Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      How Much Would You Pay to Hear Great Music?

      by

      With ticket prices for performing arts rising, could fresh approaches like pay-what-you-can increase access and foster more adventurous programming?“I’m a cellist, and I have played in orchestras my entire life,” Blake-Anthony Johnson, the president and chief executive of the Chicago Sinfonietta, said recently. “I used to ask the other musicians, ‘What is the most you would pay for your ideal concert?’ And it was nowhere near what our patrons actually pay.”Johnson was describing a slow-moving crisis in the performing arts: Ticket prices have risen far more precipitously than most Americans’ earnings — to say nothing of the seductively low cost of streaming services at home.This rise doesn’t just trouble short-term sales. It also affects the long-term health of arts organizations, which depend on the philanthropic support of patrons who have generally built close relationships with the objects of their giving.“I have long been concerned that ticket prices present a barrier to newcomers who are curious, and a barrier to inciting habitual attendance,” said Marc Scorca, the president and chief executive of the trade organization Opera America, noting that kind of habit can lead to later giving.“High ticket prices are a disincentive to experimentation, and they raise the level of expectation,” he added. “And the higher the price, the less likely that expectations will be met, leading to disappointment.”It’s axiomatic: High ticket prices are barriers at a time when organizations need their doors to be open ever more widely. And dependence on ticket sales also hobbles programming innovation. (In Europe, where arts institutions receive sometimes substantial public subsidies, ticket sales are a far smaller percentage of budgets, so artistic decisions don’t have to prioritize attendance.)But could new approaches to ticketing work to increase access and foster more adventurous programming?“Removing socioeconomic barriers is one of those things we have to be ahead of,” said Johnson, whose Chicago Sinfonietta introduced a pay-what-you-can ticketing approach last season. “I sleep really well at night, to have someone say, ‘I’m able to bring my family to these concerts.’”Experimentation in this area has been spreading in the theater world. Most recently Ars Nova, the prominent Off Broadway incubator, announced that it would move to a pay-what-you-want model for the coming season.In classical music, this kind of initiative has been far rarer, with the Sinfonietta leading the recent charge. But a much larger and more influential institution, Lincoln Center, threw down a gauntlet this summer, when it made the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s brief season choose-what-you-pay.The results were heartening. According to the center, 90.5 percent of tickets were sold for the concerts, which took place at Alice Tully Hall since the orchestra’s usual home, the larger David Geffen Hall, was being renovated.The suggested ticket price was $35, but the average paid was just over $19 — compared with almost $60 during the orchestra’s 2019 season, when face value ranged from $35 to $90. Sixty-three percent of Mostly Mozart ticket buyers this summer were first-timers to a Lincoln Center presentation (though not, perhaps, to the center’s constituents, like the Metropolitan Opera or New York Philharmonic).Of course, many institutions have reduced-price tickets available for students or seniors, or for last-minute buyers. And increasingly some have subscription-style programs that make cheaper tickets available for a monthly or annual fee. But those programs effectively penalize newcomers and occasional ticket buyers. And what about those who aren’t students or seniors, but are still challenged by rising prices?“I find it really odd that we subsidize tickets for youths and senior citizens,” Johnson said. “There is a very large group of people in between. What I’m suggesting is that we have the kind of relationship with the community in which we are a public service and want to be a part of your life regardless of whether you’re giving us money.”As Renee Blinkwolt, the producing executive director of Ars Nova, told The New York Times when that company’s new pricing policy was unveiled in August: “It’s not income based, it’s not age based, there’s no demographic basis. It’s just radically accessible — the doors are wide open to any and everyone to pay what they will.”The rise of dynamic pricing — in which ticket prices fluctuate based on demand — is spreading beyond the commercial theater world. This can help maximize revenue for institutions when they have a hit.But it can also do a disservice to audiences and the long-term fate of presenters. Aficionados are probably less likely to be purchasing tickets at the last minute, when in a dynamic pricing situation they’ll be most expensive. So relative newcomers will disproportionately be the ones stuck needing to pay a premium, when they should be most diligently targeted with discounts. (For this reason, the Metropolitan Opera did not employ dynamic pricing during its highly successful run of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” last season.)The obvious solution would be for institutions simply to systemically lower prices — without expecting patrons to comb through websites for special ticketing programs or know how to game the dynamic pricing system.One way to lower prices is to eliminate ticket revenue as a factor in budgeting. Yes, that sounds extreme: When Emilee Syrewicze, the executive director of Opera Grand Rapids in Michigan, told her board earlier this year that their company was going in that direction, there was a little freakout.“Their first thought was, We’re no longer selling tickets,” Syrewicze said.What she was envisioning, though, was something different. Syrewicze had realized that the company’s ticket sales, as at many small and midsize institutions, were bringing in only a small portion of the budget: in the case of Opera Grand Rapids, around 15 percent. She also saw that the company consistently lacked a steady source of income to direct toward new projects and new works.What if, she thought, the opera reorganized its finances — and juiced its fund-raising to compensate — so that all of the money from ticket sales would be devoted to creative programming? In other words, as she put it: “What if we had a couple hundred thousand laying around?”When she explained to the board that the company was not simply disappearing the ticket revenue, but was planning to put it into other programs — and that the change would happen gradually over a few years, starting this fall — the members calmed down.