemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More