“The freakout was only momentary,” Syrewicze said with a laugh.In Grand Rapids, the goal is not to lower prices, which are already cheap and addressed by several accessibility programs. But other organizations could use the same strategy as a model for price reductions: If ticket revenue doesn’t matter, tickets can be cheaper.Small or midsize institutions may well have an easier time experimenting, because if changes to ticket strategy are going to work without cutting budgets, donations will need to rise to fill the gap. That said, smaller organizations also tend to have less fund-raising prowess; the Stavros Niarchos Foundation supported the Mostly Mozart pilot program this summer, and Syrewicze and her new development director are confident that their city — which has a notably strong philanthropic record — will support their experiment.But it is still a gamble, and it requires a rethinking of the entire organization around a goal of lowering prices.For larger companies that sell more tickets, and those that still look to ticket sales as a bigger percentage of their budgets, the losses — and increased pressure on fund-raising — might not be workable. And as Johnson pointed out, the very configuration of most concert halls, in hierarchical tiers, resists truly democratic approaches to pricing.But Lincoln Center has shown that even the biggest organizations can at least experiment in this area, embracing the radical accessibility espoused by Ars Nova and opening the door to broader audiences of their own while providing inspiration for the rest of the field.There is still work to do. Syrewicze said she didn’t know of other organizations doing truly creative thinking in the pricing area, though a couple of her colleagues approached her to learn more after she had presented what she was working on in Grand Rapids at an Opera America meeting.“They liked the sound of it, but we like the sound of a lot of things,” she said. “How things translate to a budget is totally different. Because of our size and because we keep ourselves lean, we’re comfortable experimenting with this.”Of course, even if ticket prices came down, it wouldn’t solve all of the problems faced by orchestras and opera companies seeking to build their audiences and secure their donor bases.“When we’re talking about folks who have not come to the opera generally, price is not the only barrier,” Scorca said. “We should not kid ourselves that lower ticket prices will make people feel totally comfortable. But it is a potent, tangible, identifiable barrier.”Just the same, it would be unfortunate if the fact that lowering prices won’t solve everything keeps it from solving anything.“Let’s see what happens,” Scorca added. “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing in an experimental mind-set.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      With a Sound Forged in War, Iannis Xenakis Embraced Chaos

      by

      The Greek-French composer, who was born 100 years ago, created a revolution in music.“Greeks are like that,” the composer Iannis Xenakis said in 1967. “They are a people continually in search of themselves, always ready to launch out into all kind of rapid, violent actions, and end up by not finding themselves.”He was in his prime when he made that comment, known internationally for his music and collaborations with, for example, Le Corbusier. Yet the search never stopped, and Xenakis managed to stay elusive until his death in 2001, along the way building a legacy that is being observed this year, the centennial of his birth.The premiere of “Metastaseis,” in 1955 in Germany, put Xenakis in the company of the era’s respected composers. Admirers and opponents alike were struck by the work’s sheer violence of the masses of sound, which were constructed not by notes, but by ever-changing glissandos going up and down, and landing briefly into visceral clusters of pitches.It was something new and exciting. The composers of the Darmstadt School, then the powerhouse of avant-garde music, had been focused on serialism, and the belief that every aspect of composition should be under control, measured and organized in a highly abstract manner. But Xenakis, in an article titled “The Crisis of Serial Music,” took issue with the likes of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, essentially accusing them of leading music into an impasse.Xenakis, for his part, embraced chaos. A Greek French artist born in Romania, he went to explore it through philosophy and science, as the ancient Greeks did; “I felt I was born too late — I had missed two millennia,” he used to say. In the first chapter of “Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition,” a dense 1971 treatise on compositional technique and methods, he wrote about the “collision of rain with hard surfaces” or “the song of cicadas in a summer field” as inspirations for his concept of stochastic music, an approach to writing music that was concerned with large numbers, chance and probabilities, which were manipulated to achieve a particular goal. (“Stochos” means “target” in Greek.)Another example he gave: Imagine a large crowd of people demonstrating in the streets. They chant slogans in waves from front to rear, determining where to go next. Suddenly, the enemy attacks, dispersing the crowd by firing machine guns into the air and into the crowd itself. “After sonic and visual hell,” Xenakis wrote, “follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death.”DURING WORLD WAR II, Xenakis joined the Greek Communist resistance and fought against Italian and German occupying forces. That was short-lived, however: In late 1944, Winston Churchill ordered British troops to suppress the Communists and keep Greece within the Western sphere of influence. Their ideals were crushed within a few weeks. On Jan. 1, 1945, a shell from a Sherman tank scarred Xenakis for life.“He told me once,” the composer Pascal Dusapin recalled in a recent documentary, “that he keeps trying to reproduce the sound he heard when the shrapnel went into his face.”There is no shortage of explosions, at extremities of force, in Xenakis’s music — whether in “Terretektorh” (1966), one of the first modern spatial compositions, or “Jonchaies” (1977), in which the full dynamic power of 109 musicians slowly builds up after a surprisingly melodic introduction. “Keqrops” (1986), on the other hand, starts with a sonic blast, with a solo piano trying to catch up and penetrate the massive orchestral sound.It wasn’t just the sound of war that shaped Xenakis. He spoke with vigor about the “fantastic spectacle” created by the German occupiers when, while the air was filled with echoes of whistling bullets and explosions, enormous military searchlights lit up the night. Those memories directly affected the “Polytope” series, a daring journey toward a creative assemblage of architecture, light show and electronic music, usually on a grand scale.He talked about his wartime experience with sinister overtones. And if one thing stands out in his music, it is the absence of “human pathos and emotional compulsion,” said the cellist Arne Deforce in an interview. But that style, leaning toward the extreme, egoless but at the same time natural — in the way a deafening storm is natural — had its origins on the streets of Athens.“Xenakis has been discovered — liberation!” the composer Reinhold Friedl said. “To lose oneself in the sound was intoxicating. He was a freedom fighter against the bourgeois distinction of new music.”Laszlo Ruszka /INA, via Getty ImagesXenakis left Greece in 1947, while the country was being torn apart by civil war, after hiding in Athens. He was sentenced to death, officially for political terrorism. (A pardon came only after the end of the right-wing junta, 27 years later.)A young civil engineering graduate, he initially wanted to go to the United States but never made it beyond Paris. After a few harsh, depressing weeks of getting to know the city, he found a job with the architect Le Corbusier. He also studied with the composer Olivier Messiaen from 1951 to ’53, whose interest in non-Western music inspired Xenakis to follow suit. (In 1978, having exploring the music traditions of Southern and Eastern Asia, he created “Pléïades,” a 45-minute, multicultural tour de force for six percussionists.)Xenakis’s relationship with Le Corbusier went on to be both fruitful and celebrated, leading to the creation of the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. And as Xenakis garnered fame, his dramatic past stirred up fantasies for many people, especially during May 1968 protests in Paris. A banner reading “À bas Gounod! Vive Xenakis!” (“Down with Gounod! Long live Xenakis!”) was hung from the windows of the Paris Conservatory, and Xenakis said on television, “It’s not just about sound and music; it’s about transforming people, too.” Unlike his Italian contemporary Luigi Nono, though, Xenakis refrained from sharing strong political statements, and left mixed impressions on the public.The composer Reinhold Friedl, who directs the Berlin-based contemporary music ensemble zeitkratzer, remembered his discovery of Xenakis in the mid-1980s: “Xenakis has been discovered — liberation! To lose oneself in the sound was intoxicating. He was a freedom fighter against the bourgeois distinction of new music.” The music writer Ben Watson, however, criticized Xenakis’s lifelong commitment to classical instruments: “Ironically, Xenakis’s lack of interest in alternative methods of realizing music — such as free improvisation (which he calls ‘a fashion, like jazz’) — fixes 19th century methods as absolute.”Xenakis nevertheless was revolutionary in music. “Concret PH” (1958), a short musique concrète piece used for the Philips Pavilion, along with Edgard Varèse’s “Poème Électronique,” is the first known occurrence of granular synthesis, a basic part of any electronic artist’s vocabulary today. As a pioneer of electronic music, Xenakis was also behind the creation of UPIC, a graphic sound synthesizer.The relationship between the graphic and the auditory was essential for Xenakis. He typically created a graphic score first, then meticulously transformed it into a traditional one. The means of production notwithstanding, he opened new horizons through the use of clouds or masses of sound. “Do not think in pitches but in sound processes,” said Deforce, who frequently performs Xenakis’s demanding solo cello pieces “Nomos Alpha” (1966) and “Kottos” (1977). “That perspective has been one of the big game-changers Xenakis realized in Western art music.”The baritone Holger Falk said in an interview that Xenakis’s music “feels like diving into a world of rituals that pushes you beyond your everyday consciousness.” Falk often sings Xenakis’s “Aïs” (1980), a dazzling, sonorous piece about death that makes use of exaggerated falsetto, lip smacks and neigh-like glissandos, accompanied by a large orchestra. John Eckhardt, a double bass player, used the word “ritualistic,” to describe his state of mind when performing “Theraps” (1975-76), along with “focused and heroic.”Glimpses of these feelings can be reached by listening, too. Heard live, the music pins you to your seat. How did Xenakis manage that? Perhaps it is the urgency with which he tackled the unknown, went beyond known musical idioms and clichés, and thus found something both unique and universal. His works resemble natural events both terrifying and awe-inspiring: storms, the formation of branches, tsunamis. But instead of mimicking the forces of nature, his music is a force of nature on its own. More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Blackpink and the Limits of K-Pop Maximalism

      by

      The genre’s more-is-more moment might be coming to an end, and younger acts like Aespa and NewJeans point a way forward.As K-pop was broadening its global ambitions in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it was also expanding its appetite, becoming the hungriest pop music scene on the planet. It feasted especially on American pop, hip-hop, R&B and dance music, alchemizing it all into a maximalist fantasia, creating an aesthetic of absurdist excess that became, for a while, that world’s most progressive and most popular approach.Acts like the YG Entertainment girl group 2NE1 thrived in that environment (along with its boy band compatriots BigBang), and helped set the stage for the genre’s worldwide takeover. Here was music — largely masterminded by the producer Teddy Park — that was curious, chaotic and cocksure. Other pop scenes seemed to dematerialize in its wake.Blackpink, the next-generation YG girl group that debuted in 2016, seemed poised to carry that torch with the early success of singles like “Whistle,” “Ddu-Du Ddu-Du” and “How You Like That.” But by the time of its first full-length release, “The Album,” in 2020, the group’s music had become somehow more bombastic and more brittle than that of its predecessors, and the blueprint was showing its seams.“Born Pink,” the second full-length Blackpink album, is in theory an opportunity to innovate, both for the group and for the genre itself. And it finds Blackpink — Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa, Rosé — at a crossroads: whether to continue its high-energy sonic collision; whether to fully embrace the English-language market; whether to dismantle its own house.The first single, “Pink Venom,” is classic Blackpink — which is to say, pandemonium stitched so tight it achieves its own internal logic, both caffeinated and fatiguing all at once. Jisoo’s singing is as rich and austere as ever, and Jennie’s rapping is flexible and dotted with clever little filigrees.“Pink Venom” plays like a theme song, more a jingle for the group than a pure musical statement. And it is something of a relief that the album doesn’t over-index on this approach, which has become a genre default.“Born Pink” is occasionally galvanic, and occasionally iterative. When the group does push into new territory — or more accurately, unshackles itself from familiar ground — it doesn’t leave much of an impact. “The Happiest Girl” is a brittle melodrama of a piano ballad, and “Yeah Yeah Yeah” is a cheerful ’80s pop simulacrum that also nods to the Weeknd and Daft Punk.Four of the songs are wholly in English, including “Hard to Love,” performed in full by Rosé (Blackpink is far more effective in this idiom than, say, BTS). And there’s cursing as well — not new for the group, but still a pointed gesture.Densely stacked production remains central to the group’s mission and positioning, especially on the songs Park worked on. And throughout the album, there is intense sonic layering, with G-funk swirls and classical music string samples and references that are so buried that they might not even be there at all. “Still Tippin’” on “Typa Girl”? “Mighty D-Block (2 Guns Up)” on “Pink Venom”? “My Baby Takes the Morning Train” on “Yeah Yeah Yeah”? Who can say?The smorgasbord of Blackpink, or 2NE1 before it, was at least in part a reaction to an earlier wave of girl groups that helped establish K-pop’s ambitions and scale, but whose dalliances with Western influences were more glancing.Last month, one of the crucial acts of that era, Girls’ Generation, released a new album, “Forever 1,” 15 years after its debut. More than a decade ago, Girls’ Generation was among the first, if not the first, K-pop acts to release an album on an American major label. But its ambitions aren’t as relentless as Blackpink’s.“Forever 1” is a refreshing throwback to a less agitated moment in the genre. The production is largely mellifluous and bright, and the singing is sweet and uncomplicated. It is redolent of an era in which K-pop was still establishing its own grammar, before it voraciously consumed everyone else’s. There are light flickers of hip-hop and new jack swing, as on “Seventeen” and “You Better Run.”But in the main, this is classicist music — the sheer brightness of the piano on “Closer,” the light sashay on “Summer Night.” It posits the music not as a world killer, but as a respite and a dream.As compelling as “Forever 1” is, it doesn’t feel of the moment, more like a rediscovered memento. That’s especially clear when it’s contextualized not simply alongside Blackpink, but also the intriguing wave of girl groups that has arrived in that group’s wake, identifying the contours of its success and building upon them.Of those acts, Aespa has been the most vital in recent years, and its recent EP, “Girls,” is one of the year’s most impressive K-pop releases precisely because of its dual mastery of the intricate and the elegant. That’s captured in its closing run: “Black Mamba,” a warrior stomp that channels flamboyant early 2000s pop, the throwback up-tempo ballad “Forever,” then “Dreams Come True,” which feels like a nod to K-pop’s earliest engagements with R&B.By contrast, Itzy stands out for its resolute quirk. Its recent “Checkmate” EP continues the group’s boisterous mayhem, with vocals that are intensely alert and jubilant, and production that seems to be bubbling in real time. “365” recalls industrial or avant-garde club music, and “Racer” sounds like Disney theme park music run through a glitter factory.Finally, and perhaps most promisingly, there’s NewJeans, which has just released a stellar self-titled debut EP that’s utterly cool and poised. The production is sensuous and restrained, and the singing is both lustrous and unhurried.On the surface, NewJeans harks back to an earlier, pre-2NE1, unhectic moment in K-pop. But its submerged references are deeply modern, especially the detour into New Jersey club music on “Cookie.” NewJeans deploys its contemporary reference points in service of a throwback idea, though. Or perhaps more pointedly, it’s learned all of the lessons the world has to offer, and is bringing them back home. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      New York Drill Rappers Say They Were Removed From Rolling Loud Festival

      by

      At least three local artists were cut from the traveling rap show, scheduled for this weekend in Queens, at the request of the New York Police Department, their representatives said.At least three rappers with ties to the booming New York drill scene — which has risen in popularity in recent years, even as law enforcement officials and politicians like Mayor Eric Adams have questioned its relationship to local gun violence — have been removed from the lineup of the traveling rap festival Rolling Loud, scheduled for this weekend at Citi Field in Queens, at the request of the New York Police Department, the artists’ representatives said.The rappers included Sha Ek, a 19-year-old from the Bronx; 22Gz, an influential figure in Brooklyn’s drill movement; and Ron Suno, a musician and comedian from the Bronx.Rolling Loud, which is scheduled to run from Friday to Sunday, and the New York Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the rappers’ removal this week. But the last-minute cancellations matched a similar scenario ahead of the festival’s New York stop in 2019, when five artists, including 22Gz and Pop Smoke, had their performances scrapped.The rappers had “been affiliated with recent acts of violence citywide,” according to a letter sent by an assistant chief at the Police Department to the festival organizers at the time. “The New York City Police Department believes if these individuals are allowed to perform, there will be a higher risk of violence.”Tariq Cherif, a founder of Rolling Loud, said then that the festival had no choice but to comply if it wished to return to New York. A representative for Sha Ek and 22Gz said this week that the artists were paid in full for their performances.But on Thursday, Stanley Davis, a manager for Sha Ek who is known as Noodles, said in a statement that his client had not been charged with any crime that could justify his ban. “The police try to associate what he’s doing with violence and negativity,” he wrote. “They don’t respect that he’s an artist and entertainer trying to better himself and feed his family at 19 years old.”Davis added, “Sha Ek has performed all over the Northeast this year. The crowds at his concerts are full of kids dancing and having fun. He’s excited to keep growing his touring business and proving the police wrong.”Diamond Brown, a manager for Ron Suno who goes by Bo, said via text message: “How can a person who has no criminal record and no gang ties — the kid never even made a diss record — be denied to perform in his hometown after all his hard work?”Suno had been involved in a fight at last year’s edition of Rolling Loud in New York, but he downplayed the incident in subsequent interviews and on social media. No charges were filed.A spokeswoman for 22Gz’s record label, Atlantic Records, confirmed his removal but declined to comment further. 22Gz is currently out on bond after being charged in June with attempted murder for his role in a Brooklyn club shooting that injured three people.Drill, which started as a neighborhood hip-hop sound in Chicago about a decade ago, has since traveled to London, New York, Stockholm and beyond, becoming a dominant mode for rap music. But the proudly hyperlocal artists, whose songs are often a reaction to and a documenting of gun violence, gang disputes and extreme poverty in their hometowns, have also faced heavy scrutiny from community leaders and law enforcement officials, who claim that the music incites more violence.In the United Kingdom, drill artists have said their lyrics and their very existence have been criminalized, resulting in constant scrutiny. Chief Keef, one of drill’s pioneers and a breakout star from Chicago, has also been prevented from performing in his native city, or even nearby, with police once shutting down a concert in Indiana in which Keef was appearing only via hologram from California.In New York, Mayor Adams has questioned whether social networks should ban drill music from its platforms. “Violent people who are using drill rapping to post who they killed, and then antagonize the people who they are going to kill is what the problem is,” he told reporters earlier this year.The mayor then met with a coalition of New York rappers to discuss drill and potential ways to reduce gun violence in the city. Two of the drill artists who sat down with Mayor Adams in February — Fivio Foreign and B-Lovee — are still scheduled to perform at Rolling Loud this weekend.Since its 2015 debut in Miami, Rolling Loud has grown into the defining and farthest-reaching music festival for rap, though it has also been connected to spates of arrests and occasional violence. Headliners this weekend in New York include Nicki Minaj, Future, ASAP Rocky and Playboi Carti. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Popcast Live! The New Faces of 2022

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFor the first live taping of Popcast, held at Gertie in Brooklyn, members of The New York Times pop music team explored the ways music is evolving today by highlighting some of this year’s breakout stars. The conversation touched on the British rapper Central Cee, the Bronx drill rapper Ice Spice, the country-folk singer Zach Bryan, the alt-rock revivalist Blondshell, the haunted pop crooner Ethel Cain and more.The conversation included debate about what makes for innovation in the crowded and confusing pop music marketplace in 2022, and an audience Q. and A. session touching on Taylor Swift, the persistence of physical media and much more.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 63 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      The Remarkable, Resilient Loren Connors

      by

      Three decades ago, the New York guitarist was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. His output still hasn’t slowed.If Loren Connors was going to get to his gig, the guitarist knew he would need to crawl. It was late January 2007, two months after he had smashed into a Brooklyn sidewalk and broken his hip while carrying an armload of art, resulting in major surgery and an 11-day hospital stay.But he had agreed to rally for a concert organized by his record label two miles from his apartment, improvising with a trio he’d never met. After all, this was his life now: Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease 16 years earlier, he expected the falls and concomitant broken bones to escalate.After a lift from a friend, there was just one unexpected hurdle on that winter night — 16 steep stairs leading to the venue, tucked inside a silo alongside the Gowanus Canal. “Loren got on his hands and knees and started crawling up,” Eric Weddle, the founder of Family Vineyard, said by phone. Weddle started his label in part to issue Connors’s music, and now he stood at the top of the stairs, dumbstruck. “His laundry list of injuries is crazy, but none of this has stopped him. It is resilience.”Connors, 72, can barely cross a room now. The pills he takes a dozen times each day often steal his speech until he can only stutter; even on good days, the syllables blur together. His legs kick at night, and he is mostly confined to the cramped Brooklyn Heights apartment he has shared with his partner, the singer and lawyer Suzanne Langille, since 1990.“Parkinson’s is a curse,” he said on his landline early one recent morning, when his speech is typically best. “It doesn’t kill you, but it just makes your life terrible. I’m hanging in there.”He is hanging in there, to some extent, because he can still play guitar and paint, both of which he does most days. In the three decades since his diagnosis, he has released about 100 records — gentle suites of forlorn melodies, relentless spans of plangent notes, and, most recently, sprawling drifts of ghostly tones.This is one of the most productive periods of his career, too, as a confederation of labels rushes to reissue his rarest albums, which often fetch hundreds of dollars online, and to distribute new recordings. During the last year, Connors has shared live collaborations with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and the Australian experimental impresario Oren Ambarchi, plus a book of impressionistic flower sketches. “Airs,” a quiet 1999 collection of gorgeous and brief pieces, will be reissued Friday, with another art book and at least a half-dozen other records due in the next year.“It’s a passion and a compulsion — he has to create all the time,” Langille said by phone. “And he’s still doing it with all this weight on his back. It comes down to his determination, courage.”Connors grew up in New Haven, Conn., born to the opera singer Mary Mazzacane and the inventor Joe Mazzacane. The family of five wobbled at poverty’s edge — “shanty Irish,” Connors quipped. He developed a reputation as a rapscallion, less interested in school than drawing, the guitar and rowdy misadventures into New York.A work from Connors’s book “Wildweeds.”Loren ConnorsIn 1975, after an unhappy — if artistically inspiring — year at the University of Cincinnati, he became a janitor at Yale. For a decade, he lived rent-free in a warehouse crammed with 20 artists, the smell of paint and shellac commingling with fumes from plastic melted by a businessman making toys. (With no family history of Parkinson’s, Connors believes his exposure to these toxins ultimately led to his disease.)Connors had fallen hard for acoustic blues and electric guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, still a favorite. (“All my avant-garde friends don’t like Clapton, because he’s a pop star,” he said. “He’s more than that.”) He ran an art gallery and hosted shows by visiting musicians. In the late ’70s, he began self-releasing a series of splenetic improvisations that suggested the blues broken into bits following a violent car crash. “The reception was absolutely terrible,” Connors said by video call soon after sunrise on a September morning, Langille laughing to his right. “Everyone thought I was a real weirdo — pretty discouraging.”Actually, not everyone: Connors often cleaned the office of the Southern culture scholar William Ferris, who learned that his janitor had taken the job in part to access Yale’s voluminous library. Connors began sending him those early recordings, and Ferris offered his academic imprimatur via liner notes. “It crossed so many boundaries, redefined the blues in a very modernist way,” Ferris said in an interview. “He taught me where the roots music I loved was moving and wrote a new chapter in American music.”He found another convert in Langille, a recent Yale Law grad mesmerized the moment she saw him sit at a piano to improvise with a saxophonist in 1984. He loved the intensity of her eyes; she loved, as she put it, that “the whole composition was in him from the first note, just flooding out.” Two years later, they had their only child, Jamie. Four years after that, Connors quit his paper route, his final job apart from art. The trio moved into their 600-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn Heights in 1990 so Langille could work as a public lawyer, arguing against incinerators and advocating for wetlands.Connors in Brooklyn with his wife, the singer and lawyer Suzanne Langille.Daniel Weiss for The New York TimesFor Connors, the move fulfilled a lifelong goal he’d never been able to afford. New York became his wellspring. After Langille headed to work, Connors and Jamie would make daily pilgrimages over the Brooklyn Bridge to explore Hell’s Kitchen or Five Points. They’d spend hours at the library, researching Connors’s Irish heritage, the city’s homeless paperboys or the work of artists like Mark Rothko.“I would come home from school, and there would be paint all over the ceiling and walls from these big canvases in this tiny apartment,” Jamie said. “Or he would be recording albums in our living room, and I’d just sit there, really quietly, watching.”Connors began to meet younger experimental musicians who, much to his surprise, knew his work. His network ballooned. When Connors had been in New York for less than a decade, for instance, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth organized a monthlong series of concerts to celebrate his 50th birthday. Four nights per week, Connors played with someone new. (His favorite? Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power.)This cadre admired his obsession with seemingly small ideas — like starting so many compositions in A minor — and recognized Connors’s fabled compulsion to make anything, always.“On 9/11, picking up a guitar was the last thing on my mind, but Loren recorded,” said Alan Licht, Connors’s most consistent collaborator for 30 years. “The city’s on fire, but he’s making music in response, like, that day. That’s how deeply ingrained it is.”It may seem cruel that Connors was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1991, just a year after arriving in New York, the place he’d always wanted to be. Langille and Connors both demurred at the notion. Instead, she saw how motivated he became, hoping to work as much as he could before losing control of his hands. (He hasn’t yet.) He even learned to schedule his pills so they didn’t interfere with his music. “He dived in and became incredibly productive,” she said. “Once he got into that rhythm, he never stopped.”That cycle — playing and painting every day — has created a kind of artistic map of his disease’s progression. He is improvising with the changing state of his body. Connors once bent strings wildly, as if the entire guitar quaked beneath his blues. But now, with his small-bodied Fender, he produces wide washes of subtle sound. They shift gradually, like leaves losing color in autumn. He doesn’t mind the change, even if he didn’t choose it.“People these days are always making plans — I never did that,” Connors said, chuckling softly. “When you’re a kid, you play like a kid. When you grow up, you leave kid stuff, like licks, behind.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Zach Bryan Is Music’s Most Reluctant New Star

      by

      The Navy veteran — who blends folk, rock and country — has had a breakthrough year with his major-label debut, “American Heartbreak.” But fame isn’t what he’s after.INDIANAPOLIS — In late May, Zach Bryan released “American Heartbreak,” a bracing and shaggily elegant 34-song country-folk opus that served as his major-label debut. It opened at No. 5 on the Billboard album chart, an astonishing mark for a singer who less than a year before had been in the Navy, putting out music on the side.A couple of weeks later, he was riding his motorcycle with his girlfriend when he took his eyes off the road for a moment and crashed. The left side of his forehead was badly scraped, his right arm deeply gashed and his skin pockmarked with road rash. (His girlfriend, Deb Peifer, was largely unhurt.)The two had just spent a quiet afternoon at a nearby creek. The emotional whiplash jolted Bryan, 26, into his new reality.“The most beautiful moment that I’ve had in the last five years, and the worst moment I’ve had in the last five years, and it all happened in like 24 hours,” he said in July, in the diviest dive bar in Indianapolis, the afternoon after he performed to around 6,000 people at TCU Amphitheater at White River State Park.“I’m like a Kerouac guy,” he continued. “Like, I think life is reckless and it should be insane. It all ends in agony. It’s all about the outcome, so like, do it, you know? Do whatever it is.”But the accident — and the new responsibilities it underscored — chastened him. “I rode motorcycles 120 miles an hour, 130 miles an hour in my life. Now I’m on a scooter going 10 miles an hour, like, freaking out, looking back at her like, ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’”A handful of days after the crash, he returned to the stage. And not long after that, as Bryan is wont to do, he started writing through the suffering, resulting in an EP, “Summertime Blues.” “Here,” Bryan said, his eyes tightening ever so slightly. “Thanks for the pain.”BRYAN HAS BEEN making hay from pain for the past few years, first getting attention for the muscularly intense songs he released on Twitter and YouTube while he was still in the Navy, and now as one of this year’s most sudden breakout stars. “American Heartbreak” has hovered in the Top 20 of the Billboard 200 since its release, displaying staying power similar to recent albums from Kendrick Lamar, Future and Post Malone.It is a refreshingly unpretentious album, with songs that take the shortest path from feeling to words while also deploying some alarmingly lovely turns of phrase. “When you place your head between my collar and jaw/I don’t know much, but there’s no weight at all,” he rasps on “Something in the Orange,” which has become his most recognizable hit since his early songs “God Speed” and “Heading South.” On “Sun to Me,” he vividly captures feeling unworthy of someone’s love:I don’t recall what you were wearing on the first night we metBesides the subtle cloud around you from my last cigaretteAnd you come from a good place with a happy familyThe only bad you’ve ever done was to see the good in meBryan is midsize, sturdy and preternaturally calm. He generally dresses comfortably — Carhartt T-shirt, a well-loved pair of Birkenstock Bostons. But onstage, singing any of a couple dozen songs about wounds and what it takes to lick them, he clenches tight, as if determined to lift an unusually heavy barbell, and nailing it.He grew up a Navy brat — his father was a master chief, and the family was stationed in Japan. When Bryan was in the eighth grade, the family moved to Oologah, Okla., an actual one-stoplight town around 30 miles northeast of Tulsa. His parents, Dewayne and Annette, divorced when he was around 12.Bryan, photographed in early September, his forehead still healing from his motorcycle crash.Kristin Braga Wright for The New York TimesBryan was popular in school, a wrestler who was student council president. He had a rebellious streak, but also a clear idea about the man he intended to become. Graham Bright, a childhood friend who’s now his lead guitar player, recalled a night of drinking when the young men saw police lights nearby. “He goes and hides under a bed and starts crying and he’s just like, ‘I want to join the Navy. That’s all I want to do. And I’m not going to be able to!’”Bryan enlisted when he was 17; the day he shipped off to boot camp, he hadn’t spoken with his father in weeks. “He called my wife some names and he put me on my butt,” Dewayne recalled, referring to his second wife, Anna, with whom Zach now has a strong relationship. “He’s tougher than nails.”Even though he lived with his father, who had full custody, Bryan felt close to his mother, who had also served in the Navy: “an Oklahoma sweetheart, homecoming queen cheerleader, like a small-town freaking famous person almost.”But Annette struggled with alcohol, straining family relationships. She died in 2016, and afterward Bryan’s songwriting deepened. “I think my mom dying really solidified the darkness in life to me,” he said. “It opened that thing in you that’s like, ‘Hey, be a man now.’”“People say I repress,” he continued. “And I’m like, no, the person that I want to tell all this stuff to is dead. And you don’t deserve me weighing in on my feelings to you.”Bryan’s years in the Navy left him with an emotional resilience and a sense of equanimity, even under fire. Peifer noted that “Sometimes he’s so levelheaded that I’m like, wait, you should be mad or something. Like, we need to react to this!”Bryan’s sister, MacKenzie Taylor, said they’d “learned from our mom how to put a mask on,” adding, “And he’s a dude in Oklahoma — he’s not supposed to have emotions.”In the military, Bryan was an aviation ordnanceman stationed in Washington and Florida, and did tours in Bahrain and Djibouti. He assembled, repaired and loaded weapons, and in his downtime, recorded songs. He was a fan of the Oklahoma country band Turnpike Troubadours — especially the songwriting of its frontman, Evan Felker — as well as Radiohead, Bon Iver, Gregory Alan Isakov and assorted “weird indie music.”In 2015, he started posting clips of his music online, and by 2019 he was garnering attention from progressive country music websites. In Florida, some Navy buddies helped him record his first album, “DeAnn” — his mother’s middle name — which he self-released in August of that year. A second set, “Elisabeth,” followed in 2020. By 2021, still in the Navy, he made his first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.Bryan records and releases music at a furious pace. “I have this weird fear of like, if I don’t put this music out, someone 20 years from now isn’t going to be able to hear it,” he said. Kristin Braga Wright for The New York Times“I was like, don’t put your guitar down, keep going, something’s going to happen,” he said. “Not because I felt driven. Not because I wanted to be famous. Not because I wanted to be rich. I literally just would sit there and think about my mom and be like, Something is telling me not to stop doing this.”Bryan was honorably discharged from the Navy in August of last year, and soon after set out on the road, finding a rabid fan base waiting for him.“He wouldn’t sell meet-and-greet tickets because he is too goddamned principled, I guess,” J.R. Carroll, Bryan’s keyboard player and another Oklahoma friend, said with a light cackle. “So they would just have anybody who wanted to meet him after our show. He would just stand there and talk to these people, and they would tell him the most unbelievably dark and depressing stories for three hours.”Now that Bryan is operating at a bigger scale, he is beginning to set boundaries for himself. “People don’t understand the pressure exerting emotion on other people exerts back on you,” Bryan said.‘AMERICAN HEARTBREAK’ HAS 34 songs, an improbable number but not, apparently, an undigestible one. In the four months since its release, Bryan has continued to unleash music at an unconventional clip, more like a rapper than a folk singer.“The EPs I give the label for free — I can’t stop writing,” he said. “I have this weird fear of like, if I don’t put this music out, someone 20 years from now isn’t going to be able to hear it. If some kid needs this in 40 years and he’s 16, he’s sitting in his room, what if I didn’t put out ‘Quiet, Heavy Dreams’? What if that’s his favorite song of all time?”Considering that Bryan is now routinely selling out shows of several thousand people, he’s maintaining raw skepticism about the ruinous power of money and celebrity. He has a decidedly old-fashioned take on the music business and the ways art should be made, a throwback to the authenticity obsessed 1990s, or even the late ’60s and early ’70s.“Songwriting is such a massive part of this,” he said. “If you’re missing out on it, what the hell are you doing? You’re just performing. You’re an actor.”Still, he has embraced the occasional surreal moment — recording “American Heartbreak” at Electric Lady Studios; coincidentally being at the New York restaurant Carbone the night in January that Kanye West went there with Julia Fox; getting the opportunity to work out at the Ohio State football team’s facilities before the Indianapolis concert.“People feel entitled to be famous and rich,” he said, with genuine amazement, “and I’m like, dude, you could be digging ditches, bro.”Besides, the music business is fickle. “You don’t know if it’s cringy in the time,” Bryan said of his songs, and their success. “‘Cause what if it’s a trend? What if all this is going to be embarrassing and you’re just trying to be a genius that you’re not?”In the current slotting of genres, Bryan falls perhaps closest to country, though it doesn’t feel like home to him. “I think people understand that I’m not that,” he said. “I want to be in that Springsteen, Kings of Leon, Ed Sheeran at-the-very-beginning space,” he said.But some of the more partisan elements of the country audience can surface at his shows. In Indianapolis, before Bryan took the stage, parts of the crowd broke out in a vulgar chant about President Biden.Bryan spent much of 2022 on the road. Next year, he plans to scale back to spend more time with family and potentially return to school.Kristin Braga Wright for The New York Times“I told people if I heard it, I would stop it immediately,” Bryan said. “Don’t come to my shows and start it. But they do it anyway.” (He describes himself as a “total libertarian.”)Moments like that contribute to the creeping sense that his success has become too big to fully control and supervise. This was made manifest at a performance in Oklahoma in April, when someone threw a beer at Bryan when he was onstage. The audience was filled with people he knew, or somewhat knew, or somewhat knew him.“You see all these eyes and you’re like, Y’all don’t know me anymore, man. I’ve grown. I’m reborn,” he said last month, taking a cigarette break in a Philadelphia parking lot, not far from the modest home he recently bought. Living in Oklahoma, as much as he loves it, isn’t a viable option right now.And so he’s already retrenching a bit, aiming to make his suddenly big life just a bit more cloistered. “I’m too writing-driven to be a big star,” he said. “I’m not meant for it.”Last month, “he had like a week and a half off,” Peifer said. “Got back, recorded some songs, and then took four days to build cabinets. And it was all of the exact same importance.”And he has been chipping away at the final nine credits he needs to receive his bachelor’s degree, squeezing coursework in between concerts. He’s studying psychology: “I just wanted to figure out why my mom was the way she was, you know? Like the most beautiful lady of all time and also kind of tortured herself.”On Twitter, he recently said he wouldn’t properly tour again: Next year, he plans to play around 30 shows — less than half of this year’s number — so he can leave time to potentially return to school and pursue a master’s degree, ideally in philosophy, and also to spend time with his loved ones.“How are you going to write music that’s personal and heartfelt if you never get to see the people you love?” Carroll asked, adding that the band’s goal is simply “Letting it be beautiful.”That means taking space, and saying no, and knowing when is enough. Bryan underscored the dilemma with what sounds like self-deprecation but is in fact a kind of stoic pragmatism. “Music’s going to die out,” he said, characteristically straight-faced. “You either keep going and you fail, or you stop while you’re ahead.” More